by Anita Desai
Then he chanced to find the word ‘Ex – port’. ‘Ex-phott,’ he said, and the fat, puzzled, perspiring man seemed to roll himself up into a ball, tight with excitement, and then explode out of his seat.
‘Ex-pawt!’ he gasped, clutching the side of his head. ‘Ex-pawt. Of course, ex-pawt. Germany, Europe. Shipping, timber – I know, I know.’ He charged around the desk, grasped Baumgartner by the hand and pumped it up and down, then slapped his shoulder for good measure, and began to babble at such speed that Baumgartner gave up even trying to follow. Instead he gazed at the eleven-armed goddess for an explanation – perhaps she had brought about this flood of communication, perhaps she was the goddess of good fortune. Certainly the tinsel draped around her winked and gleamed as it turned and susurrated lightly in the breeze from the electric fan.
He waited till the man had run through all the gestures and tones of excitement and sat down to mop himself with his large bandanna. Then he took from his pocket the letter from Herr Pfuehl and handed it over.
‘Letter from Foo-ol? You have?’ The bald man’s face emerged from behind the bandanna, beaming, but it was clearly no longer necessary. ‘Please have lunch with me. We will go out, and eat, and talk.’
On their way to a restaurant, bowling along the sea-front in a horse carriage, Chimanlal waved an arm at an imposing pile of stone that lined and overlooked the bay. ‘The Taj Hotel,’ he said, proudly showing off the sight, and seemed gratified when Baumgartner swung around in his seat and stared as though he had seen something he never expected to see in all his life.
‘That – Taj Hotel?’ Baumgartner wonderingly enquired.
Chimanlal nodded, pleased to see him so impressed, but instructed the carriage driver to go a little further. ‘Vegetarian restaurant, vegetarian food,’ he explained, on dismounting, ‘is famous for. You are liking vegetarian?’
Actually Baumgartner could not have told if what he put in his mouth was fish, flesh, fowl or foliage – the sauce in which all the bits and pieces floated was so fiery it scalded the coating of his tongue and made him burst like a fountain into perspiration.
His host seemed pleased at that too, as though it were a special act of politeness on Baumgartner’s part. He laughed and shovelled more rice on to Baumgartner’s shining tin tray. The rice steamed, the sauces sputtered, Baumgartner perspired and fished around in it all with a large tin spoon, admiringly watching his host manage all the complicated exercises involved with just his fingers. Finally the heat of the food and the heat of the time of day overcame them both; no more eating was possible. The trays were taken away by the boy-waiter who wore an amulet on a cord round his neck, and little plates were brought of condiments Baumgartner felt compelled to sample; the flavours proved such as he could not have imagined. The sweet, the astringent and the perfumed swirled around in his mouth; he kept his lips tightly together so none of this lethal mixture could escape. Chimanlal tossed handfuls into his own mouth, crushed the scented seeds casually, leant back in his chair, picked his teeth, and began to talk of business, of exports, of shipping, of trade in what seemed to Baumgartner a bewildering combination of two or three languages. He replied in his own selection of two or three. It seemed Chimanlal could give him a valuable introduction to an associate in Calcutta; it seemed there were all kinds of possibilities in the business world of India. Miraculously, Baumgartner could play a role in it that might turn out quite profitable.
Out on the latticed veranda the light from the afternoon sky fell in great blocks of white heat. Somewhere beyond that veranda was the street, the traffic, the noise, and beyond that the sea, the ships, the rose-red arc of the Gateway of India. Baumgartner felt his world not merely opening up but torn open, hacked open, to the Eastern light.
‘What, on your very first day you ate curry? And you did not get food poisoning? Dysentery? Not even diarrhoea?’ Lotte had been outraged when he told her, years later. ‘Mensch, it must be like a rubber tyre, your belly.’ Baumgartner laughed, rather proudly. It set him apart from his fellow countrymen, from others as pale as he in this foreign land. It was one more thing, he eventually realised, that set him apart from them.
Then the two days and two nights on the train, rattling and rolling along the rails laid on the dryest earth that was imaginable. He sat at the window, staring at that hard, flat earth – at first a friable red, then a crumbling black, and finally mile upon mile of dun colourlessness till the sun made him feverish, and the sameness of the scene shiver. He pulled down the wooden shutter in a cloud of dust and soot and settled back with his head against the bunk, rolling. Even boxed in, shuttered, he could still see the flatness and dryness and the unvarying colourlessness of the land thundering by, hundreds upon hundreds of miles. The coconut trees that stood out like blackened spokes and bore no fruit, nothing, just some dead, dry leaves, fan-shaped, like broken umbrellas. The villages or townships that seemed too meagre, too like the flat pale earth itself to be differentiated from it as human habitations – shelters that were no shelters but merely a part of the featureless land. The cattle that wore their hides draped in loose folds on their skeletons, roaming aimlessly in search of non-existent grass. Birds like clouds of mosquitoes hanging upon the air in the distance. Only the sudden leap of a boy, a goatherd, in jubilation at the sight of this vehicle in thundering motion along the rails, waving to Baumgartner when he pulled up the shutter and leant out in the grey of the evening. Baumgartner waved back, his heart suddenly pounding with joy, with fear.
Because alongside the train was always the shadow of the past, of elsewhere, of what had been and could never be abandoned – an animal in its grey pelt, keeping pace, clinging, refusing to part. An animal like a jackal in the day, a hyena in the night. In the darkness, it continued to chase the train, chase Baumgartner.
The passengers. A Jesuit father on his way to the seminary in Chanderanagore. Returning after sick-leave. Dressed in black. His face haggard and green with many seasons of malaria and dysentery. Reading the Bible, also in black. His lips moving, eating the words. Then eating a banana. Looking across at Baumgartner and saying, ‘The only thing you can eat on a journey in this country. It is not touched by their hands, you see, it is protected by its skin. The skin – it is thicker than ours, see.’ Peeling it delicately, precisely, then flinging the skin out on to the station platform where a cow, foraging amidst the empty cigarette packets and paper bags, swung its face low and snatched it up with its long black tongue and munched it lugubriously. ‘And peanuts, in their shells,’ he added, as though inspired. As if he had conjured them, children appeared from behind the cow, children without a stitch of clothing on them except for those amulets on black cords he had seen before, holding out paper cones filled with peanuts. They were no apparitions – their voices rang ear-splittingly: they might have been made of tin, or saws.
Two British soldiers in khaki. Their voices too loud, rasping. Yet Baumgartner could not understand a word, was not certain even that it was English. They rolled their words in their mouths, like potatoes. They were as foreign as those children on the platform – black, naked, raucous.
A block of ice was brought in and placed in the middle of the compartment in a tin tub. The ice melted and dripped and leaked through the day, smelling of damp straw and mud. The British soldiers kept their brown beer bottles lying alongside it in the tub. They turned the bottles over as gently as if they were babies. They opened one and offered it to the priest who refused, curtly, then to Baumgartner who felt he had to refuse also lest they discover his nationality. They looked at him as if their worst suspicions were confirmed.
In Calcutta, the tropical green. After all that dun dust, that bone-meal grey, suddenly, out of the night, this sprouting green, this fountain of green vegetation, as overwhelming as the aridity had been before. Like the desert, washed by white-hot light so that the green glinted as fiercely as metal or glass. But pools of dense shade, still, stagnant water. Even the people were damp – moisture seeped from under their h
air and ran in rivulets, drenching their clothes. Baumgartner, struggling yet static in the crowd at the station, was soon damp and streaming, too. But he made his way, with the last reserves of his quickly melting energy, to the address he had been given by Chimanlal. Here under the indolently turning electric fan with its broad wooden blades edged with grime, the man at the desk flattened out Baumgartner’s letter of introduction under his brown fingers with their brown nails. Looking up across it, he smiled, as if offering a slice of fresh coconut. He knew the Man from Hamburg. Also Chimanlal from Bombay. He knew the timber trade. Also the shipping industry. Everything was possible, available. He would give Baumgartner a place – he waved an arm in a fine, delicately ruffled, white muslin sleeve – here, in his office, to go through the files, study the market, make plans. With his, Habibullah’s, help and instruction, he could begin at last.
He stayed in a hotel on Middleton Row that looked like a substantial villa. The expense worried him – Herr Pfuehl’s kind loan was dwindling – but, with the help of Chimanlal’s introduction, he would soon be earning and then a good address would be a necessity, not an indulgence. His room, high-ceilinged, had french windows with green shutters. Baumgartner had imagined such shuttered windows were to be found only in the South of France, along the Mediterranean. He stayed gratefully behind them all afternoon. In the evening he opened them and looked into a garden where strings of electric lights were lit in the trees and waiters idled with trays of glasses and ice, cold drinks, iced beer. Later, a band played. Ravished by the sights, the sounds, Baumgartner went out, ordered beer, sat in the dark, listening, drinking. He had bathed and wore his lightest clothes; in abandoning the thick, heavy clothing of Europe, he felt lighter than he had ever been, physically unburdened. The air – so warm, so humid, so languid – made him drowsy, relaxed. He felt he was in paradise – or would have, had it not been for the immense, ferocious mosquitoes.
Driven indoors by their assault, he took off his shoes, felt his feet bare on the cool marble. He had never in his life done such a thing: what would Mutti have said? He found some fine letter-paper and under a lamp around which moths lurched and flapped, he began a letter: ‘Liebste Mutti . . .’ His hand became damp and stuck to the sheet of paper, blurring the ink. He perspired as though he were doing heavy labour. But he wrote, putting in all the things he thought she would like to read – about a snake-charmer he had seen on the Bombay streets, about the bananas and papayas he had had to eat – and left out the raucous, naked children at the station, the cow that ate cigarette packets, the land that bore no fruit. Also the British soldiers, and the Catholic priest. She would not understand, it was too bewildering. To reassure her, he added, ‘Soon I will be earning. Tell me if you have enough or I will send you what you need; also, repay the loan to Herr Pfuehl.’
Going out for a packet of cigarettes from a stall he had noticed at the corner, late at night when the shops were shut, he was hailed by two women who stood by a high wall that stank of urine and garbage. They wore white frocks, like nurses, and jewellery of glass, and tin. When they smiled at him, waving ‘Hoo-hoo, To-mmy,’ he saw that their teeth were stained red. When he had bought his cigarettes and turned away, they grabbed him by an arm each, crying, ‘Less have drink, Tommy, come awn.’ They told him their names were Rosie and Violet, but they smelt of Eastern flowers – jasmine, or lotus, as well as perspiration, cheap cigarettes, alcohol and the stuff they chewed with their strong, flashing teeth, spitting frequently to rid their mouths of its crimson juice.
He found he had to build a new language to suit these new conditions – German no longer sufficed, and English was elusive. Languages sprouted around him like tropical foliage and he picked words from it without knowing if they were English or Hindi or Bengali – they were simply words he needed: chai, khana, baraf, lao, jaldi, joota, chota peg, pani, kamra, soda, garee . . . what was this language he was wrestling out of the air, wrenching around to his own purposes? He suspected it was not Indian, but India’s, the India he was marking out for himself.
Baumgartner on the steamship, travelling to Dacca. Baumgartner with his feet sweating in white canvas shoes, propped up on the rail, sitting in the shade of a straw hat and studying the bank in an attempt at separating the animate from the inanimate. The forest that was like a shroud on the bank, ghostly and impenetrable. Crocodiles that slept like whitened stones, spattered by the excrement of the egrets that rode them delicately. Bamboos that stirred, women who lowered brass pots into the muddy swirl from which a fish leapt suddenly – but when he remembered them later, in a hotel room in a steaming city that rang with rickshaw bells, he wondered if it had not all been a mirage, a dream. If it had been a real scene, in a real land, then Baumgartner with his hat and shoes would have been too unlikely a visitor to be possible, a hallucination for those who watched from the shore. If he were real, then surely the scene, the setting was not. How could the two exist together in one land? The match was improbable beyond belief.
Baumgartner with fever. Fever filling his limbs, and belly, with lead. Making the surface of his skin crisp, delicate, sensitive. The head cracking, at the temples. The mosquito-net parcelling him up and hanging limp because there was no air. The medicine carmine and bitter, so bitter he could not have believed such bitterness possible, in a bottle marked with a notched strip of white paper. A glass, a long-handled spoon. ‘Malaria one does get here, Mutti, but quinine grows here too and puts it right,’ he wrote on fine blue paper. ‘So many mosquitoes in this land,’ whirring in his ear like electric fans, stinging him all over with their nettles. How did they enter the mosquito net? He tried to hunt them by the beam of his electric torch but the fever and the quinine made him giddy; he fell over, exhausted.
In the South, the heat of the sun was an assault, a violence. Amongst the slimness and darkness of the men and women in their white loose garments, he felt himself a great hunk of red meat, cooking in his own juices. They gave him coffee in a metal tumbler that nearly fell from his blistered fingers. When he ate, it was his tongue that was blistered and peeled. Daily he grew redder. Would he one day be darker? It seemed desperately important to belong and make a place for himself. He had to succeed in that if the dream of bringing his mother to India and making a home for her was to be turned into a reality. The news that came from Europe became rapidly more alarming; it was as if she, and therefore he, Baumgartner, were being pursued, run down to earth. She had to be made to leave, she had to be brought away, and then somehow he would have to make her accept India as her home. It was becoming clear to him that this was the only possibility, there was no other. It was why he plunged into it with such urgency.
At the auction he stood amongst small men who seemed to gibber with the excitement of seeing the giant teak trees, the great monuments of timber cut and piled in the yard. Elephants had dragged them from the forest, men could not have. He bought teak in the North, mahogany and rosewood in the South. He stood in the docks in Calcutta, despatching it. Then wondered if it would reach its destination. War was imminent, war loomed behind every lamppost and bush in the form of soldiers, stinking with fear and unwashed clothes.
He stood in the middle of his room in the hotel on Middleton Row, holding the fine sheets of paper across which her writing slanted, and stood reading them, before going in to bathe or change although he had just returned from a journey through Assam. He devoured the writing, then the spaces between the writing, hunting for the reassurance that the words so lacked. It was a cold winter and there was no coal but . . . there was of course no butter to be had but the neighbours were kind, they looked to her needs . . . he must not worry . . . there was no need to worry . . . the oftener she repeated the phrase, the more agitated he grew. The gin and tonic he had ordered to drink while reading the news from home stood untouched beside the chaise longue on which he could not now sink down and rest.
The unease only increased, till one day the letter he was handed at the desk on his return from yet another journey,
turned out to be his own stamped ‘Adresse Unbekannt’. Address Unknown? Now what was this? Had she moved? Where to? Why? He must send a cable, to Herr Pfuehl, to the landlady of the boarding-house on Grenadierstrasse, to his mother. Rushing out of the hotel, he ordered the taxi-driver to take him to the nearest post office. It was shut. They dashed to the main post office on Dalhousie Square. At a grimy counter, watched by a betel-chewing clerk, he filled in one telegraph form after another, perspiring profusely.
Gratefully he let himself be taken to a club that night by some of the other inhabitants of the hotel. At the round table in a room almost pitch-dark but brilliant with the noise of the band, he drank gin, not beer. Someone brought a big blonde woman in a white dress to the table. ‘Here, someone from your own country,’ was the introduction and they looked at each other warily. ‘Lola, from Prince’s,’ laughed the young men who jumped to their feet in excitement. She raised a round, plump arm and patted her hair which was thick, frizzy and yellow, a straw mat on her red, ringed neck. In those raw, sore rings of her neck, so like his own, he saw their kinship. When they put her on a chair next to his, he stammered, ‘How came you here?’ in the German to which he was no longer accustomed. But hers was worse.
