Baumgartner's Bombay

by Anita Desai

  Had it always been so? Baumgartner wondered, coughing into his handkerchief, or had he simply not noticed in the old days when he lived in the pre-war Calcutta of bars, dances, soldiers, prostitutes, businessmen, fortunes and fate? Perhaps if he went to the 300, to Prince’s or Firpo’s, he could find some of his acquaintances. But he could not bring himself to do so: that life and that time was a closed book, or like a pack of cards – finite in number.

  Yet he remained there, hoarding his small savings, for more than a year, watching the fires that burnt in the city, their hot glow reflected by the smouldering mass of fog and smoke that buried them all and did not allow the flames to escape. At times there were screams to be heard in the dark and footsteps pounding along dark lanes just as in badly made thrillers for the cinema. Processions wound endlessly through the city, chanting slogans like dirges, slipping into sudden outbreaks of activity, to overturn buses and set trams on fire. Or there would be a strike – of taxis, of trams – and the streets would be deserted, waste paper slowly swirling from one end to the other, like ghosts or – again – like the cinema. There were barricades in the streets, police with helmets and batons and rifles, mobs sullen or infuriated – one could never tell.

  Halted at a barricade, watching the police with their rifles at one end, the mob with their screams and gestures at the other, he turned in bewilderment to ask, ‘Why?’

  ‘They are protesting against the trial of the twenty thousand men who fought in the I.N.A.,’ he was told by a fellow onlooker.

  ‘The I.N.A.?’

  The man looked at Baumgartner with fury. ‘You do not know, about the Indian National Army and the war it fought against the British? In Burma and China? On the side of the Japanese?’

  Baumgartner was speechless. Nodding rapidly and apologetically, he retreated from the barricade. He heard the increasing frenzy of the mob, the growing tension of the police, and told himself, ‘Not here, not this, Hugo. No, no,’ and slipped away.

  His war was not their war. And they had had their own war. War within war within war. Everyone engaged in a separate war, and each war opposed to another war. If they could be kept separate, chaos would be averted. Or so they seemed to think, ignoring the fact that chaos was already upon them. And lunacy. The lunacy of performing acts one did not wish to perform, living lives one did not wish to live, becoming what one was not. Always another will opposed to one’s own, always another fate, not the one of one’s choice or even making. A great web in which each one was trapped, a nightmare from which one could not emerge.

  He could only shuffle away down the side lanes, keeping close to the wall, his head lowered. That did not mean he did not see what there was – the misery, the filth. Empty ration-shops, hungry people outside. Those English newspapers that he read told him there had been a cyclone that had wiped out a year’s crop of rice, that there were crop failures, shortage of grain, that the Viceroy, Wavell, had regretfully cut the caloric ration of each man to 1200. But out on the maidan where he sometimes drifted to hear the speakers who collected crowds whose size varied according to the volume and anguish of their voices, he heard talk of food stocks having been transferred to the British army, of scorched earth tactics by the British army under Japanese threat, of wilful destruction of resources. Moving from one group to another, listening to the speeches in their full flood of oratory and condemnation, Baumgartner retreated to the ranks of the peanut sellers and idle urchins, the pecking crows and stray dogs. Here, too, at any moment, someone might have grabbed him by the neck, seeing it was white. Rubbing the back of it, thoughtfully, Baumgartner shuffled away, back through the brown, stained lanes to the house.

  On the twelfth of February the whole city closed down in a general strike after a tremendous rally in Wellington Square that Baumgartner did not attend. He stayed in. More and more now, he stayed in.

  Not that the house provided any kind of shelter from the city. Down at the bottom of the lane there was a gap in the wall where the gate had once been and one entered through that into the walled compound that was really only partially walled since the wall had crumbled and in many places disappeared, allowing beggars, cattle, stray dogs and vendors of the whole locality to wander in and set up wherever they found space. There were always rows of supine bodies covered with white sheets so that they had the appearance of corpses in their shrouds but were only people lying in rows outside the house and its once gracious, now decayed portico – those who slept in the day were labourers who worked on night shifts, and those who slept at night were families that lived in the cracks and crevices of the building like so many rats, or lice, but came out for a little air after dark. Within the walls, sewing machines whirred, typewriters clacked, printing presses thumped, motor mechanics hammered at rusting automobiles, paint was splattered on tin and wood, chickens were plucked and slaughtered and, all the time, the single tap in the courtyard ran and ran over slabs of green and shining stones. Here women washed toppling mountains of pots and pans, filled buckets and kettles, scrubbed screaming children, bathed and washed their hair and carried on a seemingly endless war upon filth. The first sound of the morning, long before daybreak, was the chink of a metal pail set on the stone slab beneath the tap and then the rush of water as it filled. Late in the night when the last bit of washing was done, water still ran from the rag that was tied to the brass tap to prevent splashing and one might have imagined a perpetual stream ran through the courtyard. Yet nowhere could one see any sign of cleanliness – the tap only created a morass of mud and slime; children squatted anywhere to urinate or defecate; the washing did not turn the clothes white, only muddier. These clothes, that were washed daily and it seemed hourly, hung in long festoons from every window and balcony of the building, covering its mottled walls with flags – or shrouds – six-foot-long saris and dhotis forty inches wide. The whole building seemed to tremble and sway in every breeze as the garments flapped or floated or hung limp like the hide of an emaciated beast or the bedraggled feathers of a moulting bird.

  Even when he had parted these curtains, entered the house, mounted the stairs, careful not to step on the beggars and lepers and prostitutes who inhabited every landing, and at last achieved the small cell that was his room, he had no sense of being walled away from the outer world as he had had in the camp. Here the world forced its way in without being asked: a hundred radios invaded it, either with the mournful songs so beloved of the Bengalis, full of regret, sorrow and sighs, or the rapid gunfire of news bulletins that marked the hours of the day and night. Always there was the nervous flutter of typewriters, the hum and whirr and clack of machinery. There were the inevitable sounds of quarrels and violence at night when the illicit toddy brewed in the closed sheds and garages and odd corners of the compound was bought and consumed; then wives were beaten, children threatened, or else the drunkards themselves abused and thrashed. (One of them howled customarily: ‘Beat me, beat me. I am so wicked, you must beat me!’) To sleep was only to know a tired semi-consciousness, stirred involuntarily by the sounds of human and insect life. Yes, that too, for in one corner of the compound mosquitoes bred in a still, scummy well and rose at dark to invade the house, defend itself as it might with the ringing of bells, the blowing of conch shells and the waving of joss sticks – the daily ceremony of dusk – and there devour its inhabitants till the early hours of the morning when they dropped off and flew sibilantly away.

  In time his anonymity and the anonymity of his neighbours broke down, and identities, individualities were revealed.

  Out in the compound a frail grey wisp of a woman in a widow’s white sari pottered about with a watering can, irrigating the trees she planted compulsively all over the compound, only to have them eaten by the goats and chickens or trampled by the motor mechanics or the football-playing children. Whenever she saw Baumgartner, she came to him – she was very light-skinned, with the papery whiteness of the Zoroastrian and she seemed drawn to his complexion – and quavered tearfully about the latest lo
sses: ‘Six mangoes in a row I did plant, and today not one left – and last week my frangipani eaten by the buffaloes –’ while he nodded and nodded with weary sympathy. He watched her from his window as she stood over her wretched little servant boy with a surprising authority, ordering him to dig pits and plant the saplings she acquired from some mysterious nursery he could hardly believe existed in this city. Her doomed attempts to create a garden in this city-world awed him and horrified him by their persistence. Then he learnt – from a clerk who also sought him out more than he wished and tried to establish the bond of education by reading to him from the newspapers he carried around all day, and occasionally quoting poetry in a rhetorical thunder that sounded to Baumgartner uncannily like German – that she had once owned the house and still lived somewhere in its uppermost regions even after it had been sold and halved and quartered beneath her, and then the persistence seemed a mere habit of ownership. The clerk seemed to admire her proprietorial instinct but one who mocked it was a young man who lived in a kind of loft built above the landing outside Baumgartner’s room. After watching one of Baumgartner’s encounters with the landlady, he said sardonically, through his cigarette, ‘These people who own land – they think even the grass grows for them.’ ‘And it doesn’t?’ Baumgartner asked, smiling. ‘No,’ he snapped, ‘the grass is the people’s, the land is the people’s.’ ‘Ah, a Marxist?’ Baumgartner queried, and the boy nodded.

  Sometimes he came down and asked Baumgartner for a match, then Baumgartner would offer him a cigarette as well. It turned out that he was not so young after all – had been involved in what he called, with dark pride, the ‘Alipore bombing case’ and been exiled to the Andaman islands for thirteen years – ‘But how old were you? A boy?’ Baumgartner asked, and the young man made a gesture of his hand by the waist to show how tall he had been then – and that was where he had learnt his Marxism. He laughed as he told Baumgartner, ‘All British are highly educated, we think, but we used to order Karl Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, anything we wanted, for our library and they would get for us. They didn’t know what they were giving us to read.’ He had not only infinite scorn for his erstwhile captors but also an implacable hatred. The day he discovered that Baumgartner was German, he lit up with admiration as if in the presence of a war hero. ‘But a Jew, a Jew, not a Nazi,’ Baumgartner tried to deflect his misplaced ardour but this meant nothing to Sushil who had renounced religion for politics and had no interest in Judaism; nor would he entertain any criticism of the German regime. ‘If they had defeated the British, then they would have helped Japan to drive them out of India. They are our friends, Japan and Germany.’ When Baumgartner stammered that they were not his friends, Sushil politely changed the subject, saying, ‘Now I am not so political, now I want to learn other things.’ He had learnt yoga in order to build up his body, and taken a course in radio mechanics. That was his greatest passion in life now and, released from the Andamans, he had set up an intricate array of radios in his loft in which the babble of a hundred voices thrummed, knitting themselves into a web of eery sound. Swinging himself up into the loft like a pilot into the cockpit of his aircraft, settling the ear-phones over his ears to emphasise this similarity, he would become engrossed as if taking off into space, bemused as a space-traveller, in a way that Baumgartner found enviable. From that abstract height he would occasionally smile at Baumgartner, say softly, ‘Tokyo radio’ of ‘Voice of Moscow’ and then his eyes would glaze over. Only sometimes his erstwhile friends would visit him, climb up after him, voices would be raised in argument, the air grow fraught in a way that would alarm Baumgartner. When they left, he would come to his door and call, ‘Sushil, is everything all right?’ and the boy would sigh, ‘These men – old friends – they won’t let me go. I want to listen to my radio, I want to learn more and more. Bombs, guns – those games I don’t want to play any more.’ ‘Games, Sushil?’ Another sigh. ‘Ah, bombing here, killing there. It goes on all the time – why ask me to join?’ Then he would settle the earphones over his thick black curls and cup his chin in his hand, pick up his pencil and notepad and seem to forget the earthbound world below.

  So it might have continued if the city and pre-partition violence had not closed in upon his hiding-place. The nights were hideous with screams, gunfire, the sounds of rioting, the smell of burning. The days were strangely calm and empty. Baumgartner even went out sometimes, oppressed by the house, by his room, by the summer. There were times he felt he could not breathe the city air, that he was being suffocated, and then he would be filled with a panic to leave, to return to the camp and see if that orderly schoolboy world still stood, slip through the barbed wire and return to the barracks where he had lived in austerity and simplicity that had seemed his natural element – at least now, in retrospect, seemed his element. Then he found himself searching the streets for someone from that world with whom he might associate. He even wandered on to Park Street, the forbidden area of the past. Here, in normal daylight, he found himself staring in at the big plate-glass windows of Flury’s. As if in answer to his enquiry, he saw a group of blonde women having coffee at a table and imagined one of them was Annemarie. Her pale hair, her fine neck, her back to him – surely it was Annemarie? He stood there, waiting patiently – impatiently for her to turn. When she did, he saw of course it was not her. Annemarie would not have had coffee and cake in Flury’s. Nor should he. He too turned and left, hurried back to the nightmare house where he lived, to which he now belonged.

  That night the house itself was engulfed by a riot. He woke to screams as he often had before and only turned on to his back, resignedly folding his hands over his chest and preparing to postpone sleep till the latest domestic quarrel had died down. But when guns were fired, he jumped to his feet and went to the window to see the ghosts in their white shrouds fleeing and running pell-mell as men in theatrically blood-soaked clothes entered through the gap in the wall with torches and knives, screaming those slogans of religious warfare that were raised everywhere now. The buffalo calf in the shed bawled in hysterical fear to its mother who bawled back. Footsteps thundered up the stairs from below and Baumgartner hurriedly moved his chair and bag against the door, trying to secure it against intruders. The loudest scream came from his landing, from the loft above it – a male scream, somehow more intolerable than a woman’s or a child’s. His heart hammering inside him, Baumgartner moved the chair away and opened the door to go out and see – and met the marauders as they leapt down from the loft and ran down the stairs past him. When he climbed up to the loft and called, ‘Sushil? Sushil?’ he saw the radio buff’s chair overturned and the boy lying face down on the floor. The blood streamed. Women came up the stairs, wailing. Pushing past them was the little landlady in white. She stood and stared at the corpse. ‘Tcch,’ she said, ‘I always knew this boy was bad.’ ‘Madam,’ Baumgartner stammered, ‘the boy is dead.’

  In his sleep, in his dreams, the blood was Mutti’s, not the boy’s. Yet his mother – so small, weak – could not have spilt so much blood. Or had she? The blood ran, ran over the floor and down the stairs, soaking his feet which stood in it helplessly.

  When he went to see if Habibullah was safe and unaffected by the night’s violence, he found the office empty, ransacked. A beggar picked through the rubble. Baumgartner asked him, in his cautious Bengali, ‘Where is he, the sahib, Habibullah?’ but did not understand the reply. Outside the morning street was normal, humdrum, except for the gutted buildings, the shattered glass and the smoke from the night’s fires which were after all commonplace now. Baumgartner felt himself overtaken by yet another war of yet another people. Done with the global war, the colonial war, only to be plunged into a religious war. Endless war. Eternal war. Twenty thousand people, the newspapers informed him, were killed in three days of violence in Calcutta. Muslims killed Hindus, Hindus Muslims. Baumgartner could not fathom it – to him they were Indians seen in a mass and, individually, Sushil the Marxist, Habibullah the trader. He wondered if Habibull
ah had fled to safety in East Bengal and not left it too late. He must not leave it till too late. He must take Habibullah’s advice, he knew, and leave for Bombay. He returned to his room, packed his bag, carried it down, went to Howrah Station – the rickshaw puller scuttled through the city as if in fear – and bought a ticket. He spent the intervening time in the railway rest room, unable to face the sight of the destroyed buildings or the panic-stricken population. Refugees from the city poured on to the station platform, filled it to overflowing with families and belongings, and in the end he had to fight through them, climb over them and claw past them on to the train that carried him to Bombay.

  So Baumgartner came to Bombay. The glitter of the noon sun on the waves in the bay struck his eyes. It was reflected by the white walls of the houses along Marine Drive on which traffic rolled in an orderly way that suggested affluence and Westernisation of an order that Baumgartner had lost touch with in Calcutta. He was astonished by the way the streets sloped sharply and even curved; by the way houses were named, not numbered – all Europeanisms that he had forgotten, now brought back. He felt intimidated rather than reassured: he shrank, his eyes blinked. It made him realise how much a native he had become. Baumgartner, a native of Hindustan. He smiled, thinking of what Mü would have said to that. And yet he had not met a single snake other than in a snake-charmer’s basket on the city pavements – he must tell her that. But – he forgot constantly, again and again he stopped and was brought up against the fact he could not admit: he would never hear from her again, there would be no more communication. He wrote to people, to addresses he remembered; he never had a reply; all of Germany might have been wiped off the face of the earth. That made him sort out the matter of his papers, his passport, his nationality, and found himself become an Indian citizen, the holder of an Indian passport. Holding it, he wondered if it meant that he would now never leave India and realised that, for all that it was a travel document, it did.