Cracking India

by Bapsi Sidhwa

  It is always a shock to see the raw hands and faces of the English exposed to the light of day; and as the column moves away my mind transforms it into a slick red and white caterpillar, its legs marching, marching, its hundred sightless eyes staring ahead.

  At startling intervals the caterpillar bursts into sound. Drums, bugles and tambourines clash—and as it curves out of sight round a bend in Jail Road it manufactures a curious vibration, like a unison of muzzled voices raised in song.

  I stand transfixed, waiting for the creature’s return. Ayah tries to drag me away but I resist, and she leans resignedly—and attractively—against the white-washed gatepost.

  When the caterpillar returns, now marching on our side of the road, the red jackets and white saris separate to take the alien shapes of Englishmen and -women. Observed in microscopic dissection the head of the centipede is formed by a strutting Englishman holding the stout pole of a red flag diagonally across his chest. Of its own volition his glance slides to Ayah and, turning purple and showing off, he wields the flag like an acrobatic baton.

  Close behind, orifices glued to convoluted brass horns, strut two red jackets: and on their heels, forming the shoulder and chest of the creature, a tight-packed row of red jackets beating drums, cymbals and tambourines, their leaden eyes attracted to the magnet leaning against the gatepost.

  The saviors move away and the bits and pieces of Englishmen and -women fit together again to form the elongated and illusionary caterpillar of Jail Road.

  We no longer use the pram to visit Godmother’s house: it is a short ten minute walk. But when Ayah takes me up Queens Road, past the YWCA, past the Freemasons’ Lodge, which she calls “The Ghost Club,” and across the Mall to the Queen’s statue in the park opposite the Assembly Chambers, I’m still pushed in a pram. I love it.

  Queen Victoria, cast in gunmetal, is majestic, massive, overpowering, ugly. Her statue imposes the English Raj in the park. I lie sprawled on the grass, my head in Ayah’s lap. The Faletti’s Hotel cook, the Government House gardener, and an elegant, compactly muscled head-and-body masseur sit with us. Ice-candy-man is selling his popsicles to the other groups lounging on the grass. My mouth waters. I have confidence in Ayah’s chocolate chemistry... lank and loping the Ice-candy-man cometh ...

  I take advantage of Ayah’s admirers. “Massage me!” I demand, kicking the handsome masseur. He loosens my laces and unbuckles the straps gripping my boots. Taking a few drops of almond oil from one of the bottles in his cruet set, he massages my wasted leg and then my okay leg. His fingers work deftly, kneading, pummelling, soothing. They are knowing fingers, very clever, and sometimes, late in the evening, when he and Ayah and I are alone, they massage Ayah under her sari. Her lids close. She grows still and languid. A pearly wedge gleams between her lips and she moans, a fragile, piteous sound of pleasure. Very carefully, very quietly, I maneuver my eyes and nose. It is dark, but now and then a dart of twilight illuminates a subtle artistry. My nose inhales the fragrance of earth and grass—and the other fragrance that distills insights. I intuit the meaning and purpose of things. The secret rhythms of creation and mortality. The essence of truth and beauty. I recall the choking hell of milky vapors and discover that heaven has a dark fragrance.

  Things love to crawl beneath Ayah’s sari. Ladybirds, glow-worms, Ice-candy-man’s toes. She dusts them off with impartial nonchalance. I keep an eye on Ice-candy-man’s toes. Sometimes, in the course of an engrossing story, they travel so cautiously that both Ayah and I are taken unawares. Ice-candy-man is a raconteur. He is also an absorbing gossip. When the story is extra good, and the tentative toes polite, Ayah tolerates them.

  Sometimes a toe snakes out and zeroes in on its target with such lightning speed that I hear of the attack only from Ayah’s startled “Oof.” Once in a while I preempt the big toe’s romantic impulse and, catching it mid-crawl or mid-strike, twist it. It is a measure to keep the candy bribes coming.

  I learn also to detect the subtle exchange of signals and some of the complex rites by which Ayah’s admirers coexist. Dusting the grass from their clothes they slip away before dark, leaving the one luck, or the lady, favors. I don’t enjoy the gardener’s turn because nothing much happens except talk. He talks and Ayah talks, and he listens and Ayah talks. I escape into daydreams in which my father turns loquacious and my mother playful. Or to heroics in which I rescue Godmother from the drooling jaws of her cannibalistic brother-in-law who is a doctor and visits from way beyond the perimeter of my familiar world.

  I learn fast. I gain Ayah’s goodwill and complicity by accommodating her need to meet friends and relatives. She takes me to fairs, cheap restaurants and slaughterhouses. I cover up for her and maintain a canny silence about her doings. I learn of human needs, frailties, cruelties and joys. I also learn from her the tyranny magnets exercise over metals.

  I have many teachers. My cousin shows me things.

  “You want to see my marbles?” he asks, and holds out the prettily colored glass balls for me to admire and touch—if I so wish, to play with. He has just returned from Quetta where he had a hernia operation. “Let me show you my scar,” he offers, unbuttoning his fly and exposing me to the glamorous spectacle of a stitched scar and a handful of genitals. He too has clever fingers. “You can touch it,” he offers. His expression is disarming, gallant. I touch the fine scar and gingerly hold the genitals he transfers to my palm. We both study them. “I am also having my tonsils removed,” he says. I hand back his genitals and look at his neck. I visualize a red, scalloped scar running from ear to ear. It is a premonition.

  Sometimes I spend days and nights with my limber electric-aunt and my knowing and instructive cousin. “See this pillow?” he asks one night—and as it moves nearer it resembles a muzzle. I scream. Frightened, he covers my scream with the pillow and sits on it. I struggle madly at first and then feebly, and cautiously he allows me to emerge, screamless.

  The next day, when we are alone, my cousin’s face looms conspiratorially close and he says, “Come on. I’ll show you something.”

  He leads me through wire-mesh doors to the back veranda. He drags a wooden stool close to the whitewashed wall and climbing on it points to a hole in a small white china object stuck to the wall. “See this?” he asks. “Put your finger there and see what happens.” He jumps down and almost lifts me to the stool. He is a couple of years older than me. I raise my hand, index finger pointed, and look down at him expectantly. He nods. I poke my finger into the small depression and an AC current teaches me everything I will ever need to know about gullibility and shock. Though my faculties of reason, deduction and logic advance with the years, my gullibility and reaction to shock remain the same as on the day I tumbled screaming, hair, nerves and limbs spreadeagled, into my cousin’s arms.

  My electric-aunt is a resourceful widow addicted to quick decisions and swift results. The speed at which she moves from spot to spot—from dawn to dusk—have earned her a citation. She is called, in moments of need and gratitude, bijli : a word that in the various Indian languages, with slight variations, stands for both electricity and lightning.

  She is also addicted to navy blue. She and her son share a bedroom. It has navy-blue curtains, navy-blue bedspreads and navy-blue linen doilies on the dressing table. It is, depending on my mood, either a restful or a gloomy room. The night of my lesson in gullibility and shock I find it gloomy. My cousin and I spread mattresses and sleep on the carpeted floor of the cheerful sitting room next to the bedroom.

  That night I have the first nightmare that connects me to the pain of others.

  Far away I hear a siren. Tee-too! Tee-too! it goes, alarming my heart. The nocturnal throb and shrieking grow louder, closing in, coming now from the compound of the Salvation Army next door. Its tin-sheet gates open a crack to let out a long khaki caterpillar. Centipedal legs marching, marching, it curves, and as it approaches Electric-aunt’s gate it metamorphoses into a single German soldier on a motorcycle. Roaring up the drive t
he engine stops, as I know it must, outside Electric-aunt’s doorstep. The siren’s tee-too tee-too is now deafening. My heart pounds at the brutality of the sound. The soldier, his cap and uniform immaculate, dismounts. Carefully removing black gloves from his white hands, he comes to get me.

  Why does my stomach sink all the way to hell even now? I had my own stock of Indian bogeymen. Choorails, witches with turned-about feet who ate the hearts and livers of straying children. Bears lurking, ready to pounce if I did not finish my pudding. The zoo lion. No one had taught me to fear an immaculate Nazi soldier. Yet here he was, in nightmare after nightmare, coming to get me on his motorcycle.

  I recall another childhood nightmare from the past. Children lie in a warehouse. Mother and Ayah move about solicitously. The atmosphere is businesslike and relaxed. Godmother sits by my bed smiling indulgently as men in uniforms quietly slice off a child’s arm here, a leg there. She strokes my head as they dismember me. I feel no pain. Only an abysmal sense of loss—and a chilling horror that no one is concerned by what’s happening.

  Chapter 4

  I pick up a brother. Somewhere down the line I become aware of his elusive existence. He is four—a year and a month younger than me. I don’t recall him learning to crawl or to walk. Where was he? It doesn’t matter.

  My brother is aloof. Vital and alert, he inhabits another sphere of interests and private thoughts. No doubt he too is busy picking up knowledge, gaining insights. I am more curious about him than he about me. His curiosity comes later. I am skinny, wizened, sallow, wiggly-haired, ugly. He is beautiful. He is the most beautiful thing, animal, person, building, river or mountain that I have seen. He is formed of gold mercury. He never stands still enough to see. He turns, ducks, moves, looks away, vanishes.

  The only way I know to claim his undivided attention is to get him angry. I learn to bait him. His name is Adi. I call him Sissy. He is too confused to retaliate the first few times I call him by his new name. At last: “My name is Adi,” he growls, glowering.

  The next day I persist. He pretends not to notice. In the evening, holding up a sari-clad doll I say, “Hey, Sissy, look! She’s just like you!”

  Adi raises his head and looks squarely from the doll to me. His jet eyes are vibrant. His flushed face holds the concentrated beauty and venom of an angry cobra. And like a cobra striking, in one sweep he removes a spiked boot and hurls it at me. I stare at him, blood blurring my vision. And he stares back communicating cold fury and deathly warning.

  It’s not that he doesn’t want to play with me. It’s just that I can’t hold his attention for more than a few seconds. His unfathomable thoughts and mercurial play pattern absorb him. Squatting before comers or blank walls, head bent, fingers busy, he concentrates on trains, bricks, mudballs, strings. Quickly he shifts to another heap of toys and garbage in another corner; or out the doors into the garden, or vegetable patch, or servants’ quarters at the back of the house.

  At night he’s into his nightsuit and fast asleep while I’m still soaking my chilblained toes in scalding salt water—or standing on a stool brushing my teeth. We sleep in outsize elongated cots. Like our loosely tailored clothes with huge tucks and hems, our cots are designed to last a lifetime. (My brother outgrew his cot. I still fit into mine.) Ayah tucks in the mosquito net and switches off the faint light.

  Is there anything to compare with the cozy bliss of snuggling beneath a heavy quilt with a hot-water bag on a freezing night in an unheated room? Particularly if you’ve just dashed from the bathroom over a bare brick floor? And you’re five years old? And free to go over the excitements and evaluate the experience of the day and weave them into daydreams that drift into sleep? That is, provided the zoo lion does not roar. If he roars—which at night is rare—my daydreams turn into quaking daymares: and these to nightmares in which the hungry lion, cutting across Lawrence Road to Birdwood Road, prowls from the rear of the house to the bedroom door, and in one bare-fanged leap crashes through to sink his fangs into my stomach. My stomach sinks all the way to the bottom of hell.

  Whether he roars at night or not, I awake every morning to the lion’s roar. He sets about it at the crack of dawn, blighting my dreams. By the time I dispel the fears of the jungle and peep out of my quilt, Adi is already out of bed. A great chunk of his life is lived apart: he goes to a regular school.

  Spring flowers, birds and butterflies scent and color the air. It is the end of March, and already it is hot in the sun. Cousin and I come indoors and see my brother, embedded in the sag of a charpoy, fast asleep. We gently turn him on his back and propped on elbows scrutinize his face.

  “He’s put on lipstick,” Cousin says.

  “Yes,” I agree.

  His face has the irresistible bloom of spring flowers. Turn by turn Cousin and I softly brush our lips and cheeks against his velvet face, we pry back a sleek lick of dark brown hair and kiss his forehead and the cushioned cleft in his chin. His vulnerability is breathtaking, and we ravish it with scrutiny and our childish kisses. Carried away by our ardor we become rough. Adi wakes up and opens indulgent, jewel-et eyes. They are trusting and kind as a saint’s.

  “You’ve put on lipstick?” I ask, inviting confidence.

  “No,” he says mildly.

  “Of course he has!” says Cousin.

  “No, I’ve not,” says Adi.

  “Can I rub some tissue and find out?” I ask courteously.

  “Okay,” he says.

  I stroke the Kleenex across his lips and look at it. It is unblemished. I moisten it with my tongue and rub harder. Cousin is armed with his own tissue. Adi withstands our vigorous scouring with the patience of the blameless. I notice blood on the Kleenex. The natural red in his lips has camouflaged the bleeding. Astonished, we finally believe him.

  “He should have been a girl,” says Cousin.

  By now Adi is fully awake. I watch helplessly as mercurial preoccupation veils his eyes. He becomes remote. His vulnerability vanishes. He kicks out, pushing back our hands with the tissues. He is in control.

  Passing by, Ayah swoops down on him and picks him up. After hugging him and nuzzling his face she abruptly puts him down again, saying: “He is my little English baba!”

  Last evening Ayah took us for a walk in Simla-pahari and a passerby, no doubt impelled by her spherical agitation into spouting small talk, inquired: “Is he an English’s son?”

  “Of course not!” said Ayah imperiously. However, vanity softening her contempt, she added: “Can any dough-faced English’s son match his spice? Their looks lack salt!”

  Ayah is so proud of Adi’s paucity of pigment. Sometimes she takes us to Lawrence Gardens and encourages him to run across the space separating native babies and English babies. The ayahs of the English babies hug him and fuss over him and permit him to romp with their privileged charges. Adi undoes the bows of little girls with blue eyes in scratchy organdy dresses and wrestles with tallow-haired boys in the grass. Ayah beams.

  On bitterly cold days when ice sales plummet, Ice-candy-man transforms himself into a birdman. Burdened with enormous cages stuffed with sparrows and common green parrots he parades the paths behind the Lahore Gymkhana lawns and outside the Punjab Club. At strategic moments he plants the cages on the ground and rages: “I break your neck, you naughty birds! You do too much chi chi! What will the good memsahibs think? They’ll think I no teach you. You like jungly lions in zoo. I cut your throat!”

  He flourishes a barber’s razor. It is an infallible bait. Clutches of tenderhearted Englishwomen, sporting skirts and tennis shoes, abandon their garden chairs and dainty cucumber and chicken tea sandwiches to rush up and scold: “You horrid man. Don’t you dare cut their throats!”

  “Them fresh parrots, memsahib. They not learn dirty words yet. I catches them today,” coaxes Birdman, plunging his crafty hands into the cages. “They only one rupee for two birds.”

  His boneless fingers set up such a squawking and twittering among the parrots and the sparrows that the
ladies become frantic. They buy the birds by the dozen, and, cooing, “You poor little itty-bitty things,” snuggle them to their bosoms.

  After the kissing and the cuddling, holding the stupefied birds aloft, they release them, one by one. Their valiant expressions and triumphant cries enthrall the rapt crowd of native gawkers as they exclaim: “There! Fly away, little birdie. Go, you poor little things!”

  Squatting on his heels Birdman surveys the tearful and spirited mems with open-mawed and marveling admiration. Conjuring rueful little nods and a catch to his voice, he remarks: “It go straight to mama-papa.” Or, sighing heavily, “It fly to hungry little babies in nest.”

  And today, foreshadowing the poetic impulse of his future, wiping tears and pointing at a giddily spinning and chirping sparrow, Ice-candy-man says: “Look! Little sparrow singing, ‘See? See? I free!’ to mad-with-grief wife!”

  Ayah, Adi and I watch the performance with concealed glee. Every now and then we heighten the histrionics and encourage sales by shouting, “Cut their throats! Cut their throats!” We cheer and clap from the sidelines when the birds are released.

  Ice-candy-man resorts to his change in occupation only two or three times a year, so his ingenuity works. He usually clears a packet. And if the sale has been quick and lucrative, as on this Saturday afternoon just before Christmas, he treats us to a meal at Ayah’s favorite wayside restaurant in Mozang Chungi.

  We are regulars. The shorn proprietor acknowledges us with a solemn nod. He is a pahailwan: a wrestler. Covering his massive torso with a singlet in deference to Ayah’s presence, he approaches. Despite the cold, his shoulders gleam with sweat and a striped lungi clings to his buttocks and legs.