Indian Magic

by Balraj Khanna

  I began with the head and got bogged down with the eyes. Ranji had begun with the heavenly breasts and was slowly making his way down to the divine triangle when there came a shout from our teacher who, unknown to us both, stood right behind us.

  ‘Nein, nein, nein,’ the German said to Ranji. ‘You don’t begin there. Get up, please. Let me show you where to start.’ Ranji’s face! It was that of a thief caught red-handed. ‘Am not wearing them knickers and my chap is up.’ I pretended not to hear him.

  ‘Up, up, young man,’ Miss Lieberman said and pulled Ranji to his feet. As she did so, both of us saw a monstrous protrusion in his fly. He had tried to hide it with the end of his jacket, but it had been seen by the artist - by the model, too, I was sure.

  ‘Disgraceful,’ Miss Lieberman hissed in my ear. ‘It’s only a naked woman, for heaven’s sake.’ Then she ordered Ranji to ‘sit’ as one orders an unruly dog.

  Shamed, my friend sat down, hissing, ‘It stand itself. What can I do?’ Our second art lesson was our last.

  The boss was in a foul mood. He shut down everything every night himself before locking up, but last night, he had forgotten to close a little window overlooking the dustbin lane behind the Magic. A fierce shower in the early hours had let in quite a lot of the rainwater. It was nothing serious, but enough to annoy him, since - as he opened up the place first thing himself, he had to personally clean up the mess.

  Before we received our first customer, we had a visitor – Gokul Swami’s friend Rameshwar. He wore a meaningful grin. He Had come with news - ‘Hot news’.

  ‘Property going for next door to nothing. Interested, Gokul?’

  Every now and then the boss had talked of ‘expanding’. This bit of news bucked him up. ‘Details, Rameshwar?’

  The details pleased our boss, but he didn’t like the fact that the property was not English-owned. Although he was glad to know it was not Indian-owned, his motto being ‘never do business with an Indian’, he wished its owner was English. This made me ask him a question. ‘Sir, as a gentleman who’s Been here for so long, do you have many close English friends?’

  ‘What you talking, boy?’ I had asked a silly question.

  ‘Raavi wants to know if you know the Englishman personally,’ Ranji translated my question, making Mr Swami stare at me.

  ‘What’s come in your potato heads? England, best country. Englishman, best man. Queen, best woman. So? I am Tory type. Not issocialist, only a good issocialiser, call a spoon a spoon. Is straightforward.’ It was an evasive answer. But Ranji pressed on. ‘So are you a Royalist? True, sir?’

  ‘I don’t know the meaning of the word. I am a Queenist and Philipist. Yes.’ Mr Swami waved Ranji away. He then pointed to a Lowenbrau box and told me: ‘Take to my house. Pooja isseason isstarting. Mrs Isswami isselebrating from today.’

  I didn’t want to go to his house again. I didn’t wish to set eyes on her again. That little bitch who had made an ass of me.

  ‘Isstop gaping at my face, boy. Go.’

  ‘But, Mr Swami.’ Why didn’t he send one of the others, Ranji or Hari or J or P? Why me?

  ‘Go, go, go. Mrs Isswami waiting.’

  And who opened the door this time?

  ‘Oh, it’s you again,’ she said as she let me in. Again I wondered why she wasn’t at school - it was mid-day. Perhaps she has come home for lunch, I thought. For she wore a uniform of some sort - grey blazer, black skirt, white shirt and a striped tie, but there was no insignia on the blazer pocket. My God how different she looked - very sophisticated as all English schoolchildren do by comparison with their slovenly Indian counterparts. Today her chest was flattened no more. In fact, her breasts stood out through the translucent nylon shirt as two over-grown nimbu limes. Having seen me steal a glance at them, she pulled her jacket back a bit and turned to look at the clock in the hall. I was too annoyed, and slightly flustered, to take advantage of the opportunity offered. I looked at the clock with her. It chimed half past twelve and Miss Swami jerked her head like her father and looked at me. Not a hint of apology. Nor a word of explanation. A simple case of adding injury to insult.

  ‘Mr Swami has sent these things for Mrs Swami.’

  ‘Oh, good. Ta. MUM!’

  Mrs Swami had obviously heard the bell. She came.

  The resemblance between mother and daughter was striking’. They had the same eyes, nose, mouth, even the height. Only the mother was older and wore gold chains and gold bangles and gold rings. One look and I knew who she was - a happily married Indian lady with a weakness for ghee and a resultant tendency towards plumpness. With a large smile, she gave me a long-up-and-down look.

  ‘Everybody speak about and they are right.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Bring in the kitchen. Cold? Tea-cup?’

  ‘Mrs Swami, I must get back. Mr Swami is waiting.’

  ‘But you help. No?’

  ‘To do what, Mrs Swami?’

  ‘Move sofa.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Swami.’

  ‘And not worry about Mr Swami. I phone. What phones are for. And call me Auntie, not Mrs Swami. Not very nice. We are not cold English. We are warm Gujarati Indian. Family type.’

  Mrs Swami led me to the kitchen and gave me a cup of tea and a samosa, eyeing me up and down all the while. ‘Made with my own hands. The samosa.’

  ‘It’s delicious, Mrs Swami.’

  ‘Again Mrs Swami?’

  Mrs Swami was being exceedingly nice to me. The thought did not cross my mind to ask myself why. I was, after all, only a waiter in her husband’s restaurant. But I was twenty-three. I took it for granted that everybody would be influenced by my looks and good manners. I expected most people to be nice to me, especially ladies.

  ‘And you are high-related.’

  ‘Where is the sofa?’ I couldn’t bring myself to call her Auntie, so I called her nothing. Mrs Swami took me to the front room. There Miss Swami lay on the carpet, sipping tea from a mug and watching television. It was not just the sofa, but the whole bloody suite. It had to go from that room to another.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mrs Swami said girlishly. ‘The table too. Very very sorry.’ Moving the dining table meant that Miss Swami had to shift a few inches this way and that. She did so while scrutinising me. She stopped watching TV and began watching me as if I was doing something mind-boggling.

  ‘There,’ I said when it was all done.

  ‘Here,’ Mrs Swami said, dipping a hand in her gold-laden Cleavage and coming out with a ten-shilling note.

  ‘No, no, no, Mrs Swami.’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ Mrs Swami tucked the note in my pocket. ‘You take or Auntie get angry. And I have something for you to Take to Mr Swami,’ She went out of the room. This gave me the opportunity I was looking for.

  ‘What was the big idea?’ I said crossly.

  ‘What idea?’

  ‘Sending me on a wild-goose chase.’

  ‘Whaa?’

  ‘Sending me to the wrong school?’

  ‘Which school?’

  ‘Your old school. Sarah’s or whatever you said it was.’

  ‘I never. I never did.’ It was clear that she had forgotten all about it, the pint-sized small-breasted bitch.

  Just then, Mrs Swami walked back into the room with a carrier-bag full of this and that, so I never got another chance to ask her daughter why she had played that shitty trick on me.

  I bumped into poet Melaram again another Sunday. He gave me a searching look, unnerving me. He asked me a question which tortured me day and night. ‘Raavi, smart, handsome and all the rest that you are, do you propose to pass the rest of your life as a waiter?’

  ‘What a question, Mela-ji?’

  ‘Then what are you doing about it?’ I was doing bugger all about it. I was locked in the little brown world of Indian Magic, and the Subcontinental. I was locked out of the great white world outside the two. I did not know how to get out of one and enter the other. I was waiting for something to happ
en. What, when, how? I did not know. But being a Punjabi, I knew that sooner or later, it would.

  ‘A friend of mine knows someone who has your qualifications and he works as a supply teacher at a school. Why don’t you apply to be one, Raavi?’

  ‘They gave an Indian a job at an English school?’

  ‘And this individual gets four pounds ten a day.’ That was more than half my weekly wage.

  ‘I’ve got a number from him for you to ring.’ I knew it was an utter waste of time, but I rang up nonetheless on Monday, more out of respect for Melaram than from any great hope. To my astonishment, I got an interview. Melaram, Tariq and Walia took time off and came with me for ‘moral support’.

  I had seen the County Hall before, on my first or second day here, but from across the river and at night. Then, it was flood-lit, a Cinderella castle made of golden stone ringed with a million pre-Christmas lights which rose from a riot of shimmering waves. This morning, it looked grey and massive, a forbidding fort of power. Inside it was a rabbit warren of miles of corridors of polished wooden floors which smelled of varnish.

  The interview was held in a room with panelled walls and a stupendous view. All I had to do was to put my hand outside the window and I would touch the Thames, Westminster Bridge and the most beautiful of all London buildings - the Houses of Parliament. A couple of extremely long barges chugged along. A tiny speedboat shot past them in two jets of white spray. Then a great pleasure-boat glided by. What a room to be interviewed in for a ‘no job’!

  My interviewer was one Mrs Alderfield, a frail old lady who swayed a little like a paper boat in a still pond when she spoke. She looked just like an aunt of mine I used to adore and who adored me till she by chance saw me smoking one day. The moment we met, I knew Mrs Alderfield liked me.

  ‘You must find it cold here,’ she began by saying.

  ‘Yes, it’s bitter. If only I had known.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have come. Oh dear. What a dreadful winter. We haven’t had one like this for years. Now, tell me,’ Thus began the interview. At one point, our eyes strayed to the walls of the handsome room.

  ‘Beautiful panelling,’ I remarked.

  ‘Teak.’

  ‘Indian teak.’

  ‘Oh? How can you tell, Mr Mera?’

  Good question. I didn’t know the answer. So I said.

  ‘I can tell Indian teak when I see it.’ Till that morning I had not seen teak in my life. If I had, I had not known it was teak. Mrs Alderfield laughed and looked even more like that aunt of mine whose great affection for me went up in smoke merely through seeing me with a cigarette in my hand.

  ‘You know, I have worked in this building most of my life but have never known this was Indian teak. I am sure no one else does either. Probably we got it from you for nothing.’

  ‘Having an empire does have its advantages.’

  The mention of the word ‘empire’ had an effect on Mrs Alderfield. Her face suddenly acquired a semi-glow of a sort, half-radiating disguised pride.

  ‘I don’t know how we did it. I mean, such a tiny island, this. I really don’t know how we did it.’ The glow was now replaced by a look of astonishment. I tried to think of a suitable answer. A line came to me from a film I had seen just before leaving India. ‘Your ancestors were more enterprising than mine.’

  My English aunt liked that. She laughed a little and swayed a little in the still pond and looked at me with the eyes of a person who likes the person they are looking at. I was sure I wasn’t deluding myself.

  ‘But we did a lot of good to India,’ she said. ‘We did - didn’t we? Unified it. Gave it democracy.’

  ‘Mrs Alderfield, we had all that thousands of years ago with Ashoka and the Mauryas and the Guptas.’

  ‘Did you? But still. We gave India the Civil Service, railways, technology. How do you like the view? Isn’t it smashing?’

  ‘”Earth has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty…”’

  I stopped.

  ‘Go on, Mr Mera.’ I completed Wordsworth’s sonnet. Mrs Alderfield then began to quote:

  ‘“When Ruth was left half desolate

  Her father took another mate:

  And Ruth, not seven years old,

  A slighted child, at her own will

  Went wandering over dale and hill,

  In thoughtless freedom, bold.”’

  ‘Go on, Mrs Alderfield,’ I urged her. But Mrs Alderfield seemed exhausted by the emotion the poem had aroused in her. It was a strange interview, a beautiful interview.

  ‘The formalities will take a few months,’ she warned me. ‘We will need to check with your university in India, of course, and then you will have to have a medical.’

  Afterwards, I hijacked the lift to the open arms of my friends in the foyer downstairs, and we went for a celebration meal at the Lyons Corner House in the Strand.

  One must never report to work feeling over the moon - bosses don’t like it. Even less, one’s colleagues. But that was how I felt and obviously looked, when I turned up at the Magic.

  ‘Come here, oi. Why you got that thirty-two-tooth grin?’ Mr Gokul Swami burped the moment I walked in. He seemed in a very nasty mood today. All our deliveries came from Southall. The supplier had apparently just phoned to say his van had conked out and there could be no deliveries that week, and very likely none the week after either.

  I didn’t want to tell him anything. So I pretended to be taken aback by his question.

  ‘Somebody made you happy?’ he snapped.

  ‘Sort of, sir.’ I wasn’t going to tell him anything.

  ‘English girl made you happy? Told you to keep distance. She only good for bad purposes. You know what happen when you get too close. You catch it. Then you begin to go blind.’

  ‘I am not seeing an English girl, sir.’ And what the hell if I was? None of his bloody business.

  ‘None of my business, you may say. But it is. I am father type. Concerned. No hanky or panky. Understand? Otherwise.’ Ranji came upstairs. He had a request for the boss.

  ‘Swami sahib, my aunt in Southall is having the wedding of her daughter on Saturday. Can I go, sir?’

  ‘You lose one day pay then,’ Jagan said instead of the boss. The SOB loved it when someone lost something, especially money.

  ‘Not if I work for you, sir. Bring back everything. Cheaper than delivery. Think, sir.’

  ‘Go,’ Mr Swami said without thinking.

  ‘If you let Raavi come with me, we bring four weeks’ supplies and you save more, boss-ji, sir.’

  ‘Go. Both.’ This was unbelievable. What had come over our boss, giving us Saturday evening off, all paid? Ranji described Southall.

  ‘Is Little India. Everybody is Indian. Every shop too. Shops have too much to sell. Hindi cinema. Kebab and goal-guppa. Chaat masala and masala dosa. My mouth is already watering. And dress like best dog. Suit, boot and tie to conquer Southall.’

  Sometimes, it was all quiet on the western front, but then it was all guns blazing as on that very evening. Ten tables were taken well before eight p.m., I found myself taking charge of a well-dressed man of forty-five or so. I welcomed him then went away to fetch the menu and the wine list. He looked at neither.

  ‘A gin and tonic, please. With lots of ice.’

  ‘Papadom, sir?’

  ‘Yes, why not? A couple.’

  ‘Mild, medium or hot, sir?’ I said, like a parrot.

  ‘Hot - considering the weather.’ The man laughed. When I returned with the drink and the papadoms, he looked at me and smiled - our English customers never usually looked at us. He took a sip and crunched through the papadom as he studied the menu. ‘You should place a fire extinguisher at each table.’

  ‘Sorry, sir. I can bring you a mild one if you like.’

  ‘It’s all right. What do you recommend?’ I did what I had been told to do in such a case - suggest
the most expensive items on the menu.

  ‘Do you know, what I like enormously is a good dhal.’

  ‘We do an excellent one, sir.’ This was lying through the teeth. The Magic dhal was an insult to India. It was the same bland boring old moong day in and day out. I had been urging the boss to try different kinds – tasty toor, crunchy urid or the royal black maash. But his answer always was, ‘Nobody complain about my dhal. So why change it? Anyway, Englishman never complain about food. Nor can he tell the difference. So why change my dhal?’

  ‘Oh, good.’ The man ordered everything I recommended.

  ‘Mild, medium or hot, sir?’ The parrot spoke again.

  ‘In the absence of a fire extinguisher I suggest you make it medium. Tell me. You are from the Punjab, surely.’

  ‘How can you tell, sir?’

  ‘I had an Indian friend. He looked just like you.’

  ‘I am told we all look alike.’

  ‘Not sure in your case. How long have you been here?’

  I was thrilled that he spoke to me like that, like a friend. No English customer had ever said more than a couple of words to me. And here he was, holding a proper conversation with me. He had talked himself into double portions.

  ‘I have only just arrived, sir. Three months.’

  Our conversation carried on through his lunch.

  ‘You don’t look the waiter-type to me.’

  ‘I am not, sir.’

  ‘Explain.’ I explained. When the County Hall received clearance from my university in India, I would teach for a year or so, save up enough to do what I had really come here for and think of a proper career after. The man, a true gentleman, listened attentively. I was flattered that he was interested. Nobody before had ever shown such interest in me.

  As it turned out, my double portions were wasted on him. He hardly ate, but left me a ten-bob tip. Jagan and Prohit saw. Already burning, they became incandescent. I saw the red chilli glow like a neon sign in Piccadilly.

  ‘Come again, sir.’

  Gokul Swami loved talking. One of his favourite subjects was Indian philosophy: ‘Immigration of the soul - you behave well in this life and you may come back as JFK in the next with Jackie. If you don’t, you are a beetle - not the new John Paul Ringo George type but the real.’ Another was the WWII. He was obsessed with Hitler and fascinated by Churchill, his Hero No. I: ‘No question and no answer.’