Black British (2 page)

These women decided he was ill and insisted on ministering to him. “Dr Aitkens! You shouldn't be running around at your age.” Mrs Stott, the wife of the State Bank Manager, borrowed status from her husband's position and appointed herself spokesperson of her cronies. With a singular lack of tact she added, “You are not a young man anymore!” Armed by her third tipple of gin-and-lime for the morning she was intent on doing her good deed for the day.

Calling for water, “
Bearer, pani loa
. Now!” And as though he was helpless, she insisted on holding the glass while he sipped. At the same time she attempted to mop his brow. Unfortunately, her alcohol-induced tremor meant that most of the water landed on his shirtfront so that by the time he arrived at the hospital his usually immaculate image was gone and he was dishevelled. My birth was also safely over and he had missed his opportunity to show off an expertise that is so unnecessary in an uncomplicated birth.

The second breathless messenger found the midwife at a tailor's shop. She was clutching a grab-rail, desperately trying to maintain her balance on a three-legged stool while having the hem of her new dress pinned. My father was at his mill, and my sisters Lorraine and Lily took full advantage of adult distraction to ensure they were underfoot.

“Biscuit!” Lorraine was peremptory with our
ayah
, the nursery maid who had charge of them. Though she was only four years old she recognised an imbalance of power.

“Hungry!” wailed Lily, happy to learn a naughty lesson. But before the biscuit tin could be opened Lorraine jumped up and hit it with such force that the lid shot off and gingernuts flew in every direction.

“Run!” she shrieked, and grabbed biscuits in both hands before she tore through the dining and drawing rooms to the library. “In here. She won't fit in here.” And Lorraine dived under my father's desk with Lily close behind.

Biscuits gorged, helpless giggling at their temerity in the face of futile pleas from the ayah “to come out, baba,” soon subsided into boredom.

“It's dark in here.” Lily showed signs of capitulation and that's when Lorraine found inspiration from the wastepaper basket.

“We were making confetti,” she explained later with an air of surprise, because apart from ignorant adults, everyone knew that's what little girls do when they are ensconced under a desk in close proximity to scrap paper. But no wild feat of imagination could explain how so many tiny shreds of paper got into so many cracks and crevices in one small room.

Somehow the responsibility for their behaviour was laid at my door.

As were several other legacies that resulted from my early birth. My mother lost her opportunity to follow the pattern established by my grandmother; the obstetrician's best golf game ever was spoilt – a point he re-emphasised each time I met him in church in subsequent years until he left Kanpur to try his golfing prowess in greener pastures; and for causing the midwife to attend the St Andrew's Day dance wearing the previous year's dress. She insisted that was the sole reason her boyfriend Alex McKenzie married her best friend instead of her, and was later killed serving on the North West Frontier. The implication was that I was ultimately responsible for the midwife's ex-best friend's early widowhood.

I take a deep breath, recognising I've talked a lot. Should I continue? I'm supremely aware that I'm baring my soul to someone I've never set eyes on before. Sitting on the stone bench beside me he continues to look towards the church and appears comfortable and at ease.

I stretch my legs and look up at the cobalt sky of Goa, so alike and yet so different from the skies of Kanpur.

Maybe I've said too much? As though he can read my mind, my companion chuckles.

I pause for a moment.

Then I chuckle too. “You know, my family come from Goa,” I tell him. “In fact, from this very village.”

“Tell us a story, Daddy. Tell us about when you came from Goa.” Lorraine, Lily and I were past masters at pestering our father.

My father sighed. Repeated renditions had robbed the story of all romance. “I was born in Kanpur,” he said, “in this very house. So was your Aunt Arabella, Uncle Claude, Aunt Moira and Uncle Richard. Our
ancestors
came from Goa and settled here a long time ago. Our name, ‘de Souza', comes from Goa.”

“Why?” That ubiquitous question that all children ask.

“I don't know why they left Goa. It was around a hundred years ago so the story is forgotten. I presume it was grinding poverty. It must have been, for why else would anyone leave their home that is dear and familiar, to come to…this?” Sitting on the front verandah on hot summer days he'd shake his head in disbelief as we looked out on the dry, dispirited plains that couldn't support a blade of grass.

But a different theory came from my Great Uncle Hugh who had independent rooms in our house and therefore was a pronounced influence on our lives. “It was probably adventure and enterprise that drove them. Goa is fifteen hundred miles southwest of Kanpur so not a journey for the foolhardy, especially in those days.” Opening the atlas, he pointed out the journey they would have taken.

“And when you consider that everything was so different for them. They spoke Konkani not Hindi, which is spoken here. We're Catholics whereas the local people here are Hindus, their culture was different, this horrendous climate was… eh…horrendous, and yet they flourished. It says something favourable about the calibre of our ancestors.” Uncle Hugh looked lost in thought over that epic journey.

At the time Goa had been a Portuguese colony for over 300 years, since 1510, and development had been stymied. In such a climate it only takes one restless person to stand on tiptoe, yearning for a glimpse of the worlds hidden beyond his horizon; one person with the hunger for adventure and the excitement of the unknown; one person with persuasive leadership to inspire his brothers, and family history is rewritten.

It only took one person – and that one person was my grandfather.

Or was it his grandfather? Or the one in between?

When a girl grows up steeped in family history details get lost. Like most children, my sisters and I took our background for granted.

My father took up the story, “Your great-grandfather [plus or minus one or two] gathered his chattels into a single box and made the long, perilous journey north into what, for him, was the unknown. He walked for three days to reach the port of Panjim where he found a rowboat to get him to the mainland. A bullock cart carried him to the edge of the hot, dry plains of Central India which he crossed by camel caravan. Another long walk took him through the last stage of his journey – a journey that was to change his life forever and the lives of his children and his children's children.”

The enormity of the undertaking kept us silent for a while until Lorraine asked, “Wasn't he sad to leave his home?”

My father considered this. “I don't know what he felt as distance shrank the view of his family and home. I don't know if he realised he'd never speak his melodious language again or that his children would adopt a different culture, a ludicrous language and never call Goa home.”

My father looked so distracted over the poignancy of the story that all three of us sensed the desolation a mother would feel when she realised she'd go to her grave without another sight of her son; that her family, who had thrived on their Goan plains for hundreds of years, was dying out, their songs forever silent, their dances long forgotten and their home-distilled
feni
undrunk.

“Why did he come so far?”

“Kanpur had been decimated after the First War of Indian Independence in eighteen fifty-seven so there was a flurry of activity to rebuild. The fertile soil and abundant water just six hundred feet underground meant the town was ripe for development. Kanpur's position on the Ganges made trade easy. There would have been opportunities galore.”

Taking advantage of every opening my great-grandfather (plus or minus one or two) showed rare genius and prospered. He must have been an honourable man because, as he found his feet, he sent for his nephews from Goa and set them up with their own futures so the number of relations living around the Kanpur cantonments increased and I grew up surrounded by an odd assortment of aunts – and a few even odder uncles.

We'd heard this legend many times before and now, at the age of eight, Lorraine made connections beyond our tiny world. “Are you glad they came to Kanpur?”

My father answered promptly. “I'm grateful for their success, which gave me opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have had. I'm grateful I can provide magical lives for my precious daughters. But now I'm worried because though we are native by blood, birth and skin colour we are foreign by language, creed and culture. Our mother tongue has been English for generations, we're Judeo-Christian in our beliefs and values and we dress in western clothes. Though the British Empire is now defunct old sins cast long shadows so the local people see us as remnants of their oppressive regime with no place in a modern India.”

In the national upheaval and chaos that invariably follows the demise of a great power, some of the local people found interesting ways to convey this message to us so that we lived with ever-present threats to our personal safety. That made us prisoners in our own home: willing prisoners, but prisoners nevertheless, isolated from people around us and marked as different. With dwindling fortunes our lives were a portrait in sepia, little more than witness to an iridescent past.

CHAPTER 2

IN MY FATHER'S HOUSE

“Look at
this
! This is
our
house. Our house.” Lorraine pointed to a picture in the
Mother Goose
book she was reading. Lily and I duly peered at the black-and-white sketch and saw a building of bizarre angles and planes and shadowy shapes and shadows. We nodded our heads because Lorraine knew everything. She was eight years old.

The home we inherited was massive and strong and accepted everything thrown its way, from the vicissitudes of weather to the oddities of my family. It had started life as four central rooms with external walls three bricks thick to withstand cannon fire and provide insulation against the great heat of summer. The ceilings soared up to the high heavens, providing ample room for spacious thoughts to flourish and many preposterous arguments to grow and expand. Surrounding these rooms was a wrap-around verandah and in front, a high porch supported by eight 5-metre rusticated columns.

Over the years, successive generations of my family sought to compensate for the enduring inconsequence of their own existence, by leaving what they assumed was an indelible mark on history. They repeatedly modified the ancestral place, so periodically parts of the verandah were imprisoned, and a generation later, released.

More rooms were added higgledy-piggledy. Standard dimensions were for other people. My ancestral home insisted on living outside the rules. Ceiling heights followed personal whims so the roofline was a convoluted series of lumps and bumps. Doorways had been bricked up at random, storage cupboards were in odd places and to communicate between adjacent rooms my sisters and I became proficient in our own version of Morse code. My childhood home was a labyrinth of dark, mysterious corridors that led nowhere and staircases that opened on small poky cupboards stuffed to bursting with all sorts of exciting, ancient unknowns.