East, West (15 page)

4

It was the summer of 1962, and school was out. My baby sister Scheherazade was just one year old. Durré was a beehived fourteen; Muneeza was ten, and already quite a handful. The three of us – or rather Durré and me, with Muneeza trying desperately and unsuccessfully to be included in our gang – would stand over Scheherazade’s cot and sing to her. ‘No nursery rhymes,’ Durré had decreed, and so there were none, for though she was a year my junior she was a natural leader. The infant Scheherazade’s lullabies were our cover versions of recent hits by Chubby Checker, Neil Sedaka, Elvis and Pat Boone.

‘Why don’t you come home, Speedy Gonzales?’ we bellowed in sweet disharmony: but most of all, and with actions, we would jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton. We would have jumped down, turned around and picked those bales all day except that the Maharaja of B— in the flat below complained, and Aya Mary came in to plead with us to be quiet.

‘Look, see, it’s Jumble-Aya who’s fallen for Mixed-Up,’ Durré shouted, and Mary blushed a truly immense blush. So naturally we segued right into a quick me-oh-my-oh; son of a gun, we had big fun. But then the baby began to yell, my father came in with his head down bull-fashion and steaming from both ears, and we needed all the good luck charms we could find.

I had been at boarding school in England for a year or so when Abba took the decision to bring the family over. Like all his decisions, it was neither explained to nor discussed with anyone, not even my mother. When they first arrived he rented two adjacent flats in a seedy Bayswater mansion block called Graham Court, which lurked furtively in a nothing street that crawled along the side of the ABC Queensway cinema towards the Porchester Baths. He commandeered one of these flats for himself and put my mother, three sisters and Aya in
the other; also, on school holidays, me. England, where liquor was freely available, did little for my father’s
bonhomie
, so in a way it was a relief to have a flat to ourselves.

Most nights he emptied a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and a soda-siphon. My mother did not dare to go across to ‘his place’ in the evenings. She said: ‘He makes faces at me.’

Aya Mary took Abba his dinner and answered all his calls (if he wanted anything, he would phone us up and ask for it). I am not sure why Mary was spared his drunken rages. She said it was because she was nine years his senior, so she could tell him to show due respect.

After a few months, however, my father leased a three-bedroom fourth-floor apartment with a fancy address. This was Waverley House in Kensington Court, W8. Among its other residents were not one but two Indian Maharajas, the sporting Prince P— as well as the old B— who has already been mentioned. Now we were jammed in together, my parents and Baby Scare-zade (as her siblings had affectionately begun to call her) in the master bedroom, the three of us in a much smaller room, and Mary, I regret to admit, on a straw mat laid on the fitted carpet in the hall. The third bedroom
became my father’s office, where he made phone-calls and kept his
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, his
Reader’s Digests
, and (under lock and key) the television cabinet. We entered it at our peril. It was the Minotaur’s lair.

One morning he was persuaded to drop in at the corner pharmacy and pick up some supplies for the baby. When he returned there was a hurt, schoolboyish look on his face that I had never seen before, and he was pressing his hand against his cheek.

‘She hit me,’ he said plaintively.

‘Hai! Allah-tobah! Darling!’ cried my mother, fussing. ‘Who hit you? Are you injured? Show me, let me see.’

‘I did nothing,’ he said, standing there in the hall with the pharmacy bag in his other hand and a face as pink as Mecir’s rubber gloves. ‘I just went in with your list. The girl seemed very helpful. I asked for baby compound, Johnson’s powder, teething jelly, and she brought them out. Then I asked did she have any nipples, and she slapped my face.’

My mother was appalled. ‘Just for that?’ And Certainly-Mary backed her up. ‘What is this nonsense?’ she wanted to know. ‘I have been in that chemist’s shock, and they have flenty nickels, different sizes, all on view.’

Durré and Muneeza could not contain themselves. They were rolling round on the floor, laughing and kicking their legs in the air.

‘You both shut your face at once,’ my mother ordered. ‘A madwoman has hit your father. Where is the comedy?’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Durré gasped. ‘You just went up to that girl and said,’ and here she fell apart again, stamping her feet and holding her stomach,
‘ “have you got any nipples?” ’

My father grew thunderous, empurpled. Durré controlled herself. ‘But Abba,’ she said, at length, ‘here they call them teats.’

Now my mother’s and Mary’s hands flew to their mouths, and even my father looked shocked. ‘But how shameless!’ my mother said. ‘The same word as for what’s on your bosoms?’ She coloured, and stuck out her tongue for shame.

‘These English,’ sighed Certainly-Mary. ‘But aren’t they the limit? Certainly-yes; they are.’

I remember this story with delight, because it was the only time I ever saw my father so discomfited, and the incident became legendary and the girl in the pharmacy was installed as the object of our great veneration. (Durré and I went in there just to take a look at her –
she was a plain, short girl of about seventeen, with large, unavoidable breasts – but she caught us whispering and glared so fiercely that we fled.) And also because in the general hilarity I was able to conceal the shaming truth that I, who had been in England for so long, would have made the same mistake as Abba did.

It wasn’t just Certainly-Mary and my parents who had trouble with the English language. My schoolfellows tittered when in my Bombay way I said ‘brought-up’ for upbringing (as in ‘where was your brought-up?’) and ‘thrice’ for three times and ‘quarter-plate’ for side-plate and ‘macaroni’ for pasta in general. As for learning the difference between nipples and teats, I really hadn’t had any opportunities to increase my word power in that area at all.

5

So I was a little jealous of Certainly-Mary when Mixed-Up came to call. He rang our bell, his body quivering with deference in an old suit grown too loose, the trousers tightly gathered by a belt; he had taken off his rubber gloves and there were roses in his hand. My father opened the door and gave him a withering look. Being a snob, Abba was not pleased that the flat lacked
a separate service entrance, so that even a porter had to be treated as a member of the same universe as himself.

‘Mary,’ Mixed-Up managed, licking his lips and pushing back his floppy white hair. ‘I, to see Miss Mary, come, am.’

‘Wait on,’ Abba said, and shut the door in his face.

Certainly-Mary spent all her afternoons off with old Mixed-Up from then on, even though that first date was not a complete success. He took her ‘up West’ to show her the visitors’ London she had never seen, but at the top of an up escalator at Piccadilly Circus, while Mecir was painfully enunciating the words on the posters she couldn’t read –
Unzip a banana
, and
Idris when I’s dri
– she got her sari stuck in the jaws of the machine, and as the escalator pulled at the garment it began to unwind. She was forced to spin round and round like a top, and screamed at the top of her voice, ‘O BAAP! BAAPU-RÉ! BAAP-RÉ-BAAP-RÉ-BAAP!’ It was Mixed-Up who saved her by pushing the emergency stop button before the sari was completely unwound and she was exposed in her petticoat for all the world to see.

‘O, courter!’ she wept on his shoulder. ‘O, no more escaleater, courter, nevermore, surely not!’

My own amorous longings were aimed at Durré’s best friend, a Polish girl called Rozalia, who had a holiday job at Faiman’s shoe shop on Oxford Street. I pursued her pathetically throughout the holidays and, on and off, for the next two years. She would let me have lunch with her sometimes and buy her a Coke and a sandwich, and once she came with me to stand on the terraces at White Hart Lane to watch Jimmy Greaves’s first game for the Spurs. ‘Come on you whoi-oites,’ we both shouted dutifully. ‘Come on you
Lily-whoites.
’ After that she even invited me into the back room at Faiman’s, where she kissed me twice and let me touch her breast, but that was as far as I got.

And then there was my sort-of-cousin Chandni, whose mother’s sister had married my mother’s brother, though they had since split up. Chandni was eighteen months older than me, and so sexy it made you sick. She was training to be an Indian classical dancer, Odissi as well as Natyam, but in the meantime she dressed in tight black jeans and a clinging black polo-neck jumper and took me, now and then, to hang out at Bunjie’s, where she knew most of the folk-music crowd that frequented the place, and where she answered to the name of Moonlight, which is what
chandni
means. I
chain-smoked with the folkies and then went to the toilet to throw up.

Chandni was the stuff of obsessions. She was a teenage dream, the Moon River come to Earth like the Goddess Ganga, dolled up in slinky black. But for her I was just the young greenhorn cousin to whom she was being nice because he hadn’t learned his way around.

She-E-rry, won’t you come out tonight?
yodelled the Four Seasons. I knew exactly how they felt.
Come, come, come out toni-yi-yight.
And while you’re at it, love me do.

6

They went for walks in Kensington Gardens. ‘Pan,’ Mixed-Up said, pointing at a statue. ‘Los’ boy. Nev’ grew up.’ They went to Barkers and Pontings and Derry & Toms and picked out furniture and curtains for imaginary homes. They cruised supermarkets and chose little delicacies to eat. In Mecir’s cramped lounge they sipped what he called ‘chimpanzee tea’ and toasted crumpets in front of an electric bar fire.

Thanks to Mixed-Up, Mary was at last able to watch television. She liked children’s programmes best, especially
The Flintstones.
Once, giggling at her daring, Mary confided to Mixed Up that Fred and Wilma reminded her of her Sahib and Begum Sahiba upstairs; at which the courter, matching her audaciousness, pointed first at Certainly-Mary and then at himself, grinned a wide gappy smile and said, ‘Rubble.’

Later, on the news, a vulpine Englishman with a thin moustache and mad eyes declaimed a warning about immigrants, and Certainly-Mary flapped her hand at the set: ‘Khali-pili bom marta,’ she objected, and then, for her host’s benefit translated: ‘For nothing he is shouting shouting. Bad life! Switch it off.’

They were often interrupted by the Maharajas of B— and P—, who came downstairs to escape their wives and ring other women from the call-box in the porter’s room.

‘Oh, baby, forget that guy,’ said sporty Prince P—, who seemed to spend all his days in tennis whites, and whose plump gold Rolex was almost lost in the thick hair on his arm. ‘I’ll show you a better time than him, baby; step into my world.’

The Maharaja of B— was older, uglier, more matter-of-fact. ‘Yes, bring all appliances. Room is booked in
name of Mr Douglas Home. Six forty-five to seven fifteen. You have printed rate card? Please. Also a two-foot ruler, must be wooden. Frilly apron, plus.’

This is what has lasted in my memory of Waverley House, this seething mass of bad marriages, booze, philanderers and unfulfilled young lusts; of the Maharaja of P— roaring away towards London’s casinoland every night, in a red sports car with fitted blondes, and of the Maharaja of B— skulking off to Kensington High Street wearing dark glasses in the dark, and a coat with the collar turned up even though it was high summer; and at the heart of our little universe were Certainly-Mary and her courter, drinking chimpanzee tea and singing along with the national anthem of Bedrock.

But they were not really like Barney and Betty Rubble at all. They were formal, polite. They were … courtly. He courted her, and, like a coy, ringleted ingénue with a fan, she inclined her head, and entertained his suit.

7

I spent one half-term weekend in 1963 at the home in Beccles, Suffolk of Field Marshal Sir Charles Lutwidge-Dodgson, an old India hand and a family friend who was supporting my application for British citizenship. ‘The Dodo’, as he was known, invited me down by myself, saying he wanted to get to know me better.