India (63 page)

‘He grew up here in the palace. His family served our family for three generations. I knew him very well. It’s like a film, like something in a novel. Before the elections, he used to come here every day. He’s now doing everything he can to finish me off in every way. He’s immensely rich now.’

Amir was smiling.

I said, ‘You appear to be managing.’

He laughed. ‘After all the things we’ve ben talking about – to come down to
this!’ This:
the rage of a political rival.

We had been talking for a long time, sitting at a big table covered with a white tablecloth. Behind him were inset bookshelves, part of his library. From time to time during the day Amir’s very young son, Ali, had appeared, and idly gone in and out of various doors. We had had lunch, sandwiches and fried fish, not from the kitchen upstairs, but from the Kwality restaurant in Lucknow. (I heard this later from Rashid. He knew the palace servants, and he had seen them at Kwality’s when they had gone to get the take-away lunch.)

It was cool in the library-sitting-room of the palace. Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Oude, had planned the palace on Versailles lines, it was said; but perhaps what was meant by that was only that he had planned to build a lot. The walls were thick; they were made of the thin Lucknow brick and the special mortar of lime and ground-stone. The temperature was so benign that I had stopped thinking about it. But warmth and dazzle were outside all the time, and they made themselves felt as soon as we were out of the library, and in the dust of the drive.

Outside, too, were some of the palace servants Amir had spoken about, thin men standing up and, whether noticed or not, making constant gestures of obeisance and keeping their eyes fixed on their master: men quite unlike the waiters of restaurants or the staff of hotels, or even the staff of the main Lucknow club: men made by the security and idleness and antique etiquette of palace life.

We were going to the Legislative Assembly. Amir wanted to show it to me. But we were delayed for a while. A car came down
the drive. It held a constituent. He jumped out of his car; Amir got out of his. The two men shook hands, and Amir told his constituent that he would be back in half an hour or 40 minutes.

He said he saw about 20 people a day. At any rate, 20 people came to see him. It was the side of political life he didn’t care for. The people who came to see him often had impossible requests, about jobs or their dismissal from jobs, or about the fixing of tribunals of inquiry. They sometimes even wanted Amir, as their elected representative, to bribe people on their behalf. Amir wasn’t like Prakash, the minister, in Bangalore. Amir wasn’t amused, as Prakash was, by this aspect of the human comedy; he didn’t enjoy the theatre of the morning crowd of suppliants and downright beggars at his door. Amir didn’t like being badgered. He had discovered, he said, that people were never grateful for what you did for them; they always felt you could have done more.

The legislature was not in session. We looked at the chamber through the glass door. The formality and ritual of the chamber appealed to Amir. But he was enervated by the pettiness of much of political life. The vendetta of the man he had displaced, however much he appeared to laugh at it, was emotionally draining, an entanglement and irritation he could have done without.

‘Politics costs a lot of money, and I feel guilty squandering – if the word can be used – money on politics. I have doubts about continuing.’ But to someone of his ancestry there was a special appeal in public life. ‘My political life has renewed and revived the link between my family and the people of Mahmudabad which had atrophied since 1936. That was the year my father became a member of the Working Committee of the Muslim League.’ And his election victory from Mahmudabad wasn’t something he could easily turn his back on. ‘It was a moving experience, because the people of Mahmudabad – 80 per cent Hindu – voted overwhelmingly in my favour, in spite of my father’s politics. It was an unprecedented majority in the district of Lucknow. My mother was very touched. She said – on election night in the Qila – that she hadn’t seen the Qila filled with so many people since her childhood.’

The Hindu spring festival of Holi, which had emptied the Legislative Assembly, had also emptied the school of La Martinière. The
buildings were famous: a late 18th-century French or European extravagance in far-off India. The grounds were immense; and, as so often in such settings, one thought with something like envy of the man who, 200 years or so ago, had had the foresight or the luck to buy so much land. The school was important to people who had grown up in Lucknow. It figured in the memories of Rashid and his friends. It figured in the memories of Amir, and in a printed memoir by his father.

It was still a private school; the money available was not enough to keep it absolutely in repair. To approach the school from dusty scrub at the back, to see the weeds sprouting out of the masonry, taking root on ledges, was like seeing something about to become a ruin. It was in better order at the front, more impressive. There were well-watered green gardens there, full of colour.

On this quiet day, with the great expanse of the sunstruck grounds, and their burnt colour, it was again – as with the view of the Gumti River from the hotel window – like being in the original of one of the late 18th-century prints of the Daniells. The Daniells would have been of the period of the self-styled General Martin, would have been of that period when a European soldier of fortune could have sold some of the skills of Europe to an Asian ruler for vast sums.

Some such thought must have been going through Rashid’s head as well. His memories of La Martinière had been entirely happy; and an old boy’s school pride had made him bring me here. Yet the sight of the Oude cannon cast by the general, still with the general’s name in big raised letters, polished to a shine by the innumerable hands that had caressed them – the sight of that on the wide terrace at the front of the school had stirred up old ideas of Muslim and Indian helplessness and defeat; and, quite unexpectedly, Rashid had begun to be enraged by the thought of European and American experts of today, the successors of General Martin, travelling regally about the poorer countries.

He was overcome by his mood. He stayed in the shade in the pillared front loggia, and sent me out into the sun to look at the names of old boys carved on the wide stone steps at the front of the terrace.

Some other idea of loss was working on him, something to add to all that been lost since the 18th century.

He said later, ‘All the masters here used to be Anglo-Indians,
except for the Hindi master. They were very respected. Their families have now gone to Australia. Their families had been in Lucknow for generations. The Anglo-Indians had been mostly in the railways, teaching, and the police. The railways were absolutely their show. And their colonies, the areas where they lived, were outside the city – lovely, clean places. After 1947 they packed their bags and left.’

Something of that melancholy attached also to Hazratgunj, the main shopping street of Lucknow in the old days, where Rashid’s family had had their camera shop, and where Landau the watchmaker had had his big corner shop. Landau’s corner was now Ramlal and Sons, a cloth and sari shop, with the slogan, ‘Our Collection is Your Selection’. Not far away was the house where MacGregor, the old Hazratgunj tailor, who had made clothes for princes and IAS men and Raj Englishmen, had lived until his death.

The melancholy of the recent past, there. Elsewhere, the memories of the defeats of 130 years before, in the ruins of the Residency and of the Nawab’s palace and hunting lodge. Before that, and just as painful now, the reminder of the glory of the older Nawabs: especially in the monument known as the Great Imambara, built as famine relief work in the late 18th century: over-decorated, weak, but impressive by its sheer scale. No great architecture in the old princely city, but many parks, many places to walk in: not many cities in India had this kind of style. But these walks saddened Rashid, as they were saddening him that afternoon, bringing out the tragic Shia side of his nature, the side that dealt in defeat, grief, and injustice.

He said, ‘Lucknow is me. It’s not the river or the buildings or anything. You don’t like your father because he’s six feet two inches, and handsome. He’s your father. In this way, Lucknow is me. We’ve been here for generations, on both sides.’

What did it mean, being a Lucknow Muslim?

‘It’s like the Buddhist idea of “Not this, not this”. I’m an Indian, but the temple is not for me. I’m a Muslim, but in its details my faith cannot be the same faith as the one in Afghanistan or Iran or Pakistan. I speak Urdu. I greet people in the Lucknow Muslim way. I say “My respects to you” instead of “Peace be upon you”. I derive my sustenance from Lucknow. It gives me my sense of
identity – the buildings, the monuments, the culture, the relationships.’

There was a new white palace that could seen above the greenery from many places in the city. It was called the Butler Palace, and the story was that it had been built by Amir’s father as a palace of pleasure for a British official, Sir Harcourt Butler. It was part of the property that Amir had lost. It was still in the possession of the Custodian of Alien Property, and it had been rented out for 38,000 rupees a year to the Indian Council of Philosophical Research. The palace, so far as as some of its motifs went, was in the Lucknow style. It wasn’t a distinguished building: all that gave it a palace feel were the four many-sided towers at the corners.

In one of those towers an elevator had been installed. Upstairs was a very large philosophical library; many of the volumes were new, and looked unused. No finer or more respectful use could have been made of the building. But, from what Rashid said, that didn’t assuage Amir’s grief. Amir, Rashid said, had never set foot in the Butler Palace since it had ceased to be his.

I asked Rashid afterwards – at the end of our tour of old Lucknow, the city of schools and palaces – about his visits to Pakistan. I wanted him to tell me a little more. I wanted more concrete details.

He said, ‘In India the beggars asked for small change. In Pakistan they asked for a rupee. The customs officers in Pakistan were taller and better built than on the Indian side, and this was the first time I’d seen a Punjabi Muslim. But then I thought – and I wonder whether you’d understand this – “What’s the use of their being Muslims, if they speak this crude Punjabi, and not chaste Urdu?” You see, I had associated Muslims with Urdu and culture.

‘When I went to Lahore I thought it was a better version of Lucknow: a whitewashed Lucknow, where all the people had had a bath and changed their clothes. It was pleasing to see. There was a funny thing: you looked at the cinema advertisements, and, because they were making copies of Indian pictures – the Pakis can’t make a picture to save their lives – you saw the names of pictures you knew, but with new stars, different faces. In Lahore you feel at first you are in a different city of India which you are visiting for the first time. But slowly the differences become apparent. You meet a person, you get to talking. You think he is a Punjabi, tall, well-built, speaking Urdu in a crude Punjabi accent.
You ask him where his father is from, and he says Lucknow – and you are left amazed, because you are now so different from each other after 40 years.

‘I stayed for two months, but I knew I couldn’t belong there, in spite of the wealth. Even the relatives I met had changed. They were more worldly-wise; they were more aggressive. They had become like the refugees who had come from the Punjab and Sind to Lucknow. I had a cousin who was a trader. He had a finger in every pie; he could bribe every officer; he knew that the main thing was to move and make money. He had been made homeless twice, the first time in 1947, at independence, and then in 1971, in Chittagong in Bangladesh. He knew he could depend on nothing but money. Other values didn’t matter. He was quite different from the person I remembered.

‘Another thing I found over there was that there was no living in the past, as with us here. They had a healthier attitude to partition than the Indian Muslim. What was done was done. They’d started a new life – they’d forgotten the people they’d left behind, even the people who still remembered them and thought of them and had sent messages through me.

‘After my two months I was glad to leave. I felt relief to be back in India, after the claustrophobia of an Islamic society. I liked seeing women again on the streets. The dirt and filth of India didn’t seem to matter. The people in Pakistan were relaxed enough about their religion. It was just the wretched laws, hanging like a cloud over one: the call to prayers, the moulvi coming to my friend’s house and asking why he hadn’t seen us at the mosque recently. The thought police. Islam on wheels.

‘I felt relief to be back here. That sense of belonging, which I had in India, I knew I couldn’t find anywhere else. Yet I also know that I can never be a complete person now. I can’t ignore partition. It’s a part of me. I feel rudderless. If there had been no partition I might have been a married man with all the paraphernalia of a middle-class Muslim existence. But I’ve lived all my life so far as a bachelor, and it’s now too late for me to change. The creation and existence of Pakistan has damaged a part of my psyche. I simply cannot pretend it doesn’t exist. I cannot pretend that life goes on, and I can have the normal full emotional life, as though what had been here before is still around me.’

Some weeks later, when I had left India, and was among my own things again, I looked at a book I had bought many years before but hadn’t read in any connected way. The book was
My Diary in India in the Year 1858–9
. The author was William Howard Russell; he was described on the title page as the special correspondent of
The Times
. It was as correspondent of
The Times
that Russell had made his name in the years immediately before, during the Crimean War: his reports about the hospital conditions of the British expeditionary force had caused Florence Nightingale to be sent out to the Crimea. It was with that reputation, and no doubt with the hope of repeating something of that success, that, nine months after coming back to England, he had gone off again, to the Mutiny in India.