Out of India (11 page)

So we left her and began the wary process of getting to know a father.

My father was not athletic – very far from it. He moved in a clumsy way – a left-hander who had not adapted to the world being the wrong way round – and he was rather lazy, having been spoilt in childhood by the clutch of women in his household. Walking, which he enjoyed, was the only concession he made to exercise, and nature had equipped him well for this. His long legs swung forward briskly, and his lean frame was not much affected by heat and humidity. So, driven forth from the hotel, we set out, the tall fellow with sleek dark hair, in well-ironed tunic shirt and trousers of razor-edge creases and soft suede shoes, tugging in his wake two rumpled boys, heated with sun and argument and exuberant energy, with pale winter skin and grimy knees and socks about the ankles.

Crossing the knife-edge of shade into the broiling street, we walked with no particular direction or purpose in mind. We seemed free and easy, but this was a complicated time. We were taking a look at India, getting reacquainted, as it were, with a forgotten birthright. And we were trying to re-discover a family, separated for too long by war, for which absence there was some unspoken rancour against our father in our young hearts, and no doubt some sorrow and regret in his. He had some explaining to do, some persuasive gestures to make to smooth away the rough memories of the last four years. These words and gestures would not come easily. Trained in the reticence of country folk, stamped by Methodism and poverty, he had so little practice in the language of the emotions. But he could begin by showing us around,
guiding his whelps to a home territory; for my father regarded India, not England, as his home range, where he had lived most of the years beyond his youth, and had become confident in manhood and prospered and hoped to end.

But where should he begin? What a maze history leaves! Deposit after deposit, shards of strange species, evolving, enduring, then degenerating. Holding on against a current whose course is always obscure and eventually contrary. There were arguments here too labyrinthine for the tidy military mind, and of course way beyond the understanding of children. The best approach was to sample the city and let the weight of the past sink in.

We strolled down Colaba, through fashionable streets, making a circuit and returning along Apollo Bunder between city and sea. There was an unlikely familiarity in the names. Ormiston, Barrow, Henry, Walton. Who were these men (we may take it for granted that they were not women)? Now, I see sun-red faces and wigs dusted with cornflour, coarse confident visages as in a Kneller portrait. They washed in and out with the tides of time. Once, they were imperial actors, but for India, what did they intend? That was a tangled knot that history was still trying to undo. Today, their names remain, largely forgotten but still markers of a sort, alien words sounding peculiar in the mouths of local postmen.

We walked, and came upon questions not answers. Later, with luck, we would know something, or at least begin to feel something in our bones. For the moment we registered only questions. What was the meaning of that alarming fish-stink, creeping up from the southern streets as bold as an invading army? Those lofty houses in Arthur Bunder Road – they had an anomalous air. Their position shouted commerce, but the elegant, time-worn wooden tracery of their galleries suggested the sensibility of artists. Were statues in honour of Indians
permissible
? We children
wondered at that. In the world we had just left, statutes represented white men – kings, politicians, generals, men with the rape of society and many capital murders under their belts – or occasionally the freaky presence of a woman. But that figure of Sivaji on a horse, he seemed to have a look of provocation that would be worrying to governors of empire.

And what lesion of the imagination had caused such bloated, disordered buildings as the Taj Mahal Hotel or, even more grotesque, Victoria Terminus station? Castles in the air, forced on by overwrought ambitions, these dreams somehow solidified into stone. Yet blasted by the city’s sunrays they rose above the tumult with cockeyed gaiety. Each, in its own way, was a hive for a portion of the multitude. The rich and the up-and-coming and their fawning acolytes rustled money and peddled influence in the vast byzantine-baronial halls and bars of the Taj Mahal, while poor workers and a desperate scrum of downward-descending populace made bleak home under the aspiring squiggles and fol-de-rols of Victoria Terminus.

After a day we were tired of wading among people, so thick was the density on the streets. To feel this city, to test the texture of it, was a strenuous business. Having sweated the downtown avenues we went over to Back Bay in search of a breeze, past the cricket ground and along Marine Drive. We were heading slowly, with many stops and with help from rickshaw or tonga, for Malabar Hill, a bold city flank still with remnants of green cover, which spoke of exclusivity in this place of seared grass and the heat-palpitating daze of the streets. We no longer talked much. We children were grumpy, and our father now had the martyred air of the put-upon parent. In the jostling mob of vendors round Chowpatty Beach his temper slipped a bit, both with the crowd and with us. This urban chaos was not a soldier’s India. This was the sort of uproar that civil society got itself into, a folly that soldiers could not mend.
At least my father recognized that, but he was sufficiently military to regret the loss of discipline and to bridle at the liberties of the hustlers. For the Raj, however well-intentioned, when stretched and annoyed fell back on a fundamental demand for space and deference. Even the best of white men were tainted with a sense of superiority.

‘Make way there,’ he ordered in parade-ground manner, using his height and his elbows to lever a way through. From time to time he added something in military Urdu, bringing a flush to his own face, though it did nothing to quiet the babble pressing upon us.

But we children were transfixed by the excited, unlicensed weirdness of it all, with hands offering us strange comforts on all sides. Our father was not pleased and turned a frosty eye on us.

‘No, most certainly not,’ he snapped as we clamoured for
bhel puri
or a samosa or a bhaji. ‘What would your mother say? Look at the flies and the filth. And in all this heat and dust.’

The day was hot and we could have done with something wet and cold, but the
kulfi
looked as suspicious as the rest of the food. So the ice-cream was also forbidden us. My father was never subject to the sudden whims of taste. I remember a much later occasion, on a sizzling day in Italy. I had cajoled him into trying an ice-cream cone, just because I wanted one. His composed face licked the dripping cone impassively, granting me a favour rather than satisfying himself.

But for the moment, at Chowpatty Beach, he went so far as to allow us a paper twist full of peanuts.

The sea off the Beach looked greasy with spoil and the water under this film too sluggish to heave itself into waves. It crept into shore bearing an offering of queasy odours. Dusting vendors and beggars from his path with firm sweeps of his arm my father led us almost at a trot towards the Hill, seeking shade and a temporary escape
from the painful asking in the faces of the hustlers. We fled into crooked ascending alleys, past the priests and the pilgrims of Balbunath Mandir, sidling around the flanks of loose wandering cows that were blocking the mêlée with the insolence of their holy state and favouring pilgrims with long doleful looks from under silken eyelashes. We mounted steps broken by weather and neglect, through steep woods to the ridge road. On the ridge, the views were very fine and the road led, with an air of inevitability, to more temples. Perhaps from this time began the feeling, which only later could I put into words, that this land was much trodden by the gods.

But my father, who had very little religious sensibility, was puzzled as to who owned what. Surely that was another Hindu shrine? No, it was a Jain temple, as neat and solemn and composed as the Jains themselves, with the shoes of the worshippers in orderly racks beside the door. But that, further down the road, was the famous Walukeshwar Mandir, where Shiva had done something bold – I believe my father mentioned the
Ramayana
, though the details of the story escaped him – and left a characteristic
lingam
as evidence of his godly potency.

My father was anxious to skirt around that topic and merely mumbled gruffly that ‘we’d learn about all that soon enough’. He could not bring together the legacy of the Methodist morality of his upbringing with the unblushing sexual iconography of the Hindu gods.

Below the temple, down a rough slope, was Banganga Tank, an inviting pool despite the green scummy bloom on the water. Rama’s arrow had struck out the spring that fed this pool, and thus it became a holy bathing-place for believers. On an ordinary day it was nothing much, cool and peaceful and unhealthy amid the circling tenements, a resting place for the slum-dwellers and the dhobi-wallahs of the nearby shore who washed laundry next to the burning-ghats of the dead.

After a couple of days my brother and I were done with these sticky, aggravating city marches. We slopped along in our father’s trail more and more slowly, keen to get cool, to give ourselves the indulgence of a day’s swimming. But even in search of a pool we could not get out of the shadow of religion. On the western shore quite close together, stood the contrasting shrines of the Muslim saint Haji Ali and of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, Bombay’s favourite deity and the provider of prosperity and beauty, both of which were needed in large measure to make a mark in the fabulous grime of this city.

From a distance, the mosque of the saint, at the end of a narrow tide-washed causeway, with elegant Moghul proportions and the bright white of its dome set against the ocean or the rusty sunset, had the advantage over Mahalakshmi Mandir, larded with the usual riot of figure and shape beloved of the Hindu religious imagination. For Westerners, that was the first and natural reaction, a view formed according to the chaste aesthetic of Greece and the reformed purity of Islamic representation. But once, after many lookings, the eye had become accustomed to the local visual dramatics, I came gradually to see that the faiths demonstrated in both monuments were, at some primitive level, not dissimilar. They were both grounded in the heartache and yearning of the battered humanity that clogged these holy places, people praying, begging, suffering, threatening, pleading, buying and selling pathetic junk in the commerce of devotion. Belief was their last refuge, whereby they gained daily breath and bread, and so tied bodies to souls. What they offered in the steamy sun of these religious precincts was not primarily merchandise or services, but a naked dearth that called forth the charity and good works without which humankind relapsed into gangs of bandits and predators.

The gods (peace be unto their many names) sprinkled temples and mosques plentifully on this land, and by doing
so allowed for the exercise of humane qualities transcending the boorish preoccupations of money, ambition, power and success. But these places were slovenly because people were slovenly. Sanctity did not negate man’s mess. No matter. A place was not holy because of fine architecture, or beauty of decoration, or the silence of awe, nor on account of scrubbed courtyards and well-kept paths and mute orderly pilgrims. A place was holy because it was god-visited, nothing more. A deity that knew divine business would do well to pitch salvation down among the poor and lowly who most needed it and sought it out. Desperate people do not lead pretty lives. But it helps them to be met on their own ground by accommodating and friendly spirits.

There was, though, something jarring on first acquaintance about the intensity of the effort made by these scarecrows and skeletons to keep themselves alive secured by such slender ropes of faith and hope. I found the twisted faces, scorched eyes, spittle-flecked mouths, reaching gnarled hands, put too much strain on my ignorance and timidity. I was afraid of them.

In this mood we fled, feeling unclean just through proximity, and hurried to our swim at Breach Candy. Here, among the sahibs and the native well-fed, we splashed in the waters of privilege under a sun that seemed imprisoned in geostationary orbit just over our lucky heads.

Later, in the soft evening of a day well-spent in the idle pleasures of the swimming pool, we returned satisfied to the hotel. Nearby, the strains of ‘Home Sweet Home’ drifted from the Rajabhai clock-tower. All was well.

*

At breakfast time, the manager of the hotel was hovering at the foot of the stairs. He looked pleased with himself, like a djinn just popped out of his bottle.

‘Oh, sahib,’ he cooed, trotting beside my father to the
dining-room, ‘today we have magic-man coming, making magic for you. Ver-ry good fun. He go upstair, about tea-time, make all family ver-ry happy.’

In late afternoon we were awaiting the magician in our rooms. He was a tall elderly man, dignified in a loosely tied snow-white turban, though his natural gravity was undermined by a big drooping moustache. His assistant followed him, carrying the props in an old suitcase coming apart at the seams and secured with several passes of a frayed rope. While we waited in one bedroom the magicians gathered themselves in the other, fussing with the apparatus, erecting a screen across a corner, changing into coats resplendent with silky colours and sparkles and cut-price jewellery. We caught fierce whispers, hissing out from below the doggy moustache, harrying the assistant. After a long interval they were ready and we hurried in with the too-eager expectation that children give to the promise of amazement.

But the magician was stern. Not for him the ingratiating joke or the casual, flip delivery. His attitude asked for attention and respect. What was being attempted was a ritual, rich and strange, a revelation of old wonders.

He held up his hands impressively, a ring on every finger, and the performance began.

Very soon, he had demonstrated that he was a master of incompetence. Not only did he have tricks up his sleeve, but it was easy to see where they were. Cards fell to the floor, transformations stalled, the coloured scarves got themselves into a hopeless tangle, the tap of the magic wand collapsed the magic box that revealed … well, nothing – no rabbit, no dove, no fluffy chicks. While the assistant was in a flurry, dipping in and out behind the screen, trying to make the tricks behave themselves, the magician himself went on imperturbably. When a card fell to the floor he covered it quickly with a stealthy foot. His incantations rolled out sonorously, while his long
cloak swooped and soared over the rickety table of his effects.