Out of India (15 page)

Soon after these events in Ambala, in about the third month of her pregnancy, my mother miscarried.

I
N THE MORNING, in the wide bright dusty streets, sometimes we rode and sometimes we pushed our bicycles. It was easy going – almost no traffic to worry us – and if we were early we had time to practise the day’s poem. This time, the words tripped along nicely:

It seemed a cheerful incantation, but in the present circumstance I could make little sense of it. In this country, I saw a tangle of bushes, thorn, tamarind, acacia, palm, with dust-devils and too much distance in between. Somewhere over there, it was true, flowed a big river. The town of Ferozepore had been founded on the old high bank of the Sutlej, one of the five watery fingers of the Punjab. But the reaches of that Himalayan run-off did not invite cosy reflection. The spirit of the water was unreliable, a thing only temporarily contained, moody amid snags and currents, shifting in a blink from bland to ugly.

On the verandah of the school bungalow the teacher, a Scotswoman in a long skirt and with two ropes of hair coiled in Valkyrie-fashion about her ears, greeted us formally. Each day, before lessons began, we had a group-recitation.
We jumped up eagerly and formed into a double line, vying with each other to catch the teacher’s eye, piping in high strident voices:

We chanted this with enthusiasm while a dragon’s breath of wind scoured the shores of the Sutlej.

The next poem to be learnt was ‘The Daffodils’. It was, said our teacher rolling her ‘r’s, ‘a grand wee poem for all of us in a foreign land.’

*

Had it not been for the similarity of the heat, and the bleached white light lying like hot drops of mercury on the eyelids, the municipality of Ferozepore – town and cantonment – promised to be easier on the body and the temper than Ambala. The town (Firozpur in the new orthography) owed its foundation and later development to two short but happy moments five hundred years apart. Firoz Shah had established it, in the middle of the fourteenth century. This Turkic ruler of the Delhi Sultanate had combined the indolence and savage unpredictability of oriental despotism with an artistic sense that yearned for the memorial of palaces and mosques and tombs, and for the more immediate gratification of gardens and arbours and fountains and the quiet plangency of the
sarod
and the stealthy tinkle of the dancing-girl’s bells. For a few years, under the able administration of a Brahmin minister, the reign of Firoz cast a brief benevolence over the Punjab, and generations of peasants and townsmen saluted the memory of the old king (or, in reality, the memory of his minister Makbul).

The good times did not last. Makbul died and Firoz
degenerated to a scandal of unhinged senility and impotent rage. Old days of misery returned and Ferozepore began to crumble and rot by the Sutlej, dwindling over centuries to a squalor of dogs and cow-dung amid a grandeur of ruins. From this state of near extinction it was rescued, in the mid-nineteenth century, by Sir Henry Lawrence, energetic soldier and loyal booster of British interests, who saw the advantage of the town’s position and imprinted commercial enterprise, Victorian amplitude and bourgeois respectability on the old town-plan, adding broad tree-lined streets, substantial houses for business, a factory or two, and a wide circular promenade around the walls. This walk was lined with the villas and the gardens of men grown prosperous in the affairs of the East India Company. The military cantonment tacked on by the Raj after the shock of the Mutiny and the withering away of the Company did little to spoil this town that at least shook hands with the ideals of two very different civilizations.

But not a whisper of this long, embattled history reached us. I had to learn about it at a much later time. Miss McWhatshername instructed us in Faith, Duty and Deportment, with reading and writing and simple number-work, to which was added as an extra burnish the glory of ‘Great Poems’. Sometimes, after lessons, we were shown the rudiments of Scottish country dancing.

Like all the British of the Raj, adult or child, I was a part of two worlds. I and my kind lived
on
India, not
in
it. One world – the superstructure of our lives provided by the Raj – was manifest, too plain to be missed by even the greatest dunderhead. The facts of this history supported us every moment of the day, in our houses waking and sleeping, in school, at work, in leisure and entertainment. We knew with an ingrained knowledge what the order of life should be and what was the limit of the permissible. At night, after the last drinks were cleared away, and the
Indian bearer had dimmed the lights, emptied the ashtrays, plumped the cushions and given the silverware a final buff, he pulled the door closed softly, leaving us to rest in the cocoon of our contentment while he retreated into the limbo of the servants’ quarters, in the shadowland of Indian India.

This other world, this shadowland, was a place for our averted eyes, almost secret – if not a dirty secret, at least a slightly disreputable tale, hardly mentioned in decent company. Of course, our elders knew that they could not escape the native world – it was the burden of most of their complaints. Struck by the same sun, we all trod the same parched earth under the wheeling kite’s omniscient eye. The carrion crows lined up on the wall, giving their heads an ironic tilt as they took their usual opportunistic view, saw no more advantage in one of us than in another. The land, the climate, the day, the moments of existence belonged to all of us. But the two worlds moved, as it were, on parallel tracks, intimately close but separated by the indestructible veil of our histories. Our rules for living were not their rules.

This veil was less a problem for children than for adults. We could slip under it. Bicycling to school, gathering our little white tribe under the eye of our Rhinemaiden, struggling with her unlikely accent, wondering why the Scots Border country of Wallace and Bruce should be dear to our hearts too, counting the crowned heads of English monarchs on the wall-chart in the schoolroom (puzzling, Christ-like images, with soft brown beards, pale skin and doleful eyes), then embarking on yet another Lakeland journey from the
Lyrical Ballads
, we began each day strictly reined in by the expectations of our kind. And in the afternoons we swam in the clear blue pool of the Gymkhana Club, sipped lemonade, sat on the lawn in the lee of the big umbrellas while a regimental band of brown faces, immaculately smart, struck up the ritual
tunes of our colonial music – popular pieces from Gilbert and Sullivan.

But released from the order of our conventional timetable we were free to improvise. Going home from the club we would follow the
bhishti
, laying the dust with the water from his goatskin as he edged slowly away from pseudo-Europe towards the ragged fringes of the cantonment bazaar. Greedily, we accepted nameless morsels from grubby stalls and keyhole shops where kids splashed water on the straw
tatty
, to make a cooling evaporation in the smouldering air. Ragamuffins kicked a ball of paper or cotton scraps into our path, challenging us to an impromptu game, jeering at our ineptitude (as yet we knew very little about team games).

‘You want jiggy-jig?’ they laughed at our innocence, pointing to shanties at the back of the bazaar. ‘Very clean sister, she like jiggy-jiggy. You try?’ Laughing, they swept on, hacking the rag-ball wildly over the
khud
-side. We blushed, not with shame but out of ignorance. We felt the presence of a mystery, but what it was we did not know.

*

One afternoon, in the leafy part of town inhabited by Europeans, I bent down to pat a dog. It was a handsome black labrador with a thick coat, lying restive but soulful in a patch of hot sunlight. As I ruffled the neck-fur and tugged at a drooping ear, the dog lurched up on its haunches and snapped at me, catching me on the cheekbone and breaking the skin.

As I staggered back I heard a lean major cry, ‘Good grief, the boy’s been bitten. Grab that hound.’

The dog, now completely quiet, was collared and led away, its tail curled between its hindlegs. Anxious faces peered at my cut, which was only superficial, and I was taken to the military dispensary. While an orderly was dabbing my face and cutting some sticking-plaster, I heard the word ‘rabies’ murmured.

To hear that word. It implied a world of horrors. Immediately, the dog and I were closely watched, as if we shared some guilt. Was the dog foaming from the mouth? Did I show signs of hydrophobia? Should the dog be killed and its brain sent for analysis? That would take time, the laboratory was far away. Should I begin the treatment anyway, the agonizing course of injections into the wall of the stomach? At night, I snivelled into my pillow, imagining a salivating jaw ripping into my flesh.

But the dog was normal, showing no signs of canine dementia. It had only been panting in the sun, suffering as we all did in the heat. My attention had made it jumpy and irritated. The fearful word ‘rabies’ ceased to be a crushing anxiety and retreated into some receptacle of warnings in the back of my brain. I began to see India in a new colour, a place with dangerous surprises hidden amid the privileges and the fun.

*

Sometimes Father took us to watch his Indian troops on some regimental occasion. In the declining day, when the worst of the heat had passed off, we sat on canvas chairs by the touchline of the sportsfield. A fine dust, pulverized by flying feet, blew off the bare surface. On a table by the halfway line, a big silver cup stood on a cloth with the regimental crest. An inter-company hockey match was under way and my father, trying not to look bored in the seat of honour reserved for the commanding officer, applauded carefully when others did the same. He hated sports. Hockey in particular was a penance to him, because when forced to play it he had been as maladroit as a lamed camel, and he was left-handed to boot.

But the Indian soldiers loved the game. They lashed into the ball with passion, protected only by puttees wound around the ankles. The ball skimmed the hard ground like a musket-shot, guided by the most delicate stick-work and sleight-of-hand, but pursued by violent
oaths and furious gestures. I saw my father wince as a rush of Urdu hit his ears. The least of these expressions, I learnt later, were ‘filthy pig’ (to a Muslim) and ‘your mother’s a whore’ (of more general application). But there was effervescence in their play, in the way they changed in a flash from apparent malevolence to joyful comradeship, from a brutal clash of sticks and whacks on the legs to radiant smiles and an arm across the shoulder. Sport, to us, seemed to mean earnest exercise, and modest sobriety in victory or defeat. To these sepoys it was fantasy, warfare, boasting, condescension, triumph, mercy. I began to perceive then, however unclearly, how these men might fight for real, with what raw fury in adversity, with what tears of compassion in relief. At the end of the game I saw the shy flush of approval on the faces of both winners and losers, the sigh for things done well as they lined up for the presentation of the cup. They were still grinning as they suffered my father’s congratulations in halting Urdu.

We children had time on our hands, and an instinct to use it in low company. To help keep us out of mischief Father arranged for me and my brother to have riding lessons. A couple of times a week we went down to the lines of an Indian cavalry regiment (I forget which one). Out of the sun we passed into the high gloom of the stables, temporarily blinded by a deep wash of shadow, hearing the big animals shifting and blowing, their hoofs clunking hollowly on the wooden stalls. I smelt damp straw and urine, and the sweet odour from the brushed and curry-combed bodies.

Beyond the stables, by the side of the schooling ring, the risaldar-major awaited us. This native soldier, the senior Indian NCO in the regiment, was traditionally a figure of lofty importance, even grandeur. The essential intermediary between British officers and native troops, he was the pivot on which the well-being of the regiment rested. If the balance was wrong then the life of the
regiment was likely to be cockeyed and tipped over into resentments. And good risaldar-majors knew their place and worth. Usually, they measured up to their own estimation – ramrod figures with handsome cavalry moustaches and the stamp of command on weathered faces. The shine on their riding boots had the moonlit sheen of a deep still lake; the cummerbund about the long tunic was placed to an inch; the ends of the tight-wound turban, with the regimental colours aslant, waved bravely below the high peak of the
pugree
.

The risaldar-major came forward a little stiffly on legs getting old and too used to riding. His salute to my father had the dignity of respect without a hint of subservience. Formally, he turned to us children and saluted again, this time with a smile. ‘Ah, young sahibs,’ he said, ‘come. Now, we ride.’

I did not like it. I was frightened. The beast was too large, the glossy brown back a continent too wide for my puny legs to encompass. Unable to get a grip I felt the bruising bump of the hard cavalry saddle. The risaldar-major stood by the ring with a long whip in his hand. With the tip of the whip he stirred the horse, giving it more a caress or a tickle than a stroke. ‘Huh,’ he whispered, ‘huh,’ or for more urgency a rapid ‘hah, hah, hah,’ using an equine language that the horse understood perfectly. Arching its neck it moved into a deliberate rocking-horse trot, round and round the ring, for me an interminable torture. I held the reins, but for all the control I had I might just as well have been on a fairground merry-go-round.

‘Good, good,’ cried my instructor who was also my tormentor, ‘back more straight, please. Bottom up down.
Up
and down,
up
and down. You see, very nice, very nice riding.’