Out of India (22 page)

In early evening, when the worst of the heat had gone out of the day, she would take her hat and gardening gloves and poke about in the flowerbeds, not really knowing what she was doing (though she dearly loved flowers), her actions quick and agitated but somehow inconclusive. A stab at the ground, a weed yanked out
with distaste, a flower, its roots disturbed, left leaning piteously.

I followed her with a watering-can. When she pointed to the cannas I gave them a good drenching, though their thirst in the dry friable earth seemed bottomless.

*

In our own wing of the house my brother and I lived free and easy. We had our own bedroom, playroom and bathroom – a tin tub, a wooden washstand, a big square thunderbox with a contemplative view through the open outside door onto dappled shade. Between rising and bedtime in the cool, comfortable bungalow we came and went more or less as we pleased.

Despite this freedom I began to feel awkward and fretful in the house. Around me I saw a collection of unspoken rules that I was beginning to acknowledge but did not understand. Hierarchies were becoming entangled with human relations. Sami, for example, how did he stand with us? He was as careful towards us as a father, and far more available, steering us towards better sense and covering us from parental wrath. He, far better than my parents, knew what I was up to. What is more, he sympathized with adventure, however wild and foolish, and forgave the stupidities of youth. Once, late at night, when my parents were out, I gave the servants an impromptu fashion show, wrapped in a sheet. I was silly and slightly lewd, waggling a bare bottom and sketching some effeminate gestures. The cook, a bony old cadaver with a grizzled, soup-strainer moustache, was shocked. He spoke almost no English and appeared to regard working for the Raj as a necessary evil at best. Sniffling through his beaky nose he raised bloodshot eyes for judgement. Nearly every day he witnessed some obscenity, and now he was not surprised to be disgusted. But Sami was both amused and anxious. He was indulgent towards a bit of childish play-acting but anxious that all of us should not get it in the neck if my
father returned suddenly. He shooed us into bed with mock severity and left chuckling.

By what right, I began to wonder, did I give this man orders, sending him here and there like a pawn on a board? The chokra, a lively youth in his late teens, dropped his eyes when he came upon us and circled around by the wall. And the sweeper, whom I saw most days emptying the thunderbox from our bathroom? In the house he was an Untouchable, a carter of ordure. But to see him outside in the grounds, slowly whisking a broom of twigs through the dust, I now saw him as an Indian, a fellow human, possessor of an autonomous life.

These perplexities were like a fog between four walls, penetrated by the hushed voices of the servants, calls from a far, unknown shore. I wanted to rush outside, to clear the air, to avoid the stringencies of the house. Nature's back was broad. Undecided questions lay more easily amid the boundlessness of the land.

It was partly a matter of climate, of course. Apart from hunger and malaria and cholera and smallpox and rickets and uncorrectable griefs, there is a sense in which children of hot lands are blessed. I, at least, plump and healthy and itching with curiosity, was graced by the large allowance of time and freedom granted me by the sun. Beyond the gate was a universe to be cracked open and savoured each day, as tasty and full of promise as a newly baked bun.

We had our bicycles. When we were not at school we dashed from the house as soon as possible and in a short time we had left behind the dusty roads of the cantonment, shaded by palmyra and date palms. We launched ourselves onto faint beaten tracks scuffed into a parched sandy ground, meandering through brushwood and rank plants, past fields of
cholam
, gram, cotton and rice, with a few tall sentinel trees standing over the rough, crouching, boulder-strewn land. In the distance scattered villages hid in groves of tamarind and cottonwood and mango and fig. Dotted
around these islands of habitation, the ‘tanks' – large ponds dammed and dug for the irrigation of this porous land – gleamed like pale mirrors. At certain times the fields reeked of toddy, thick juice trickling from the palms into earthenware pots left to ferment in the sun.

In the heat of the day the ringing clamour of birdsong fell away – just an occasional whirr of wings or rattle of alarm. We cycled through the marks of their territory. A store of grubs and insects impaled by the shrike on acacia thorns. A colony of pendulum-houses made by weaver birds. Out of sight, animals were at their ease, breathing deeply under shade. Only a few showed themselves by the cool of a well or waterhole. A jackal lapping quietly, leaving hardly a ripple; a disturbed hare exploding into open ground like a shot from a gun.

Once, at a deep watering-hole overhung by vegetation, where a buffalo was working a long boom, creaking a bucket in and out of the muddy water, I saw a python slip noiselessly from water to low branch, a movement as fluid as the water itself, an uncoiling of a long jewelled rope. On another occasion, swimming in a flooded
jheel
, I saw a cobra cruise by me at a distance of about a dozen feet. I was far from shore, and it was too late to panic. I stopped swimming to give a bursting heart some relief and watched, with wonder starting to overcome terror, the sinuous ease of the motion. The snake's head was held proud of the water and the hood was just a little distended, like a shawl on a king.

*

‘A snake, you see a
big
snake?' Rahul, the bearer's son, was amused. Snakes were not uncommon, shy creatures that left you alone so long as you did not disturb them. Even cobras, despite the scares of Kipling's story, avoided humans if they could.

Rahul was my informant on native matters concerning flora and fauna, custom and practice. He put up with my
questions but it puzzled him that I could not see what
everyone
knew. He himself had other things in mind, being about fourteen and desperate for school knowledge and improvement. Though his natural disposition was sunny and his nature kind, his delicate, handsome face creased often with worry for the future. A command of English seemed to be one of the keys to that future and Rahul was happy to trade practice in English for some information that was no mystery anyway.

But after a while he would have had enough of questions. He would begin some fast skipping steps, whirling a bamboo cane in dazzling motion, arcing above and below and side to side, covering the whole body, as Maratha warriors had done with the sword (or so Rahul said) in the days of Sivaji. To me, it looked like an act of pure joy.

*

We were at school again, the enduring penance of youth. This time, the army school was large and formal, serving all the busy cantonments of Secunderabad. But I was used by now to an eccentric and obsessive tuition from teachers on the edge of exile and I paid little attention to my new school. The learning seemed deficient and the children rowdy and idle.

If I went with any enthusiasm at all, hanging over the tailgate of the 3-ton army truck that did the school-run for our district, it was on account of the many girls in the new school. I was approaching
that
age. The phenomenon of girls made me break into sweat, projecting me onto slippery ground where I floundered about woefully. Luckily for my maladroit shyness – had I been shown favour, then what would I have done? – the pretty girls, around whom the boys stuck like swarming bees, did me the compliment of ignoring me completely. I was free to sigh inwardly without being put to the cruel test of popularity.

There was little enough in this Secunderabad schooling to please our parents. Was it not certain, and likely to be quite soon, that we boys would be translated ‘home' for the great competitive battle of influence-peddling and place-hunting known as the British public school system? If this were so we must get going, obviously, on Latin. My brother, the elder, was the first victim. He was sent for weekly lessons from the only Latinist around, who was our local Catholic priest. Monsignor Jozef (his last name, being a terrible tangle of Polish syllables, was never used), the white-bearded patriarch of our Bolarum parish, seduced us each Sunday into a doze with his deep mumbles. I never did learn what quirk of clerical fate had marooned him in the bastion of his gaunt old church, set behind thorn bushes on the far edge of the maidan.

For the Latin lessons the old priest, white beard snowy between the dark soutane and the dark biretta, met us at the sacristy door. A heavy callused hand descended on my brother's shoulder and guided him relentlessly into the dungeon of scholarship while I fled into the undergrowth.

At that time I was a keen but undiscriminating collector of birds' eggs, which I stored in metal ammunition boxes commandeered for me by my father. I was attracted more by beauty than by system or rarity, and (to the benefit of rarer species) would take one pretty egg from the large clutch of a common bird rather than look for the shy or unusual specimen. In my search for eggs, the untended greenery around the isolated church was a good place to look. I had Salim Ali's
Book of Indian Birds
with me. Doubtfully, I turned the pages between the beautiful coloured plates, trying to distinguish between the common and the large green bee-eater, between the rose-ringed and the blossom-headed parakeet. Most of the time I was lost in the dazzling flutter of small brilliant birds, while from above the rascally old cons – crows, kites, vultures – monitored their chances.

When I was finished for the day I waited by the sacristy door. From within I heard a muffled thunder of verses. Monsignor Jozef, carried away into an almost forgotten Horatian world, was going far, far beyond the competence of my brother. The sonorous Latin took the priest back to the whitewashed walls of icy Polish seminaries, to the friendships of a long-lost land:

All gobbledegook to us! While I was outside listening to the vivid hubbub of a bulbul, my brother crept from the door, shoulders bent under misgivings. On this evidence, the academic future was likely to be hard going.

*

We were drifting apart, India and I. At a younger age, with the trust and ignorance of childhood, I had taken the extent of my desire for the limit of the world. India had indulged me. I was entirely bathed with India – my nurse, my guardian, my playground. Now, growing older and tasting a little of the sordid fruit of knowledge, I was being drawn into distinctions. Brown and white, servant and master, native and European, them and us. These labels were insinuated into the scheme of things not as reasons for condemnation or contempt, least of all for hatred, but merely as matters of fact, aids towards a clear taxonomy in the interests of social science.

Rahul, Sami's son, understood very well the unwritten protocols. He was my pal, but only up to a point. There were moments – only too easily reached – where life parted us. ‘No, no,' he would say when my brother or I proposed some unthinking devilry, ‘that's all right for you sahibs. Not for me.' I saw him ready for school, so eager and neat, dressed in shorts, shirt and tie with a
satchel over his shoulder. Intelligent and painstaking, he was anxious about exams. He saw his future depending on grades, marks, certificates. There was nothing to fall back on. ‘Please, I must go now,' he would murmer. ‘That geometry. So much work, so difficult.'

At the back end of the compound, where rubbish collected under straggly trees, well away from the flowerbeds and the big shade-trees, our paths divided. I was in a hurry to get to the fridge on the rear verandah, to the cold jug of mango juice, and then to soak in a hot tub prepared for me by the unseen hand of the sweeper; he receded to the bare box among the weeds that he shared with his parents. Already he was thinking about homework, then the little house was to be swept, and the charcoal got ready for the cooking of the evening meal in the pit in the open yard.

I was moving into conformity with my own kind, though not from conscious choice. The Secunderabad cantonment was so big – all those pale faces in Bolarum, Trimulgherry, Bowanpalli, Chilkalguda, Begampett – not just the officers and families of my father's Indian Army Division but also the men and officers of British regiments. It was hard to step around that British presence. Secunderabad, a town with no history, grown up as a scruffy handmaiden to military needs, offered little. We went there to school, and on Saturdays we usually cycled in for a day by the large swimming-pool. On the hot ride from Bolarum we tried to freewheel in the slip-stream of fumes, clinging to the battered metalwork of decrepit old steam-powered, charcoal-burning buses.

On the wide apron around the pool bodies lay as thick and supine as landed fish. There was plenty of brown flesh in evidence (shading to the angry red of sunburn) but only in very few cases was that colour the natural hue of the sunbathers.

Somewhere amid the bunched bodies and the flash of
spray our friend Dai was waiting for us. He was a young Welsh corporal, a bugler with a British regiment, who appeared to look on life as a superlative lark, a kind of cosmic entertainment into which we were drawn also by his energy and enthusiasm. We had met him by the pool, a tidy little man, a pocket Atlas in a brief swimsuit, with stiff carroty hair and a wide smile. He liked to wrestle in the shallows, swoosh recklessly from the water-shoot, and splat dangerously from the top diving-board among the idle floaters below. He would grab a wrist and an ankle to hurl one of us into space. ‘Hold on, boy,' he would cry, ‘I'm coming to get you.' After ducking and mauling us with rough good humour he would haul us to the side to lie in the sun and share his soda-pop.

I see now that he was lonely and out of place and needed an outlet for youthful good nature. Our puppy-like devotion made him grow an inch. He counted for little in the barracks, and India at large was uncharted land. He wanted our simple friendship. ‘Come on back to the billet,' he invited us, ‘and I'll let you have a go at the bugle. You'll like that.' We did, and so did he. He was amused by our attempts, our burps and growls. ‘Ah, you see,' he laughed, ‘it's not as easy as it looks, is it?' Then he would take the instrument and give us a prolonged bugle-call, playing with flair but rather too fast.