Out of India (26 page)

*

We got there, of course. In the hill village it was cold, the wind snapping suddenly round the corners of steep cobbled streets. I felt the lassitude that comes after bad times and danger. My companions were stiff from the long cramps of the ride and chilled from weather and aftershock. In those December days the village closed early, battened into darkness soon after the Angelus bell, with only a few lights and an open bar by the main square. Reluctant to face the empty, unheated house too soon we went to the Bar Espejo for a dish of tough chicken and stayed there within reach of the butano heater, ordering rounds of ciento-tres, Malaga dulce, raw local wine and stuff that was even worse. We talked of this and that, with
long silences, but no one cared to mention the whiff of death that we had caught that morning. At about eleven we stumbled up the rough black street, a little bit drunk, and went to bed in a house of bitter discomfort and almost no furniture. I had a sleeping-bag spread on a floor of sloping flagstones.

Next morning, I found the Irishman pacing the kitchen, stroking his beard.

‘How you feeling?’ he said, giving me a leery look.

‘OK,’ I replied, ‘all things considered.’

‘Weird night, what?’

‘Was it? I slept pretty well.’

‘No funny stuff, then?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Let me tell you a story,’ he said, pouring hot water over grains of instant coffee.

He had woken suddenly in the night, jerked from sleep by the sense of someone prowling in the room. In the poor light he had seen a figure and after a few moments had recognized it as me. He was about to speak to me when something in the obsessive shuffling steps made him stop. The motions were those of dreams, and then it came to the Irishman that I was sleepwalking. Face to the wall I began to rearrange some shoes lined up on the floor, pushing them about like toy boats in a child’s bath. And all the time I was talking, low-pitched words that had the stamp of coherence and organization. The sound of this language seemed oddly familiar, and in a while he had placed it. It was the sound of an Indian tongue, such as he had heard among the Indians of the newsagents and small grocery shops in his part of North London. Afraid to wake me, the Irishman sat up in bed wondering what to do. After a while I abandoned the shoes and sidled out of the bedroom, closing the door carefully behind me.

Awake and conscious, I have now no memory of Hindi, apart from a few mispronounced numbers and some
broken sentences of the kind that the Raj would address to servants. All my conscious effort, in fact, has been given to another linguistic task, to try to get on good terms with English, a process I expect to last the rest of my life.

So I conclude that the ‘I’ of my waking mind is somehow less than the whole person. Like icebergs, we are supported by a hidden subliminal level which, again like icebergs, may be weightier than all that’s seen.

I am more than I know myself to be. Out of my childhood emerges a cloaked figure, Western genes grafted to Indian environment. We pull back the cloak. Light falls on the whole person, a completed and manifest history. I rub my eyes in astonishment: I wonder, where am I now?