Out of India Read online

  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.

  ‘Why, the man’s a fool,’ my mother muttered beneath her breath. My mother was always anxious that promises should be kept, in life or in commerce. To her, an unmagical magician was merely a charlatan. He certainly wasn’t worth good money.

  ‘W-e-ll,’ said my father with a doubtful, almost conspiratorial grin.

  I could see that my father was enjoying the performance. And my brother and I were in a barely contained rapture, on our mettle to anticipate what could go wrong next.

  ‘Look,’ whispered my brother, bouncing his feet on the floor with excitement, ‘he’s got something hidden at the back of his collar.’ And then he added with a whoop, ‘No, no, it’s one of the handkerchiefs that should be in the hat!’

  I was in such excruciating pleasure that I had to cross my legs and squeeze them tight, for fear of disgracing myself with a little puddle under my chair.

  The magician, feeling a lack of proper solemnity and mystery, brought the performance to an abrupt end. But he did not lose his dignity. A deep salaam, a tug at his ragged moustache, and he retired behind the screen in good order, leaving his assistant to scoop up the malfunctioning props.

  After a while two shadows slipped from the bedroom, the long elderly one holding a black rolled umbrella like a staff, and the smaller one lopsided under the weight of a bulging wrecked suitcase.

  *

  Abbé Dubois, the inquisitive French missionary who spent thirty-one years in the Madras Presidency obscuring his priesthood under a brahmin’s robes, in the wonderfully detailed anthropological investigations that he had compiled by 1823, had many things to say about magicians. They were highly respected and feared in Hindu society, though their trade was dangerous, threatened by the jealousy of the spirits, the rebounding of spells, the revenges of rivals, the obduracy of gross material objects.

  But their powers were satisfactory for even the most wild-eyed egomaniac. Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva – the great gods themselves – could not resist the magicians. These men plied their occult trade with the planets and elements in tow, aided by ghosts, earth devils, malign female sakti spirits, and death-dealing Kali, goddess of destruction. The Abbé, who showed a nice line in ironic appreciation, had a soft spot for these wonder-workers. He mentions a master who mixed the bones of sixty-four different living beings – a man born on the Sunday of the new moon, a woman born on Friday, bones from the feet of a cobbler, a pariah, a Muslim, a Ferangi, and many others – then buried the mess under propitious stars at the threshold of an enemy and infallibly caused that enemy’s death. Another magus, muttering a mantra such as h’hom, h’rhum, sh’rhum, sho’rhim, ramaya, namaha, whose effects were decisive and irresistible, mixed the mud of sixty-four filthy places (sixty-four and its factors seemed to be the efficacious numbers). He worked in human hair, nail clippings, bits of human dross, and moulded it all into figurines, each with the name of an enemy on the breast. Then, if the incantations had been scrupulously followed, those persons were done for. The grahas, the planetary influences, took hold of them and led them a merry dance to perdition.

  Thirty-two weapons, licked by the blood of human sacrifice,
could put a besieging army to flight, making a huddle of defenders look like a battalion of thousands. The roots of sixty-four noxious plants, prepared with spells, could make a secret hash of the life of any hated rival.

  From this treacherous and resplendent world, time and Western conquest led India into the twentieth century. Now rationalism bites, materialism begins to sweep the intellectual ground, agnostics trample over belief. Something is gained in the direction of sobriety and good sense. But something, the wilder poetry of instinct and wonder, is lost too, or debased into a maladroit sideshow for cocky Western children.

  SIX

  The Vindhyas

  LAND OF TRAINS, bearers of modernity and restlessness.

  It was not hard to leave Bombay. After a short while the city began to frighten us. People bent low under their burden of calamity and desperation – bleeding lives, emotions worn to the nub, the immensity of the hopelessness. We children wanted sun without this painful stink of sweat, space where we would not be elbowed by the agonies of others. With relief, we put Victoria Terminus behind us, for though we did not know it then, that bloated architecture was the emblem of our disappointments.

  Invented grandeur is one of many imperial failings. It mocks what it strives to assert. The boasts become jokes: a lion on one side of the entrance, a tiger on the other; a figure of Progress, twelve foot tall, surmounting the dome of the building; predatory animals carved in the crannies of the vast space, watching below with bleak stone eyes. The Victoria Terminus was the proclamation of a deliberate programme for India. It was planned as the high temple for a land transfigured by the British introduction of Western commerce and industry. These were the new recruits for the ancient Indian devotion to the god of the paisa. And here in the station precinct, in a murky ambience of steam and smoke, a servant of that god – the Great Indian Peninsular Railway – with much whistling and metallic thunder began to take us off into the folds of central India, into a land beginning to lack ancient heart, and as yet without a full confidence in the new.

  The days were hot, working up to the full ferocity of the high summer months. In the carriage my brother and I jostled to get by a window, welcoming the small gale of dust and soot-laden air blowing through the rattling frames. After jolting slowly through the human driftlands of the city’s edge the train assumed a leisurely pace into a countryside that gradually emptied itself of people. Where had they all gone? A population so brazenly, so appallingly, present in Bombay seemed to recede from sight. Lonely figures became lost in landscape, bled out by harsh sunlight into a world of shadows.

  Recalling that journey now, I see stasis rather than movement: peasants on dusty paths like representations on a frieze, the slow train losing them from sight between one step and another; an old man at rest, naked but for a loincloth and a baggy turban, stretching his bones on the twisted ropes of a charpoy bed; gaunt dogs lying still enough to mimic death; cattle with their heads down, defeated by the pestilence of flies; a solitary buffalo knee-deep in a pool at whose edge a solitary woman straightened and held her back beside a pile of washing. Here and there smoke arose out of the trees in thin pillars, drifting up towards zones of bleached air where kites, hardly moving, smoothed the sky with their great wings.

  Places without motion abolish time. Was that the deception practised by rural India? Each snapshot through history looked very much like the one before it. A row of small monkeys sitting on the roof of a wayside station, grimacing like wicked senators, might have been from the age of Ashoka. Weather and nature embraced the buildings of all ages, returning them to the equal status of the semi-ruined. Only the train seemed to provide the connecting thread of a narrative. But what was the story it told? From green hills freckled with jungle we descended into broad valleys, then clattered gingerly on bridges of rusting girders over wide rivers that were nameless to me, before labouring into the next range. This long rocking rhythm up and down was like counting the ribs of a somnolent land. Then, by the tracks, suddenly a large town would swell out of the trampled dirt, tilting towards chaos, with people congealed together like flies on a fly-paper. The stasis broke apart. An inhospitable present rubbed a filthy nose along the windows of the carriage.

  The train crossed the Narmada river and climbed slowly into the Vindhya hills. Dregs of mist still clung about the deeper places. White water rushed in ravines, bellowing into caverns. Clouds piled on the ridges and the escarpments above vegetation lush with the juice of good rainfall.

  At the southern edge of the Malwa plateau, not far from Indore, the train let us off at the little town of Mhow. This was a cantonment of the Raj, founded in the early nineteenth century with a keen eye for geographical position, administrative convenience, and the comfort of white folk sweating copiously and far from home. At the pleasant height of about two thousand feet, on a ridge falling away spectacularly to south and east, tangled in greenery, Mhow laid a cooling hand on the brow of an alien and lonely soldiery.

  *

  Suddenly, I almost lost sight of my parents. In the fear and loneliness of wartime England I had clung to a parental hand and was miserable when chance and time tore that hand away. Now, in this bird-singing immensity of warm morning sunshine, guidance was a restraint, and safety became a form of bondage. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I complained, dodging out of reach of the comb and spilling out of the door too fast for instruction to catch me.

  Cheerfully tousled, my brother and I hurried to breakfast. Tables were laid on a wide verandah over-looking a large garden, which looked unkempt but was merely giving way to the profusion of nature. Wide-spreading trees, tough bushes intent on reaching the light, unknown flowers blowsy with colour, unknown birds giddy with song. The clean green was made richer by the morning sunlight before the full onslaught of the heat. Against this immoderate nature the verandah proclaimed the decent orderliness of man. Stiff white tablecloths laid with bright arrays of highly polished cutlery. Chinaware sparkling with anticipation, jugs and pots poised and ready. In the shadow of the doorways the Indian servants waited crisp in white, looking formal yet willing, eager to pad softly forward on bare feet, a murmured salaam on the lips and a big silver-plated pot of tea in hand.

  Even at breakfast I was ravenous, as if physical hunger were only a part of the hunger of ignorance, an overwhelming greediness to devour a new world.

  ‘Hallo, what’s this then?’ I wanted to know, plunging a spoon into the perfumed pulp of an unknown fruit.

  It was papaya. At other times there was guava, or melon, or mango, or pomegranate. They were all a surprise, all wonderful. After the lean years in England I looked joyfully at the special circumstance of life that laid them in my way. How generous was this India!

  *

  As yet, there was no obvious purpose to our days. I know now that my father was in an administrative limbo, an incomplete line in one of wartime’s muddled ledgers. Soon he would move on, but in the meantime we did not go to school. Other children went by in small groups, some with a suspicious convent-look about their uniforms. Larger boys from the Parsi school batted paper balls with rulers and scuffled by the roadside, trying to steal pencil-boxes from the girls. But we were going to the swimming pool. The tang of damp laterite, fresh from a dawn shower, was in our nostrils, and to us this was the delicious smell of freedom.

  The pool was in the open air, small but clean and well-kept, set in bushy scrub but with a wide concrete perimeter. To whom it belonged I do not know, but in the times we went there no other swimmers appeared. Occasionally, young Indian boys, in long white shirts, veered off the path and stopped, chewing the ends of sticks. We didn’t know enough to invite them in. They observed us carefully, half hidden by the bushes. Their brown eyes had the patient watchfulness of deer. There was no judgement in their looks. What was happening was normal. But we needed no invitation. When the unruffled blue of the pool came into view at the end of the path we ran the last hundred yards, popping buttons and flinging off clothes over our swimsuits, then ju
mped with abandon and smacked our pale bodies into the shallow end.

  Since neither I nor my brother could swim, our father came along to keep an eye on us, though it is my suspicion that he couldn’t swim either. A poor agricultural lad from the doughy earth of Lincolnshire, what would he know of waterside frolics? He held in contempt what we might now call the fashions of the Costa del Sol – the witless vanity of the beach, the painfully endured rawness of sunburnt flesh, the vacancy of idle minds. I never saw him wear a swimsuit or take off his shirt in public. Sometimes, in what for him was an act of abandon, he would roll his trousers up to the knees, though only in private moments, for he then revealed the large angry scar left on his shin by a desert sore. He was not ashamed of this disfigurement but considered it an indelicacy to expose it to the wide world.

  Though I could not swim, I was experimenting. It was my notion that swimming under water was easier than swimming on the surface. If I walked slowly along the bottom from the shallow end, holding my breath, I would get the feel of being below water and lose some of the terror of sinking. Looking up, I saw the material world wobbling out of shape, refracted by the water. The shimmering pattern of the surface, seen from below, was a beautiful and unexpected reordering of the familiar universe, a liquid kaleidoscope without the sharp edges of reality. As my breath gave out I bobbed upward, clutching the rim of the pool. My head burst through the surface in a corona of bubbles, quitting the shifting translucent netherworld for the steady lines and angles of normality. I would look at my father to see if he were noticing these brilliant effects. But it would have taken a small seismic upheaval to divert him from his book. He had a deckchair arranged in a rather upright position, pulled well back from the splashes of the pool. He did not wear a hat, though the sun was hot. His dark brown hair was as neatly trimmed and parted as usual. He crossed his long legs and serenely turned another page. He did not glance up but his left hand took the ever-present cigarette to his lips.