The only possibility was that Reg Greer’s parents had indeed left Australia, as I had soon to leave it. All was not well at Mill Farm, where the inmates had begun to drive each other crazy, under the influence of the primal elder’s curse. The winter was cruel; as one person crept around the house turning heaters off, another was creeping around turning them up. The greenhouse heater burned out completely and eighty daphne seedlings and a few hundred other laboriously propagated odds and ends were dead. Besides I was expected in India, where I was to combine attending a conference in Delhi with investigating the Doolally connection.
The day before I left Australia, I came across an entry in the Tasmanian marriage register. I had stopped searching Greer names, for by now I knew them all, and had started on Wise. I found an Emma Wise who got married in Launceston in 1889. The town was right, the name was nearly right, but the date was all wrong. I looked up the marriage certificate to see whom she married, on 26 March in the Manse of York Street Baptist Church. Her husband’s name was Robert Greeney. There were too many coincidences by half. All but three letters of their surname, plus their Christian names, were right. If this illiterate labourer born around 1863 was my grandfather, every word of the history my father gave the interview board of the RAAF was false, including his name. I was not so disloyal as to entertain such a suspicion; I scribbled the details in the margin of my notebook, and did my best to forget them.
India, February 1987
Destiny is beyond the range of experience:
it can be adored only by meditations and prayers.
But father is living-God and it is not proper to slight him for an unknown destiny.
By worshipping the father, one in fact worships all, and wealth, virtue and objects of desire are gained by it.
There is no higher sacred duty than this.
Devotion to truth, charity and sacrifice are not equal to this duty.
THE RAMAYANA OF VALMIKI
Delhi. My suite on the seventh floor of the Ashok Hotel is larger than most Indian houses. Tall dark chairs upholstered in deep purple stand about like mourners, attended by squat tables as gloomy as themselves. They are borne up by a magenta carpet with flowers of the most unhealthy blue, pink and yellow wriggling all over it like chorionic villi. I have turned off the glacial air-conditioning, so that the warm air can bring the happy-sad scent of India through my open windows. It is the smell of life in death and death in life, of rottenness and ripeness, of promise and denial. I love this country so much that my sides ache with it. Round every corner there is more wonder, more sumptuousness, more anguish than I could ever have foreseen before I walked that way. Every time I am in India I am astonished at human ingenuity and endurance and nobility. Nothing less like the suburbia of my childhood could be imagined. Poor Daddy; he would never have understood my rush to squalor from the even tenor of suburban ways.
There is to be a wedding in the hotel garden; huge garlands made of millions of marigolds are being hung on the dyed calico walls of vast open-air rooms. Persian carpets with designs of fantastic vegetation are being stretched over the tattered reality of grass. Long tables are being arranged round the swimming pool like stripes on an enormous serpent. The silken dais erected for the musicians is being festooned with chains of frangipani flowers, and another dais is being canopied in cloth of gold. Within hours the dusty gardens of the hotel will be transformed into an earthly paradise where two divinities, Radha the bride and Krishna the groom, will be united and for an hour or two the world will make sense. The servants behind their bamboo partition are chopping, mashing, mixing, slicing, releasing gusts of fragrance, ginger, coriander, turmeric, tamarind, asafetida, that mix with the scents of the flowers and mount up to my room as aromatic smoke. The maker of rumali rotis has arrived on his bicycle and is arranging his braziers and iron pans with all the absorbed self-consciousness of a genius.
If I turn to my other window I can see a roof-top where two little girls are playing cricket with their brother. They take turns to stand up in front of a red wicket painted on the pink wall and endeavour to block their brother’s fiendishly acrobatic bowling with a home-made bat almost as tall as they are. The ball will be made of paper, rolled and flattened, plaited and mashed and bound with string in a roughly spherical shape. If you can hit one of those soggy objects off the top of an Indian tenement building, you can definitely sky a six at Lords. The red bows on the ends of the little girls’ braids flip round their heads as they dash back and forth along the roof, avoiding the stretched saris and the kari bush. Their brother shouts ‘Howzat’ with every other ball but, as there is no umpire and the little girls cannot bowl well enough to interest him, they stay in.
The air is as usual thick with smoke and dust. Australians would find it hard to realise that most of the people in the world never get their lungs quite free of either. They complain of pollution without the faintest idea of what it really is and who really suffers by it. The children’s father has appeared on the roof and is clapping. A grey pigeon comes to ask me for something to eat. He stands diffidently at the end of my window sill. I give him one of the sugary biscuits the hotel management left for me, and he leaves me a turd in exchange. The hotel balconies are all fouled by pigeons and the ventilators are all stuffed with nests. If I open my bathroom window, there will be a storm of fluff and wings and straw as the nesting pigeons take fright. Pigeons are supposed to be Brahmins in the transmigratory exchange.
I am still in Limbo. Daddy is still unknown to me, more unknown than ever, since I can find no corroboration for the account that he gave of himself to the Repatriation doctors. It is becoming important for me to feel that he didn’t lie, not to me or anyone, however economical he may have been with the truth. This business just has to be lived through, if I am to grow up to the point where, as my friend Bauci says, I forgive my parents. Some people are so afflicted by anxiety spasms that they can’t make their legs work, can’t open a door. Daddy couldn’t seem to clear his throat, couldn’t eat. I can eat alas, but a cold blanket of something is creeping over me like a pigeon-coloured cloud. I find myself sighing heavily, dragging stale air into squeezed lungs, like an unwilling charlady climbing stairs.
I turn away from the window and stare into the darkening room. My heart has swollen up until my ribs feel stretched to bursting. My gut is painfully coiling and uncoiling upon itself. ‘Touchy tummy,’ Daddy called it. I have it, my brother has it. My nephew Peter Marcus has it. We got it from Daddy, but where did he get it from?
By the time I emerge from my vast marble bathroom, the wedding guests have arrived and the garden is ablaze with Benares silk. Jewelled filigree twinkles in the glow of the fairy lights; great ropes of jasmine swing against tool-smooth hair. Somewhere a brass band is playing. It marches around the corner into my line of vision, and behind it on a white horse, with his little sister mounted behind him, rides the bridegroom. In another corner of the garden the bride, dressed in red and gold, shimmering like a flame, moves surrounded by her gopis towards the dais. Two huge families are about to become one.
Bombay. In my obsessional way I have become hypnotised by the father-daughter relationship. Just now, between the galled ponies and the piles of green coconuts, a bespectacled man passed by, carrying on his crooked elbow a little girl. She is dressed in a burst of petticoats and a red nylon dress with a frill. He is kissing her round cheek as if he could not get enough of it, and she rests her head in the hollow at the base of his neck, using his tall body for a palanquin. Her hair is oiled and curled, her eyes darkened with kohl, and small knobs of gold stand in her ears.
There are no flowers in the house if there are no daughters.
Where the silk surface of this flat sea heaves up the water is brown, but the foam as it breaks on the flat sand is as white as anywhere. This sea brings not plastic bottles, plastic bags and plastic twine, but ropes of decaying flowers, bound together with cotton. They are the flowers brought down from the puja rooms to be thrown in the sea wh
ere no creature can step over them. This is not a sea to swim in, or to wind-surf across, still less to churn up with motor-boats and skis. Under the palms the cows chew the cud, watched by their saddhu cowherds, resplendent in tattered saffron. Another saddhu walks the beach with a python sleeping round his shoulders.
Occasionally a plump businessman passes by, doing his best to jog, as if he were in America or Australia. Otherwise Juhu beach is happy to be India, not California. The sea is for worshipping, not for swimming in. The beach is for strolling, for socialising, not for tanning or physical jerks. Brightly painted pony carts bowl up and down at the water’s edge, plastic pennants flying, avoiding the camel swaying along with a wide-eyed child clamped to the pommel, and the Himalayan bear trudging along behind his young master, who is annoyed when I give the bear a banana, not I think because he wanted it himself, but because the bear will not do his tricks if he is not hungry.
Another father-daughter ikon passes by. This time the little girl is wearing a black frock with gaudy floral insets. Daringly her mother hoists her sari all the way to her knees and walks in the water.
The beach is very wide, eighty yards at least, yet every man who walks along it comes within two yards of where I sit writing in my notebook. Some of them, emboldened by their smart western apparel, tight nylon shirt with huge collar, flared synthetic trousers and high-heeled plastic shoes, dare to sit down and stare fixedly at me. ‘Move. Go. Be off. At once,’ I say in a piercing mem-sahib voice. They pretend they have not heard, look away for a minute or two, and then, face saved, casually saunter off. I put my head in my notebook, anxious that they should not see my grin.
Why is it. I wonder, that all men are confident of their attractiveness and so few women are? Why would any tatterdemalion Mahratta imagine that a foreign tourist lady of apparent wealth would welcome his attentions? I think it is not simply a matter of her being alone, which is certainly unusual in Indian society. I think it has something to do with the difference between mothers and fathers as lovers of the young. Mothers carefully, diligently, constantly build the confidence of their sons. Fathers give only fitful testimony to the lovability of their daughters.
Nasik. Why did Daddy hate kite-hawks so? Shite-hawks they called them although they shit neither more nor less than most other birds. They have a curiously unaggressive cry, timorous and mournful. I can understand that the vultures would have shaken a man as ill as Papa, but the kites are harmless. Even the Indian crows, though they get everywhere, ride on horses in the carousel and pick the noses of the cows, are far less horrible than English crows, while no crow on earth is as despicable as an Australian crow, with its penchant for removing the eyes from new-born lambs or unconscious humans. Indian crows have a silly walk; they jump about with both feet and never seem quite to get their balance. Teetering back and forth in their neat grey hoods they hardly look like crows at all.
Daddy was offended by the cows too, the most benign of all the sights of India. Whether eating waste paper in Calcutta or the petunias of the Bombay Parks and Gardens Department, they are deeply inoffensive. The first time I saw a ‘sacred cow’, as my taxi was lurching and bouncing through the solid human mass that is Calcutta, her eye met mine at the same level, as she sat on a traffic island, munching multi-coloured excelsior with all the appearance of enjoyment. She looked at me under her long eyelids, with fronds of pink paper dangling from her wet nose, as if to say, ‘Only the roughage counts. All else is illusion.’ I longed for her to be miraculously transported to Piccadilly Circus, by way of showing that there is more to life than corporate slavery. I had been terrified of Calcutta, because of the stories Daddy had told us about India. Somehow I imagined that he was talking about Calcutta, because I knew he was quite wrong about Delhi, Agra, Benares, Bombay and everywhere else I’d been. I had been peering out of my taxi expecting the abomination of desolation, and instead I saw a cow munching paper froth. I wound down the window and started to enjoy myself. Reg Greer was still alive then; sacred cows became just one more thing I couldn’t talk to him about.
Daddy belonged to the vast mass of westerners who believe that if people are poor and hungry it must be their own fault. He always spoke of India as if all its inhabitants were superstitious morons. He believed that the suppliers of fuel and dahi, the drawers of the carts and ploughs, that wandered round the streets eating rubbish, should be farmed and slaughtered for food, in the Australian way. The Australian way seemed to him sensible, the right way. If I had told him that I have come to see cattle farming as a major abuse of the ecosphere, and of cattle, he would have been convinced that I was quite barmy. One day perhaps there will be signs and slogans saying ‘Beef is bad for you’, but by then the world will be all brown, and Reg Greer’s nightmare will have come to pass.
Of course Reg Greer did not have the option of getting to know my India, for a soldier cannot get to know the country he is in. He sees only beggars, prostitutes, camp-followers and thieves, only the society as it is distorted by his presence. Daddy never had the privilege of staying in this house or any other Indian household.
A minister in Mr Gandhi’s government, concerned that I should not encounter difficulties because Nasik is off the tourist track, has confided me to the care of his friend, Mr Vaishampayan, whose elder son collected me at the airport. When I arrived I was shown every room in their house. All are open to the outside with small balconies. All have cement or marble floors and the worn look of rooms that are cleaned every day by servants, like railway waiting rooms. There is no personal clutter, only beds with railings of light metal alloy, to carry the mosquito nets. The bare floor will be swabbed every day by one of the servants, who may enter the room at any time. It hardly matters when, for no one sleeps naked, or spends any significant amount of time undressed.
Two beds have been made up in my room at the top of the house. One of the daughters-in-law will keep me company each night, leaving her husband to sleep alone. The three little boys sleep with their grandparents, except if their father is away when they sleep with their mother. It is assumed that nobody would willingly sleep in a room by herself. I succeed in persuading the co-sisters that I have always slept in a room by myself and reluctantly they give in, only asking me several times if I am sure that I will not be lonely. I do not bother to explain that I do not wear night clothes and will suffer greatly if obliged to sleep dressed.
Daddy would have noticed that the house is shoddily built and shabby, from the stained purplish white distemper on the walls, to the rusting electric conduit, the bare fluorescent tube, the hard beds, the thin mattresses, the clumsily cobbled curtains. The grandest things in the house are the huge vinyl-covered settees in the sitting room, where forty people of Indian dimensions can be seated at once. Against the dreary background, the women move like jewelled moths. The sound of their laughter wells up the echoing marble stairs.
To me all seems exactly as it should be. This is not a house to be worshipped, bedizened and beautified at the expense of all who live in it. There are no emblems of conspicuous consumption here. The best silks are the oldest; the car is as old as I am. There is no lavishness, no waste. The only luxuries are the smell of fresh masala being ground for lunch and the gold and silver of the puja room. The lady of the house, the babis’ mother-in-law, cleans the puja room herself. Every morning she goes into her garden and picks the blooms that have just opened. Freshly bathed, barefoot, she brings them to the devi and arranges them before her in an intricate pattern on a flat salver of pink-tinted marble, until the whole room fills with the scent of zafar and roses. The devi is an eight-armed dancing Durga, attended by most elegant handmaids. Around her stand figures of Shiva, Brahma and Krishna, all old, precious and exquisite.
When the babis are bathed, they too come to the shrine with offerings of flowers, and standing before the devi sing the morning canticle, keeping time with finger cymbals, not the dreary tramp that westerners associate with religious music, but a skipping, gliding music that floats t
hrough the house. The goddess exists to glorify and be glorified. When her flowers have faded the servant will gather them in the corner of her sari, walk to the river and throw them in, for no creature must ever step over them. All of life in this household is a dance; the aim is beauty, grace and harmony, not what Mrs Thatcher calls ‘an increased standard of living’ or the Australian ‘sophisticated recreational lifestyle’. From my room at the top of the house, I hear the babis’ laughter, and smell the spices and flowers, and the little boys’ treble chatter and for the first time in my life understand the meaning of the word ‘glory’.
One of the co-sisters, Kunda, is plump and golden-skinned, with a merry laugh, which is quickly answered by the other, Alka, who has one son to her two. When Alka bore her son in Poona hospital, she suffered an abdominal infection, for which she was given too much medication. Since then she has had trouble with her eyes and there have been no more children. Before her son was born, Alka had written three novels in Marathi, two of which were published. Her husband brought her to meet me at Nasik airport, and told me about her novels. From the way he looked at her when he told me, I could have sworn that he loved her better for being so extraordinary. Since the damage to her eyes Alka does not write any more; when I asked her why she had resigned herself to damaged vision and given up her writing she said, ‘I do not want to struggle. I want to be a happy person.’ She had purged her discontent like a sin; her grace and light laughter, the singing that made the house glorious, were the triumph of discipline. She had succeeded; she was happy. The girl who went to the arranged marriage with the Vaishampayans’ elder son thin, large-eyed and nervous had become this sleek, tranquil, genuinely light-hearted woman. Even if Alka had been a great novelist, there would have been no regrets.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 10