Kunda was different. Her energy was of a more restless kind, and she was plainly ambitious for her husband and sons. The calm Brahmin household allowed her her competitiveness, let her make a more vivid impression, sparkling momentarily on the strong tide of their spirituality. When Mr Vaishampayan should die, the brothers will set up households of their own, and Kunda will have to learn the subtle discipline of a mother-in-law. Her own mother-in-law moved noiselessly about the house, clad in the simplest cotton saris, guiding the household through its hours like a convent. When the little boys came home from school, shrieking and tumbling over the great black settees, in noisy mock fights that too easily turned into real ones, one inaudible word from Mrs Vaishampayan hushed their hysteria. She was not well; her face was pale and her eyes shadowed with pain, but she was happy. I struggled to find the right things to say to her, for her English was not good. When I succeeded, and we made contact, her drawn face became young again and she laughed like a girl. The little boys adored her.
The strenuous discipline that results in such structures of spiritual elegance and calm is called by people like my father, fatalism. It is blamed for everything that is wrong in India. If the tap drips, a Hindu feels that it is better to surmount the irritation than to tear the house apart trying to mend the pipe; therefore every tap in India drips. It’s enough to drive a Reg Greer crazy.
Mr Vaishampayan took me to the library in Nasik, so that I could pursue my researches into Devlali in wartime. He was also anxious that I should see the collection of Indian artefacts that he had given to the museum, ‘curios’ he called them. The librarian came to meet us, louting low, so that we saw more of his dyed head than of his gleaming face. Throughout the visit he kept up a loud ingratiating chant, exclusively addressed to Mr Vaishampayan, turning his back on me in a manner too pointed to be rude. He was obviously making a desperate pitch of some kind, possibly for a salary on which he might be able to pay his bills. Mr Vaishampayan listened courteously, as birds flew in and out of the window grilles. The librarian, and the walls and the chairs and tables, were all copiously stained with betel juice. I pointed to a line of droppings more substantial than the bird-dirt to be seen all around.
‘Bats?’ I asked.
‘Owls,’ said the librarian unhappily. He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘bowls’, logically enough.
As the spines of the books were neither lettered nor numbered, it hardly mattered that the glass of the bookcase doors was opaque with dirt. I took up a volume at a venture and the pages erupted in a cloud of red dust and cascaded on to the filthy floor, leaving me clutching a pair of warped boards.
‘Perhaps they had kept a file of the local newspaper?’ I suggested. The librarian shook his head; all paper went for recycling. Given the humidity, and the dust and the super-phosphate and rat droppings all over the library, newspapers would not have lasted more than a few months.
As Mr Vaishampayan took me in to see his ‘curios’, a pair of extremely skinny men in filthy pyjamas scuttled past us and began to enact a music-hall routine involving a glass-topped display cabinet and a tape-measure. Inside the cabinet, a rather good miniature was lying half-hidden by decaying newspapers, together with a spent light bulb and some boxes of Indian playing cards. As one man measured the cabinet, the other ceremoniously entered the measurements on the back of a tattered notebook, nodding and bowing to Mr Vaishampayan as he did so, evidently to reassure him that proper storage facilities for his treasures were even now in process of construction.
There was even more filth silted over the objects inside such display cabinets as there were, than on the pieces lying scattered about on the floor. Wonderful South Indian bronzes were so encrusted that they seemed crudely fashioned from iron or terra cotta. The silver and gold idols were shrouded in blue and black oxides. Only a sumptuous natraj still wearing his diadem of red and vermilion kum-kum glimmered with all his old glory, safe in his own glass case. Mr Vaishampayan stepped over idols pocked with stone disease and ancient wood carvings, occasionally directing the custodian to clear away debris so that I could see. He seemed not to mind that his treasures were decomposing, but I felt some sympathy with those grave robbers who say that they steal the cultural heritage of others to save it from destruction. The Government of India would prevent me from taking any of Mr Vaishampayan’s pieces out of the country, but it could not force the citizens of Nasik to preserve them.
I could feel Reg Greer’s disgust with India gnawing at my heart as I looked at Mr Vaishampayan’s paintings on glass, fifty or more of them propped on a high picture rail where only the birds would see them. The birds preferred to sit and shit on them. The damp of the plastered walls was lifting the pigment off the back of the glass before my very eyes.
‘Corrupt, incompetent, useless…’
Then I came to my senses. ‘Yes but.’ Poor Daddy. All he ever heard from me was yes but. ‘Yes but, museums are for tourists, Papa, not for makers. Not for dwellers. They’re for people passing through. Every Indian makes art every day. It’s the process that is important not the product. The activity is the end in itself. Happiness is happening. Indian women make paintings with flowers every day. On special days they make patterns in the earth outside their houses with white lime and when the guests come the pattern is destroyed by their feet. Living art is biodegradable. When the idols are not worshipped they are only brass or stone. And then they are fit only to be collected by anal fixates. India does not struggle against time; time is the essence of the dance.’
Next door to the library the Sri Vivekananda primary school was conducting its annual prize-giving and display. In the gloomy interior of the concert hall a thin miasma of dust, cow-dung, smoke and car exhaust drifted slowly in the dim light of two fluorescent bars. The dirty plastic seats were crammed with people sitting two to a seat, with children on laps, knees, shoulders, arms. Children giggled, wailed, scrapped and raced up and down the aisle. I was surprised to see how many fathers had come to see their children perform. Many of them carried their little daughters, heedless of their dribble or the smears of kohl that menaced the immaculateness of their safari suits.
I sat at the edge of the crowd, observing the audience more than the tiny performers. A squad of children with breathtakingly skinny legs performed something that purported to be the Hokey Pokey, but it seemed likely to me at least that neither they nor their teachers had understood the words, for they put their hands in when the words said they were putting them out. Their motion of the main step was a kind of abrupt knee bend and momentary dislocation of the pelvis. The next dance was performed by tiny girls in huge saris stiffly encrusted with lurex, to the words of a song bawled from the wings by a lady accompanying herself on the tabla. Little boys in soldier suits standing at the back of the stage unconsciously copied the girls’ movements, and gave a much better account of the dance than they, but their attempt at military formation marching ended in pointless milling around. The audience roared and applauded like mad. Great waves of love rolled up and lapped around the children, and only the teachers, whose fault it all was, looked less than utterly gratified.
As Mr Vaishampayan’s car wriggled through the throngs of people and animals I wondered why Reg Greer never came to any of our speech days or speech nights. We three children all supposed that it was because he was too busy or too tired. He was his own boss, unlike the civil servants, and council employees and clerks and salesmen who had been so happy to put on their best suits and sit for hours in the dark hall listening to interminable speeches and watching other people’s children singing badly and dancing worse.
Reg Greer was even less likely to have risked being a guest at the Vaishampayans’ than he was to have enjoyed the Sri Vivekananda primary school speech day. His conviction that India is some kind of madhouse would have been borne out by the constant obbligato of pye dogs’ barking, owls’ theatrical screaming and donkeys’ braying that punctured my dreams all night. The practice march-past of the police band at six in t
he morning would have been interpreted by Reg Greer as utter lack of consideration, and the passing-by of the saddhu, mad-eyed and gaunt, babbling tantric prayers and incantations among which the word baksheesh figured rather prominently, would have crowned the whole idiotic panoply.
Reg Greer would have been incensed to see the elder Mrs Vaishampayan come reverently out in the dew to wash the marble of the garden shrine this morning and disgusted to hear her soft singing of the hymn as she worked, a hymn with a throb as clear as the thumps from the Devlali gunnery range over the hill. Her piety would have seemed to him mere superstition, even hypocrisy, for were not the Vaishampayans rich and their servants poor? He would not have seen that the Vaishampayans lived pretty much as their servants did. They ate the same food and slept on the same beds and wore the same clothes most of the time. They treated their sweepers and washers-up with the same quiet courtesy that they showed to each other and they paid five people to do the work of one.
The road to Devlali rises slowly as it goes southwards from Nasik. You know you’re in Devlali when rows of sanatoria appear on each side, mad Gothic bungalows with steeply pitched verandahs under roofs of tile. Hindu, Muslim, Jain and Sikh sanatoria, sanatoria built in memory of this functionary and that, all exactly alike. ‘The climate here is very great,’ said one of my escorts. And one of the Indian Army officers elaborated. ‘This is a no-fan station.’ There was no sign of kite-hawks; only pigeons nested in the red temple blossom trees that glowed in the dappled shade cast by immense deodars. I was mystified. Where could Reg Greer have got his tales of monsoonal squalor from, when he had spent two months, not two years as I had mis-remembered, in this idyllic hill-station with one of the best climates in India? Summer in Devlali is marginally less uncomfortable than summer in Melbourne.
My guide was the youngest Mr Vaishampayan, who had thought it best to bring along a Brahmin friend who had married a Parsee whose father was a trader in Devlali. ‘The Parsees were always close with Britishers,’ he said. Another friend had come along apparently for the ride. The three of them learnedly discussed my mission. The man who married the Parsee assured me that the military hospital was ‘top secret’; what he thought Indian army personnel could be suffering from in peace-time that would be top secret, he didn’t say. In fact neither he nor his friends knew anything whatever about Devlali, or they would have been aware that the cantonment hospital, like every other military hospital in India, treats civilians as well as military.
Courtesy obliged me to allow them to set up my interviews in Devlali, and that meant getting hold of the Parsee father-in-law who knew nothing of our visit and was nowhere to be found. My escorts left me to wander around the market set up on the temple terrace. Vendors were stringing marigolds into garlands to be offered in the temple, together with platters of kum-kum and sugar crystals. Behind the temple, Marathi women with huge mango-shaped nose rings of thick gold and orient pearl were selling vegetables with the dew still on them. No women in India are more dazzlingly clean in their saris of printed wash cotton and no skin in India is a lovelier colour. To produce that clear golden burnish little girls are rubbed with a paste of turmeric, mango and mustard oil, but it has more to do with health and hygiene than beauty care. A Marathi woman would no sooner allow her skin to be dimmed with dirt or her hair to stand up in a bush for lack of oil than go out without a flower in her hair. Marathi women, who pull the palu through their legs and wear their saris caught up into breeches, had swept the great stone slabs of the market floor clean of every trampled leaf and cigarette butt before the farmers arrived with their produce in the morning. Having done their day’s work, they set out their wares and sat in the shade, chatting softly and smiling at me. No one pushed or shoved or hawked her wares. How could Reg Greer have hated this place?
My honour guard returned, with the Parsee gentleman, and beckoned me to fall in behind them. Inside the compound they collared a clerical officer, and gave him some garbled account of my quest. Then they pulled me forward and introduced me to him. I began to tell my tale for the tenth time that day. ‘I am looking for someone in authority at the military hospital who can tell me if any records have been kept of Allied personnel quartered in Devlali during the Second World War.’ The man’s eyes swerved in a manner that I have come to associate with ignorance of English. Ignoring my escort, who seemed altogether bewildered by the military environment and the proliferation of stripes, pips and badges, he led me through a curtain into a consulting room, where two very beautiful women were dealing with a rather haggard mother and child. I was in the Devlali cantonment family planning clinic. My four companions came stumbling in the door behind me.
Both women wore forest green safari shirts and saris, with the palu held by their left shoulder tabs. One carried on her tabs the three red pips of a captain, the other the red three-headed lion of a major, of the Indian Army Medical Corps. I was impressed. This time when I told my story two pairs of brilliant dark eyes followed every word.
‘Please write down your father’s name,’ said Captain Mathrani, and pushed her prescription pad across to me.
I wrote, ‘F/O Eric Reginald Greer, seconded to RAF from RAAF, No. 254280.’
‘Put your name also,’ said Major Chibbha.
‘Germaine Greer,’ I wrote. Captain Mathrani picked up the paper.
‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘Oh no!’ She held the paper out to Major Chibbha, who fell to crying ‘Oh no!’ and ‘Oh my God!’ as well. My four male companions rushed the desk, thinking that I had committed some appalling solecism and we were all about to be flung in the stockade.
‘Is it really you?’ said Major Chibbha. ‘This is really wonderful for us.’
‘Very wonderful,’ said Captain Mathrani.
‘Why do they know you?’ asked my escort, mystified, as they handed me into the front seat of the car this time.
‘Women’s business,’ I said indistinctly. I was shaken to think that Captain Mathrani and Major Chibbha should have been so honoured to help me.
It fell to the youngest of the three Mesdames Vaishampayan to drive me back to Devlali next day to meet the commanding officer. Sitting majestically behind a froth of printed silk she gazed genially upon the struggling crowds and assailed them with loud fanfares from the Ambassador’s brand new electronically amplified horn. Like a conquering devi with conches blowing before her she sailed through the wobbling, darting, stumbling, foot, bicycle, tricycle and ox-cart melee and cut her noisy way to Devlali.
Mrs Vaishampayan had evidently been taught never to use first gear, in the interests of fuel economy, I suppose, and never ever to change down once she had achieved top gear. She was completely innocent of the concept of clutch control, which was not surprising in view of the fact that she could barely find the pedal amid the yardage of silk that foamed around her feet in their gilded mules. The only part of the car that she fully understood was the horn. The instruction to be found on the backs of trucks in Maharashtra, ‘Horn please’, was by her followed to the letter. She horned us from our garden suburb into Nasik and horned us out again. Even inside the vehicle the horn was so loud that it juggled my bridgework; what it did to the unfortunate bearers who struggled past with heavy loads on their heads, only to receive a blast clear into the ear-drum from a foot away, Mrs Vaishampayan certainly could not imagine. ‘My husband does not like this horn,’ she said. ‘He says it makes us seem something we are not.’
I supposed it was misleading if people walking in front of the car took it to be a bus because of the extraordinary loudness of its horn. Certainly we had noticed some of them hurling aside their loads and leaping into the ditch.
‘It’s not that,’ answered Mrs Vaishampayan. ‘It makes us seem rich. He doesn’t like to appear rich. He is very complicated, my husband.’ She beamed over her pearl necklace, with a large cabochon ruby at the centre. I said I found his reaction quite straightforward, for I too was not enjoying our masterful progress, which would have shamed the most arrogant a
risto on the eve of the French Revolution.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Vaishampayan. ‘He is very straightforward,’ and her trusting smile assured me that being straightforward is the most complicated thing in the world.
Unwisely, after we had taken several corners and a row of speed bumps in top gear, I ventured to suggest to Mrs Vaishampayan that she might change down from time to time, whereupon she took to doing so at the most unpredictable moments, crashing from top direct to second. The Ambassador being the only car in the world that will travel in top at speeds of less than 5 kph, this advice was quite uncalled for. I had nobody but myself to blame if I shot through the windscreen during any such maneuvre. As she horned deafeningly along, Mrs Vaishampayan kept up a lively conversation, mostly about her installation as President of the Nasik Sita-Jaycees. The ceremony had consisted of an endless series of awards offered by one splendidly silk-clad lady to another, much giving and taking of huge nosegays of flowers and sheaves of long-stemmed roses, and a number of charming and rather adroit speeches in English.
‘I was very appreciated at my installation,’ said Mrs Vaishampayan. ‘Everyone appreciated me. But my husband, he did not appreciate me.’
‘Doesn’t he like you being in the Jaycees?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Vaishampayan proudly. ‘He said to me, “Others appreciate you now. At the end of your term, if you have done well, I will appreciate you then.”’ She smiled as if to say, ‘Men will be men.’ I tried to think of any man of my acquaintance who would say something so challenging to his own interest, and failed.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 11