‘My husband is very severe,’ she went on, ‘If I apply lipstick he says, “I shan’t kiss you today.” He says I am beautiful without.’ This was obviously true. Mrs Vaishampayan glowed with satisfaction.
‘Does he tell you you are beautiful only to stop you wearing make-up?’ I asked.
‘He says, “I married you because I found you beautiful. I don’t have to tell you every day.”’
In fact Kunda met her husband when they were both students at college. There being no obstacle of caste or community, they asked their parents if they could marry, and permission was given even though their elder brothers and sisters were not yet married. The result was that Mrs Vaishampayan the younger was treated more like a western wife, while her sister-in-law had experienced the traditional Indian love story. As a shy and nervous bride, Alka had been courted after marriage; never a day passed without her husband giving proof of his love and admiration.
As steering interfered with horning, Mrs Vaishampayan tended to keep it to a minimum, especially as she was fond of mysterious hand signals, one of which clearly invited those behind her to overtake as she turned right. Her fellow motorists understood her a good deal better than I did and we arrived in Devlali in no worse shape than when we set out, except that we had acquired some minute attendants, called chiltas. At first I thought that I had worms and they were merely spots dancing before my eyes, but then I caught sight of spots dancing round Mrs Vaishampayan’s eyes and realised that they were actually tiny flies trying to snack off our eyeballs.
At Devlali we were told to go in search of Lieutenant Colonel Sardana at the Art’y Association Museum. Mrs Vaishampayan set off down the metalled road past libraries, gardens, messes, clubs, all in apple-pie order, past the army farm acquired from Major Wellman, down Haig Row, and all over the place, for we were soon quite lost. Everywhere immaculately uniformed Sikhs gave us new directions and snapped a salute as we jerked and freewheeled away. At one point Mrs Vaishampayan backed the Ambassador into a ditch and within seconds a tribe of giants with navy turbans and black beards had lifted us bodily back on to the road.
‘Oh,’ cried Mrs Vaishampayan, returning their salute by flapping her hand out of the window, ‘don’t the sadarjis realise how much we love them? Why do they want this Khalistan thing?’
Lieutenant Colonel Sardana warmed to the task of describing Devlali in wartime. He divided it into South Devlali, where the Americans were, the centre which is now North Devlali and etcetera and so. ‘Sometimes there was as many as 50,000 men billeted at Devlali, and things got rather difficult.’ The present commandant’s house was the surgical ward of the old hospital and the present hospital was the old officers’ mess. Most of the buildings have been as he put it ‘swept away’, but four of the hospital barracks remain. There is also a Tower of Silence for the Parsees at Devlali, and a cemetery of Turkish prisoners who died during the Great War, which the Turkish government still pays to maintain.
‘There has been a TV show in England about Devlali,’ said Lieutenant Colonel Sardana. ‘This has shown Devlali in wartime, tents and everything, but I am unable to see it. Also there are maps and plans of Devlali from the British time, and we have not seen those either.’ I promised to send copies of anything I could find and went my way. If Reg Greer had had medical treatment in Devlali, it would have been recorded in his file. Actually he did what everyone else did in Devlali, he sat around and waited. There was no brain-washing; there was just bad food, poor sanitation, and unending tedium.
If Mr Vaishampayan was surprised by my declared intention of paying my respects before I left Nasik to the mother goddess at Sabtashrungi, he was too courteous to say so. As one of the trustees of the shrine he was keen to see it become better known as a place of pilgrimage. He lent us his car and driver for the trip and sent a message ahead that the infidel was to be allowed to visit the inner shrine as his guest. I wore a long kameez and loose salwar, in case the goddess should be offended at the sight of my legs, and a broad dopatta to cover my head; Alka was wonderful in apple-green silk. Kunda brought fresh flowers to scent the car, including zafar that smells sweeter as it fades.
The driver drove up the steep zig-zag road through the seven peaks in all the wrong gears. Where great black boulders had crashed down from the heights they had simply been painted white so that we could more easily avoid them. At intervals we passed rocks bedizened with vermilion paste, which marked where the pedestrian route crossed the road. There the foot-slogging faithful stopped to rest, to drink water from a holy spring, and to pray.
At the foot of the great stone staircase that leads up to where the goddess looks out towards the cave where Markundeya Rishi lived that he might gaze every day on her majesty, we slipped off our sandals and, barefoot, began our ascent. Each of us was burdened with a massive garland, embroidered blouse pieces, rice, kum-kum and agarbati. The five hundred steps were so steep that we sometimes staggered, and had to pause and pant, looking about us at the eagles that tumbled into the air from their nests on the ledges above the shrine, wheeling over and over in their spiral mating flight. Halfway up we passed Ganesh, the gatekeeper of the gods, and rang his bell to warn the goddess of our approach. We avoided treading on his tortoise carved in the middle of the path.
The temple was tiny, no more than a closet hewn in the rock. Inside it the stone idol wheeled her eighteen arms, rocking on vast feet, gazing at nothing with perpetually astonished eyes. One huge hand cupped her ear the better to hear the song of praise that Markundeya Rishi sang to her from the opposite hill every morning of his life. A blouse piece of woven gold thread was fastened across her breasts; on her head a three-coloured bindi showed the Indian swastika, sign of power through wisdom, in the middle and on her huge feet lay scarlet kum-kum an inch thick. She was barbaric, gross, garish; she was wonderful. The priests of her sanctuary were slick with coconut oil, casual in their manner, conspicuously well fed, as usual. Reg Greer would have found their naked torsos and grey hanging nipples extremely distasteful. They were not exactly delighted to find that they had to allow me to touch the idol. I drew my veil over my head and waited.
A sweet-faced boy took the puja offerings. Reverently he received the padi that the old lady ahead of me poured from her unknotted shawl, carefully he hung up our garlands and the roses from Mrs Vaishampayan’s garden. Then he opened the gate of the Holy of Holies and I passed inside. I knelt and laid my head on Durgadevi’s great hard foot.
The purohit watched me impassively. Sweat dripped down my back under my kameez. The boy anointed me with kum-kum, so copiously that it dripped down my nose; I must have looked as if I had been hit on the head with a hatchet. He gave me prasad, a paper of kum-kum, and a coconut, and tied a scarlet and gold thread about my wrist.
Alka had been fasting all day; after her bath she had stayed in the puja room, singing her prayers in her low sweet voice, and keeping time by clapping. Now she moved out of the sanctuary and sat in the lotus position in front of the shrine and began singing and clapping again. Our driver sat listening, clapping in double time. As Alka prayed, absorbed, a monkey with a newborn clinging about her neck stole the temple kum-kum out of her basket and bit into the paper. Before she threw it down, the fine scarlet powder had painted a broad smear across her face. A goat walked down the perpendicular rock face and through the sanctuary to nose at the coconut shells. Our fellow pilgrims were breaking their coconuts on a spike set in the ground and handing around the sweet coconut meat. They were mostly poor people, thin and harassed, limping old ladies, and a pair of newly-weds. The bride stood proudly by her husband, for her presence was essential for the proper performance of puja, with the tinsel-laden palu of her red sari drawn over her head.
Why did I go to Sabtashrungi? I went to draw strength, to turn my face away from the dark past. By performing this puja, spending money, veiling myself, abasing myself before a painted rock, herself only an image of the mountain itself and the power that pushed its volcanic core up through the p
lain, I was doing penance for defying the laws of life. Durga is time, the now, the immediate. By digging my father out of his grave I was flouting her. She is the lady of destruction, the queen of cannot be. As I laid my head upon her stone wedge of a foot like an anvil, I accepted my destiny, the dharma of a woman with neither father, husband nor son. With Durga’s help I could pass among the rakshasas of my father’s night unscathed.
‘Why do you go so far into it?’ asked Alka. ‘Why do you want to know so much about your father? He borned you, that is the great thing.’
‘Bored me rather,’ I thought but did not say. I had tried to convey to Alka and Kunda just how little I knew of my father, but it was beyond their imagination. They simply thought that they had understood my English wrong if I said that I did not know my grandparents or even the names of my uncle and aunt. They did not believe me if I said that I had little idea what my father really thought about anything, except India, which I knew he hated. Hated in a silly, racist, stereotyped way, not as Indians themselves hate it when they yearn for the bliss of non-being, an end to the endless anguish of rebirth. I was beginning to realise that Reg Greer did not really experience India. Most of the things he claimed to hate so much were things he had heard of and never seen. The shite-hawks, the Towers of Silence, the sacred cows, the fakirs, the burning ghats, he had never seen any of them.
Essex, March 1987
I thought the road led to a splendid city,
Noble and bright.
Love did I love, nor feared the touch of pity:
I walked in light.
‘I shall be there,’ Hope whispered, ‘ere the night.’
Others I see arriving, enter gladly.
But in my face
The gates are shut. I may not enter. Sadly
I run my race
I know not whither. Night draws on apace.
MARY COLERIDGE, ‘DELUSION’
In my March notebook I wrote: ‘Another blue day. It is not hard to believe that yellow feathers will pop out of the seamy bark of the acacia on such a duck-egg-blue day. The winter-flowering irises are wearing crowns of melting snow and the witch-hazel is carrying dangles of white and silver on its tassels of gold; only the hellebores seem to be enjoying themselves. I have hardly slept at all, through the silent snowy night; my little red cat stopped snoring and watched through the night with me.’
When I began to write this book, I knew that my only hope of finishing it was to try to keep one of my feet firmly in the now, which is now of course the then. When I realise that, I feel a slight panic, as I used to when we discussed that old Philosophy I conundrum, can one step in the same river twice? The answer, if I remember rightly, is no. That is the sort of thing you can remember rightly, the only sort of thing you can remember rightly, like the date of the battle of Naseby and the name of Leonardo’s birthplace, or how to prove that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. This is the lure that draws so many of us into the academy, the prospect of escape from the myriad dancing shadows of our real lives into the linear simplicity and elegance of eternal truth.
When an academic turns her face from the solidity of her text, black characters on a lit page, to look at the man sitting next to her in the dark, his face perpetually turned away, she is asking for trouble in mind. It is not wise to insist on an answer to the unutterable question, ‘Did you love me?’ The inevitable, eternal, unanswerable woman’s question, with its flotilla of implied questions, ‘Did you respect me? Why did you never ask my opinion? Why did you never spend time with me? Why did you never confide in me?’
It is to avoid such questions that men give us presents on the days set down, and buy overpriced trash at the airport on their way home, scent and sexy nighties. Not, mind you, that I remember much in the way of gifts from my father. He used to bring me the foreign-language selections published by the Readers’ Digest, Das Beste, Selection and Selezione which one of his colleagues probably gave him for me. He brought home all the special book offers made by the Herald and Weekly Times newspapers as well, but they were English and anyone in the house could read them. The Collected Plays of Bernard Shaw I remember, and the speeches of Sir Keith Murdoch. They jostled in the tiny bird’s-eye maple bookshelf with Negley Farson, The Way of a Transgressor, and Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin and The Countess of Rudolstadt in translation, with A Tale of Two Cities, and O’Flaherty’s Famine, the dictionary and the encyclopaedia both covered in fake morocco leather, and an old Shakespeare with steel engravings and Alan Moorehead’s The End in Africa. I have no book he gave me, not a single thing that was his, except his face and half of my genes.
Up on the white hill the hares are capering in the snow. The greenfinches are fat and greasy from eating my peanuts. I own a stake in this beauty, a wedge of second-rate land, all chalk and masonry rubble, dotted with gnarled gobs of flint shaped like spat-out chewing gum. By that land alone those who come after would know me, even without the millions of words generated by my own literary activity. Land, any lump of it, confers immortality. It gets you into the gazetteer, into rates and rent records, onto lists of householders, whether you’ve got an unlisted telephone or not. People who can’t find me anywhere else can find me at Mill Farm. If I had descendants they would be suffocated with information and disinformation. They would have to practise incuriosity in order to survive. Perhaps it is better that I have none to be so troubled by the ersatz phenomenon of Germaine Greer, celebrity. Anything I have forgotten someone else will remember for me; much of what they remember never happened. Anyone who feels a passing tickle of interest can find me in any of dozens of biographical directories, while I cannot place my father, my father(!) in his background, amongst his own kin, his schoolfellows, the friends of his youth. Eric Reginald Greer, where did you come from? How did you get here? What did you bring with you?
On this blue day a letter finally arrived from the Departement van Binnelandse Sake in Pretoria in answer to my request for a copy of my father’s birth certificate. I had had one before: a form letter in Afrikaans and then in English setting out the regulations governing the issue of copies of the records, most of which had two lines drawn criss-cross over them and the words ‘gekanselleer/cancelled’ written over them, and the form I was supposed to fill in. The form demanded his Identiteitsnommer, which did not, I thought, apply to persons born in 1904, and his Bevolkingsgroep. I considered putting Caucasian/Aryan/Ulster Scots/Jewish/British/don’t know, and then put down White. I learn now that South Africans prefer the locution ‘European’ whether true or false.
I tore open the letter. It contained the form I had filled out, and another form letter, Afrikaans on one side, English on the other. ‘With reference to your application, I have to inform you that with the particulars furnished by you the registration of the birth of Eric Reginald cannot be traced in the Department’s Records.’
What did it mean? Did it mean that they had looked up the wrong name? Did it mean that birth registration was not compulsory in Natal in 1904? Did it mean that yes, my father was born in Natal in 1904 but no, his name was not Eric Reginald Greer? It meant the primal elder’s curse.
I had not meant to place great store by the birth certificate in the first place, thinking that my father and his family would surface through school and employment and voting records in Tasmania, but although Tasmania is a tiny place, no Greers were findable in it. No Greer was listed as a householder between 1910 and 1920 in any directory. No Greer passed any public examination in that time.
We had always believed that when my father was born the family was passing through Natal en route to somewhere else; from England to Australia, maybe. The port of Launceston had lost its records in a flood. None of the lists of passengers arriving at Fremantle, Port Adelaide, Melbourne or Sydney between 1904 and 1920 shows a Greer family travelling into Australia out of Durban with two children, or for that matter any Greer family, but steerage passengers are not usually listed. I worke
d my way backwards through the passenger lists just for interest and on the SS Agenoria in 1849 found a William Greer aged twenty-seven. On the SS Augustine in 1841 I found James Greer, eighteen years old, of Balty Bay, Monaghan, a Presbyterian who could read and write. The next year Jane, twenty-one, Thomas, twenty, and Hannah and James, both nineteen, Protestant farm workers from Antrim, arrived on the SS Elizabeth; they could all read but only Jane could write. A Greer was named in the Morning Herald as the builder of the Mariners’ Church at Soldiers’ Point in Sydney in 1844. At first I had no reason to do more than note these names in passing but, as lead after lead petered out, I researched every one of these Greers backwards and forwards, and no Eric Reginald born in 1904 could I find.
If we are descended from Old Australian Greers then Daddy did rather a good job in misleading us, for he knew we believed that he was born of ‘English’ parents passing through Durban on their way to a temporary sojourn in Australia. Certainly my mother thought that and continues to think it. This is only one of the many things we might have had all wrong. On the other hand, our vague notions may all be correct as far as they go, and only the name is wrong. My father seems to have lived his whole life without a birth certificate or a passport; this in itself is something of an achievement, but why should he have done it?
No one had ever mentioned Ireland in connection with my father, but while Greer is a name relatively rare in England it is common in Northern Ireland. No Ulster-Scot living in Australia would call himself Irish because the vast majority of settlers from Ireland were Catholics from the south. The middle-class adventurers who came to Australia from Northern Ireland were quite likely to call themselves ‘British’. The records for all of Ireland before 1912 were held in Dublin where they were destroyed in a fire caused by an IRA bomb in 1922. The possibility still exists that Robert Greer met and married Emma Rachel Wise in Ireland sometime around 1900 but, unless I have some idea of the parish where the marriage took place, I cannot find any record.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 12