Back in my office, a shoal of computer screens fringed with yellow Post-it notes shimmered in the dark like phosphorescent fish. From time to time, shadows of mice scuttled along the skirting boards, dodging traps, in search of biscuit crumbs. The office lights were set to switch off automatically when the sensors detected no movement. Bent over the keyboard, I regularly found myself engulfed in darkness. I kept forgetting to stand up and wave my arms about in order to turn the lights on and make the mice disappear.
No one visibly controlled my broadcasts, although everything I did was logged and recorded. ‘Our victorious army entered the town yesterday,’ said a colleague from the Croatian service, forgetting in his patriotic fervour that he was the voice of the BBC and not of some Zagreb outfit. Some days later, he had to explain himself to someone higher up the food chain. At Bush House we weren’t really supposed to use ‘our’ for anything, British, Serbian, Croatian or anybody else’s.
At the Serbian end of the enterprise I was less likely to make the same mistake. My Croatian colleague was only a few years younger than me, but the small difference in age had meant that he was educated in the dog days of Yugoslav socialism, when no one needed to pretend to worship the old gods of Titoism. Paradoxically, that seemed only to increase his desire to do obeisance to the new idols of nationalism. When we were growing up, my school friends and I had to write poems and essays about ‘our army’ – the one my father worked for – at what were practically monthly intervals: 20 October, Belgrade Liberation Day; 29 November, Republic Day; 22 December, Army Day. Our calendars were forever stuck in the early forties. We were never allowed to forget who – supposedly – liberated us from the occupying enemy and then held our Russian, American and British allies at bay. If the long years of commissioned rhymes achieved anything, they ensured that I never called any army mine in a hurry.
My news bulletins at the BBC were exemplary. Outwardly, I kept my distance and knew how to be even-handed. In my feelings about the war, however, I tended to overcompensate both in my distress that Serb suffering did not seem to register anywhere and in my shame that the Serbs could cause so much pain to others. Both suggested that my relationship with my own Serbianness was perhaps more raw than I admitted even to myself. It was part of a knotted circle of love and guilt which I preferred not to pick at very much. If I could have closed my eyes and kept Serbia beautiful, I would have done that, but before I knew it it was far too late.
In an echo of the world of Balkan politics, the BBC had given the Serbs and the Croats adjoining rooms, with no connecting doors but with a large window in the dividing wall, so that we could always see what the others were up to, although both sides feigned lack of interest as they went about their daily work. The Croatian section overlooked the street; the Serbian faced a large pillar through pigeon mesh. The Serbs therefore needed more light, which they could only get if they had a window in the Croatian wall. Was the management trying to send some kind of message?
One night in early August 1995, one of my colleagues from the Croatian service, who bore a very grand Montenegrin name, came into the Serbian office to tell me to hold the top news story for the morning bulletin. His sources reported that something big was about to happen in the Serb-held enclave of Knin. By five a.m., that ‘something’ became operation ‘Storm’; columns of the Croatian army advanced towards Knin, while inside it thousands of Serbs prepared to flee. After I read the news, I locked myself in a cubicle in the women’s lavatory. Tears ran down my face, leaving big wet blotches on my white shirt. I cried for the bewildered refugees in their endless columns moving east, and then I cried that I didn’t cry in the same way when others suffered. I realized that I could still tell ‘my side’ simply by how much it hurt.
I had the answer to Kosta’s question. I had become English in every possible way, but the fault lines along which the pain reached me were still Serbian, whatever that may imply. This is not to say that I forgave my fellow Serbs for any of the awful things they had done in the Balkan wars, or that I forgave myself for anything I could have done to help but didn’t, simply that the me I had created, that fashionable, travelling, global, postmodern subject of my own little life story, had a chink in her armour after all. The truth, the real story, and all the other journalistic fictions and pretensions seemed irrelevant by comparison.
I joined the BBC in order to keep my mother tongue alive, and I now knew more words for dying than the Inuit know for snow. I had to admit, although that wasn’t news, that I wasn’t really made to be a news hound. I took things to heart. I kept looking at them from both sides, until nothing seemed clear any more. By owning up to my own weakness, I conceded the feeling of moral superiority to anyone who felt able to throw any certainty at me. I had none, except perhaps for the knowledge that, if an army was created, it would go to war sooner or later. I was about to disappoint my mother again. I kept escaping to the British Library to work on a book about the Balkan past with much more enthusiasm than I ever had for the Balkan present. Whatever I now needed to learn must certainly be there.
Some months before my nineteenth birthday, I was invited to read a poem on Studio B, then Belgrade’s most fashionable radio station. I was no stranger to poetry readings but I was not prepared for the magic of radio. When she heard the music fade under her voice, the shy exhibitionist in me – a creature of contradictions – knew she had found a home, a place to be invisible and show off at the same time. I stayed on to present a programme aimed at secondary school students, called An Extra Hour, through my last school year and the summer before going to university. Studio B could barely be heard beyond the boundary marked by the orbital road around Belgrade, but this was still my entire world anyway.
My fellow presenter, a nursing student called Ljuba, was a tall, lanky youth whose voice was as clear as crystal. He and I read the news from Belgrade schools, interviewed young athletes and maths champions, and, in between, played modish tunes. I was part of the most stylish crowd in the world, I was regularly being asked out by some of the most fantastic-looking young men around, and I was just eighteen. Even my parents extended the curfew from eleven to eleven thirty when I argued that I needed the extra half-hour in order to review the latest theatrical openings and still get home by public transport: what more could a girl ask for? I didn’t know where the top of the world was, but it couldn’t have been far away.
For our editor, once a star radio presenter, this might have been a career cul-de-sac. For Ljuba and me, it was heaven on earth, a world straight out of the communist Utopia, in which you worked purely because you loved work – ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’ – except that we were not paid a penny. The Extra Hour was in many ways a typical creation of the socialist media. Its main purpose was to train new generations of radio presenters. I never knew whether I had an audience of two or two million: there was no pressure of that kind. The programme existed simply because someone once thought it was a good idea. I was truly a spoilt child of communism in so far as I was brought up never to worry about where the money was coming from. It was simply there when you needed it. Then it ran out.
My mother and father hoped that my career on Studio B might lead to all sorts of things, although finally it led to nothing very much, other than a brief moment of radio fame inside the Belgrade orbital. In fact, my parents have always had an overriding concern with exactly where things might lead. Their very different family backgrounds were similar in their poverty, and in the restrictions socialism placed on their early freedom of choice. In their view, any action I took was inseparable from its potential, distant consequences. Any boy with whom I went out to dance was analysed as a prospective husband, any two-day job as a career for life. My momentary whims and my thirst for new experiences – the way I abandoned men and places and projects, expecting that the next one would be waiting for me just around the corner; the way I said I needed to ‘try everything’; even the way I spoke my mind – were alien to their i
nstinct to hold on to what you already had. ‘Don’t run from the first one,’ my mother kept saying, and yet I always did, particularly when there was no good reason for it.
While youthful experiences of hunger and dispossession made my parents long for stability and permanence, the days of my own early life clicked and clacked into each other steadily and predictably, like rows of worry beads. You could always see the next bead on the string, bright and shiny and almost identical to the one you’d just held with your fingertips. Once I tasted war, illness and unhappiness, I too changed my prayers from give to please don’t take away. There were things, all too many things, I found out, which I wouldn’t really want to try, not even once.
‘Now that my daughter-in-law is a journalist,’ my father-in-law says, ‘Would she mind taking a look at my Piffer column?’ We are talking colleague-to-colleague here – the producer of the BBC Serbian Service to a correspondent of The Piffer, the newsletter of the Punjab Frontier Force, to which my father-in-law contributed a regular diary piece. It is more than half a century since he left India as part of the withdrawal of the British legions. He was still in his early twenties. After partition, in which his corner of India became Pakistan, there were years at Cambridge, years of active service in Malaya and Singapore, years of running a farm in Surrey and years of retirement in an ancient house in Sussex, surrounded by apple orchards, but those years somehow counted for less. The British may have left the Asian subcontinent, but my father-in-law’s heart and mind were still in the rocky borderlands with Afghanistan where he served amid the ebb tide of the Raj.
As a foreigner from a poor country which was itself a kind of colony throughout most of its history, I cannot grasp the attraction of, and even less the homesickness for, India of the kind which I first encountered when I met my father-in-law. Several generations of men in my husband’s family abandoned beautiful houses amid the southern English hills, which roll towards the coast like opalescent waves, for life in khaki tents on sun-blasted plateaux in Asia and Africa. Granted, there were grand army titles, and governorships of strange places, and lots and lots of medals, or in a word – one of my father-in-law’s favourite Urdu words – izzat (honour), but that life seems to have brought them little money and less love, and these were the only reasons, as far as I was concerned, why anyone would desire to live abroad.
Simon’s great-grandfather
I had been a communist and a Tory and ended up as a typecast university lecturer: mistrustful of political parties and a leftist liberal. I vote Green to put pressure on whoever is in government, but if the Greens ever came anywhere near real power I would probably want to vote for someone else. Regardless of changes in perspective, my father-in-law’s India story has never entirely made sense to me. This is perhaps because I have, in some way which is still beyond my grasp, remained an alien, even if I now understand how a love of England, her milky greenness fed by months of melancholy rain, can thrive at a distance of several thousand miles.
I scan the vast library behind my father-in-law’s desk: copies of New Calcutta directories, of army lists and of what seems like just about every book on India ever published. The walls are adorned with prints of expeditions to places I didn’t know existed and of wars of which I’ve never even heard – the battle of Goojerat, the storming of Mooltan, the battle of Sobraon. The room is a link to an earlier Britain whose pulse barely beats; but the country of which I am now part still loves its soldiers and parades, its shiny buttons and its metal toys, more than any other place in Europe, except perhaps for Serbia and Russia.
I edit his article, a list of updates from old India hands and officers’ widows: illnesses, moves to old people’s homes in places like Cheltenham and Chichester, and deaths, several deaths in every column. Amid all this I realize that my husband’s father is now, in many ways, as much an exile in Britain as I am. We understand each other so well not because I am a journalist and journalists adore soldiers, and not because we are bound by the same name and the love of his son, but because we both belong here and somewhere else, to places and times and countries which no longer exist. We are linked by a homesickness which doesn’t make sense.
To break a long sequence of night bulletins and Balkan battles, I decide to visit the North-West Frontier Province with my husband and his father. We stay with my father-in-law’s friends, retired officers of the Pakistani Army, in an Islamic version of the world of Tolstoy’s novels. Martial, equestrian, latifundia-owning Pathans, they speak English and travel the world. The gulf between them and their villagers is just as great as between Bezukhov and his serfs. Among orange and mango orchards on distant country estates, I discover houses with libraries which echo my father-in-law’s collection. They provide lavish shelters from the bleak villages and herds of emaciated cattle, so far removed from the dusty roads on which boys in rags play cricket after a long day’s work that they might as well be in Dorset.
My father-in-law is happy, as happy as I’ve ever seen him be. His Urdu is rusty, his Pushto is a joke, but he is at home. In England, he often descends into long silences, but in the large households of Peshawar, Islamabad and Rawalpindi he seems never to run out of conversation. He wants to know all about government manoeuvrings, internecine Islamic clashes, reforms and road building plans, and hundreds of other details. Britain simply does not interest him any longer in this way.
He takes me to visit a hospital, a cotton factory and even a gun workshop in Tribal Territory, where the government’s writ does not run and a faithful replica of any weapon you bring can be made overnight for a few rupees. My head is covered but my mouth is not: he smiles proudly when I boast of my own prowess as a markswoman, even though I am not sure quite what I’m trying to prove.
I often have to watch him and my husband from an unaccustomed distance, seated among women in ornate shalwar kamiz and expensive gold jewellery. One of them quizzes me, amiably but relentlessly, about the reasons why I don’t have children. She shakes her head when I say I don’t know. When we bid our farewells, she whispers, ‘May God give you a son next year,’ into my ear.
I marvel at the beautiful century which could bring a Serbian girl, a former commie, to the verandas lining the northern edges of the Asian subcontinent in the company of an old Englishman who fought communists in the jungles of Malaya. In the long evenings, over dried mulberries and cups of sweet tea, I start to show him books I brought with me on the journey, writings by Sara Suleri, Pankaj Mishra, Anita Desai – the sort of India I know about – but he is tired after a day’s walking and dozes off in the middle of my story. My husband chuckles quietly in the corner, his face hidden behind a thick history book.
I ask the servant to prepare my bed, then walk over to the room to give a helping hand. I succeed only in embarrassing the poor man. It’s too late to learn how to be gracefully feudal. When I return outside, the sky is lit with hundreds of stars and for a moment the last call to prayer overpowers the crackling chimes of Big Ben on the BBC World Service, to which my father-in-law, awake again, listens in semi-darkness on my husband’s small transistor radio. The news bulletin is presented by someone I know well. On the other side of the world, where the day is still unspent, I see the basement studio of Bush House, and a freckled, serious face behind the microphone. From this distance, I feel that I too am listening to the voice of home. ‘I’ll forgive you your wars, if you forgive mine’ is something I don’t say to my father-in-law. There is no need.
My father-in-law (tallest, as ever) with two of his brothers at Eton
8. Fathers and Sons
THE DAY OF MY father-in-law’s funeral was one of those sunny, translucent English summer days when everything stands still for a moment. The air was full of pollen, petals and fragrance, as though someone had turned the earth – with London on it – upside down and back again, like a snowstorm in a paperweight. Even the slopes of Kensal Green cemetery, in an otherwise bleak corner of north-west London, looked so fecund and lush that it seemed as if the Victo
rian stone angels had gathered for a picnic on broken gravestones scattered like sugar cubes among wild flowers and tall grasses.
I watch the small groups of white-haired men and women gather around my husband and his brother in front of the cemetery chapel. The mourners are so unmistakably English that they might have been painted by Gainsborough two centuries earlier. Fresh from their trains at Victoria and Charing Cross, they look alien and out of place, as though London is a foreign town, to be negotiated with care. Many of the men wear silk neckties with colourful regimental stripes and highly polished, thick-soled shoes which fall on the ground with a heavy parade sound. Even in retirement, they look as though they are in uniform. ‘Indian Army,’ whispers one experienced chapel attendant to another.
My father-in-law’s long, long coffin is carried into the chapel. No one displays visible signs of grief, although it is somehow clear that the occasion is a mournful one. At a Belgrade family funeral, someone would have been wailing at this point. Other mourners would have audibly stifled their sobs in the pauses between orations, or sighed heavily against the low monotone of the Orthodox chant. Here, we open our hymn books and sing at the prompt given by the organist.
I am not familiar with the tunes and pay too much attention to the Victorian verse, which is at the same time touchingly beautiful and too upbeat about death for my taste. The celebration of departure, the refusal to accept separation as anything but a brief interlude, makes it sound as though my father-in-law is off to plant a Union flag in the sands of some paradise island. I stumble over the lines, catching up and losing the melody. I can’t get myself to sing at an Anglican funeral, just as I couldn’t – were it an Orthodox one – wail as my female ancestors were expected to. In Serbia old women were sometimes even paid to mourn. They walked behind the coffin in the funeral procession and celebrated the dead in wailing laments delivered in rhythmic, haunting pentameters. I am stuck somewhere between the singing and the wailing, speechless.
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