by Amitav Ghosh
Matthew came on board and escorted them off the ship. They were all to spend the night in Georgetown and he had booked rooms in a hotel. Uma was due to arrive the next day and they were to drive to Morningside together. Matthew had brought two cars and a chauffeur: they were waiting at Butterworth, on the mainland.
The next morning, after breakfast, they walked together to the port, all seven of them. At the pier, they found themselves caught in a noisy throng. A large number of people had already gathered there, most of them Indians. Many were armed with flowers and garlands. At the head of this crowd stood two flamboyant and colourful figures, one a saffron-robed sadhu and the other a Sikh Giani, with a flowing beard and bushy white eyebrows. Neel, burly and assertive beyond his twenty years, pushed his way into the crowd to find out what the fuss was about. He came back looking puzzled.
‘I asked them what they were doing here and they said: we’ve come to greet Uma Dey.’
‘Do you think they mean our own Uma?’ Dolly said incredulously, to Elsa.
‘Yes, of course. There can’t be two Uma Deys on the same ship.’
Then the ship came into view and a cheer erupted from the crowd: ‘Uma Dey zindabad, zindabad—long live, long live, Uma Dey.’ This was followed by other shouts and slogans, all in Hindustani: ‘Inquilab zindabad’ and ‘halla bol, halla bol!’ When the ship docked the crowd’s leaders went swarming up the gangplank, with garlands and marigolds. Then Uma appeared, at the head of the gangplank, and was met by a wild outburst of cheering: ‘Uma Dey zindabad, zindabad!’ For a while there was complete confusion.
Watching from the far end of the pier, Dolly could tell that Uma had been taken by surprise: she was evidently unprepared for the reception that had been accorded her and didn’t quite know how to respond. She was scanning the crowd, as though she were looking for someone in particular. Dolly raised an arm and waved. The gesture caught Uma’s eye and she waved back worriedly, sketching a gesture of helplessness. Dolly made a sign to reassure her—don’t worry, we’ll wait.
Then Uma was ushered down the gangplank and garlanded again. Several people made speeches while everyone stood sweating under the hot sun. Dolly tried hard to concentrate on what was being said, but her eyes kept straying back to her friend. She saw that Uma had grown gaunt and her eyes had retreated into deep hollows, as though in protest against a hectic and uncertain life. But at the same time, there was a new assurance about the way she carried herself. It was clear that she was accustomed to being listened to and when it was her turn to speak, Dolly noticed, with dawning awe, that Uma seemed to know exactly what to say and how to handle the crowd.
Then, abruptly, the speeches were over, and Uma was pushing her way through the crowd. Suddenly, she was standing in front of Dolly, her arms thrown open: such a long time! such a long time! They laughed and hugged and held on to each other while the children looked quizzically on, standing a little apart.
‘How well you look, Elsa! And your daughter—she’s a beauty!’
‘You look well too, Uma.’
Uma laughed. ‘You don’t have to lie to me. I look twice my age . . .’
Dolly broke in, jogging her friend’s arm: ‘Who are these people, Uma? We were so surprised . . .’
‘They belong to a group I’ve been working with,’ Uma said quickly. ‘A group called the Indian Independence League. I hadn’t told them I was coming here, but I suppose the word got out . . .’
‘But what do they want, Uma? Why were they here?’
‘I’ll tell you later.’ Uma took hold of Dolly’s hand and stuck an arm through Elsa’s. ‘There’s so much to talk about and I don’t want to run out of time.’
In the afternoon they took the ferry to Butterworth where Matthew’s cars were waiting at the port, one of them longer than any that Dolly had ever seen, almost the size of a railway carriage. This was a Duesenberg Model J Tourster, Matthew explained. It had a hydraulic braking system and a 6.9 litre, straight-8 engine. It had chain-driven overhead camshafts and could do up to 90 m.p.h. in second gear. In top gear it could cruise at 116.
Matthew was keen to show the Duesenberg off to Neel and Dinu so they rode with him, along with Timmy and Alison. Dolly and Elsa followed more sedately, in the car that Matthew had given Elsa for her fiftieth birthday—a magnificent tan-and-gold Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8A Berlina Transformabile with power-assisted brakes. The coachwork was by Castagna and the upholstery was of Florentine leather.
The Isotta-Fraschini headed north with the sun dipping low over the Andaman Sea and by the time they reached Sungei Pattani, it was almost dark. They began to climb the slopes of Gunung Jerai with the Isotta-Fraschini’s headlights shining into a fog of dust. Passing under the estate’s arched gateway they went speeding up a red, dirt track. Then the car turned a corner, and a mansion appeared ahead, springing dramatically out of the slope, with lamps blazing through its windows and doorways. A rounded turret formed the fulcrum of the house. Built around this were wide, sweeping verandas and a roof that curved gently upwards, in the Chinese style.
‘Morningside House,’ announced Elsa.
Dolly was dazzled. In the inky darkness, it looked as though an unreal brightness were pouring out of the house; that the light was welling up from some interior source of illumination, spilling out of the mountain on which it stood.
‘It’s magnificent, Elsa,’ Uma said. ‘There’s no other word for it. I think it’s possibly the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen . . .’
Inside, the house was aglow with the rich warmth of polished wood. On their way down to dinner, both Dolly and Uma went astray in the long corridors, distracted by the many fine details of the interior: the floor was of intricate parquetry, and the walls were panelled with rich, fine-grained woods. Elsa came up to look for them and found them tapping the banister of the great stairway that wound through the centre of the house.
‘How beautiful this is.’
‘Do you like it?’ Elsa’s face lit up with pleasure. ‘When we were building Morningside, Matthew said one day: Everything I have, I owe to trees of one kind or another—teak, rubber. And I thought to myself, why that’s it: Morningside will be a monument to wood! I made Rajkumar send me the best teak from Burma; I sent people to the Celebes and Sumatra. You’ll notice that each room has wood of a different kind . . .’
Elsa led them downstairs and ushered them into the dining room, which was very large, with a long, polished hardwood table running down the middle. The walls were lined with knitted bamboo and the lights that hung from the ceiling were set inside glowing nests of rattan. As they stepped in, Saya John rose from the table and came up to Dolly and Uma, walking slowly, with the help of a cane: he seemed smaller than before, and more gnome-like as though his body had shrunk in proportion to his head.
‘Welcome, welcome.’
At dinner, Uma and Dolly sat between Matthew and Saya John. The men worked hard at keeping their plates filled with food.
‘That’s gulai tumis, fish cooked with pink ginger buds, bunga kuntan.’
‘And this?’
‘Prawns roasted in pandanus leaves.’
‘Peanut crumpets.’
‘Nine-layered rice cakes.’
‘Chicken with blue flowers—bunga telang.’
‘Pickled fish with turmeric leaves and lime leaves and leaves of purple mint.’
‘A salad of shredded squid and polygonum and duan kado, a creeper that smells like a spice-garden.’
With every morsel their mouths were filled with new tastes, flavours that were as unfamiliar as they were delicious. Uma cried: ‘What is this food called? I thought I’d eaten everything in New York, but I’ve never tasted anything like this.’
Saya John smiled: ‘So you like Nyonya cooking then?’
‘I’ve never eaten anything so wonderful. Where is it from?’
‘From Malacca and Penang,’ Elsa said smiling. ‘One of the world’s last great secrets.’
Replete at last, Uma pushed her
plate away and sat back.
She turned to Dolly who was sitting beside her.
‘So many years.’
‘Twenty-three, almost to the day,’ said Dolly, ‘since I last saw you in Rangoon.’
After dinner Dolly accompanied Uma to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, cross-legged, while Uma combed her hair at the dressing table.
‘Uma,’ Dolly said shyly, ‘you know I’m still wondering . . .’
‘About what?’
‘Your reception at the port today—all those people . . .’
‘Oh, you mean the League?’ Uma put her comb down and smiled at Dolly, in her mirror.
‘Yes. Tell me about it.’
‘It’s such a long story, Dolly. I don’t know where to begin.’
‘Never mind. Just start.’
It went back to New York, Uma said. That was where she had first joined the League, inducted by friends, other Indians living in the city. The Indians there were few in number but closely connected; some had come to seek shelter from the surveillance of the Empire’s intelligence services; others had been drawn there because of the relative affordability of the education. Almost without exception they were passionately political; it was impossible, in that circumstance of exile, to remain aloof. At Columbia there was the brilliant and intense Dadasaheb Ambedkar; there was Taraknath Das, gentle in manner but stubborn in spirit. Midtown, there was the Ramakrishna Mission, housed in a tiny, loft-like apartment and manned by a single, saffron-robed sant and scores of American sympathisers; downtown, in a tenement south of Houston Street, there was an eccentric Raja who believed himself to be India’s Bolivar. It was not that America was hospitable, either to them or their enterprise: it was merely oblivious, uninterested, but indifference too provided shelter of a certain kind.
Soon Uma’s apartment had become one of the nodes in this small but dense net of Indian connections. She and her compatriots were like explorers or castaways; watching, observing, picking apart the details of what they saw around them, trying to derive lessons for themselves and their country. Witnessing the nascency of the new century in America, they were able to watch at first hand the tides and currents of the new epoch. They went to visit mills and factories and the latest mechanised farms. They saw that new patterns of work were being invented, calling for new patterns of movement, new ways of thought. They saw that in the world ahead literacy would be crucial to survival; they saw that education had become a matter of such urgency as to prompt every modern nation to make it compulsory. From those of their peers who had travelled eastwards they learnt that Japan had moved quickly in this direction; in Siam too education had become a dynastic crusade for the royal family.
In India on the other hand, it was the military that devoured the bulk of public monies: although the army was small in number it consumed more than sixty per cent of the Government’s revenues, more even than was the case in countries that were castigated as ‘militaristic’. Lala Har Dayal, one of Uma’s most brilliant contemporaries, never tired of pointing out that India was, in effect, a vast garrison and that it was the impoverished Indian peasant who paid both for the upkeep of the conquering army and for Britain’s eastern campaigns.
What would become of India’s population when the future they had glimpsed in America had become the world’s present condition? They could see that it was not they themselves, nor even their children who would pay the true price of this Empire: that the conditions being created in their homeland were such as to ensure that their descendants would enter the new epoch as cripples, lacking the most fundamental means of survival; that they would truly become in the future what they had never been in the past, a burden upon the world. They could see too that already time was running out, that it would soon become impossible to change the angle of their country’s entry into the future; that a time was at hand, when even the fall of the Empire and the departure of their rulers would make little difference; that their homeland’s trajectory was being set on an unbudgeable path that would thrust it inexorably in the direction of future catastrophe.
What they saw and thought, seared them, burned them: they were all to some degree mutilated by the knowledge of the evil that was their enemy. Some became a little unhinged, some went mad, others simply gave up. Some turned communist, some took to religion, searching the scriptures for imprecations and formulae, to apply on themselves, like balm.
Among Uma’s Indian contemporaries, in New York there were many who took their direction from a newsletter published from the University of California, in Berkeley, by Indian students. This publication was called Ghadar, after the Hindustani word for the uprising of 1857. The people who were involved with the magazine were known as the Ghadar Party. Much of their support came from the Indians who’d settled on the Pacific coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of these immigrants were Sikhs— former soldiers of the British Indian army. The experience of living in America and Canada served to turn many of these former loyalists into revolutionaries. Perceiving a link between their treatment abroad and India’s subject status, they had become dedicated enemies of the Empire they had once served. Some of them concentrated their efforts on trying to convert such of their friends and relatives as were still serving in the British Indian army. Others looked for allies abroad, developing links with the Irish resistance in America.
The Indians were, comparatively, novices in the arts of sedition. It was the Irish who were their mentors and allies, schooling them in their methods of organisation, teaching them the tricks of shopping for arms to send back home; giving them instruction in the techniques of fomenting mutiny among those of their countrymen who served the Empire as soldiers. On St Patrick’s Day in New York a small Indian contingent would sometimes march in the Irish parade, with their own banners, dressed in sherwanis and turbans, dhoties and kurtas, angarkhas and angavastrams.
After the start of the First World War, under pressure from the British intelligence services, the Ghadar Party had gone underground, metamorphosing slowly into a number of different groups. Of these the Indian Independence League was the most important, with thousands of partisans among overseas Indians: it was their offices that Uma had been visiting in eastern Asia.
Here, Dolly, who had been growing increasingly puzzled, broke in. ‘But, Uma,’ she said, ‘if what you’re telling me is true, then why have I never heard of the League? The papers are always full of Mahatma Gandhi, but no one ever speaks of your group.’
‘The reason for that, Dolly,’ said Uma, ‘is that Mr Gandhi heads the loyal opposition. Like many other Indians he’s chosen to deal with the Empire’s velvet glove instead of striking at its iron fist. He cannot see that the Empire will always remain secure while its Indian soldiers remain loyal. The Indian army will always put down opposition wherever it occurs—not just in India, but also in Burma, Malaya, East Africa, no matter where. And of course, the Empire does everything possible to keep these soldiers in hand: only certain castes of men are recruited; they’re completely shut off from politics and the wider society; they’re given land and their children are assured jobs.’
‘What do you hope to do then?’ Dolly asked.
‘To open the soldiers’ eyes. It’s not as difficult as you might think. Many of the League’s leaders are old soldiers. Giani Amreek Singh for instance—do you remember him? He was the distinguished Sikh Giani who came to the pier today, remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell you a story about him. I first met him in California, many years ago. He’s an old military man himself: he’d risen to the rank of a junior NCO in the British Indian army before deserting. The first time I heard him speak, he talked about the necessity of opening the eyes of Indian soldiers. After a while I said to him: “But Gianiji, you served in this army yourself; why did it take you so long to understand that you were being used to conquer others like yourself?”’
‘And what did he say?’ Dolly asked.
‘He said: “Yo
u don’t understand. We never thought that we were being used to conquer people. Not at all: we thought the opposite. We were told that we were freeing those people. That is what they said—that we were going to set those people free from their bad kings or their evil customs or some such thing. We believed it because they believed it too. It took us a long time to understand that in their eyes freedom exists wherever they rule.”’
Dolly acknowledged this with a smile and a nod. ‘But what else, Uma? Did you ever meet anyone? A man? Did you never talk of anything but politics with your revolutionaries?’
Uma gave her a wan smile. ‘I met many men, Dolly. But we were always like brothers and sisters—that’s how we spoke to one another, bhai and bahen. As for me, because they knew that I was a widow, I think the men looked to me to be a kind of ideal woman, a symbol of purity—and to tell you the truth, I didn’t much mind. That’s the thing about politics— once you get involved in it, it pushes everything else out of your life.’
eighteen
Uma woke the next morning to find that breakfast had been served on a veranda that looked down the slope of the mountain, towards the brilliant blue of the Andaman Sea. Neel and Timmy were leaning on the balcony’s rail, talking about cars. Alison and Dinu were listening without joining in. Looking at them, it occurred to Uma that even until the day before, she would not have known them if she’d passed them in the street. Yet now, in their faces, she could see inscribed the history of her friendships and the lives of her friends—the stories and trajectories that had brought Elsa’s life into conjuction with Matthew’s, Dolly’s with Rajkumar’s, Malacca with New York, Burma with India.