by Kalyan Ray
The next morning Mr. Braithwaite came in his carriage with all the necessary papers. We got on. The pig, hoisted in an enormous crate, followed in a cart. We rode to Quebec, took the ferry to the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, and continued south, towards Lake Champlain.
As we drove away from the river and I glanced back to look out of the window, I could see another bedraggled ship entering the final stretch to Grosse Isle, bearing its dying, the desperate, and the ill, perhaps from County Sligo itself.
IV
and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
Robert
Calcutta, India
1911
“What do you do all day, Son?”
The day after my sixth birthday, I had wandered into his room. I did not know what my father meant. He often looked surprised to find me around, as if he had been jostled awake from whatever he had been reading. But he never forgot my birthday. That year I got a set of storybooks with pictures, for I already loved to read, and a Hornby train set with its tracks, bogeys, and caboose, and a small station with signals, red and green. Baba and I shared my birthday cake.
Even after all these decades, I remember its taste—chocolate with flecks of toffee—my favourite. I have time now for memories, an old man alone in an old house.
I had grown up under the silence of large portraits which hung over me, looking down from the high walls. Most of the windows were kept shuttered, for the sun was often fierce. I would walk and play by myself under the eyes of my dead ancestors.
My grandfather Padraig Aherne’s hair was thick and coppery. He had a dark moustache, and his jaw looked like it was made of stone. His bright blue eyes under thick eyebrows seemed to follow me as I moved about the room. I used to think he missed not being able to stride about. I was certain that his laughter emerged like a boom. His long hair was tied with a black ribbon. His hand on the back of a carved chair looked powerful, while the other rested gently on my grandmother’s shoulder. I wished he could place it on mine.
Once I got up on a chair to look closer, peeping into my grandmother’s face. She had a hovering smile which made me certain that she would have loved me. Whenever I entered this room, I felt she had just finished speaking to me, and in a moment might say something again. I stood at the edge of that silence, under my grandfather’s blue gaze.
“What do you do all day?” asked my father again.
“I don’t know,” I said. I had grown used to playing by myself in our backyard garden, climbing trees to scare the squirrels, or throwing the ball against the walls.
“You’re six,” he had said, looking thoughtfully at me, very like our tailor, Suleiman, who had come to our house two weeks ago to measure me for my suit, a birthday present from my father. “Joe Belletty’s boy also turned six, he told me the other day,” he said to himself. “Anthony.” He put his hand on my shoulder and added, “Would you like to go and play with him?” Yes, I nodded.
• • •
I HAVE OFTEN thought of that morning more than seven decades ago, the first time I went out to meet the world.
Sonu-amma, our maid, escorted me across Elliot Road to a small flat on the third floor of a building, noisy as the street. It had only two rooms, both crowded with furniture and people, but no books.
Anthony had a baby brother who sat propped on a chair, banging his spoon on the spattered dining table, while his dad sat beside him next to an open window, scratching his chin and reading the sports page of the newspaper. Mr. Belletty looked far younger than my father. “Hello, Robert,” he greeted me. Anthony’s mother stood at the stove, frying eggs that smelt wonderful. She had not combed her hair yet. “Tony, look, your friend is here,” she called out to him.
Tony was on the floor, playing with a train that was not shiny like mine, but I felt lucky to be here. “Hello, Robert,” he said, as if a new boy to play with was no surprise for him. He tossed me a wooden block, and I caught it easily.
“Hello, Anthony,” I said.
“I’m Tony,” he said emphatically. “My mom calls me Anthony when she’s mad.”
His mother laughed and said, “Here are your eggs, Robbie and Tony—go sit down there beside Ned, you two.” She pointed at the chairs across from Mr. Belletty. I was dazzled. This is what it must mean to have a mother who is alive. I wondered if my mother had combed her hair right away when she got up in the morning. I hoped not. And nobody had ever called me Robbie before, but that is what she did ever after.
After eggs and fried bread, while we played on the floor, Tony told me that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up. I immediately told him that so did I. By the time I left, we had decided to play together everyday until we could join the same regiment.
• • •
TWO WEEKS LATER my father told me that I was to go to St. Xavier’s School on Park Street. But Tony’s father had attended La Martiniere for Boys, farther from home, and that is where Tony would go. I set my will against my father’s and discovered it not very difficult to get my way.
In the classroom, Mr. Pantaky seated us in alphabetical order, and thus we—Aherne and Belletty—found ourselves next to each other. And outside the classroom, Tony and I explored our neighbourhood and discovered a world of children who lived across the street and in the lanes surrounding us. One of them was plump Krikor Aratoon, whose father was the largest man I ever saw, with ears like pieces of pink sponge. They had tons of relatives and went to their own Armenian church and celebrated Christmas in January.
We played cops and robbers, and wrestled with the Zachariah boys, Ben, Solly, and Mordy, who used to walk to their synagogue wearing little caps on their heads, like tea saucers, on Saturdays, and they were not allowed to come out to play. Their synagogue on Pollock Street had vivid yellow and green tiles from Spain, and pillars that looked like shepherd’s hooks. I went once to look around. All the adults there had beards, including one old lady.
Some days Tony and I played golli-danda and marbles with the twins Majid and Wajid Baghdadi, whose father, Muhammad, owned a cut-piece fabric store in Hogg Market—and who had to fast like good Muslims with the rest of their family during the summer month of Ramadan. Their great-grandfather had come from Syria. Rukhsana, their sister, had the best aim among us at marbles. But she had to sneak away to play with us, because their burka-clad mother said that she was almost a woman; Rukhsana was eight.
No one could beat the Tsang brothers, Ki Tieh and Liang, with the slingshot. Their father, who had a wispy goatee and sported a long pigtail, had come from Sichuan in China and ran a shoestore on Bentinck Street. The brothers, especially Ki Tieh, had unbelievable aim and shot down flying pigeons at will, which they took home to be cooked. But they never used their slings when Violet Stoneham was around, for it made her cry. We all liked Violet.
The Parsee brothers, Bahram, Feroze, and Jamshed, taught me chess and checkers. Their Aunt Perizaad was born blind, but noticed everything, cooked for them, and beat everybody at chess! They went to their Zoroastrian temple and worshipped fire. Their ancestors had come from Persia centuries ago. Tony told me that when Parsees died they were not cremated or buried, but left on a tower to be picked clean by vultures. I did not believe him and asked my father, who said that Tony Belletty was right, for once.
I asked Tony, “So what happens to their bones?”
“I expect they boil them to make glue for postage stamps,” he said. I have never licked a stamp since then. Although I did not entirely believe Tony, I did not want to accidentally taste any of Jamshed’s old relatives.
• • •
ONE PARTICULAR AFTERNOON stands out in my mind, clear as a shard of glass, even today. I liked sometimes to be driven to the Strand by the Ganges on our brougham, accompanied by Sonu-amma. I was dressed in my blue and white sailor-suit, my dark brown hair cut in bangs. I still have a picture taken around that time.
When we reached the gardens on the Strand, I noticed an ornamental gate with ma
rigolds all over it, decorated for some special occasion. I heard a military band playing for British soldiers in regimental uniforms and their ladies, some under hats with wagging feathers. Inside the gate, children ran about among streamers and coloured-paper decorations, some sucking on candy canes. Before the brougham came to a complete halt, I remember dodging out of Sonu-amma’s reach and racing through the gate towards the far counter with all the candy in the world. I tripped and fell, which did not bother me in the least bit, though my sailor-suit had a grass-stain on it. A regimental officer reached out and picked me up with ease. I took in with great admiration his navy-blue uniform, his red sash and stripes, and the splendid sword at his waist.
“Did you hurt yourself, child?” asked a young lady in a white dress.
“What’s your name?” asked another woman, with blond hair and a lined face. Her fingers glittered with stone rings.
“I am Robert Patrick Aherne, sir, and I am not hurt at all.” I wanted to blurt out right then that I planned to be a soldier.
“Where is your father, Robert Patrick Aherne?” The old lady frowned. “Here?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, feeling very grown-up. “My father is Brendan Aherne. He is at home.” I added, “We live on Elliot Road.”
“Elliot Road, did you say?” snorted the old lady, glaring at the army officer. “Lieutenant Harrison, am I to understand that Anglo-Indians are coming here today?” The lady in white began to move away. The army man looked discomfited and absently put his palm on my head as I looked up at them.
“He’s just a child,” he began.
Her eyes blazed as she shook her shiny yellow head, and I watched fascinated as she licked her grey teeth with a slippery pink tongue. Her neck was mottled, and her cheeks splotchy with rage. Chee Chee, she hissed at me. “Chaalo idhaar se.” Get away from here, it meant in Hindustani. I knew that.
“Harrison!” she said.
The army man picked me up under my arms and swung me back into my father’s brougham. Sonu-amma was staring openmouthed in fright, her hands clutching me. The army man would not meet my eyes, but pressed a coin in my palm, without saying a word. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down above his regimental collar with its gold fretwork.
“It’s for Europeans only,” he muttered. I don’t know if he said this to me, to Sonu-amma, or to himself. Even before the brougham moved off, I flung away the coin in anger. A number of brown beggar children appeared from nowhere and began a screaming fight over the coin, right in front of the flower-decked entrance. The last I saw of them was the army man kicking about in a frenzy, trying to get the nimble, laughing children of the streets away from the grand gate.
After all these years, I still remember the sting.
Then I saw the soldiers marching in formation. Our brougham had to stand aside to let them pass. I did not know then that the Great War of 1914 had just been declared and this was its celebration. The bagpipes were strident.
I have often thought since then of the numberless columns of Indian soldiers in formation behind their British officers, many of them Irish, who died of bullets, poison gas, or despair, in soggy trenches and bomb-cratered fields, in places with unfamiliar names like Ypres, Passchaendale, and Verdun, beginning their first march towards death here in Calcutta. Those who survived would return to a different world, both changed irretrievably.
At home that evening, when Sonu-amma told my father what had happened, he called me into his study. I could see he was upset.
“It is their army. It is their war, Son,” he said.
“I want to be a soldier,” I wailed.
He looked completely taken aback. After a while he asked, “Why?”
“I want to be a soldier so I can wear a uniform,” I said. It seemed impossible that he could not understand.
“Why would you want to kill anybody?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. I remembered feeling my anger turn against him for making me feel foolish. Young as I was, I wanted to have authority, power over others. This was what I felt in the playing fields of my school, even in our boyish games and scuffles.
But this was the moment, seven decades ago, when I began to understand not just my place as an Anglo-Indian, but also that my father and I were different. I stood sullen and silent in his study, a baffled boy, not yet ten.
• • •
THE NEXT DAY he surprised me with a full set of illustrated books of Robert Louis Stevenson. I decided to read deep into the night, and my father let me. I knew this was my father’s way to comfort me. I called him Baba, in the Bengali manner, rather than Daddy or Papa as most Anglo-Indians did. It was what my father had wanted.
After what had happened to me at the Strand, Baba began to explain that when the English, and especially the Irish, had first come to India in the eighteenth and earlier parts of the nineteenth centuries as soldiers or clerks of the East India Company with little hope of bringing their women, the church encouraged marriage with native converts, preferring that to concubinage and unprovided children. Many, including English aristocrats, married Indian women.
“What is concubinage?” I asked him.
I remember how he stumbled about to explain, then decided to recite the roster of famous Anglo-Indian names: Sir Eyre Coote, Clive’s assistant at the Battle of Plassey, loved and honoured his Indian wife; General Hearsey, who was Scottish and Indian—as was the great James Skinner, founder of India’s best cavalry regiment; and Anglo-Indian Lord Roberts, who later became supreme Commander of the British Forces in Africa.
“Then there was Lord Liverpool, Britain’s Prime Minister, whose maternal grandmother was an Indian woman from right here in Calcutta—just as yours was! We Anglo-Indians,” concluded my father, “well, we used to think ourselves pillars of the Queen’s Indian empire.”
“We don’t now?” I asked. “What happened?”
“History,” he said, fiddling with his pipe. I waited for him to explain.
“When Creoles in the West Indies revolted and slaughtered English colonists sixty years ago, there spread distrust for people with mixed blood.” He stopped briefly. “Half-castes and half-breeds they were called now, synonymous with treachery. English officials from those islands brought their views here.”
“But didn’t the English know better?” I asked indignantly.
“There were now other factors too, Robert. Cheap and fast steamers through the new Suez Canal,” said my father, putting down his pipe. “Missionaries came in droves. Widows and daughters from England began arriving at the ports—Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. The ‘Fishing Fleet’ they were called, and received an official allowance for a year, after which the unwed were shipped back, now called ‘Returned Empty.’ The army arranged balls, and it became a great social falling-off now if the English married, not a white woman from Oxney or Ealing, but a native bride. Missionaries openly said that marrying us would sully Anglo-Saxon purity.”
“But doesn’t the Bible say all people are equal in God’s eyes? You said that too.”
“No matter, Son. The English rail against Hindu idolatry and its caste system in the churches, and then set up their own pantheon of gods. They have their own caste system, as full of taboos as any to be found in the remotest Indian village.”
“But what about the Irish?” I protested.
“They have perched their own place on that caste ladder. You see, the Irish joined the army and the police in such numbers that they were a social force to reckon with. They are discreetly sneered at by the English, but they all close ranks and hold themselves aloof from boxwallahs.”
I had heard of boxwallahs. “Do boxwallahs carry boxes on their back? I have never seen any of them.”
My father laughed aloud. “No, no, Son, they are in business, you know, tradespeople from the likes of Brixton or Camberwell, or Jewish merchants from Europe and Syria, or Armenian traders.”
“But they are all hardworking people!”
“It’s all snobb
ery and snootery, Robert. These are people who daily have to haggle and rub shoulders with Indians in the rough and tumble of local markets. And here’s another funny thing, Robert, if you think this sort of thing funny: You know that Calcutta is lighted with electricity supplied by Mr. Ezra, the Jewish merchant? Indians in one neighbourhood named a street after him.”
“Oh yes, and we’ve been to Ezra Street, I remember.”
“Mr. Ezra wasn’t allowed inside the British clubs.”
“Is that why you gave up on your father’s business?” I interrupted him. “Grandpa traded with the Indians, but not you, because you do not want to be called a boxwallah?”
My father looked stricken. He shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. I felt for a second that I had slapped him.
He looked directly into my eyes, “I have no head for business, Son. I did try. My father was a big enough man not to hold it against me. I am sorry I disappoint you, Robert. My father had never a word of disrespect for his mother, who kept a small shop. Parents owe their children no more than they can afford.”
I felt quarrelsome and small. My father was right, but I resented his being so.
• • •
MY SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD GRANDFATHER Padraig Aherne had died in his sleep in 1907 when I was only two, but he was ever-present in my father’s stories.
He married my Bengali grandmother Kalidasi late, many years after he had built this house on Elliot Road where I lived with my father, Brendan. She had been born into an orthodox Brahmin family. Married at seven, widowed at nine, she did not much remember her marriage or the groom—since a bride is sent to her husband’s home only at puberty, my father recounted. She was in her twenties and my grandfather Padraig almost fifty when he heard her singing voice behind a courtyard wall. How they managed to meet is one of our family mysteries, but they fell in love and she eloped.