by Kalyan Ray
Grandfather Padraig, who seemed to like breaking rules, offered to convert to Hinduism. That caused a furor among the British, and he was told severely by Hindu priests that nobody becomes a Hindu: You can only be born one. Besides, Hindus did not allow widow remarriage. Padraig had managed to offend both Christians and Hindus with his usual panache. My grandmother became a Christian instead, in a private ceremony conducted by Reverend Bandopadhyay. So the conversion and marriage ceremonies were solemnized and celebrated by outcasts, which must have suited my fiery Irish grandfather perfectly.
Kalidasi’s Hindu family cut her off—as if she were dead. Patrick gave her the Christian name Euphonia when she insisted upon one at her conversion. I do not know what he called her at home, Kalidasi or Euphonia. He adored her, said my father.
Years after her conversion, Kalidasi used to go under veils to a temple during the Puja festival and take my father along and offer flowers and laddoos; her pet name for her son was Brindaban. “One god or many gods,” Padraig would chuckle, “let them sort it out among themselves without getting us humans involved, or have us kill each other on their behalf. The more powerful some people think their god is, the more they have to do the killing for that particular almighty.”
My grandfather kept fine horses which were stabled nearby, at Chitpur, but my father told me that my grandmother did not enjoy taking our brougham along the Esplanade or next to Fort William, where the English walked stiffly with their ladies and raised their hats like wind-up toys when they passed their compatriots. No one raised his hat to my grandmother Kalidasi’s carriage, which was far grander than most of theirs, because she was a black Hindu woman. The English went to take the air, trying to decide whom they might acknowledge and who was beyond the pale, but Kalidasi went to the Strand when she felt the need to look at the sacred Ganges. She died of influenza when my father was twenty-four.
The following year Grandpa Padraig sent my father to Bombay, presumably to learn about business from his friend, the Parsee businessman Cowasjee, out from under his long shadow. There, my father met and married my mother, Susannah Estelle O’Reilly, the daughter of Michael Edward O’Reilly, an elderly Anglo-Indian violin teacher. He returned to Calcutta with a great reverence for Mozart, Telemann, and Purcell, loads of sheet music, and his young wife, but with little sense of how businesses are run. Apparently my grandfather Padraig doted on his young daughter-in-law, and the house was a happy place again, until my mother Susannah died of something called puerperal fever four years later, soon after my birth.
Sometimes I used to say her full name to myself when I played alone in our backyard, a private chant: “Susannah Estelle O’Reilly Aherne.” I used to peer into my mother’s portrait, her complexion lit by some gentle lamp within her, fascinated by her long eyelashes and perfect eyebrows.
I also had a maternal uncle, Raphael Iain O’Reilly, but I remember seeing him only twice in my life. He had a freckled bald head and enormous ginger eyebrows and whiskers. He ran a business exporting grain and fruits from the Punjab through the port of Karachi to Mombasa, Aden, and other places. With no reference to my birthdays, which he generally forgot, Uncle Rafe would send me strange gifts: a mechanical clown with terrifying eyes; an elaborate Arabian maze puzzle inlaid with ebony and pearls; and a razor-sharp Afghan dagger with an agate-encrusted sheath—an odd gift for a seven-year-old.
My father had my grandmother Kalidasi’s serene face, delicate hands, and large brown eyes. His hair was greying prematurely, and he wore thick glasses and spoke, everyone said, with a lilt in my grandfather’s Irish manner. He was very attentive to his fine Darjeeling and Oolong teas, his briar and meerschaum pipes, his Burleigh or Latakia tobaccos, his sheet music and books, especially the ones of painting reproductions and photography of landscapes. He loved music, and played his violin—quite beautifully, I thought—or read scores, and immersed himself in his books while he settled into a contemplative middle age as I was growing up.
When the Great War of 1914 came, many people like my friend Krikor’s father, Mr. Aratoon, made quick fortunes in wartime trade, but our family business of timber and grain export went from the brisk gallop of my grandfather Padraig’s days to a limp, and soon was knackered. Mr. Aratoon bought our horses and the brougham. My father seemed indifferent to the losses. I missed our horses, George and Eddie.
Now Krikor, who lived around the corner, was driven to school in our old brougham, while I walked there. On the first day Krikor offered me a ride back home, and I hit him on the nose, making it bleed, as if my father’s business ineptitude had been compensated by that blow. Krikor did not complain at school or to his father. The next day, after Krikor was driven to school, I made up a jingle:
Fatty-fatty Kriko-bloaty
Ate up all the ghee chapatti
His trousers split as he ate
Everything on his heaping plate!
All our friends knew it by afternoon, when Krikor left in tears in his brougham. He walked to school starting the next day. But the whole matter tormented me. The following week I sought Krikor out and shook his hand, but for a long time it was not like it had been before.
One morning over breakfast on our verandah, I asked my father, “Are we poor now?” He looked up from his newspaper, and considered my question.
“Poverty means different things to different people,” he said.
“What does it mean to us?” I persisted.
“We have this house and there is enough for your education, unless when you finish school you want to go to, say, Oxford. Well, if you wanted to,” he said worriedly, “if you did, I’d have to talk to Lahey and find out what we could raise from a mortgage.” Old Lahey had been Grandfather Padraig’s lawyer.
“So we are not poor?” I wanted a clear answer.
“Son, we have enough left to live on, comfortably. Just enough.” Then he added, “I am sorry about our horses, Son. You loved them.”
After a pause I told him of my jingle about Krikor. He listened gravely. But when I told him about my apology, he surprised me with an impulsive hug. It was not unusual for him to do so, but I knew this was special.
“I am proud of what you did,” he said simply. “I love you, Son.”
• • •
MY FATHER SPENT the Great War reading stacks of newspapers.
At school, we started each day now, not just with announcements and a perfunctory prayer, but with something new. Our principal was an Englishman, Mr. W. H. Arden-Wood MA, CIE—an improbable name, my father had first claimed, until he checked for himself. Mr. Arden-Wood kicked off each morning with news of the war, followed by a sonorous prayer for our gallant boys—and a couple of former teachers—who were fighting against the Forces of Evil. When any of the boys brought in letters written by relatives from the war front, he read parts of it to the entire assembly, huffing with emotion, elocuting every precious syllable. Teddy Richard and Timmy Doyle, whose dads had joined up, brought in letters. They were even invited up on stage!
Soon senior boys like Dan Surita and the two older O’Brien boys enlisted. So did Tony’s dad the day after Tony’s tenth birthday. They came to our school in their uniforms, and everyone clapped. I wished I were old enough to enlist in the war—any war! But I knew how my father would view such enthusiasm for the British uniform. I dreamed of distant battles, holding actual guns, marching to the kettle-drums, cheered by crowds.
“Anybody who doesn’t join is a coward and a rotten egg,” said Tony, beaming. I picked a fight with him, knocking him flat behind the school gym. I felt no better for it. His dad had gone off in his new uniform, while mine sat at home reading about it. I wanted him to do things. “Someday soon I will grow up and be that kind of man,” I decided fiercely.
One late April morning, almost a fortnight after my eleventh birthday, my father rushed into my bedroom and woke me. I rose eagerly, expecting him to hold out some unexpected gift—probably from Uncle Rafe. But what he was holding in his hand was the early newspaper
. It was a Bengali paper, not The Englishman or The Statesman. His hands were shaking in excitement.
“It’s beginning to happen,” he said, hoarse with emotion. “It has begun to happen in Ireland! None of the English papers mentions this. On Easter morning, there was an uprising in Dublin. The most important buildings in that city have been taken over.”
“Is Ireland free now?” I asked, caught up in his unexpected excitement.
“The leaders were rounded up and imprisoned by the British soldiery,” my father conceded, “but the Uprising has begun.”
“But Baba,” I was confused, “didn’t you say that all the British soldiers were fighting Germany?”
“Aye,” he said, “but it must be the Protestants and the Constabulary.” I waited for him to explain.
“Among the leaders are Pearse, Connolly, MacDonagh, and McBride,” he recited from the Bengali newspaper. “One of them is a schoolteacher. Another is a poet.”
“Is that a good thing?” I asked doubtfully. “Don’t you need soldiers for a fight?”
“It is the common people,” chuckled my father in a transport of delight. “Oh, Son, what a grand time it is for Ireland!”
In the following days, my father waited eagerly for news of the uprising, which remained stubbornly absent from the English papers. Then, two weeks later, we came to know from the Bengali papers that McDonagh and McBride, Connolly and Pearse had been executed by the English after hasty courts-martial. I remember my father reading those names out to me. Here in Calcutta, my father wept for his Irish dead. I did not know how to comfort him.
• • •
I WAS GETTING used to my father’s unexpected reactions as he read the morning papers. He insisted I eat a good breakfast—though he would only drink cup after cup of fragrant Darjeeling tea. I remember how I relished puffy luchis or parathas with aloo and subzi greens, while in the summer I ate mulled oats with cool homemade curd and honey.
This morning at the end of October 1917, he could barely wait to tell me the news, reading out bits from the papers, his tea growing cold in his cup. He exclaimed that one of our allies, Russia—I knew it by its pale blue spread on our schoolroom map—had withdrawn from the war and was caught up in a Revolution.
“Will we have a revolution?” I asked hopefully, “At least an uprising like Ireland?”
“Ahh,” he said, as if that was an answer.
In the last few months, he had talked to me of many battles. The grown-ups had been certain it would be over by the first Christmas. Even the papers said so. From my school history texts, I thought that battles happened quickly and decisively: Hastings, the battles at Plassey, Waterloo, Lepanto, Philippi . . . But this war was going on and on.
Three days before that Christmas, Tony Belletty’s dad returned without a leg but with an army pension, which he complained was smaller because he was an Anglo-Indian. “Same size as his brain,” commented his sister Mrs. Mildred Noney. Two weeks later, Dan Surita came back. He never left home now, wheezing around in his bedroom. His cousin Teddy Richard told us that he had been gassed.
Some months later, when the Great War did finally end, I had turned thirteen. We heard the boom of the ceremonial cannons at Fort William barracks. Anglo-Indians like Mrs. Lahey and old Mr. Noney, whose sons had joined the forces in great numbers, fought and died, were not invited to the great ball.
“Almost one and a half million Indians have served in the British armed forces,” said my father, “in every grim theatre of the war. All of India provided food, money, munitions. Forty-three thousand soldiers died on the battlefields. Many more returned without limbs or with permanent injuries, and limped back to their homes, mainly in the Punjab, or Rajputana, or Coorg, some witless, shambling and shell-shocked.”
“So what did we get from the war?” I asked him, puzzled. “Didn’t we think of this before?”
“Well,” he began, “the Indians now know they fought white men. They also know the British Crown would have tumbled without the colonial gift of their lives and limbs.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s a lot, Robert. We learn slowly.” He sounded rueful. “But now our Indian Congress leaders, who had been regularly thanked throughout the war for their support of the British, are asking for something. Like Ireland”—he smiled—“Home Rule.”
“Will the English give it to us?”
“Shouldn’t there be a difference between giving and taking, Son?”
We were interrupted by a knocking at the door, and I knew that Tony and Krikor had come by for our afternoon game of cricket. But what happened then remains with me even to this day, for I was struck by what my father said, and the power of stories became suddenly clear to me. There we were, three boys with their bat and ball, when my father began to tell us the oddest story of give-and-take, and how an entire regiment of the finest Irish soldiers disappeared from India. We stood rooted to the spot, all thoughts of cricket gone for the moment.
Tony and I were avid collectors of cards from cigarette boxes depicting soldiers of all the British regiments. We knew that the Connaught Rangers from Ireland had fought in all the wars for two hundred years, and right after the Great War had been posted in Punjab.
“They heard from their relatives and comrades returning from furlough about the goons called Blacks and Tans perpetrating atrocities against their families. Now that Free Ireland was about to become fact, these soldiers laid down arms. They considered themselves Irish, not British! At the local bazaar, they bought three swaths of coloured cloth, and local women sewed them into the Irish tricolours. They refused payment, for their sympathy lay with the young Irish.”
My father paused, relishing the moment. “That very day, the first Irish flag was raised on Indian soil.” The authorities tried to gag the English papers, my father had told me later, but he had gathered the news from the small vernacular papers which dodged under the fence, reporting the story at the risk of closure.
“But what about the English? What did they have to say?” Krikor wondered aloud. “Yes, what did they do?” Tony burst out.
“Plenty, boys. Two battalions of Seaforth Highlanders were sent in full battle gear.”
“Were the Irish killed?”
My father shook his head. “A bloodbath was avoided because Father Livens, a Catholic priest, stood before them, ready to be slaughtered with them. Jim Daly, a young Connaught Ranger, averted certain massacre by pacifying his comrades and negotiating with English generals. He was given word that no soldiers would be executed.”
Baba sat back and added with satisfaction, “News had reached the provisional government in Dublin, which insisted on the return of the soldiers.”
“And the English agreed?” asked Tony incredulously.
“It was a case of give-and-take, Anthony,” said my father, “well, give-and-take of a certain kind.”
“What do you mean, sir?” Krikor broke in.
“The British authorities disbanded the regiment. Its colours were sent off to a great house in Boyle . . .” My father paused. “Close to Sligo from where my father came.”
“Then it all ended well,” I was relieved, “the English gave the Irish troops their freedom.”
“Give-and-take!” said my father, “True, that is what they gave. What they took was Jim Daly’s life. He helped keep the peace—and the only Irishman executed.”
“No!” we cried out.
“Yes,” said my father. “He led the negotiations and obeyed English law—and was punished like Daniel O’Connell eighty years ago. Jim Daly was only twenty-two.”
“Who’s Daniel O’Connell?” asked Krikor.
“That I’ll tell you another day, I promise,” added my father. “Jim Daly defiantly whistled ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,’ his regimental tune, on the way to execution, then was buried in a corner of the prison.”
But even that was not the end of the story!
“Jim Daly had been shot—but he lived on, in a manner of speaki
ng,” said Baba. “Odd stories have percolated through India: A scrawled writing appeared high above human height on the prison wall: Seamus Dailigh, the Irish spelling of his name. Local farmers swear that late at night someone wanders the perimeter of the jail whistling that tune.”
The stories of England, Ireland, and India keep getting tangled up, I observed. My friends could not wait to repeat the story at school. Krikor made a fortune buying up all the available Connaught Ranger cards, which the cigarette companies stopped printing. He let Tony and me choose the two best ones as keepsakes. I still have them. The rest he sold to the highest bidders at school and on Elliot Road.
I had realized that no one else’s dad told stories like my father. And it turned into a strange moment in my head, as if I was outside myself, observing us, and the picture became a permanent sepia memory of a growing boy sitting with his friends and his father in a book-lined room with old comfortable chairs, talking in a room redolent with the aroma of tea and tobacco and old papers.
It was a picture that was to return unbidden to my mind, again and again, in my unquiet years, an anchor in troubled waters.
• • •
I WAS BEGINNING to enjoy my jousts with my father about politics and history, learning to argue with him and weigh his words. Although we Anglo-Indians lived where few Englishmen set foot, jealously keeping to their own enclaves, they were ever-present in our conversation.
“Tony’s dad says that the English with very little education and no experience get salaries many times more than Anglo-Indians. Is that fair?” I wanted to know
“It isn’t,” countered my father, “but Indians make even less for the same work, and they hate us for that.”
As I digested this, my father added, “You do know, Robert, the English in India—especially those who were born here—first called themselves ‘Anglo-Indian,’ but dropped the term when we of part-Indian blood began to lay claim to that name? By 1910 or so, they switched to calling themselves ‘European.’ ”