by Michael Foss
PART II
IN THE CLEAR
FIVE
A Brief Introduction to Magic
AMONG THE ACCOUNTS of the British in India, I have read that when the Jesuit Thomas Stevens, the first Englishman to write about the country, was approaching the shore of the Western Ghats in 1579 he met a succession of strange sights. First, he saw land birds he did not know far out at sea; then boughs of palms and sedges lying sodden in the water; then swimming snakes; and then ‘a substance which they call by the name of a coin of money, as broad and as round as a groat, wonderfully printed and stamped of nature, like unto some coin’. After these signs, the ship’s company, which was reduced to crumbs of hardtack and lacked any water, knew that a landfall was certain.
It is fitting that a counterfeit of coins was strewn along the path to India, a country so fateful for the wealth of England. Wealth is the chimera of history, waxing and waning with time. But we, arriving some 350 years later, were given no portents. Coming out of the night we strolled onto the deck in the morning and found Bombay already upon us.
To the left was the Gateway of India, a grandiose arch through which our passengers did not go.
From a distance it had a look of Marble Arch in London, and the implausibility of triumphal arches everywhere. What reason could there be to go under that particular hoop for our voyagers? It would have been a form of bowing the head, an abasement or servility not likely to be found on the Polish Batory. Our ship was no imperial harbinger, no collector of tribute and salaams, but only an adventurer subsisting on the broken scraps of wartime. So we shied away from the ceremonial landing, going to starboard and easing into Bombay docks.
An appalling noise greeted us. Not just the customary clang and clatter of the dockside but an overwhelming racket of people. Was it human effervescence or something more ominous? How hard it was for the English to judge. In the worst moments of the Blitz, when the heavens spat bombs and buildings burst like balloons and St Paul’s was backlit by sulphurous flames, as if by the hand of Hollywood, the English went dumbly to their tasks, clutching quiet agonies to careworn breasts, celebrating escapes with wry grins and only an exhalation through the nose to show pent-up terror.
But this Indian cacophony? Even an inexperienced child had reason to see both effervescence and despair. The sun shone beautifully; the February heat was not yet overbearing; in the morning the air retained at least a memory of a breezy freshness off the Arabian Sea. On land, no sirens wailed. Coolies, barrows, rickshaws, tongas clogged the view, not vehicles in military blotches. This land was not at war. Yet there were casualties all around, with injuries as foul as war wounds. Rotted noses, blind sticky eyes, leprous skins, stumps, scars, twisted extremities. A grizzled skeleton swung himself forward at dizzy speed on rough crutches. A half-man, cut off at the thighs, propelled himself on a little wooden trolley with rag-wrapped knuckles. A bent woman pulled the edge of her sari over the earthquake of her face. Children gazed with sunken eyes as dark as mercury pools, their ribs fluttering like flimsy bamboo fences. Everything seemed in furious motion, though when the eye stopped careering about and fixed for a moment on a single person, as likely as not one saw extreme lethargy or exhaustion being dragged around like Sisyphus’ stone.
*
After a while, boxed about with the bags and cases of travel, we made the first descent into the torrent of this life. Leaving Ballard Pier we could glimpse in the distance the startling architectural phantasmagoria of Victoria Terminus railway station. Going to the hotel we passed streets with surprising English names, decent avenues whose orderly colonial purpose was obscured or perverted by the rash or bloom of native enterprise. Vendors, hawkers, hustlers, beggars, loungers, the myriad homeless, all contended for space amid the press of so many thousand hurrying feet helping to make the money go round. In choked streets stenches and aromas chased each other. Garbage and sewage and stagnant water and decaying offal fought against spices and a strong flower scent and the pungent smell of cooking foods and the tang of woodsmoke. We went slowly, edging round pi dogs frantic with ticks and sores, and near-naked kids doing their ablutions in the gutter.
For a child, all these were not marks of squalor or backwardness or oppression. They were the cause of excitement – a catch in the throat. Suddenly a stubborn lock was sprung, a new door flew open, the young mind reeled with possibilities and revelations. The city was ablaze with shape and colour. A helter-skelter of crazy building – towers, spires, turrets, domes, columns, statues, balconies, porticoes – mad bits and pieces that I later knew to be Renaissance or Palladian or Gujerati or Moghul or Persian. Or, making the eye dizzy, buildings voluminously Victorian, overshadowing all the rest, as if drugging the city with the fatuous rhodomontade of empire. All this made a child’s heart jump, seeing what looked like a wonderful, convoluted joke, beyond understanding but not enjoyment. The sunlight leapt from domes and windows and tiled walls. Particles of dust in the dirty air began to shimmer. We were dazzled by the assault on the senses, and then glad to hurry into the high cool lobby of the hotel.
A big fan turned lazily with a weary electric hum. A man in a tightly wound turban and a crisp white cotton tunic, in style and length rather like a frock-coat, awaited us solemnly. Suddenly his serious brown face was slashed with the brilliant white of his smile. He raised his hands to breast level in the attitude of prayer and briefly bowed his head. Then he addressed my father.
‘Ah, sahib,’ he said with great enthusiasm, ‘I have for you jolly good rooms. On second floor, best front place, gussul khana adjacent. Very pleasant, tip-top view. You see this way Museum, that way University. And maidan, very green and nice. Also, you see sky, happy breeze and peaceful sleeping at nighttime.’
He clapped his hands, then with frowning dignity gave instructions in a native tongue to a small lithe lad, hardly bigger than I was, who seemed to double as bell-boy and porter. The little fellow seized upon one of our lighter travel bags, indicating indignantly when we tried to help him that he would fetch the rest later, and though it was a struggle for him he insisted on leading the way up the stairs. As we followed up the elegant curve of the broad steps, with rusted iron banisters on our right, I puzzled over this English I had just heard, and snatches of which I had caught on the dockside and in the street. This language was mine, but not quite mine, misted and veiled with hints and shades that made me, even then, smile with surprise – not because I felt that what they said was in any way wrong, but because of its novelty. It seemed like an extension of English expression, nicely elastic, not an impediment.
At the head of the stairs we found that our rooms were on the first floor, not the second, and at the back, not the front. The bathroom was not ‘adjacent’ but a short way down the hall. My father, experienced in the ways of India, did not complain or demand changes. The rooms we were shown were tall and dim and quiet, the quieter for being at the back, away from the busy road. Ornate iron bedsteads were anchored like galleons on the green sea of the tiled floor where numdah rugs with simple, childlike designs also floated. Long louvred shutters led onto two dangerous-looking balconies. The view beyond the shutters was not airy maidan nor the great swelling dome of the Museum, but the fading yellowish wall of a house across the alleyway. Tinkles of family laughter and smells of home-cooking punctuated our days, filtering in through the louvres.
*
‘Do take the boys out,’ said the wan voice, as feeble and shaky as a new-born kitten, ‘they’re making such a row.’
My mother did not like the big city, with the heat and the noise, and so much evidence of the scars and sores of Indian life. Her Indian world had been, and would be again, the lazy life of the Raj in a military cantonment. And after four years in England she was finding it hard to acclimatize to the sweaty heat of Bombay. But we were stuck in the city for a week while my father awaited his orders. Nothing much to do, for any of us, morn to night. My mother went shopping, slowly, with wet patches spreading in the armpits of her f
rock and tendrils of fair hair growing dark with sweat at the back of her neck. She had to buy hot-weather clothes for the family, loose cotton garments and sandals and hats against the sun. Looking for good buys – it seemed to be an article of faith among the British, when shopping among Indians, that prices were to be beaten down so that every purchase became a bargain – she wandered in the maze of bazaar streets to the north of Crawford Market, taking a bearing on the golden pinnacle of the temple to the mouthless Mumba Devi, poking among the blind cubby-holes of the Bhuleshwar Market. She returned to the hotel drawn and tired, dragging her feet into the darkened room. She lay down with a damp towel over her eyes, counting the throbs of her headache.
So we left her and began the wary process of getting to know a father.
My father was not athletic – very far from it. He moved in a clumsy way – a left-hander who had not adapted to the world being the wrong way round – and he was rather lazy, having been spoilt in childhood by the clutch of women in his household. Walking, which he enjoyed, was the only concession he made to exercise, and nature had equipped him well for this. His long legs swung forward briskly, and his lean frame was not much affected by heat and humidity. So, driven forth from the hotel, we set out, the tall fellow with sleek dark hair, in well-ironed tunic shirt and trousers of razor-edge creases and soft suede shoes, tugging in his wake two rumpled boys, heated with sun and argument and exuberant energy, with pale winter skin and grimy knees and socks about the ankles.
Crossing the knife-edge of shade into the broiling street, we walked with no particular direction or purpose in mind. We seemed free and easy, but this was a complicated time. We were taking a look at India, getting reacquainted, as it were, with a forgotten birthright. And we were trying to re-discover a family, separated for too long by war, for which absence there was some unspoken rancour against our father in our young hearts, and no doubt some sorrow and regret in his. He had some explaining to do, some persuasive gestures to make to smooth away the rough memories of the last four years. These words and gestures would not come easily. Trained in the reticence of country folk, stamped by Methodism and poverty, he had so little practice in the language of the emotions. But he could begin by showing us around, guiding his whelps to a home territory; for my father regarded India, not England, as his home range, where he had lived most of the years beyond his youth, and had become confident in manhood and prospered and hoped to end.
But where should he begin? What a maze history leaves! Deposit after deposit, shards of strange species, evolving, enduring, then degenerating. Holding on against a current whose course is always obscure and eventually contrary. There were arguments here too labyrinthine for the tidy military mind, and of course way beyond the understanding of children. The best approach was to sample the city and let the weight of the past sink in.
We strolled down Colaba, through fashionable streets, making a circuit and returning along Apollo Bunder between city and sea. There was an unlikely familiarity in the names. Ormiston, Barrow, Henry, Walton. Who were these men (we may take it for granted that they were not women)? Now, I see sun-red faces and wigs dusted with cornflour, coarse confident visages as in a Kneller portrait. They washed in and out with the tides of time. Once, they were imperial actors, but for India, what did they intend? That was a tangled knot that history was still trying to undo. Today, their names remain, largely forgotten but still markers of a sort, alien words sounding peculiar in the mouths of local postmen.
We walked, and came upon questions not answers. Later, with luck, we would know something, or at least begin to feel something in our bones. For the moment we registered only questions. What was the meaning of that alarming fish-stink, creeping up from the southern streets as bold as an invading army? Those lofty houses in Arthur Bunder Road – they had an anomalous air. Their position shouted commerce, but the elegant, time-worn wooden tracery of their galleries suggested the sensibility of artists. Were statues in honour of Indians permissible? We children wondered at that. In the world we had just left, statutes represented white men – kings, politicians, generals, men with the rape of society and many capital murders under their belts – or occasionally the freaky presence of a woman. But that figure of Sivaji on a horse, he seemed to have a look of provocation that would be worrying to governors of empire.
And what lesion of the imagination had caused such bloated, disordered buildings as the Taj Mahal Hotel or, even more grotesque, Victoria Terminus station? Castles in the air, forced on by overwrought ambitions, these dreams somehow solidified into stone. Yet blasted by the city’s sunrays they rose above the tumult with cockeyed gaiety. Each, in its own way, was a hive for a portion of the multitude. The rich and the up-and-coming and their fawning acolytes rustled money and peddled influence in the vast byzantine-baronial halls and bars of the Taj Mahal, while poor workers and a desperate scrum of downward-descending populace made bleak home under the aspiring squiggles and fol-de-rols of Victoria Terminus.
After a day we were tired of wading among people, so thick was the density on the streets. To feel this city, to test the texture of it, was a strenuous business. Having sweated the downtown avenues we went over to Back Bay in search of a breeze, past the cricket ground and along Marine Drive. We were heading slowly, with many stops and with help from rickshaw or tonga, for Malabar Hill, a bold city flank still with remnants of green cover, which spoke of exclusivity in this place of seared grass and the heat-palpitating daze of the streets. We no longer talked much. We children were grumpy, and our father now had the martyred air of the put-upon parent. In the jostling mob of vendors round Chowpatty Beach his temper slipped a bit, both with the crowd and with us. This urban chaos was not a soldier’s India. This was the sort of uproar that civil society got itself into, a folly that soldiers could not mend. At least my father recognized that, but he was sufficiently military to regret the loss of discipline and to bridle at the liberties of the hustlers. For the Raj, however well-intentioned, when stretched and annoyed fell back on a fundamental demand for space and deference. Even the best of white men were tainted with a sense of superiority.
‘Make way there,’ he ordered in parade-ground manner, using his height and his elbows to lever a way through. From time to time he added something in military Urdu, bringing a flush to his own face, though it did nothing to quiet the babble pressing upon us.
But we children were transfixed by the excited, unlicensed weirdness of it all, with hands offering us strange comforts on all sides. Our father was not pleased and turned a frosty eye on us.
‘No, most certainly not,’ he snapped as we clamoured for bhel puri or a samosa or a bhaji. ‘What would your mother say? Look at the flies and the filth. And in all this heat and dust.’
The day was hot and we could have done with something wet and cold, but the kulfi looked as suspicious as the rest of the food. So the ice-cream was also forbidden us. My father was never subject to the sudden whims of taste. I remember a much later occasion, on a sizzling day in Italy. I had cajoled him into trying an ice-cream cone, just because I wanted one. His composed face licked the dripping cone impassively, granting me a favour rather than satisfying himself.
But for the moment, at Chowpatty Beach, he went so far as to allow us a paper twist full of peanuts.
The sea off the Beach looked greasy with spoil and the water under this film too sluggish to heave itself into waves. It crept into shore bearing an offering of queasy odours. Dusting vendors and beggars from his path with firm sweeps of his arm my father led us almost at a trot towards the Hill, seeking shade and a temporary escape from the painful asking in the faces of the hustlers. We fled into crooked ascending alleys, past the priests and the pilgrims of Balbunath Mandir, sidling around the flanks of loose wandering cows that were blocking the mêlée with the insolence of their holy state and favouring pilgrims with long doleful looks from under silken eyelashes. We mounted steps broken by weather and neglect, through steep woods to the ridge road. On the ri
dge, the views were very fine and the road led, with an air of inevitability, to more temples. Perhaps from this time began the feeling, which only later could I put into words, that this land was much trodden by the gods.
But my father, who had very little religious sensibility, was puzzled as to who owned what. Surely that was another Hindu shrine? No, it was a Jain temple, as neat and solemn and composed as the Jains themselves, with the shoes of the worshippers in orderly racks beside the door. But that, further down the road, was the famous Walukeshwar Mandir, where Shiva had done something bold – I believe my father mentioned the Ramayana, though the details of the story escaped him – and left a characteristic lingam as evidence of his godly potency.
My father was anxious to skirt around that topic and merely mumbled gruffly that ‘we’d learn about all that soon enough’. He could not bring together the legacy of the Methodist morality of his upbringing with the unblushing sexual iconography of the Hindu gods.
Below the temple, down a rough slope, was Banganga Tank, an inviting pool despite the green scummy bloom on the water. Rama’s arrow had struck out the spring that fed this pool, and thus it became a holy bathing-place for believers. On an ordinary day it was nothing much, cool and peaceful and unhealthy amid the circling tenements, a resting place for the slum-dwellers and the dhobi-wallahs of the nearby shore who washed laundry next to the burning-ghats of the dead.
After a couple of days my brother and I were done with these sticky, aggravating city marches. We slopped along in our father’s trail more and more slowly, keen to get cool, to give ourselves the indulgence of a day’s swimming. But even in search of a pool we could not get out of the shadow of religion. On the western shore quite close together, stood the contrasting shrines of the Muslim saint Haji Ali and of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi, Bombay’s favourite deity and the provider of prosperity and beauty, both of which were needed in large measure to make a mark in the fabulous grime of this city.