by Michael Foss
*
Hurrying to the swimming pool one sticky afternoon I saw my mother walking a little distance ahead. I do not know where she was going but she looked fresh and calm, in a summery way. But what arrested me, I think, was her smile. Usually, my mother had more shadow than sunlight in her face. We stopped, and both of us seemed to be surprised. I felt I wanted to say something, but what that was I could not grasp. At the same time I knew I wanted to get to the pool as soon as possible, so I ducked my head and turned and ran, shouting ‘Come on’ to my brother in a louder voice than necessary. As I turned away I noticed that my mother was still smiling.
*
In this new place, from time to time England still came to mind. But I found it hard to recall so many days gone blank through misery. They had seemed to die so slowly, limping into the twilight gloom of the northern climate. But now, in the book of our days, the pages flicked by. It was a narrative cut with the speed and economy of a thrilling film. Too quickly, the tropical night slammed the day shut, leaving us breathless and eager for the next act.
At night, to overcome our restless nerves, our father read us long stories. I think this was the only part of parental duty that he really liked. He was a great reader himself, and a large part of his success in an unlikely profession was due to a certain bookish intelligence. Reading to us was what he did naturally and vindicated, in a small way, his general culture. He liked to expend on us some of those treasures of the mind that had so little value in the ordinary Anglo-Indian social world.
He read with great fluency, even stylishly, but without much dramatic force. He was too shy for that.
‘This, O Best Beloved,’ he would begin, ‘is another story of the High and Far-Off Times.’
I settled down in bed, pulling the sheet up to the nose, for this was what I wanted to hear. Beguiled, I followed Kipling into that world he knew better than most, the childhood world of Wonder and Hope.
In this way, with unconscious cunning, my father directed my imagination. He put me in the world-shaping hands of Rudyard Kipling, the best guide a Western child ever had into the huge complexity of India and into the minds of India’s strange historical antagonists, the people of the Raj.
Start at the beginning, said Kipling, and so I did. From my father’s voice I heard of the Camel’s Hump, and of the Skin of the Rhinoceros, and of the Leopard and his Spots, and of the Elephant’s Child, and of Old Man Kangaroo. I became familiar with the lone walking Cat and the Stamping Butterfly. Yes, I thought, hugging my bedclothes, all this is possible in Mhow, here in India. A jungle began beyond the thin walls of our bungalow, not so very far away. In the night, wild notes swelled and died, something between warning and welcoming. It could be Mowgli out there. Now I too was in some imaginative sense a child of the forest. Coming from cities I had so much to learn, though of course I was far too frightened to think of getting to know those wise and dangerous animals of The Jungle Book. It was enough for me to begin to make a general acquaintance with nature. Already, in our walks to the pool, I had seen a long snake slide from the path. I was far enough away not to panic, but I was amazed to see a bare-footed Indian pass by the snake respectfully but with a certain nonchalance. The notion was still strange to me, that the deadly beast and I inhabited the same patch of earth. There was no necessity for war between us. I was learning, but I was not quite ready to say ‘hallo’ to the snake.
Later, Kipling would take me further, helping to lead the child-in-nature onwards towards a position of moral responsibility, helping that child become a boy-in-society, in the special society of the Indian Raj.
But for the moment all I could hear was my father saying, in a forthright military manner, ‘Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was, O Best Beloved.’
And so I did attend, though getting muggy with sleep, until my mind was awash with words, and the rhythm of them was rocking me into a land of contentment, and the last thing I heard was the now-softened voice of my father saying, ‘So they went away and lived happily ever afterward, Best Beloved. That is all.’
SEVEN
A Hush in the Hostel
TO POSSESS TWO parents was new and strange to me. We had managed with less – my brother and I – in time of war. What were the rites appropriate to this new situation, this sudden addition of an extra to our settled group? What were the uses of a father? I looked at the two of them together – my parents. Though there was nothing wrong with them, I thought there was something disproportionate in their conjunction, something lopsided. And, physically, they did make an awkward pair. My father was tall and thin, cutting a dash in his clothes but a clumsy mover in well-shined shoes surprisingly small for such a tall man. A tendency to talk too loud, a pedant in small matters, a cheerful conversationalist in the Officers’ Mess (joking and joshing with his fellows, those silly buggers from English public schools), an admirer of regimental tradition, a man’s man. My mother was short, nervous, given to headaches. Her slimness was fashionable and lent her a stylish air which she cultivated. I remember puffy sleeves on her light cotton dresses, nipped in at the waist, and necklines cut low in a broad V. Heat brought her out in a rash, sunlight encouraged her freckles. Paleness and fair hair were a distinction for ladies in Anglo-Indian society, but they had a price. Yet her frailty seemed to call for respect and tenderness. Her movements were quick, agitated and anxious. She frowned often. She was suspicious of strangers, and doubly suspicious of most men who still appeared to her, in some secret convent-formed enclave of a peasant heart, as dirty beasts.
I watched them walking together, he still smoking, stepping out in long strides. In a while she would lag behind, beginning to droop, fanning herself with a hand. ‘There’s no hurry,’ she would say with exasperation. And usually there wasn’t. But he couldn’t help himself. He drove ahead, not listening, keen to get at the root of things, convinced that the inevitable small aggravations of the Indian day would succumb to reason and good sense. He was courteous to the Indians he came into contact with – servants, clerks, box-wallahs in the bazaar and tonga-drivers – leaning down stiffly from his height to give them his whole attention. He was considerate to junior officers (specially if they were Indian), making sure all his orders were clear and simple, in words of few syllables. He always had a care for the English language and gave me at an early age a copy of Plain Words by Ernest Gowers.
But when things went wrong – and how easy it was, in the peculiar relationship between English and Indian, for promise to outrun performance and for small everyday events to fall into misunderstanding, indignity and foolishness – he would begin to enunciate in a voice much too loud, with heavy emphasis, as if to the slightly deaf, determined to save the day by some indisputable logic. Then my mother would grow impatient, tapping her fingers on her bag, looking away with a haughty stare, refusing to meet some plausible but unconvincing babu eye. ‘Oh, come along,’ she would say to my father before adding one of her favourite condemnations, ‘the man’s obviously a fool.’
Then my father would look at her as if he did not understand. He grew red and flustered, and his voice that had been so sensible took on a hurt, hectoring tone. So there they stood: my righteous father faced by what he thought was impudence but was more likely to be the panic of incomprehension; and the victim of his coldness hopelessly tangled in the historical thickets of racial dominance and subservience. The words were clear enough, but the two psychologies were out of step. In the end, often it was left to my mother to sort out the awkward moments. With her low expectation of strangers she did not hesitate to dazzle them with a forced charm.
‘There, you see?’ she would say, her triumph tinged with contempt. ‘It wasn’t so difficult.’
My father sulked.
*
The slow trunk road went from Mhow to Ambala. It etched a dust-obscured path on to the north Indian plain, a blind unsteady line along which the bullock-carts swayed with a soporific motion as they receded into th
e heat mirage lying over the baked land. A lifetime of weariness went into the pedalling of the bicyclists.
The history of India is a story of climate, though the academic books, besotted with politics and power, don’t mention it much. The first Moghul emperor, Babur, that most appealing of conquerors, mentioned it. In fact, he grumbled about it a good deal. In northern India those months of high summer, Gemini and Taurus – the blazing dog-days of Jeth and Asarh – made a hell of life, throwing evil humours over the most sanguine temperaments. In this mood Babur found little good in the towns or the countryside of Hindustan. A flat, bleak, ugly, barren landscape strangled with thorny brushwood. The people were a scurrying multitude, small wretched men and women inhabiting wretched hovels of lath, mud and straw, without gardens, without water-courses, without pleasure-grounds, without graces. A land and populace beaten down under the sun. In this blistered country, the Timurid chieftain Babur might well show some misery, born as he was beneath the snowline of the Pamirs and inheriting a Persian longing for gardens and running water and ice-cold sherbet. As long as the Moghuls reigned they tried hard to repair the appalling deficiencies of a truly Hindu dearth.
But the experience of the Moghul conquerors, wistful for high green valleys and remembered snows, was also the thousand-year-old experience of the native Aryans themselves. Nirad Chaudhuri, that impish observer, even-handed praiser and abuser of all things Indian, quotes a poem said to be by the great Sanskrit poet Kalidasa. The poet speaks of the blinding whirlwinds of dust blown off the bone-dry land; of the thirst-maddened deer that takes the shimmering blue horizon for the glint of water; of the snake, writhing on ground too hot to touch, that creeps into the shadow of the enemy peacock’s tail, and the frog that looks for relief under the hood of the cobra.
In the time of the Raj, the suffering English, sweating resolutely, scrambled for their hill stations.
One of those hill stations is pictured in the old photo album that I claimed after my father’s death. Kasauli, site of the Indian Army Signalling School, was in the north of Ambala District, where the land began to hump and lean towards the Simla Hills. It was not much of a place. The imperial gazetteer called it the least esteemed of the Punjab hill stations ‘owing to its moderate height and nearness to the dust of the plains’. The camera, drawn back to catch the sweep of the land around Kasauli, shows a long, sharp, precipitous ridge, the upper third of it heavily forested, with the scattered buildings and barracks of the small town clinging to hillside amid the dark foliage of the firs and the chil pines of the sub-Himalayan flora. Below this forest, not far from the summit, the bare, grey-brown, scarred, scuffed tumble of rock and dirt has all the comfort of a moonscape.
Looking now at those photos of Kasauli I see how much heartache and nostalgia were invested in the Indian exile of the Raj. The pictures show a re-invented topography drawn out of the memories of a lost northern childhood. Those decent four-square bungalows set in little fenced-in gardens; those tall brick chimneys steepling out of tiled roofs; those paths of beaten earth, so neatly swept, protected from the ravine beyond by stout posts and a linked chain. At the top of the town stands the church, with a long high nave and a square Norman tower at the west end. The barrack-blocks around the parade ground are like large roomy barns with elegant, round windows in the gable-ends. In the square a game of cricket goes on. The players are in regulation whites with white floppy hats, and the umpires are correctly dressed in long white coats. The batsman leans forward easily in an accustomed stance, the keeper crouches close to the wicket, the bowler has begun his run. The hands of the church clock are poised to move. In the big bungalow of the Officers’ Mess, set amid overpowering bougainvillaea, the mess servants in tight buttoned jackets and white turbans await. There will be beer and pints of shandy for the first imperious thirst of the evening, and then sherry or chota pegs of whisky before dinner.
All this claimed a little space for memory in a harsh and alien wilderness. Beyond the small confines of the town India repossessed its long, long history. To the north, crumpled broken land, ridge after ridge, piled up against the distant rampart of the Himalayas. To the south, a thin haze or a few loose clouds drifted off the hills before dissolving into the heat-crazed torpor of a plain that appeared to have no limit.
*
Even in the photos of this old album I can see that the imposition of the Raj, under the lens of time, was a moment out of history. A turning aside. It could not last, it was an anomaly. India lapped at it, and washed over it, and submerged it for ever, like a lost city obliterated by an inevitable rise of the waters. But it retains the mystery and eerie seductiveness of lost cities, a forlorn piece of the archaeology of the human spirit, grandly – triumphantly – wrong in the wrong place.
Surely, among the criticisms and excuses for their conduct, we can smile at a people who made such an unforeseen, wholehearted and dedicated mistake.
*
The climate did not worry me. Why would it? The craving for adventure overcame the small burden of heat. I saw the door open dawn to dusk. Outside was a new playground called India, for a child a place of unimaginable peculiarities and riches.
Once more, we had come in transit, to this new place. Ambala, one of the largest cantonments in northern India, was placed at the point where two railways intersected with the Grand Trunk Road. It was a marshalling yard for military men. Soldiers of all kinds languished uneasily under a bitter sun, ready to move on, their fate a brief instruction in Orderly Room files awaiting the notice of clerks overwhelmed by the end of war. A time of anxious possibilities, for who knew what was the future for British India?
The native city of Ambala was a few miles to the north of the cantonment, a big teeming place, low-built, gritty, ill-favoured. There was no reason for us to go there, and I can remember only one visit. We boys went with our father, in a staff car. Father was irritable and preoccupied with military matters. Or was it the heat and the relentless dust? The town was as fretful as my father – busy, overwrought, sweaty. It appeared to be an important centre for industry and commerce. Some factories of desolate ugliness polluted the air, smoky grime falling onto red dust. The town looked confusing and the underlying order of its day-to-day life easily escaped me. Borders seemed arbitrary – between street life and shop life and home life, between trade and domesticity. Cotton garments and kelims in sombre colours – dusty reds and dark jungle greens – spilled out of doors and were hawked in the streets. Shopkeepers in little hidey-holes squatted on mats, reading Hindi papers or taking tea in small metal bowls. Here and there a hookah was drawing peacefully. Vendors of sweetmeats, delicacies, pan, cool drinks did brisk business, as if the town was too busy to cook and the vendors were the officers of some huge communal kitchen. Boys sitting behind open sacks of grain and piles of vegetables had their heads down over books of homework. The air was brushed with strange odours of spices, like a window suddenly thrown up on a room of ancient vices.
Food was much in evidence but people were thin. All around were sunken cheeks, faces drawn and creased beyond their years, arms and legs looking too fragile for their daily duties. Food, even when plentiful, was not taken for granted. The system, such as it was, that tied agricultural production to income and life was so precarious that it wavered continually about the point of collapse.
Later, in my readings about India, I thought of those pinched faces of Ambala and the swollen bellies on the stick-like bodies of the children when I read of famines in that part of the Punjab in 1860–1, in 1868–9, in 1884–5, in 1890, in 1896–7, in 1899–1900, and so on miserably into the next century. I hardly understood what was happening until I came across the pages of Amartya Sen, that famous and humane economist, who at the time I am writing about in Ambala was himself a child in the devastating famine of West Bengal. There was grain enough then (India is a fecund mother, though wilful and unpredictable), and it was stored ready for use. But after the hard times partly caused by the war the large rural population of Beng
al had no income left to buy the grain, and so families must starve. There was not a lack of food but a lack of buying power. As in Ireland in the time of the Potato Famine, it was deemed better that miserable indigents should perish than that the iron laws of capitalist relations should be broken. What happened was considered inevitable. However kindly, well-informed people – economically mature – knew better than to monkey with the market.
There was no shortage of food for us, but we did not eat well. The quarters for the families of transient officers in Ambala – in a hostel of a sort – were gloomy places, a square blocky building marooned in a well-stamped compound of bare ground. Rooms were tall and ill-lit (keep the heat out at all costs!), the light growing dim in upper corners that needed whitewash. The old paint on the shutters was sun-blistered and flaking. Senile fans, joined to the electricity supply by frayed wires, creaked around hardly able to disturb the tepid air. The servants and the cleaners, looking unconscionably elderly, padded the quiet public rooms and the corridors, weariness falling from them like dross. The whole place was suffused with an undefeatable lassitude.
The mournful dining room unnerved even us children. Our usual hearty appetites had deserted us; we pushed the food around on the plates. Mulligatawny soup was the sole triumph of the kitchen. After that, the cook fell back, as if imagination was exhausted, to soups of the Brown Windsor variety, lumps of gristly meat in swamps of bhindi or brinjal, drowned potatoes, followed by sweetish custardy things of a yellow hue. Outside the hostel I had seen peasants and coolies taking a midday break on their heels in the shady lee of a wall, eating interesting messes from a battered tin plate, scooping up rice and lentils, folding chapatis around cumin- or turmeric-tinged vegetables. After a time I asked my father why we could not try what even the lowest-placed servant enjoyed. My father viewed without enthusiasm the prospect of an Indian diet. In matters of food, though he was not fussy, his tastes inclined to the pork, sausage, and pie-laden ideal of his pig-keeping Lincolnshire childhood. But he explained to me that orders had been handed down from the highest source in Delhi that British officers were not to use the standard foods of the Indian troops. Rice and chapati, in particular, were not to be eaten.