by Michael Foss
‘That damn fool, he’ll break his neck one day, and probably ours as well.’ My mother sniffed her disapproval. She disliked tipsiness, though she saw it often enough at parties and at the Club. Such behaviour made her wonder about the wisdom of promoting Indian officers too quickly. ‘He gives us all a bad reputation,’ she complained.
But my father would have none of it. A cautious man himself he admired gallant and daring behaviour even when it bordered on the reckless.
‘Nonsense,’ he replied. ‘A fine officer, Tommy Masood, though perhaps a little wild. He’ll calm down. Anyway, the horse was under control. It was just the high spirits of a cavalry man, letting off steam.’
My father was protective towards India and strenuously defended all things Indian against the easy flow of calumny that so often came from the British. He approved of Indian officers and recommended them for promotion. He liked to meet them socially. He wanted to get their take on his beloved Indian Army that was soon to be left in their hands.
One evening, when a high-ranking Indian officer was visiting on military business, my father had invited him to the Club for dinner. It was a Saturday and my father had forgotten that Club rules decreed uniform or dinner jacket for dinner on the weekend. Both father and guest were in civilian clothes. As they entered the dining-room, anxious servants tried to head them off. My father was indignant, misunderstanding the reason for rejection, thinking that it had something to do with the presence of an Indian guest not officially cleared with the Club committee. He grew bothered and he began to stutter loudly. Then it was explained to him, in a low embarrassed aside, that the trouble wasn’t in the invitation. The problem was that they were improperly dressed.
The day was saved by a thoughtful British compromise. Father and Indian guest were permitted to dine, but their table was pushed to the far edge of the dining-room and placed behind a screen, so that other members would not be offended by the lax conduct of officers who should have known better.
Government would pass into Indian hands, certainly. But surely, the attitude was, proper forms should be maintained. There was no place, even at this moment, for slovenly or boorish behaviour.
*
In general, in our family, we went our separate ways. Parents and children lived almost as strangers in the same house, our lives mediated through the care of servants. My brother and I relied on Sami for household information.
No common interests bound us, neither sport, recreation nor hobby. Family outings were so infrequent I remember them still with a sense of surprise: an afternoon sailing on Husain Sagar, my brother and I pushed off to make shaky progress on the placid lake while our father settled himself behind a book in a little park by the perimeter road; a visit to a nawab’s palace in Hyderabad (was it the Salar Jang palace, or the Jahannuma palace of Asman Jah?) where a solemn man in a garment like a frock-coat led us through vast shadowy rooms and past a stupefying number of painted lead soldiers – many battalions of infantry and cavalry, batteries of gunners, camel troops and elephant troops, Moghuls and Marathas, the soldiers of Tipu Sultan, the scarlet of the East India Company, the khaki drab of the present. I remember also all of us standing under wayside trees, my parents smoking pensively, as we watched garlanded cattle led through village streets for the Pola festival.
So it was with some astonishment that we received one night an offer from Father to accompany him to the airport very early next morning. Planes were strange business in those days, a mysterious technical magic that promised excitement and some danger. My father had been summoned to Jhansi for some high-level meeting, important enough to make flying imperative.
We rose before sun-up and went in the eerie pre-dawn hush to the lines of the Indian sepoys to rouse the naik – the corporal – who would drive us to the airport. The long barrack room was silent with still sleeping men, rows of dark figures on rope-strung charpoy beds, huddled under thin blankets or with limbs thrown wildly open to the night air. The naik sprang from his bed in confusion, alarmed to see in the first glimmers of the day his colonel standing by the foot of the bed in service dress uniform. The wiry dark body of the young soldier was sweaty from sleep or nerves as he hurriedly pulled on his clothes.
We drove away in silence, seeing the dullness of the cantonment with all its shabby dirt beginning to unroll in the dawn. A few men and women plodded by the road with the steadfastness of the poor. One or two men came out of the bushes adjusting their dhotis. They had just relieved their bowels by the wayside. Father was glum and preoccupied. He tugged awkwardly at his Sam Browne belt, as if it were out of place, and drummed his fingers on his leather-covered cane.
At the airstrip – the few low buildings behind a wire fence did not seem to deserve the title of airport – we dropped my father off. We all stood by the open doors of the staff-car while he finished a cigarette. He mentioned the day of his return, ordering the car for such and such an hour.
When he had finished smoking he gave us a brief handshake and turned away muttering something like, ‘Well, I suppose it’s just about finished now.’ What did he mean? I watched him walk away towards the reception building, very much the military man, tall but not stooped, in early middle age.
TWELVE
Time’s Up
THE MATRIARCH WAS dead, just short of her hundredth year. In the hot season the family, without Father, had returned to the house of Mrs Sharp-Smith in Coonoor, to occupy once again the little cottage under the swaying eucalyptus trees. But the old lady had slipped away after years of illness and decline. In her last days she had cast a long shadow over her estate. Now the hushed voices ceased whispering and curtains were drawn back in long-darkened rooms. In the drawing-room, the silk shawl like a funereal drape came off the piano, with its beautiful case of figured wood, and a halting music stumbled, for the first time in years, from the french windows.
At the end of the garden, in the little box of our cottage, we too heard the music. This was something new for me. Previously, in our helter-skelter Indian days, I had heard snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan, or perhaps Gracie Fields, on a wind-up gramophone, the needle squealing along scratches on much-travelled 78s. Or I had been momentarily entangled in the mysterious threads of an Indian raga coming from the bazaar. But in general, excluding the military thump and blare of the regimental bands, the Raj at home seemed to do without music.
Poking my head around the edge of the tall window I heard the inevitable Für Elise. The fingers, it seemed to me, were flying over the keys. I wanted to learn that legerdemain, too, to release the trembling notes. My mother made enquiries and discovered a young American, somehow adrift in south India, who taught the piano. She was an energetic woman with a fresh, open face and plenty of bounce, and she had a thoroughly up-to-date approach to the teaching of beginners. She arrived with a bulging music-case and a long slim wooden box under her arm. A space was cleared on the floor below the Sharp-Smith piano, on the faded geometry of an old Persian rug, and the wooden box, hinged along its long side, was opened up to reveal a full-sized dummy keyboard with gleaming black and white notes, able to go up and down, but silent.
On my knees on the floor I pressed down the dummy keys. The teacher called out the names and I got to know them, pressing them singly or gathering them into clumps of chords. But no voices sounded. The real piano loomed above me, bursting with unrealized music, its lid closed in resentment. On the floor my brother and I took our first steps in classical harmony.
‘Please, miss,’ we begged, ‘couldn’t we play something? Just a few little notes.’
‘OK, kids,’ she replied briskly, ‘you’ll be playing soon enough. But first let’s get with these enharmonic relationships.’
Disappointed and more sullen by the minute I descended into those theoretical thickets where no notes sang. The hesitant fumbling of childish fingers might have been good enough in the India of the old days, but this scientific method pointed to the new way of the world. After a few weeks I was sick of it. I r
efused to enter the music room and left my brother to grapple with silence alone.
Some time later the piano was suddenly released from this modern reticence. Brazen old tunes, part of the traditional repertoire of this most democratic of instruments, disturbed the genteel quiet of the drawing-room. The daughter of Mrs Sharp-Smith, winding up her mother’s estate, had summoned an auctioneer from Bangalore to arrange for the sale of the many valuable bits of property in the house. The auctioneer was almost a caricature of his type, a plump beaming fellow in waistcoat and shirtsleeves, a few strands of coarse hair dragged over his dome, reeking of cigarette smoke and bonhomie.
During the day he busied himself with long lists of objects, his grin going from ear to ear since he had hardly ever seen such a treasure trove of furniture, carpets, china, ornaments and objets d’art gathered in one house. In the evening, in great good humour, he made a cheerful assault on the piano, pounding out unvarying chords in the left hand while the pudgy fingers of the right hand twinkled through the treble with the familiar tunes of the old favourites. Sometimes he launched into the words in a pleasant light tenor, and then the ladies gathered round were bold enough to join in tremulously, even when ‘Roll out the barrel’ was noisily sprung upon them.
With the lots catalogued, the jolly man departed, waving a sweaty hand. He left, in the sombre and fragile household, a memory of bold zest that slowly receded like the smile of the Cheshire Cat. Later, my mother told me that many things of heart-breaking beauty and unknown value were knocked down for a trifle and snapped up by questionable hands. Many small things were stolen. Times were getting rough, the old certainties of property were slipping. A collection so laboriously put together from all the corners of the East, the fruits of empire (some of it ill-gotten perhaps, but always selected with taste and discrimination), rested on the stability of the old order of the Raj. Mutability threw the collection to the winds, and in the emerging India, struggling with its fate, who cared where such things landed?
Months later, just before we left India, news came to my mother in Secunderabad of a tragedy at Uplands in Coonoor. Mrs Sharp-Smith’s daughter, herself elderly and choosing to stay on in the echoing house that had been for so long her family home, was surprised in the night by thieves. There were cries, panic, blows that were too hard for an old lady, which killed her. She ended where she had been born, a white face in an eastern land she thought belonged to her. It was reported that the thieves, when they were caught, protested that they had been frightened, as if by a ghost, a hag-faced spirit of the night. They struck out blindly. They had not known that the house was still occupied. They thought it was a relic of the departing Raj, a place from which something useful might be salvaged.
*
Back in our house in Bolarum, when did I know we would finally have to leave India? The thought came stealthily, a rumour more than clear knowledge, a matter of feeling more than of words. A creeping melancholia. The midnight hour chosen as auspicious by the astrologers – 14 August 1947 – had come and gone. Independence, to sighs of amazement, had truly arrived. Mr Nehru, speaking after the moaning of a conch-horn, had been in his element.
‘No doubt about it,’ my father told me later, ‘Nehru carried it off splendidly. Plenty of old-fashioned rhetoric in the grand manner. Honed by reading Pitt or Macaulay and by pleasant memories of university days at Cambridge. But very much in tune with the educated Hindu mind, which has a feeling for cosmic vastness without being able quite to put a finger on the perils of the moment. But everything was put in question by the absence of Gandhi. Where was he? He was the most important man. His absence was ominous, a question mark, a ghost at the feast.’
Gandhi was at his ashram in Calcutta from where he spoke to a foreign newspaperman. ‘I have no message to give on independence,’ he said, ‘because my heart has dried up.’
I watched my father wither a little, too. He was forced to witness the break-up of the unified Indian Army, the one disciplined organization that gave him hope for comity and understanding in the sectarian bitterness of the new India where partisans chopped up opponents with fiendish enthusiasm. Mountbatten, both dreamer and schemer, had hoped that the divided land – now India and Pakistan – would accept a common army, at least for a transitional period. A forlorn hope, torn to bits by both sides. Regiments with a history of 200 years and more, in which Afghans and Baluchis and Jats and Sikhs and Dogras and Rajputs and Bengalis and Tamils and many more had rubbed shoulders easily enough, were dismembered. Baluchis and Pathans and Punjabi Muslims marched north and west; Rajputs and some Bengalis and Tamils went south or east. Sikhs, across whose ancestral lands the partition went, knew themselves only to be Sikhs. Before, all had been colleagues in arms. Now they were rivals, potential foes, bearing the load of nationalism.
My father, anticipating the inevitable exodus of British officers, wanted to transfer to the British Army. But he was just over the permissible age limit, though he was not yet forty-four. I saw my parents working hard to turn their minds towards England, putting behind them the habit and expectation of their adult years. Plans had to be made for life in a far land they did not know. Prospectuses for strange-sounding English schools began to arrive in the post. I looked at pictures of sleek little manikins trying to appear happy in blazers and shorts. To me, they looked revoltingly complacent and tidy. My mother began to leaf through back numbers of The Lady, pondering what spot in the cloud-damped landscape of England might suit us best.
*
In the years of his retirement, when my father’s recollection was suffused with the sunset glow of Indian memories, I asked him what he thought of Karl Marx’s opinions on the history of the Raj. He said he had never read them. Though he was a long-standing Labour supporter, my father drew political allegiance more from instinct and the heart than from social or political theory. In the General Strike of 1926, when he was a young lance-corporal in the Coldstream Guards, he had marched with his company to Victoria Park in Hackney, to the poor man’s town in the East End of London. They settled in to stay, put up tents, dug latrines, posted sentries, looked steely and warlike. They had instructions to counteract ‘the forces of riot and disorder’. The exceedingly well-bred Guards officers, swishing their swagger sticks, seemed keen on a confrontation. The company was issued with live ammunition. Was it the intention to shoot fellow-countrymen? Strikers whose sin it was to ask for work and a living wage? My father’s disgust stayed with him for the rest of his life. To him, politics was a simple matter of fairness and justice, and he needed no continental scaffolding of theory built by Marx on Hegel and Feuerbach. Despite his experience and reading my father had never quite overcome the innate anti-intellectual prejudice of the insular English.
But I looked up the passages from Marx for him, and out of politeness he read them.
‘Well, there’s some food for reflection there,’ he told me, ‘but it’s all a bit beyond my simple mind. I’ll give you my opinion, for what it’s worth.’
He looked pleased to be asked, though he always affected the plain dumb common-sense of the man-in-the-street.
‘Marx was certainly right about one thing,’ he went on, ‘when he points out, for example, that the rising standard of living in mid-nineteenth century England rested largely on the miserable starvation wages paid to Indian labourers. But I can’t see much sense in the rest of it. This man does not see India in his mind’s eye. I can’t get any feeling from him for the people, the landscape, the life. He reduces human beings to ciphers in a big theory. Marx thought that the older history of India, before the Raj, was contemptible. As far as I understand it, he thought India needed the Raj, to ripen the land into the capitalist mode of production, without which there could be no revolution of the people. So the Raj imposed a harsh discipline – a necessary pain – like a schoolmaster whipping a failing pupil. It didn’t seem to matter if the schoolmaster was also vindictive and cruel.
‘But that’s all nonsense to me. I see this Marx as an aut
horitarian and a bully. A mental bully, trying to impose the authority of a theory, which may or may not have large elements of truth but had no place in it for the poor old Indian peasant. Now, I see the matter the other way round. I think that the Indian experience of the Raj was necessary to reform British imperialism, to temper the arrogance and stupidity of conquerors, and to teach us some democratic humility. All this wisdom, of course, came at a high cost to the Indians themselves.’
We were talking in a pub and it was my turn to get the beer. When I returned my father had a distant look in his eye. He was ready to sum up.
‘I took one big lesson from all my years in India,’ he continued. ‘It seemed to me that the Raj, taken overall, was infatuated with India, as well it might be, considering the wealth of the culture, the wonderful variety of the people, and the contribution to world history. For me, and I was not untypical, India was one long love affair. Unhappily, as in most affairs of the heart, we members of the Raj botched it. The relationship went sour. We lacked sympathy and understanding. You may say that the Indians also had their faults. True enough. But it is not the job of a subject people to remedy the defects of the masters. We wanted too much and gave too little, not in terms of administration or politics or economics where, I think, we did quite well, but in our paucity of imagination, our stuffy emotions and lack of heart. Another case, I’m afraid, of British constipation.’
I was surprised that my father, a reticent man, had let himself go to this extent. Yes, I thought, in India we were lucky, very lucky. We were dealing with peoples and cultures that let us off easily. They preferred to expend their venom on each other. We came out with relatively clean hands (in so far as a greedy and selfish empire can ever be said to have clean hands). I think they saw us as lame cases who needed a helping hand. Or were we rescued just by intelligent good humour? They saw our difficulties and limitations and it amused them to play along. I recalled a tale told by an Indian writer about Govind Pant, the Chief Minister of United Provinces. Pant, as a young lawyer, was returning to his village dressed in Indian clothes: