The following morning she was sombre. “Uncle Hugh says he’s cold and wants to linger in bed. Who’s going to take him breakfast?”
We both did, and for the first time in our lives found a frail old man dwarfed by an enormous bed and a multitude of pillows that propped him up. But his eyes sparkled as usual so Lily and I were lulled into a false sense of security.
Later that morning he wandered out into the winter garden wearing his heavy army overcoat. His eyes were bright and alert with a slight smile as though he was enjoying a private joke. “Make him comfortable,” whispered my mother. “Get him a mondah for his feet.”
Lily and I sat by him and that appeared to make him happy. After opening his eyes, he looked directly at me and said, “So! You finally finished school. Clever missy!” And after a slight pause, “You know you almost didn’t start.” He was referring to the pantomime of my first few months at school.
I grinned. I’d heard the saga so many times that I was immune to any implication.
“I taught you a song,” he remembered.
“You taught us many songs,” and Lily and I sang one about a sweetheart playing in our dolls house. He chuckled, obviously remembering others we had the sense not to air in polite company.
A few moments later he addressed us again. “You’re intelligent girls. Don’t waste your lives.” Exhausted by the effort he closed his eyes, letting us think he was asleep. He wasn’t. He had more to say. “Be careful you’re not left holding the ladder for someone else to climb!” Adding with a slight roar that was a pale shadow of his usual self, “And for pity’s sake, don’t go marrying some silly dope who’ll make you pregnant every five minutes.”
Lily and I giggled with embarrassment. Only our mother was allowed to speak to us about intimate matters but unbeknownst to us, Uncle Hugh knew his time was permanently running out and so was determined to have his last say for our benefit.
“I wish I was in Heaven sucking oranges.” A loud, clear voice announced his oft-repeated catch cry.
His favourite saying, though his choice of fruit was never explained, set me reminiscing. The youngest son of many siblings, he was indulged by his parents. As he often said, “I was wild as a young man. I couldn’t settle to anything.” Eventually, in sheer desperation, his mother, my great-grandmother, sold one of her houses to fund a trip to England. Believing he was too stupid to enter a profession, she decided he was to learn a trade instead.
World War I intervened and conned, like so many others, into believing it would be a six-month fiasco and that he’d be home for Christmas, his adventurous spirit egged him on to enlist as rank and file. He saw active duty on the Somme. Like many others of his ilk, his experiences must have been dreadful. He never spoke about them, except once, when he told me this story.
One evening in the trenches, knowing they would go over the top on the following day, chaplains of various denominations came around to visit the soldiers.
“You need to confess your sins,” his friend Algy told him, but my great uncle was young and therefore, in his eyes, invincible. Death was something that happened to other people. “Go on, confess!” ordered his friend.
When persuasion, persistence, pugnaciousness…nothing, would change my uncle’s mind, true friend that Algy was, he turned to the priest and announced loudly, “I’ve known this chap a long time. I’ll tell you his sins and you can give him absolution.”
That did the trick.
Next morning both friends were shot. As Uncle Hugh remembered, “Algy had so many bullets his body wriggled and flounced and spun three hundred and sixty degrees before slipping back into the trench. I had a moment of surprise and then I was hit.”
Uncle Hugh sustained a shrapnel wound to the head but (thank you, God) it was only a World War I bullet and not one that was a match for his skull. Unable to penetrate the bone the bullet turned sideways, damaged his left eye and knocked him unconscious.
From his story, at the start of battle, sandbags were stacked up to make low structures that provided shelter for soldiers as they fought. As the battle progressed, sandbags became inversely proportionate to corpses. In the extremes of battle there’s no time for sentimentality. As the body count increased, heaped-up corpses provided shelter.
In the case of my great uncle, since he was considered dead, his body was used for one last service to the Empire and added to a pile of corpses. He believed “someone” saw him twitching, retrieved his body and he woke up in a field hospital.
Because of this episode, a standing family joke grew up about bullets and thick skulls. But I remain eternally grateful to the incompetence of one particular German bullet of World War I vintage. Uncle Hugh’s presence in my early life was a wealth beyond description. Would that all bullets were as ineffective.
Blind in one eye was no handicap for him. He continued to go on shikaris. Tigers had already been hunted almost to extinction by the worst kind of predator – foreign rulers of a previous generation who saw it as “sport” to gun down these magnificent creatures. Now, dressed in his khaki army uniform that still fitted him after fifty years, Uncle Hugh went out for man-eating tigers. He also shot bird on the wing. I know. He brought them home for us to eat.
“Mind you don’t swallow a pellet,” and, “Make sure you chew in the front of your mouth,” came at us from my father at the head of the table as we feasted our way through wild duck roast. The implication was that invoking incisor function would make loose pellets easier to find.
At the end of the meal while we were awaiting pudding, it was an enthusiastic, “That was tasty, very tasty. Your mother has excelled herself. Don’t you love wild duck?” and he’d look expectantly around the table.
I don’t know, Father. I was too busy “minding pellets” and being an obedient daughter about the way I chew my food.
Mental rolling of the eyes and disbelieving shakes of the head were definitely called for. To this day I don’t remember the taste of wild duck, but I remain an expert on small, mincing, lower jaw movements.
Uncle Hugh spent the afternoon slipping in and out of wakefulness. At the end he looked intently at Lily and me as though he was trying to imprint our faces on his memory. He started to say something but couldn’t, so with a smile of such intense love, love that was to support me numerous times in my adult life, he silently, peacefully, gently died. It took a few moments for us to realise he had gone, he looked so happy, he was so tranquil.
It was a beautiful winter afternoon when Uncle Hugh chose to leave us. The sky was endless, an opaque, intense blue, the sun warm and the silence serene.
We buried him in the cantonments cemetery among his brothers as he wanted, and planted a laburnum sapling at his head so that each May the yellow blossoms would form a bright counterpane for his bed and each June he would be protected from the searing heat.
That evening, after Uncle Hugh’s funeral I had something important to say. Sidling up close to my father I sat beside him on the sofa and lowered my voice. “Daddy,” I said, reverting to baby language because from experience children get comfort and reassurance when their world is collapsing, whereas young adults are expected to be strong and cope unaided. “Daddy, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave Kanpur.”
“Neither do I.” The response was immediate, hard and sharp. “But we have no option. The infrastructure is breaking down around us, the local people are hostile and there’s no future for us in this country.”
I knew about the failing infrastructure and local aggression – I lived with that every day. But the sentence that had dogged my life, that was trotted out periodically but never explained – there’s no future for us in this country – had been used again. I wanted to know why.
“You know why,” was accompanied with a wry half smile, his usual stoic face showing no signs of the desolation he must have felt at watching his family fall around him, and no new blood to replace them, no continuity after a hundred-odd years. “But you obviously want me to explai
n.”
He reflected for a moment before turning to me. “We don’t belong here,” and seeing me ready to bristle, he explained himself. “Ok, you may feel you belong in this tiny patch of land that is your home, but you don’t belong in India. For a start, you don’t, or won’t, speak the language. It’s impossible to live in a country and not speak the language. What will you do if you have to go to court, God forbid.”
We have to leave my home, the land of my birth, because I’m not fluent in Hindi?
For a split second I assumed he was joking, realised he wasn’t and switched my attention to the problem until common sense asserted itself. Eleven years and lots of private tuition hadn’t helped me master more than a smattering of the local language so what hope did I have now? Plus it didn’t make sense. The Indian girls in school broke their necks to learn English and yet I was being penalised for proficiency in my mother tongue.
My father continued as though I hadn’t spoken (I hadn’t), “What if you want to buy a house? You won’t be able to read the documents so God knows what you’ll be signing. You’ll be a sitting duck to be exploited.”
I was bemused. Why would I want to buy a house? I have a home already.
As though he read my mind, that thought was killed off with his next sentence. “There won’t be any money to maintain this house. Not with inflation and corruption the way it is. We’ll be lucky if we’re not beggared during my lifetime. You’ll end up a recluse, living in two rooms and watching the rest of the place fall to ruin around you. You’ll long for your death as the only release from a lifestyle you’ve outlived. It’ll break your heart long before it breaks your spirit.” He stared away into space so I knew his mind was travelling far away and wondered what else was coming. “Besides, it’s immoral to continue to live like this when half the world is homeless.”
He gave me a moment to digest his words before continuing. “Your best bet would be to sell this place and get something smaller, more manageable, in the city, but how would you like to live in the bazaar? With the crowds, the noise, the pollution, the smell!”
A brief moment of silence passed before he went on, “That raises a few points. At the moment you go into the marketplace and are revolted by the smell. If you live there the smell will be ‘home’ to your children. They will come into cantonments, breathe fresh air and feel strange and unwelcome. They’ll go back to the stinks and know they’ve come ‘home’.” He made sniffing movements to accompany his words and I knew he was trying to lighten the mood so I dutifully tittered, but his meaning was totally beyond my experience and therefore my comprehension.
“Besides, what will you use for money to support yourself, even if this house provides a roof over your head? There are not enough jobs for everyone and those available are not destined for you. Further study won’t guarantee you a job to support you in the manner you’ve come to expect.”
He shifted his position on the sofa so there was a slight gap between us. “And then there’s the counter currency. You can’t do anything in this country without recourse to black money. Are you seriously telling me you’ll accept bribes? If that’s what you’re planning then please don’t tell me. I’d prefer not to know.”
We all prized our father’s reputation for honesty. It was his lifelong salute to his father whose character was equally well regarded. Our father never took bribes. We were witness to the fact that he never even accepted gifts. Every Christmas afternoon workers from the dufta, his office in the mill, attended our house with fruit and Indian sweets and it was my task to tell them my father couldn’t accept their presents. Out of respect, the workers kept their eyes downcast while I stood a foot or two distant, bowed my head and spoke. Then, regardless of my inclination, I slowly turned and walked away, no rushed movement although I couldn’t wait to be gone.
Traditionally the offer of phal-phu, that is fruit and flowers, was considered a gift as compared to anything more expensive that could constitute a bribe. The ruling classes from a previous generation were well known to encourage toefa from their workers at Christmas time. Not satisfied with subju-gating and exploiting them in numerous other ways, they were happy to go that step further and accept presents their workers could ill afford. It added a whole new, unpleasant, meaning to the phrase Taking food out of the mouths of babes.
We knew our father was above that.
That evening the silence lengthened as consideration of the counter currency that plagued the country filled our minds. Presently my father continued.
“Who will you marry? There are no Christians left. They’ve all moved on elsewhere and you know the Indian boys will never marry you. They have to marry their own people. All the integrated marriages you see are disasters. They might become the norm in twenty or thirty years but are not acceptable now.”
In a soft voice as though he was talking more to himself than to me, my father went on. “It was hard enough in my time. When our family came north they showed a touch of genius. That moved us into another sphere of society. Though we enjoyed the spoils of wealth we became isolated from our community by virtue of education, opportunities…way of life, that sort of thing.” He paused and it was obvious that memories were popping out at him from all over the place. He was living proof that success comes with its own price, a price that is often passed on to the next generation. And the next.
“I’m lucky I met your mother,” he continued. “People say she ‘did well’ in marrying me because of my wealth, but if truth be told, it is I who am the lucky one. If I hadn’t met her I’d probably have remained a bachelor as the price of climbing out of our community.”
He looked around the drawing room and smiled at an inner joke. “And, look at the fun I would have missed!”
Oh dash, I thought, he’s going to start on his never-ending store of embarrassing tales about us as children.
But he didn’t.
“We are too different. Our culture is different, adopted from a far-off island and left over from a bygone era. Our customs are different, the songs we sing, the books we read, the clothes we wear, the respect you expect and take for granted.”
I liked the free movements possible with dresses and trousers. I didn’t want the restrictive clothes that would become the norm for my classmates. I liked popular radio music and spent many hours singing along to my long-playing records. I loved reading Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Philip Oppenheim and whatever else of a similar nature that I could find. Earle Stanley Gardner paperbacks lay around the house but we were never encouraged to read them. The book covers usually portrayed scantily clad women, and the imbalance of power portrayed in the male–female relationship of the protagonist and his sidekick was something our parents found unacceptable for our exposure. Our role models were always strong, intelligent women who took respect for granted, not dizzy, vacuous blondes.
The question that begged to be asked was Why? Why are we so different from the norm? As my father continued to speak it gradually became clear.
“Moving from Goa to British India in the mid-1800s was an enormous undertaking for our ancestors. The language was different, the clothes, the food…everything. So, like migrants anywhere in the world, they adapted. They had no choice. They aped the more powerful people in society, their foreign masters, as a way to facilitate their success.”
So effective was their adjustment that my Goan ancestors gave up their own culture and language. They were compelled to. If they didn’t, their success would have been stymied. It worked. They were exceptionally successful in life and business and as a direct consequence my sisters and I had a marvellous childhood.
“Would you want to do without the results of their success?” asked my father, prompting me to review the minutiae of my life.
I didn’t think about the big house, the motor vehicles, the security of a warm bed and enough food. Those I took for granted. Instead I remembered the fun of preparing for Christmas, the delicate handling of age-old decorations, the ingenuity of inve
nting lyrics to match a tune when the words were indecipherable, the resourcefulness and above all, the satisfaction of re-using what was available. I remembered about being scratched to death by unforgiving thorns when pruning roses, singing around the piano, Aunt Betty’s parties and the laughter, wit and fun that was never far from the surface.
“Do you remember what Kitty said about adopting a new culture?”
Aunt Kitty had come from Goa at the tender age of seven, fluent in Portuguese and Konkani as most Goans were at that time. As children do, she quickly mastered English at her convent school and continued to use her native tongue at home with her parents.
That wasn’t good enough for the nuns. As she had often told us, “I was berated severely if I was caught using the odd word in Portuguese or Konkani. They called it that peasant stuff. So we gradually spoke more and more English and in time forgot our language, our music, our dances and everything that went with it. To all intents and purposes we became British. We had to become Black British!”
What Aunt Kitty didn’t say, what none of us ever said, because obvious statements don’t need articulation, was that Goa is the only state on the Indian subcontinent that had never been pink on the map. Our racial heritage had never included the Empire. The irony was beyond ironic.
What Aunt Kitty also didn’t know, what none of us understood, was that removing a common language is a short cut to fracturing the social cohesion of a people. Language is so closely interwoven with the culture and way of life, that it bonds people together and fosters a sense of belonging. Regional languages often include words that are unique to that culture, something that cannot be translated, only explained. Take away the common language and people lose their identity and attachment to their community. Taking away our language weakened us as a people and alienated us from our roots.
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