by Pico Iyer
A press conference was scheduled for 3:30 a.m., in the building in which we were now captive, but then it was delayed—and delayed again—so that all the world’s media could be present. Tom Brokaw jumped out of his pajamas to steady the nation on NBC, and rumors began to circulate about a security guard. The whole night was one of jumpiness and jitters—every time a beeper went off, people screamed; and every package on the floor looked newly sinister. There was a new sense in the air of how one tremor in Atlanta could set a whole world shivering.
Finally, at dawn, the press conference was completed, and I was allowed to go back to my room next door. I looked out of my window, in the early morning drizzle, to the park below, which for weeks had been so crowded that one could hardly move, and where concerts had continued till 2:00 a.m. each night (forcing me to write in the toilet).
Now, though, there was no one in sight save for a few men in gray jackets, FBI in yellow on their backs, and a handful of others, in dark blue and green uniforms, poking through paper clips in the early rain. Everywhere, a sad abandoned mess of green benches overturned and strewn garbage.
An electric flame still burned outside the Coca-Cola Olympic City, and a sign kept flashing in front of the empty square: YOU ARE HERE. But nobody was there in the postdawn quiet outside the AT&T Global Olympic Village (“Imagine a world without limits”), and the World Party area was just a jungle of folded chairs. The whole city, from where I looked, resembled a party of silent ghosts arrested in midbreath, and the only signs of life in sight were a Department of ATF van (EXPLOSIVES INVESTIGATION, it said on the side), and, in the middle of the cordoned-off street, in the rain, a single Good Humor ice-cream truck.
I remembered how, the previous night, when I’d raced out into the street in the chaos after the bomb exploded—sirens whirling around me and people crashing through police barricades—I’d seen a man grabbing someone else as people flew all around. He’d been a white man, and the man he’d grabbed looked like a visitor from the Middle East (here, no doubt, to enjoy the festival of nations). “You see,” the local had all but spat in the bewildered foreigner’s face, “you see what happens when we let you people in?”
THE EMPIRE
I have been a queer mixture of the East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.… I cannot be of the [West]. But in my own country, also, sometimes, I have an exile’s feeling.
—JAWAHARLAL NEHRU
I can still remember, just, as a boy, growing up on stories of passage, nearly always of bright young boys from the colonies—tropical Dick Whittingtons—coming over to England to make their fortunes (the same England where I was reading of them): of Mohandas Gandhi, dreaming of becoming an upstanding English barrister, and schooling himself in French and dancing lessons and dandyish fashions long after he left the Victoria Hotel in London; of Lee Kuan Yew, later to say he’d always felt indebted to his British principal at the Raffles Institution for caning him, and coming over on the Cunard ship Britannia (shocked at the people copulating freely on the lifeboat deck) before returning to Singapore as Harry Lee, with the only starred First in Law at Cambridge; of Nelson Mandela, named after Admiral Nelson no less, combining in his person, those close to him had told me, “the perfect English gentleman and the tribal chieftain.” In the stories, the pattern was always the same: the young foreigner mastered the ways of Britain so fully that he was perfectly equipped to undo them, armed, as Michael Manley, the prime minister of Jamaica, and a Marxist anti-imperialist, would say, with “nothing more than the finest tradition of self-criticism taught in British schools.”
Now, though, as I sat overlooking the backs of the Cambridge colleges on an outstretched English summer evening—the light as lingering and golden as in any tropical boy’s imaginings—I was hearing a different second act. “The thing is, I admire the idea of England, but I can’t stand the reality.” My old Indian friend had a voice as plummy and rich as a major general’s, the kind they don’t seem to make any more. “I don’t know—call me sentimental, if you like; I suppose it’s the weak, Indian, wishy-washy part of me—but I always thought that England meant fairness and free choice and all that kind of thing, that this was the center of decency. And now, of course, I find I’m much more English than the English.
“I mean, at least before, there used to be some sense of compassion. I know a colonial master-slave relationship isn’t ideal, but if you’re a slave, it’s the best thing you’ve got. I suppose some people would say those were all myths, of decency or whatever, but it’s still better to have those positive myths than what we have now.”
I look at him in his New and Lingwood sweater, with the Coutts checkbook he’s made sure that I notice: he lives in a thatched Elizabethan cottage in the country, of the kind he must have dreamed of once, its address all bushes and thorns, “nr. Newmarket,” and I feel as if I’m watching someone play Othello after the theater has emptied and the lights are all turned off.
“I mean, if you’re an Indian, they’re happy to accept you so long as you speak like Peter Sellers and smell of curry and all that, because then you know your place. But if you don’t, you might as well forget it. Because the typical Englishman doesn’t understand that there is such a thing as class anywhere outside England, and that you or I are different from the Bangladeshi waiter at the local. The right wing want you to be nice smiling colonials, and the left wing want you to assert your solidarity and oppressedness by being ‘ethnic,’ and they refuse to allow you to be what you want to be. In many ways, the extreme right almost enjoy the extreme left—the Vanessa Red-graves—because they can see them as a good enemy. But if you’re sort of middle-of-the-road, you get run over by both sides.”
I look at him and don’t know what to think. The punts are drifting past the shortbread-colored towers, and the late-summer light is gilding the fields and distant spires as in the kind of watercolors the Empire sent around the globe. My friend has a big heart, I know, and a quick mind, but both are so lost inside the character he’s chosen to play that all I can hear, sometimes, is the sound of a lover disappointed, a boy who’s left everything he knows to pursue some ideal, unattainable woman, and arrives at her doorstep, only to find that she’s given herself over to some mobster from Las Vegas.
As our new world order spins, ever more intensely, so, too, do our dreams, and almost any immigrant who arrives today at the place he’s hoped for will find it’s become somewhere else. The day my friend and I meet in Cambridge, the paper announces that, when the twentieth century began, two-thirds of the map was colored pink, for Empire; now the only places left in that shade are places like Tristan da Cunha, Ascension, the South Sandwich Islands, and Pitcairn. When my friend ran away from home as a teenager, to come to England, it must have seemed the center of the world, in India; by the time he arrived, though, it was already a colony itself, looking across the waters at a half-distrusted master it secretly longed to emulate.
“None of this was in the English literature I grew up on,” he says as he bundles me into his car to drive through country lanes, past hedgerows and oaks, to a little country pub that serves the most delectable curries. “The only true English people you’ll find now are born abroad—maybe because they share our romance of England, and don’t know what the reality is. They’re much closer to the good qualities of England, at least as I imagine them, than anyone in England is.”
“It’s only we who live away from England,” says the character in Maugham, “who really love it.”
• • •
The story of migration I must have heard most deeply, growing up—piecing it together, only slowly, over the years—was the one of my own parents, coming to England just before the forces of globalism turned everything on its head. I can see my mother, neat in her English blouse and skirt, reciting the lyrics of Brooke and Shelley at the Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, and being rewarded by Mount Carmel sisters with playing cards of the Virgin Mary, which the girls swapped (she told me) as eager
ly as I and my friends did Soccer Stars; even now, any Jehovah’s Witness who comes to her doorstep, eager to convert the dark heathen within, will be greeted by a knowledge of the Bible more formidable than his own.
I can see my father, too, graduated from the Doctor Antonio da Silva High School in Bombay and coming over to England two years before she did, and three years after India won her independence, to the “dreaming spires” that both of them had read of in Arnold’s “Scholar Gypsy,” sent there by the beneficence of the South African industrialist Cecil Rhodes, who believed that to be born an Englishman was to be awarded first prize in the lottery of life.
Arriving at Oxford, my father had asked to be moved from his warm modern rooms to ones in the ancient cloisters, near Addison’s Walk, and near where the Prince of Wales had recently stayed; and had shivered all year in a historic place chilling to a boy from the tropics who’d never known autumn or winter before.
The one common link between my parents, as was not uncommon then, was the English history and literature in which they had been schooled, the one shared inheritance in a country as divided as Jerusalem, which gave the rest of us words like communalism; though both of them grew up in the same city and went to the same college, regional differences would have kept them apart in a world cut up into Hindu and Muslim and North Indian and South and caste and subcaste (one reason why Indians have always thrived in all corners of the world, and become among the great chroniclers of internationalism, I suspect, is that they were multiculturalists centuries before the term existed). The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (in the Fitzgerald translation) brought together what Hinduism and Brahminism tore apart.
When she was in her teens, my mother told me much later, she impressed my father (also in his teens, though already a professor) by reciting some lines of Tennyson to him; and on the last day of every school term, tears would run down the cheeks of the girls at Cathedral as they sang of England’s “green and pleasant land” and were ushered forth into the world.
The setting of Blake’s Jerusalem could never have been quite what the girls expected, if ever they took the boat to England, but the shock must have been many times greater when Britain became a suburb of the International Empire. The one thing “convent-educated” Indians were not prepared for, surely, was an England made up of Islamic fundamentalists (and of settlements like Glastonbury, where flaxen-haired kids sport names like Sita and Krishna and Ganesh); according to the British Tourist Association, the national dish of Britain now is curry (having triumphed, I assume, over doner kebab and pizza), and the most popular flavor ordered from the Domino’s pizza chain in the UK in 1994 was tandoori chicken. What seemed most to upset people like my Indian friend was that so many of the people in England now looked a lot like him.
To an English-born outsider like myself, the spicing of England was all to the good—the island has grown stronger and darker, like a mug of lukewarm water left to steep in 2 million Indian (and West Indian) tea bags; the Earls you meet these days in London are from Trinidad, and The Times will inform you, without apparent rancor, that there are more Indian restaurants in Greater London than in Bombay and Delhi combined. Insofar as Princess Diana was taken to be an avatar of the “New England,” it was not just because she brought “American” values—health clubs and Prozac and McDonald’s and talk-show therapeutics—into the mainstream; and not just because she upended the traditional order by allying herself increasingly with the rival, new aristocracy of the celebrity culture; but also because she was linked, romantically, to a Pakistani doctor and an Egyptian film producer, while visiting a debutante friend, Jemima Goldsmith, who’d married the captain of the Pakistani cricket team.
Yet those who’d always looked up to a certain England (brought to them, often, by homesick Oxford men abroad) were left not knowing where to turn. Recently, a friend told me, the readers of Sri Lanka, always eager to keep up with the latest in English letters, had asked the British Council to send them some voices of “Young England.” Ever sensitive to the niceties of racial diplomacy, the British had sent Hanif Kureishi (half-Pakistani), and then Caryl Phillips (born in the Caribbean). No, the Sri Lankans said, clearly disappointed: send us a real British writer (in other words, someone who looks like the people who held us down).
I went, one summer’s day in England, to watch an international cricket match at Headingley, in Leeds, on the fifth and final day of the First Test between England and the West Indies. Only six other people got off as I did at the tiny country station near the grounds, and all of them, I noticed, were of my parents’ age, or older. Perhaps this was because England had lost to Australia, to India, and to Pakistan in recent years and hadn’t, in fact, beaten the West Indies on British soil in twenty-two years (of the last forty-one matches between the two, the West Indies had won twenty-five and England two). It’s the unemployment in the Caribbean, the old people were saying as we walked towards the grounds, and besides, all the competitive fire’s gone out of England; there’s a special value placed on success if you grow up in one of those poor countries.
Around me in the stands, most of the plastic seats were unoccupied for this climactic day (because of the recession, said the men with rolled-up brollies); so few had shown up the previous day that everyone in attendance had been given free tickets to return today. Now I saw a few men in ties, scattered here and there, following the action on Walkmen, and two others dressed from head to toe as Ninja Turtles (or Hero Turtles, as they are ineffably known in Britain).
The man next to me wore a Bart Simpson baseball cap and delivered a passionate encomium to The Silence of the Lambs (“Fucking brilliant—amazing!”).
The players on the pitch, as I’d never seen before, had chalk on their faces, so they looked like Burmese village girls, and the ads around the grounds advertised Daewoo; one of the spectators nearby muttered about one of England’s players being “very patrician,” and was quickly told, “Actually, not so patrician: he grew up in the East End, and his father used to stand on the street selling birds. The trouble was, they were homing pigeons.”
On the radio, the famously articulate Old Etonian announcer, who had just dined with the Queen, was murmuring like a tributary of the Thames about “handsome strokes” and “cultivated cricketers” and shots pulled out “like a silk handkerchief being removed from a top pocket.”
So much of it was like the England I’d grown up with, watching the regal West Indians effortlessly thrash the combined Oxford-and-Cambridge team in the Oxford Parks: the redbrick buildings grouped together under chill gray skies, the hand-operated scoreboard and the puddle on the pitch, the intermittent clapping as batsmen returned to the pavilion after “ducks” or bowlers completed “maiden overs” with their “googlies” and their “Chinamen.” In one part of the stands, a small band of merry West Indians was playing barbershop ditties, and, as the match began to go against them, started to sing “Please, God, Please” (“I think,” said one of the fans around me, “it’s a West Indian rain dance or something”); before the match had begun, I gathered, the Yorkshire Club president, Sir Lawrence Byford (once Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary), had reminded the assembled throng that the West Indian lads should be treated “with the respect they are entitled to deserve” and had issued a stern headmasterly caution that “bad behavior and abusive language have no place in a cricket ground.” That hadn’t stopped one woman from stripping off her top in the “Arctic cold” to show off her independent spirit.
Now, though, as England began to close in on an unexpected victory, its fans struck up a beery, cheery chant of “God Save Our Pring” (as if to amend the “Queen Save the God” that West Indian steel bands play during Carnival), and the “man of the match” was given a jeroboam of champagne. In the national jubilation that followed, a member of Parliament suggested to the House of Commons that the prime minister and the sports minister be publicly thanked for the miracle (to which the Speaker replied that the government had played no part in
the victory, so no such thanks were in order). The one thing that was not so often mentioned—and more obvious to a visitor, perhaps—was that the main reason England had prevailed was that nine of its thirteen players came from the colonies—from Australia, South Africa, the subcontinent, and, in fact, the Caribbean (and “much the most orthodox and secure of the England batsmen,” according to the Daily Telegraph, had the newly typical English name of Mark Ramprakash); the one time in recent years England had fielded a team without any colored players—their style was a little languorous, the gentlemanly arbiters of cricket had suggested—it lost a five-day match before the third day was over.
This was not so much to say that the Empire had reversed direction as that the very sense of what direction it pointed in was somewhat by the by; the same day that a “pitifully small” crowd showed up at Headingley, 61,108 had packed into the high church of British sports, Wembley, to watch the London Monarchs take on Barcelona in the World Bowl championship of the newly popular American football league in Europe. There were cheerleaders and marching bands and cartoon characters performing somersaults, and the crowd, said the The Times, was full of “youth and keenness” as well as “almost universally wearing some form of Monarchs’ merchandise.” When the Monarchs held up their trophy—a forty-pound illuminated glass globe—in the stands, much as the English footballers had done in 1966 after winning the World Cup, the entire stadium had turned into a field of Union Jacks, and the players (all but four of whom were American) had gamely run around the stadium collecting and waving the English flag. It was “as fine a celebration,” a British sportswriter said, “as ever seen in Wembley” and for a while, England was back on top of the world. Not the dangerous plaything of hooligans (as soccer could be), not the polite diversion of gentlemen (as cricket occasionally was), American football had seemed to save the English from themselves.