by Pico Iyer
Thus ends the story of my friend’s generation, or my parents’ (Naipaul arrived in England in 1950, the same year as my father, who lived just a few hundred yards away from him in Oxford), and as the British Empire has given way to the American and then the International one, as the classic colonial refugee has given way to the Global Soul, what was once a binary relationship is now many-pronged, spraying out into every direction at once. The latest Indians raised in convent schools are likely to find themselves in Harvard Business School or San Jose or Sydney or Toronto; while V. S. Naipaul and his brother went to England, and became writers rooted in tweeds and The Spectator, their nephew and niece both went to Canada to write in the Empire of the future (where London is just a suburb, and Graham Greene a “First Nation” actor who starred in Dances with Wolves).
Naipaul’s direct contemporary, from the West Indies, Derek Walcott, dodged disappointment by going to America instead (and keeping one foot in the islands—his principal figure being Odysseus, the wanderer who never loses a keen sense of home, and whose journey is always back to his family’s harbor); his successor, from India, Salman Rushdie, could afford to turn his back on England because he’d grown up there, and had written a whole half-Moorish book of sighs as a celebration of Indian pluralisms, an act of proprietary nostalgia that could have been called The Enigma of Departure. The lyrical reminiscences of the precious stone set in the silver sea, which used to be the province of Indians, could now be written by people like Kazuo Ishiguro, who, even as the Britain around him was exploding to the sound of Johnny Rotten or Irvine Welsh, was writing of a soft, prewar England of stiff upper lip that was close enough to him for him to see through.
Nowadays, the latest Indian kids, in Birmingham and Vancouver and Brampton, Ontario, find their voices in movies with masala in the title, or in Hanif Kureishi’s bad-boy tales of Indian boys on ecstasy sticking out their tongues at old fogies from both continents; yet still a residue of melancholy remains. In the elegiac, poetic novels of Romesh Gunesekera, a Sri Lankan exile based in London, all his fellow Sri Lankans are caught between a beloved homeland that is being torn apart—when it’s not being turned into a Shangri-la hotel—and the Victorian houses and “flat, newly built motorways” of England, where “crumbled glass sparkled like a Shangri-La night under our feet.” His characters can go everywhere now—they stay on the twenty-fifth floor of “smart-card” hotels—and have access to everyone, but the return addresses on the faxes they receive are blurred, and their messages get cut off because the answering-machine tape’s used up. “I know how to live with only a modem and a strip of plastic,” says his deeply lonely and displaced narrator, just before a matriarch (who seems to be the soul of old Sri Lanka) dies and is buried at a London funeral without mourners, “but with each jolt I find I yearn for a story without an end.”
And as in any love story that divorce does not really terminate, complications never seemed to end: I happened to be in London on Poetry Day in 1995, when the BBC asked its listeners to vote for their favorite poet. The winner (after the responses of 7,500 people were tabulated) was, to many people’s surprise, Rudyard Kipling, Margaret Thatcher’s favorite poet, as well as one of Gandhi’s. “It must be an awful thing,” I remembered his writing, “to live in a country where you have to explain that you really belong there.”
My Indian friend, though it sounds too perfect to be true, had always hoped to make it in England as an actor, and I went along one evening to see him in a play in the West End, on the Strand, just across from India House and the Bush House the play mentioned. It was a piece written by one of Britain’s most distinguished playwrights, drawn from his boyhood years in India, and yet it followed the pattern of almost every English account of India, as a story of a young Englishwoman haunted by some doglike, “Englished-up” Indians who keep her in a constant state of sexual agitation. One of the actors on stage had actually played a judge in Passage to India, a magistrate in The Jewel in the Crown.
“Chelsea,” says an Indian who loves Tennyson and Macaulay, is “my favorite part of London” (his next sentence is “I hope to visit London one of these days”), and the play turns on a series of witticisms along the lines of “I cannot be less Indian than I am” or “Oh, I thought you’d be more Indian.” Next to me, an Irishman was lecturing his pretty young Indian girlfriend on the hazards of multiculturalism as they played out in her native Malaysia.
After the curtain came down, I went to the Opera pub nearby, to meet my friend, his makeup rubbed off and his fancy dress (if not his accent) put away for the night. “I know you’re not going to like me saying this,” he began (casting me, perhaps, in his private drama as a hypocritical Englishman), “but this is a very, very racist place, and it’s getting worse with all this political correctness. You get ahead by playing the exotic Indian, and this political correctness stuff is just another kind of fascism; another way of putting you in a turban.”
He’d had difficulty finding parts, I assumed (and it could not be easy finding parts for Indians with a RADA voice); the result was that he’d sometimes gotten gigs reading Kipling’s works for books on tape, and once had “swallowed my pride, and played a racist magistrate telling a black to go home.” Even in this play, he said, they’d wanted him to wear a turban—till he’d pointed out that, postpolo, an Indian was far likelier to be wearing jodhpurs.
“It’s getting to the point where they only let you play the parts you know,” he complained. “It’s like South Africa: we’re all getting ghettoized.” He blamed some of it on the Jews, “and I feel really angry after we fought to save them in the last war, and now they’re turning on the Indians.” What made it worse, though, were the other minorities. “The notion of a colored minority is a myth, because the Jamaicans hate the Trinidadians, and they both hate the Indians. But no one’s letting on.”
He would have been bitter anywhere, perhaps, but mobility had given him more people to blame, and the chance to turn every decision into one of race.
“The one good thing about England,” I said, to try to change the subject, “which almost redeems it, is the sense of humor.”
“English humor is so cruel,” he said, and he sounded so deeply shipwrecked, I didn’t know how to answer. “You know, I really miss that Indian thing of just giving a hug.”
But soon the curtain came up again, the vulnerability was covered in makeup, and he was telling me how he’d just gotten a call from the Nehru Centre, from one of Gandhi’s grandsons, as it happened, asking him to participate in a special reading. “Here it is, the bloody centenary of Tennyson, and the only ones celebrating it are the Indians! The only ones who care: don’t you think that says something?”
I said very little, maybe because I felt he wanted only a confirmation that would compound his various agonies, and he turned on me, bitterly, with “You’re so English!” (“English” now meaning formal, cold, reserved.) “If there’s one thing I don’t like about this country—and there are many things I love; otherwise, I wouldn’t be living here—it’s that they don’t admit to their feelings. They keep them all inside.”
He paused to take a breath, a sip of his beer, and to give me a genuinely warm and forgiving look.
“I mean, I love things here—like village cricket and going to the pub.” (The very two elements a lonely English expat in Paris had just singled out for me as the idealized England he missed.) “But the place is racist. It all depends on who you know, who you went to school with, all that kind of thing. And, of course, the other Indians here I really don’t have very much in common with. They’re from East Africa; they don’t know anything: they’re all Bangladeshi restaurateurs. They don’t even know how to say Ramayana.”
I didn’t know how to say Ramayana, either, so I kept quiet: there was nothing I could say if the place where he belonged was, almost by definition, the one where he didn’t want to be, and the place where he wanted to be was, almost by definition, the one that wouldn’t have him.
“I should let you go,” I said finally, since I knew where the conversation would go, and I had nothing to contribute to it.
“How terribly English of you. Saying you want to let me go because you want to go yourself.”
When I was five years old and (as it seemed to me at least) the only little Indian boy in Oxford, I had my first role ever, onstage, as the changeling in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, passed back and forth between fairy king and queen amidst the dreamy lakes and illuminated, spirit-haunted trees of Worcester College in Oxford. The Oxford University Drama Society must have been delighted to find a “real” Indian boy to play the half-real, motherless child, “stol’n from an Indian king,” in the play, and so, richly bribed with Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles and Corgi cars every day for two weeks, I got up each evening in turban and jeweled brooch and allowed myself to be fought over by rival worlds.
I knew far less about the “spicèd Indian air” than many of the English students around me, I’m sure, and probably had less interest in a place that was neither home to me nor exotic; many years would pass before I could see the aptness of the part (going to school in England, to learn that it was rumored, incredibly, that I was the son of a maharajah, and hearing for years kindly Englishwomen say to me, “You speak such good English, dear”). Certainly, I could never see how people like my Indian friend, and those of my parents’ generation, could have such a fondness for Oxford, the grimy, everyday industrial town in which I’d been born. England for them was Fabians and Romantic poets and high- and public-minded civil servants; it was Mountbatten, perhaps, and Jowett and Plato; for me, it was union strikes and fish and chips and the sound of broken glass when the pubs closed down at 11:00 p.m. I couldn’t really share their admiration for an England I knew too well, I felt, or their partisanship for an India I didn’t know at all. England—where they were fifty times as likely to be beaten up on the streets as a white (even in 1990)—was familiar as yesterday’s breakfast.
That part, of course, is the standard pattern of how a generation gap plays out across different continents in an immigrant household, and nobody is entirely smitten with the place where he was born. Through pure coincidence, my family had ended up following the very course of Empires, from India in the last days of the British, to England as it was falling under the spell of America, to America itself, in the mid-sixties, when the American Century was at its zenith and the psychedelic California in which we found ourselves was suddenly on every screen. Later, again by chance, I would go to Japan just as it was buying up Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures, in the late eighties, and becoming what looked to be a new center of gravity.
But what I also came to see, more slowly, was that some of the distance I felt might be the product of being a Global Soul, for whom all notions of affiliation are hazy; it wasn’t so much that my parents were born in India and I in England as that they knew they came from India (albeit a British India), where I always felt I came from nowhere. Our worldviews didn’t clash so much as they didn’t overlap; my parents knew where they belonged, what they believed, and where their allegiances lay, and remained unchanged in this for all their lives (in thinking that India was a home, and Pakistan was an enemy, and Macaulay and Churchill had been enemies to India); after fifty years of living in the West, they still, quite rightly, kept their Indian passports.
I, by contrast, lacked their furies and felt I’d inherited none of their enmities. I had no tradition to protect, I felt, and I reveled in those like Adorno saying, “It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” Instead of their passions, I (like many a Global Soul, I think) was more prone to floating dispassion; and instead of their fierce sense of right and wrong, I had a more unanchored, relativistic sense. “Perhaps there is an advantage in being born in a city like Monte Carlo, without roots,” says Brown, the suitably anonymous character in Greene’s Comedians (having seen his “unknown brother” Jones die along the international road), “for one accepts more easily what comes.”
The biggest difference between me and those of my parents’ generation, I felt, was that I’d never had a strong sense of departures (or arrivals); I’d grown up without a sense of a place to come to or from which to leave—and where someone like my Indian friend was caught in the space between two worlds, as between mother and father in a custody battle, someone like me, I figured, could (for worse as much as better) fit in everywhere. My friend had a map made up of clear divisions; mine was a shifting thing, in which everywhere could be home to some extent, and not home to some degree. My sense of severances was less absolute, and though I could visualize the partings in the old stories—the boy at dockside, carrying his family’s hopes across the seas, perhaps not to see them again for years—I knew I could get anywhere very soon, and nothing was final.
It was many years, then, before I could understand the spells that distance could create, in an age when people really might not know whether they would ever return and separation had a different meaning. It was many years before I could see pictures of my father, proud in his Indian formal wear, president of the Oxford Union, and realize that he was flanked on every side by the kind of Englishmen that an Indian might have dreamed of in Bombay (one would go on to become editor of The Times, one deputy prime minister; one would become head of the Liberal party, one the steady sage of the BBC). I imagined his family gathered round the crackly transistor radio in the small flat in the Bombay suburbs, listening to their distant hero on the World Service broadcast opposing such notions as “This House refuses to take itself seriously,” and I realized that by going halfway through the open door, he had allowed me to walk out of it on the other side.
One day, when I met my Indian friend, it was to find that, somehow, and unexpectedly, he’d set up house within his dreams: he’d met a highly eligible young Englishwoman—well-born, beautiful, intelligent, sincere, and highly successful—and this very picture of the blushing English rose had consented to be his wife. Now, as he spoke, in his Old World cadences, of the “human sufferings” and privations of an India he’d scarcely seen, she sat, quite literally, at his feet, eyes filling with tears at the thought of all he’d been through. Her father, I was not surprised to hear, was a domineering imperial type, still administering his own corner of Empire in the East; she was guilty, anxious to atone, a vegetarian.
Her eyes came to life as she spoke of the possibility of visiting her new in-laws, in the place her husband had worked so hard to flee; he said Hawaii sounded preferable.
A little later, when the romance was over, she would say that he was a hypnotist, another dark sorcerer from the East come to ensnare this young Englishwoman out of Forster; he had tried to turn her into an Indian woman, she complained, walking six paces behind him, and doing up his shoelaces. “Come now, my dear,” he had said, “what is this, Othello? In Thatcher’s England?”
But he had made one mistake that no shrewd Englishman would make, and that no Englishman of the old order would forgive: he had faked a ruling-class pedigree.
“I said I’d gone to Winchester,” he told me, a little defiantly, when I saw him next (down on his luck again, and sad), “because I felt I’d been there. I remember, when I was fifteen, a man in Singapore telling me, ‘You’re my little Wykehamist. You talk like a Wykehamist, you act like a Wykehamist, you believe, like a Wykehamist, that manners maketh man.’
“I thought of myself as an Oxonian,” he said, a little plaintively, “because Oxford is the home of lost causes.”
The last time I was in England, just for a week, to visit friends, I found myself walking towards Trafalgar Square, on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in August, to go to the National Portrait Gallery. Around me, policemen were leading cocky young boys with slicked-back dark hair, and women in veils, and black men in skullcaps through the streets, stopping the traffic as they passed. In the square itself, ringed by the century-old buildings that said CANADA and UGANDA and CANADIAN PACIFIC, and near the statue of George IV, a man
was standing on a platform, his voice rough with rage, and he was shouting, “There is no security in a state where there is no freedom. There are four million Muslims here in England. We are here as ambassadors of Islam.” Around him, massed under banners that said BIRMINGHAM, NOTTINGHAM, BLACKBURN, stood thousands of believers, gathered as one and looking towards the stage as if at a rally in Tehran or Damascus. Dark-bearded boys in militant T-shirts were telling passersby that they were here to bring peace; angry non-believers were telling them they were importers of war.
Certainly, the speech makers were not talking of equivocation: they had come to attack liberalism, they said, to challenge democracy and the secularism of the state; they were here to wield the sword of faith. Hundreds in the square were there as if to resist them, handing out leaflets, hastily spelled, about the treatment of women in Iran, or reading, in one case, from the Gospel according to John.
On the far side of the street, held back by police cordons, was a mob of other people, waving signs that said JEWISH SOCIALISTS GROUP and SHAME, STOP THE VICTIMIZATION OF WOMEN IN IRAN or, simply, HATE. The cacophony all round was loud enough almost to block out the public address.
“These people come from countries where you criticize the government, you are dead,” said a little old English woman seated on a bench. “But they want to come here and supplant democracy. These people are refugees from countries of oppression. And now they’re coming here and bringing their oppression with them. It doesn’t make sense, does it? Even if you think it’s wrong, what’s happening to democracy?”
The woman, I was coming to see, was not just a bystander caught in the cross fire; she had come here to join in the debate. British ardor comes in the form of resisting outsiders, and British patriotism arises mostly in response to attack; certainly, on this occasion, the British were giving as good as they got.