There was an Indian flavour, too, in what we ate and drank. Bill’s favourite tipple was freshly squeezed lime-and-soda, a taste he’d acquired in the subcontinent. Except during our posting to chilly Ngorongoro in northern Tanganyika, he’d usually have one as soon as he got in from the office. I loved to aim the soda siphon into his chunky glass tankard, scattering the pips and betting which dimple they’d settle under. Racing my brothers to jump on his lap as the strains of ‘Lillibullero’ heralded the news from London, followed on Saturdays by the football scores, I’d triumphantly nurse his saucer of nuts, lightly fried with chilli, while we anticipated the results from the announcer’s intonation. Sundays, we usually had curry with chapattis, dal, mango pickle so strong it stripped the lining from your mouth and – when it could be ordered from the coast – Bombay Duck. The moment the tin was opened, the fetid stink betrayed it as fish, however, dark and stringy as a chocolate flake.
‘Why’s it called duck, then?’ I inevitably asked.
Bill shrugged with an amused look. ‘Things aren’t always what they seem in India.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ll have to go and see for yourself.’
I’d stare, heart racing, as he speared a fragment into the pot of pickle, manoeuvred out a chunk of mango and crunched it all together in his mouth. No one, surely, could consume such a combination and survive. But Bill simply laughed, ha-ha breath fiery as a flame-thrower. His maroon slippers also came from Bombay, the leather uppers conserved through periodic re-solings, instruments of terror when we children misbehaved.
The obvious source of information about Bill’s life in India was my mother. How could he have resisted seducing her with tales of the gorgeous East during their courtship in Blitzed-out, monochrome London, to which he returned after Indian Independence in 1947? But she became ever more remote after his death. Barely forty, her hair was dappled-grey with shock by the time she finally returned from Switzerland. She seemed dazed, unreachable, when she first visited us at school. Despite my own bewildered grief, I was painfully struck by how unwilling she was to discuss what had happened. She had so many difficult practical issues to address, I suppose: where we’d live now, how she was going to manage with three of us still to educate.
Perhaps her unwillingness to talk about Bill was because she was trying to protect us. More likely, she was barely coping herself, now that history had repeated itself. My father was the second husband she’d lost to a violent death. The first was an impoverished Irishman she defied her outraged parents to marry, who drowned in the oil spill of his torpedoed destroyer. While she was pregnant. She’d never mentioned him much, so I was scandalised when his photo appeared one day next to Bill’s on her bedside table in the red-brick terrace house she bought us in Gorleston-on-Sea – a decaying Norfolk seaside resort where her father had practised law and my frail grandmother still lived, in a flat on the cliffs.
‘What’s he doing there?’ I once asked with adolescent resentfulness.
My mother smiled uncertainly. But I began to connect Sub-Lieutenant Hopkins with the misty inner world into which she increasingly retreated.
That first encounter after Bill’s death established the pattern. Even years later, her face would cloud if anyone asked about Africa. Outwardly, at least, I observed her wish that we accept that England was home now, though I hated the huddle of dreary, fog-prone streets facing the brown North Sea wastes which was Gorleston. In such circumstances, Bill’s life in India seemed as remote as Mars on the few occasions I gave it any thought. Once a letter came from a former police colleague, now stationed in Assam, covered with crossed-out addresses and stamps from three continents, which my brothers and I fought over for our collections. But whether my mother even answered it, I don’t know.
The other person who could have told me about Bill’s previous life was his sister Pat, who followed us back from Africa some years after his death, settling in an equally cheerless seaside town in Kent. We met only once or twice, however, during my adolescence, because of the bitterness my mother felt towards her. The feud had begun during their time on my paternal grandparents’ coffee farm in southern Tanganyika. Bill’s father bought it as a retirement hobby, after stepping down as director of the government Coffee Research Station in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. Following decades as an agricultural officer in Nigeria, Trinidad and Tanganyika, he had no immediate wish to return to England. Bill, his bride and four-year-old son from her first marriage emigrated to the farm immediately after their wedding in December 1947. But it was a struggle for two families to make a living, and soon there was such friction between my mother and her female in-laws that my father escaped as soon as he could to a job in the Game Department. Bill’s death, however, brought the old vendetta to a climax. Unable to contact my mother, Pat had – very reasonably, I thought, even at the time – flown his broken body up to Nairobi to be buried. For my mother it was the last straw. Not only had she been deprived of the opportunity of seeing Bill off, she once complained, but Pat had taken him out of Tanganyika, away from the national parks which were his life.
‘He always wanted his ashes scattered in the Ngorongoro Crater if something happened,’ my mother sniffled into her tissue.
Instead he’d been plonked in a suburban cemetery, hemmed in by desk-wallahs who’d died of drink and boredom.
‘Can’t we move him?’ I couldn’t bear the thought he was lying somewhere he might be unhappy.
My mother shrugged helplessly.
Only once I’d left home did I feel free to contact Pat. A flamboyant extrovert, with a colourful life of her own, her stories about Bill seemed too melodramatic, or gilded by time, to take very seriously. As far as India was concerned, she claimed he’d worked undercover for a while, dressed in a kaftan and passing as a Pathan in the border region abutting Afghanistan. Had she mixed up the North-West Frontier with Sindh? Once, apparently, Bill and an Indian subordinate chased some malefactors into a ravine. Turning a dog-leg in the chasm, the Indian suddenly barged my father from his saddle, cushioning him in his arms as they fell. Only as he dusted himself down did Bill notice the wire ahead, stretched taut and sharp as a blade at neck height across the defile.
Another time she talked of riots he’d distinguished himself in handling, as Partition approached. But there were never any specific places, dates, or names to anchor these daredevil tales. Like my mother, Pat had never been to India, which she seemed to conceive in terms of Orientalist romances like Beau Geste or The Four Feathers, so unaccountably popular with moviegoers in the 1930s. She was nine years younger than Bill, still at school when he left for the subcontinent; and when she described his exploits there, it was with the starry-eyed look of someone describing a matinee idol.
‘Do you know he was the youngest-ever winner of the Indian Police Medal?’ she’d enthuse. ‘You should be incredibly proud of him.’
But Bill had been in the subcontinent well before I was born, and if I occasionally wondered about his experiences there, other questions were much more pressing. Why had my father been on that plane in February 1965? Why had he joined the UN-funded mission to the mountainous south-west of what by then had become Tanzania, scouting for suitable areas to settle Tutsis fleeing from the Hutu terror in neighbouring Rwanda – events repeated with such catastrophic results thirty years later? Why were too many passengers aboard? Why had no one factored in the extra distance required for take-off at that altitude? Why had the plane broken in two when, according to witnesses, it barely brushed the tree-tops at the end of the dirt runway? Why had only the front part burst into flames when it hit the ground, so that Bill and the pilot were probably burned alive? Why Bill, why us?
It was no consolation that he’d died trying to help refugees, the line so many people took after his death. As a young adult I returned to Tanzania on several occasions, hoping to settle the ghosts of the past. The new African owners of the houses we’d lived in looked at me kindly but blankly, as if the times I talked abou
t were already as remote as the Triassic era. The bitterest disappointment was that Kimwaga had vanished. After Bill’s death, he’d apparently worked briefly for another European family, before joining the Game Department himself. But no one could tell me where he’d been posted, or name the village he originally came from.
In the pub, Anna leans across the table. ‘Maybe this email’s a sign? That you should go yourself. Find out about the Hoors and Sindh and what your father got up to in Satara.’
I shrug.
‘You’ve never been to India, have you?’
I feel a little foolish, as I always do when people ask me that. The subcontinent’s always loomed large in my research. Why haven’t I gone? Partly because for many years I used what time and money I had to head back to Africa. Since then, there’s been the rest of the world to see. In any case, I’d always assumed that the India I’d been most interested in, the India of the Raj, has vanished even more definitively than the Tanganyika of my childhood. The summer, when I have most time to travel, is one long monsoon downpour in western India, making it difficult to get around. By Easter, it’s an oven again, the thermometer at forty degrees or more. Christmas, which everyone agrees is the best period to visit, has been spoken for as long as I can remember. Professor Bhosle’s email hasn’t made me any keener to go. I’m sure I can now find out all there is to know about Bill’s time in India from him.
My confidence is misplaced, however. Following his request, I contact my brothers, asking if any of them found papers about Bill’s time in India after our mother’s death a few years ago. In the meantime, my historian colleague informs me that he’s written books on the Independence Movement in Bombay Province and has recently begun to focus on Satara District more specifically. He’s especially interested in a secret Memorandum Bill’s supposed to have written about the Parallel Government. Google reveals that Satara is a remote country district several hundred miles south of Mumbai, and that the Parallel Government was an armed underground movement formed after Gandhi’s imprisonment in August 1942. I’m now burning to know more about Bill’s involvement.
Frustratingly, Bhosle doesn’t add much to what he said about him in his first email. He does, however, tell me where the relevant archives are located, offers some pointers about histories of Sindh and directs me to what he describes as the best book so far on the Parallel Government, by one A.B. Shinde. Unfortunately, it’s not in the British Library; nor can I find a copy for sale on the internet. When I report back from my brothers in the negative, Bhosle starts taking longer and longer to return my emails. Eventually, he says he’ll collate everything he’s got on Bill after his next research trip to Mumbai. He’s planning two weeks there in December. It’s only intuition, but I can’t help feeling he’s increasingly reluctant to answer my questions. Why?
By the end of summer, the idea’s taken root. For the first time in years I’ll be free this Christmas. I could spend part of the vacation in the archives, alongside Bhosle himself, perhaps. Maybe, after all, something of the India of my father’s time has survived the tsunami of globalisation driving this latest tiger economy? It’s a golden opportunity to add to my knowledge of Bill. I only knew him for my first eleven years; that’s just two years more than the period he spent in India, which was no doubt crucial in making the man I remember. On the other hand, I wonder how much personal material there’s likely to be in public archives. Will I really learn much about what he was like as a young man from administrative reports?
Still undecided, I contact Bhosle again in mid-October, asking if we can meet over Christmas. In his reply, the professor tells me he won’t be going to Mumbai in December after all. Nor can he receive me in his home city of Kolhapur, where I’ve offered to travel to meet him. However, he promises to advise Dr Dhavatkar, the director of the Elphinstone Archives and a friend of his, to smooth my passage should I decide to go. His apparent evasiveness is disconcerting. But even if Bhosle’s so inexplicably unavailable all of a sudden, he’s given me enough to get started. If I don’t seize the chance, I know I’ll regret it. Before I can change my mind, I book the flight.
On 26 November, ten days after getting my visa, and barely two weeks before my intended departure date, Mumbai is attacked by a dozen heavily armed Islamists, who apparently arrived by sea from Pakistan. Scores of civilians are killed in and around sites favoured by Westerners in the city, as well as in the main railway station. The Foreign Office immediately advises against all non-essential travel. Shocked by graphic pictures of the still-burning Taj hotel, the bloodied platforms of Victoria Terminus and the heart-rending story of the Israeli infant saved by his Indian ayah from the mayhem in Nariman House, I question the wisdom of my trip. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 provoked serious sabre-rattling between Pakistan and India and only a few years earlier the subcontinental neighbours were on the brink of nuclear war. The current rhetoric between the two sides is reaching an alarming pitch.
‘I wouldn’t go, if I were you,’ Anna advises when we meet again at the beginning of December in a Waterloo pub. ‘It’s not the right time.’
‘If something else kicks off, maybe not. But Mumbai will be swarming with security, there’s probably never been a safer time. Besides, it’s cost me a packet and I can’t claim on insurance if I cancel, because it’s a terrorist incident. Anyway, I’m too curious now about Bill’s life in India.’
As she’s getting us another round, I overhear a woman at an adjoining table declaiming drunkenly about the Muslim plot to take over Britain.
‘It’s all been planned, you’ll see!’ she shrieks. ‘Mumbai’s a warning to us all.’
CHAPTER 2
Picking Up the Trail
First impressions of Mumbai blur chaotically. I’m badly disoriented by a delayed night flight during which noisy neighbours and expectation kept pricking me awake. Once off the plane, I’m too excited, too bewildered by a rip tide of jet lag and sleeplessness, to be able to order my perceptions. Every Indian man seems to have a moustache; there’s a guard in the airport men’s room, with what looks like a musket nipped between his knees, his eyes half-closed, as if stupefied by the acid stench. But outside the terminal, the jacarandas are in full purple bloom, reminding me joyously of coastal Tanganyika, though the palms are cankered by pollution. It’s claustrophobic inside the bubble of the taxi; as the drive into the city becomes extended by one snarling jam after another, sweat slithers me from side to side across the plastic rear seat.
Stupidly, I didn’t buy water at the airport and soon I’m parched. Coming from an English winter, the light’s squint-bright, and I can only snatch glimpses of slums which seem to stretch to the horizon, where distant skyscrapers thrust up like something out of Dallas. Suddenly, we’re too close to a gorgeously painted lorry, ‘Horn OK Please’ emblazoned on its tailgate. I’m thrown forward violently as the brakes bite. The Ganesh statuette reclining on the rear-window shelf tumbles over my shoulder and catches in my shirt. Before the driver’s finished apologising, we graze a stick-like woman, dark as the tarmac she’s repairing, faded sari clamped between her teeth, basket of shingle on folded head-cloth, infant slung gracefully on one hip like a counterweight. At every junction, bandy-legged boys with beatific smiles jog beside my window, proffering crimson candyfloss trapped in dusty cellophane, newspapers, snacks so salty-looking the mere sight of them leaches any remaining moisture from my gullet. The sickly jasmine air freshener is sometimes overwhelmed by the smell of fried food, melting bitumen and human waste sucked in through the fan. For what seems like hours, the skyscrapers float far away as ever in the milky haze. Are we driving round in circles? Scorched by dehydration now, I slip into an uncomfortable trance. The aching anticipation of finding out more about Bill alternates with stabs of apprehension. People say several terrorists are still on the run, all these days after the attacks. Perhaps the centre will be locked down, preventing me getting to the material I need? Have I been over-impulsive?
Forty
-eight hours later, the answer seems to be yes. In fact I’m ready to abandon my trip. Bleary-eyed despite my early night, I report to Elphinstone Archives first thing the morning after I arrive. To my huge relief, there’s no sign of disruption. A twig-limbed man in khaki, who disconcertingly introduces himself with enormous pride as ‘the peon’, takes me from office to office, where successively more important officials smile and waggle their heads ambiguously. Eventually I reach the director’s suite, where a plump, bronze-coloured man with gold-rimmed glasses and silvery hair invites me to sit. I show my London University card and pronounce Professor Bhosle’s name, confident they’ll prove my open sesame. Dr Dhavatkar nods when I mention the historian, but clearly knows nothing about me. I’m baffled that Bhosle hasn’t kept his promise. The director returns my card.
‘You need an attestation from your embassy,’ he wheezes, scratching one smooth dewlap with the tip of his pencil. Sounds like he’s got a sore throat. I’m stunned. Why didn’t Bhosle mention this requirement? Or has it been introduced since the attacks?
‘My embassy? But if I have to go to Delhi, it could take days.’
He shrugs. ‘Sorry. That is the rule, only. Perhaps the consulate can have one faxed? It’s at Makers’ Chambers in Nariman Point.’
I sense the ghost of the young Bill, hovering just out of reach. It’s hard to contain my frustration.
Despite evoking the aura of the East India Company, Makers’ Chambers turns out to be a weather-stained 1960s concrete tower. Security is tight and the queues long. It’s getting to lunchtime before my turn comes. The young woman at the window is polite but firm. No, they can’t fax Delhi, I’ll need to go in person with my documents. I’m evidently looking disconsolate, because her expression suddenly softens.
The Setting Sun Page 3