‘You should see it during monsoon,’ Keitan observes, ‘the water’s ten feet higher.’ He sighs. ‘I’d like to hang-glide from up here.’
What? I can’t imagine anything more scary.
‘Do you know they used to have flying machines in ancient times in India?’
‘You mean like hang-gliders?’
‘No,’ he says solemnly. ‘With engines powered by mercury.’
I’m flummoxed. Keitan’s eyes ache with sincerity.
‘That is correct. With mercury, only. Yo, it says so in the Vedas.’
He doesn’t seem to want to pursue the topic, and turns instead towards the steps raking down the side of the bridge.
It’s many steep flights to the bottom. At ground level, the coastal road peels inland and an imposing series of colonial buildings, hidden by a dense canopy of foliage from where we were standing on the bridge, comes into view.
‘What’s that?’ I ask.
Keitan shrugs. ‘I think some school?’
It looks far too grand. Intrigued, I set off up the drive. Outside the first building, a group of youths is gathered. They’re mid-teens, judging by their shorts and the faint down on their upper lips. They examine us intently, before one says something which makes the others laugh. Keitan seems uncomfortable, so, taking him by the arm, I stride past the onlookers into the edifice. He’s right. It is – or was – some kind of school, a technical institute, judging by the ancient lathes huddled along one wall. A man comes forward, dressed in overalls. He’s not particularly friendly, and somewhat cursorily explains that it’s indeed an industrial training college, founded by the British.
‘Sorry if we’ve intruded,’ I say, ‘it looked like your students were on a break.’
He seems mollified and suggests we continue to the main campus, where we can get further information on the history of the college. I’m not that interested and suggest that we head for the beach now. Keitan nods, with an odd look of relief.
Outside, the group of youths has swelled. There are maybe fifteen now, white shirts or vests tucked into their khaki shorts. Some instinct puts me on guard. One of them, an undernourished lad with a thicker fuzz of moustache than the rest and pinched, pockmarked cheeks calls out something I don’t understand which Keitan seems unwilling to translate. I’m not sure the lad understands me, either, when I say we’re just looking around. But he smiles ambiguously as he mutters.
‘Gazza,’ is the only word I register in his response.
Imagining he’s referring to Paul Gascoigne, the eccentric former England soccer idol, I grin back, tapping one forefinger against the side of my head. The thin smile fades. Keitan pulls me away and I follow, puzzled and reluctant. Others in the group jostle forward and again I hear the word ‘Gazza’. The tone’s clearly menacing now. Perhaps they’re Tottenham supporters, insulted by my disrespect to their one-time hero. Whatever, it’s definitely time to go.
Keitan remains tight-lipped as we make our way to the shoreline, and his hands seem to be shaking. However, I feel relaxed again by the time we cross a building site with cone-shaped piles of stones, pallets of brick and steel rods scattered like spillikins. The site’s deserted, but it looks as if an old breakwater is in the process of being refurbished. We pass through the yard and onto the sand. From here, the bridge looks very high, the noise of traffic indistinct. The first part of the beach is blinding white sand, stretching up to a line of scrub, along what looks like a shallow ditch voiding into the sea. About a mile away is the jetty. I pause for a moment, to get out the photo of the bungalow I’m looking for.
‘You OK, Keitan? What were those boys saying?’
He’s bug-eyed with tension. ‘I told you. This is Bangladesh. They’re angry.’
‘What about?’
‘Gaza. A full-scale land invasion began this morning. Many civilians have been killed.’
I’m mortified. Perhaps the youths thought I was mocking their co-religionists while Israeli F-16s continue to brave the slingshots of Palestinian youths to dump more white phosphorus bombs to cover their tanks and infantry.
Just as we resume our walk, a plume of sand fans out prettily six feet in front of us, like some bird landing heavily. When the next stone whistles overhead, however, Keitan grabs me.
‘Run!’
I do so until we reach the brake of scrub ahead. Jumping across the ditch and crouching behind a bush, I look back the way we’ve come. About a dozen lads from the Technical Institute are bent over, selecting missiles from the piles of builders’ material. Two or three are already advancing down the beach. Perhaps it’s the policeman’s genes which take over.
‘Wait a minute,’ I tell Keitan as he prepares to make another crouching run down the beach.
Letting the youths advance a few paces, I jump out from our hiding place and rush at them, yelling at the top of my voice. The vanguards spin round instantly and race back towards their comrades. When they’re halfway there, I turn again and toil back towards Keitan, lungs burning so much I can hardly suck in breath.
‘Come on, let’s go.’
The next half hour’s a nightmare. I’m shaking like a leaf and pouring with sweat by the time we slow to a walk. It’s frustration and fear and panic. And, to my consternation, white-hot anger, too. Behind us the beach is empty. Keitan’s adamant that we can’t cut inland to the road. It’s curtained behind scrub and bushes.
‘They may be coming up that way,’ he insists.
So we stick to the water’s edge, a thousand of the most disgusting yards I’ve ever trudged. This is the original flush toilet, in use aeons before Thomas Crapper patented his invention. Every few yards, piles of more or less desiccated turds wait for the sea to carry them off. The wilful tide, however, has simply returned many, higher on the beach. It’s like a minefield, the stink almost vomit-making. To make matters worse, every so often someone steps out of the thicket screening the road and strides purposefully towards us. Each apparition makes me jump. But they’re dressed in lungis, not shorts, thank heavens. Picking their way expertly through the waste, they find a patch of pristine sand, hitch up their robes, squat down and deposit their mess, all the while gazing nonchalantly as we pass.
When we reach the jetty, Keitan’s relief is palpable. ‘Is all Hindu now,’ he mutters, climbing up a gangway onto the pavement, ‘no more Bangladesh.’
‘I’m really sorry, Keitan, I should have listened.’
He shrugs. ‘I didn’t say anything at the school because I hoped they might think I was a Muslim, too, who had brought you. They were saying bad things from the moment we arrived.’
I explain the mistake I made, but he doesn’t seem to understand about Gazza and Tottenham.
‘Should I go to the police, do you think?’ I explain my connections with DSP Indore.
Keitan looks alarmed. ‘They will question me. Why I took you there.’
‘But it was me who made you go.’
My escort looks unconvinced. ‘If they come, they will beat every youth they find. They won’t care about who was involved or not.’
I don’t care, either. I just want them punished. Keitan’s beseeching look pulls me up. No, I don’t want that. Not after Chafal. Nor do I want my unwilling guide to be further harassed. Or to waste hours driving round in a squad car or, more likely, on the back of a terrifying motorbike, trying to identify the perpetrators.
Across the invisible boundary we’ve just traversed, it’s another world. The sun’s a vivid saffron balloon, sagging just above the sea, which is now the mobile silver of a fish’s belly. The beach beyond the jetty is busy with families enjoying the early-evening breeze. There are camel-rides and impromptu games of cricket. Girls wander past, sipping at candyfloss. No one, however, is in the water, not even paddling. Little wonder. We flop into chairs at a tea-house on the front and I begin to relax a little, even managing a bitter half-smile at the irony of being presumed guilty by association with the ‘enemy’ in ‘the war on terror’.
> Over refreshments, Keitan asks about my plans.
‘Think I’ll just relax tomorrow. Read a bit. And you?’
His round face deflates. ‘Family business. Would you like to see Ganpatipule the day after? There’s a wonderful temple.’
Presumably the one my fellow-passenger on the bus from Kolhapur was headed to.
‘I have to go back to the police station to see if they’ve found any documents for me.’
‘The beach is very clean. And good for swimming.’
It’s an enticing prospect. ‘Don’t you have to study?’
Keitan shrugs. ‘I will be practising my English with you. It’s about fifty minutes on the scooter. You can see some of the country.’
Go with the flow. ‘I’d love to.’
He makes to high-five me. ‘Yo, Professor, right on,’ he declaims, in a terrible American accent.
We catch an auto-rickshaw back to the bridge, where Keitan fires up his scooter and drops me at the hotel. Much of it’s candlelit. No reading until the electricity ‘load-shedding’ is over. I eat a delicious spicy kingfish curry. Later, in the bar, I find myself talking to a Chinese-Malayan man who’s working at a shipbuilder’s further down the coast. David Khoo’s on his second two-year contract, but says he’s unlikely to renew. He has silky black hair and an ageless face.
‘This country’s too frustrating. You know, the local police wanted a fat whack to confirm my residency permit last time. I already paid in Mumbai. Had to phone my embassy, get them to fix it. I suppose it’s not their fault. Even a commissioner only earns 100,000 rupees a month. That’s 2,000 dollars. Yet every assistant deputy superintendent sends their kids to college overseas.’ He sips his drink thoughtfully. ‘Look around. What do you see?’
I say it’s hard to make out anything through the thick cigarette fug of the bar.
‘Right. But alcohol permit rooms are non-smoking by law. How do you think they get round that?’ He sighs as he rubs two fingers against his thumb. ‘India could be like China, if they got it together. But they’re so divided.’
I think of the invisible line between ‘Bangladesh’ and the Hindu beach, the ethnic sniping at Briha’s party.
‘And the infrastructure,’ he says, shaking his head in exasperation. ‘Most of the money goes straight into the pockets of the politicians. You know how long it took to get my business cards from Mumbai? Seventy days, man. It’s 390 kilometres or something. If the postman walked here with them, it wouldn’t take that long.’
Sounds as if I’ll be home before my postcards after all.
‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he smiles. ‘I go fishing every Sunday with a friend, if you want to come along. We know a few nice places. We leave about midday.’
‘Sounds perfect.’ It’s something I haven’t done since my African childhood.
Back in my room, I lie sweatily on the bed, staring at reflections of candlelight in the blank television screen, trying to summon the energy to write my daily log. What a day it’s been. Never a dull moment in India. I smile at my earlier premonitions of boredom in Ratnagiri. Then I think about Bill. I’ve had a tiny taste today of what he must often have faced, especially during his time in Ahmedabad, as Partition approached and communalist tensions spilled over. Facing down adult rioters armed with stones, home-made bombs and bottles of acid isn’t something I can envisage myself doing. Only some perverse instinct made me run at the boys. Attack as the best form of defence. Perhaps circumstances sometimes goaded Bill into the same animal reflex of rage? Didn’t I want the malefactors punished, just as I did the poacher during the Ugalla River safari? It feels less easy than ever to pass judgement on him, calibrate the behaviour of a father who was less than half my present age. Not least because my reaction this afternoon now makes me feel directly implicated in what he did. How would I have behaved if I’d got hold of one of the lads? And what if I hadn’t surprised them, or they’d stood their ground? To my chagrin, I start trembling again.
CHAPTER 14
An Act of Restitution
I spend Sunday morning reading The Glass Palace. Affecting though Ghosh’s account of Thibaw is, what really resonates with me comes later, as we follow the fortunes of an Indian officer in the army of the Raj, in the period contemporaneous with Bill. He finds himself in Singapore, participating in the doomed rearguard action against the Japanese. Once made prisoners of war, many of his men swap sides and join the Indian National Army, led by S.C. Bhose, the exiled ‘Extremist’ whom Naganath Nayakwadi so admired. After heartfelt conflict over what to do, and despite deep reservations about Japan’s true intentions, the officer throws in his lot with the forces aiming to liberate India from British rule. The fateful decision leads him eventually to a miserable death.
In the ‘Author’s Notes’, Ghosh confesses that this part of the narrative is based on his own father’s experience, although Lt. Colonel Ghosh was ‘among those “loyal” Indians who found themselves across the lines from the “traitors” of the Indian National Army’. While writing his book, Ghosh clearly found himself – like me – caught between loyalty to his beloved father and recognition that the imperial cause the latter fought for was essentially indefensible: witness the barbarous treatment of Thibaw. Like me, too, Ghosh interviewed some of the rebel leaders his father fought against. He also clearly admires some of them although, equally clearly, he has qualms about aspects of the way they prosecuted their cause.
Putting the book down, I feel a surging sense of liberation. I’m not alone in the kind of dilemmas and challenges this trip has thrown up. Moreover, I’m particularly struck that Ghosh seeks neither to judge nor to condemn, but to understand the complexity of the particular problems and pressures of wartime which his characterrs face. Shades of Gandhi in Yeravda jail. Above all, he emphasizes the possibilities of reconciliation between former antagonists, through empathy with both sides. I think back to Chafal. If the villagers are prepared to forgive Bill, there’s no need to beat myself up further about what happened there. If Nayakwadi can acknowledge that mistakes were made by both parties to the conflict and draw a line under the past – without forgetting its lessons – I see no reason to contradict him.
Suddenly, my quest to find Bill’s confidential weekly reports, to hear his version of events, seems much less pressing. Haven’t I learned what I need about his role in 1940s Indian history? And understood better why he sometimes behaved as he did, even if it was wrong affronting all my postcolonial principles? I’ll see Bill differently from now on. I suddenly realise that my dream of meeting him again at the party perhaps symbolises the idea that we’re equals at last. And the anger I so belatedly expressed at his ‘deserting’ me, which I was unable to vent at the time because of the circumstances of his death, is entirely consistent with the deep and loving relationship we had. Further, I’m beginning to realise that my memories of Bill are more complex and dynamic than seemed the case while they sat undisturbed in my mental archive. I can now see in them nuances and shades invisible under the sunny glare of nostalgia, or beneath the frozen gaze of grief. As a result of my coming to India, Bill’s been resurrected, but as a much more fully human being than the outsize figure in the immobile tableaux of aberrated mourning and childhood mythology.
The rest of the day has a holiday feel. I buy some beers for the picnic and after a brief stop at a cannery to pick up ice, set off with David Khoo for an afternoon’s fishing. We’re joined by a Polish colleague of David’s, dressed in parakeet-bright Lycra, as if for the Tour de France. He fixes his skeletal racing machine on the roof rack, explaining that he finds cycling the coastal roads a perfect way to ‘decompress’ before another hectic week at the shipyard. Lukas has vivid ginger hair and alabaster skin and despite his swallowtail shades and slathers of suncream, long-distance cycling doesn’t seem wise in this sweltering heat. He’s the only other Westerner I’ve seen in Ratnagiri, and I wonder what the rural folk think when this vision whirls by in a Joan Miró splash.
A fe
w miles north, we stop by an inlet. Lukas sets off at an alarming sprint up the adjoining headland, leaving David and me in the shade of the bridge. After setting up camp stools, the driver settles himself to doze amongst cooling-boxes ready for the catch. Sipping my beer, I watch David bait his line and cast into the tidal stream, fringed on the other side by flat-topped mangroves. I’m no expert, but I can’t think the middle of a white-hot day is the right time for fish. After lunch and a snooze, at last I get my swim. The water’s bracing where the gentle current meets the sea, and I let myself be carried towards the breakers which mark the ocean’s beginning. It’s exhilarating to bodysurf the bouncing white-caps or dive to examine shells on the sea floor, before another playful wave nudges me back towards the bridge. It’s good to be a proper tourist in India at last.
That night, pleasantly worn out by swimming, I fall asleep at once, into a second dream about Bill. I’m in a small plane, something I’ve avoided pretty much all my life. Weirder still, I’m flying it. For some reason I can’t turn my head. But I’m intensely aware of a large, oppressive presence beside me, made more threatening because it’s getting dark. The engine cuts out suddenly and I know we only have seconds before we crash-land. I do a reasonable job of wrestling the rudder to hit the field rushing towards us at the correct angle. It’s bumpy and before I can slow the plane sufficiently, we hit a ridge and it flips violently onto its nose. I bang my head and lose consciousness for a moment.
When I come to, we’re tilting slowly and my companion’s been thrown onto my side of the cockpit. His weight is such that I can barely move. Worse, I smell smoke. With a superhuman shove, I wrest myself from under him, punch out the windscreen, crawl through it and drop to the ground. I begin to run away over sticky ploughed furrows. I’m barely fifty metres clear when the plane explodes, the fireball rising slow and graceful as a hot-air balloon, turning the landscape orange. As the plane disintegrates from the force of the blast, I wake, the image so intense that I’m shielding my eyes. Shaken up, I spend the rest of the night trying to work out what it all means. By dawn, I think I’m there. What a relief. It wasn’t Bill I left to his fate, but the brooding burden of his loss that I’ve cast off at last. It’s taken four decades and a trip to the other side of the world to get here.
The Setting Sun Page 26