Indian Magic

by Balraj Khanna

  ‘I am waiting for a friend.’

  ‘Been waiting for forty minutes?’ Had he been watching me all that time? What a waste of valuable police time! I wished I could tell him so, but I was afraid of him. I shouldn’t have been. Back home we were told that English policemen were the best in the world - polite and intelligent.

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t more than forty minutes only?’

  The policeman didn’t like that.

  ‘None of your cheek, lad. I said forty minutes, didn’t I?’ ‘Have you been watching me all this time? It was quite unnecessary, really.’ I knew at once I had said the wrong thing. But I was confused and quite frightened now.

  ‘Where do you live, boy? What’s your address?’

  ‘Platform One, Victoria Station, SW1.’

  This did not go down well at all. I saw him frown.

  ‘You’d better come along to my station, boyo.’

  ‘What on earth for?’ Confusion and fright turned to panic.

  ‘For a few questions. Just routine.’

  The man advanced and tried to lay a hand on me. Thereupon I did something foolish - I ran. Two cricket pitches on, a woman walking past tripped me and I fell flat on the hard pavement. More passers-by from the bile-like yellow streetlight gathered around us. A couple of local heroes sprang into action. They just sat on me.

  ‘What have I done?’ I screamed.

  ‘Keep him there. Keep him there.’

  They kept me there till a police van hissed to a halt by the kerbside. Weight lifted off my chest and I was bundled into the van. The police station was close by.

  ‘Is there anyone responsible here who could answer my very simple question - what have I done?’

  I feared the worst. But they did not hit me as their brethren back home would have done to make me ‘talk’. The Immigration Act had been passed earlier that year. I was told that it was being broken right, left, right and centre, mostly by my own brethren - Indians and Pakistanis.

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Arrived yesterday.’

  ‘How did you get in the country?’

  I nearly said, ‘Swam the English Channel.’ But instead I pulled out my passport, my Employment Voucher and my travel documents. They let me go.

  I ran again. I broke my promise to my mother and went in the pub. My new friend was not there. The portly man with florid cheeks behind the bar said yes, there had been two Indian blokes. But they had left about half an hour ago.

  The London streets again. I no longer bit my hand. I walked and walked. Time walked with me, a slow companion. Days two, three and four came and went and I was as far from a job as I had been on day one. I hoped Bishamber Shukla would come looking for me. I sat up every evening, waiting and staring vacantly at the ever-shifting mass of bodies in a hurry to get somewhere. There was many a man like me to whom Victoria was mother and home. They artfully concealed themselves in nooks and crannies, trying to become invisible.

  Mornings were the most painful time of the day. We had to clear out of the station very early, and go and sit on benches in shelters in the parks or lie down on flattened cardboard boxes under the railway arches. These were the moments which made me burn with loneliness and longing for home. By God, I would have given my right arm to be transported there just then: to be home, hearing the clang of the brass utensils, Grandma muttering her morning mantras, Mother ordering the kitchen for Father’s ‘bed tea’, the loaded milk wallah groaning coming up the steep mountain road, my little sister Ushee refusing to be bathed and crying bitterly, the children next door waking up yelling, the bells of Christ Church on The Ridge.

  There was much in common between my mountain hometown Simla and my newly adopted English one. Cool in the summer, Simla was made by the English for the English and was just as cold in the winter. But it had a lovable face which breathed out a comforting warmth. The cold of London was faceless. Forbidding. Day five I saw the wonder of an English autumn morning sun, a red-orange glow, a football of gentle incandescence entangled in the naked branches of a tree in a park. Momentarily it smothered the desperation ringing inside me. For a minute I felt soothed, as if a gentle hand had applied a paste of turmeric on a burn. Then a funny thing happened - I felt a large smile spread on my face. I had smiled because a space between my thoughts had suddenly been invaded by a question - why had I come here? I could have laughed. I could have also cried. I walked and walked

  In a shop, the bespectacled owner with a tailor’s tape around his neck was simply taken aback to see me present myself. He scratched his nose and lowered his glasses to have a proper look at the rare specimen before him.

  ‘Now what makes you think I have a job for you?’

  ‘But you’ve advertised for an assistant.’

  ‘Thank you for applying.’ He just waved me out of his shop.

  Under some railway arches in Kings Cross I saw a notice for a vacancy for another assistant, saying Apply Within. It was a joinery or something - there was a lot of cut wood and sawdust around. Chin up, I put my best foot into the place.

  ‘Nothing personal, but the West Indian sweat gets me.’

  ‘But I am Indian.’

  ‘And the smell of curry.’

  ‘I haven’t eaten Indian food for over three weeks.’

  ‘Nothing personal, you get my meaning? But you are different anyway. I can see you are. Try Shoreditch.’

  Try Shoreditch. What can you lose? I said to myself, and nearly got taken on by the security department of Woolworth’s there. But when I stood on the weighing machine, I turned out to be a stone underweight for my five foot eleven and the all -important quarter inch. It was a savage disappointment. But being a Mehra, I clung onto hope and said to the man, whose name was Livingstone: ‘There’s been an unavoidable disruption in my eating pattern lately.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘It’s only fourteen pounds, Dr Livingstone.’

  ‘That’s a stone.’

  ‘Please take me. May I presume to promise I will put it back on again in just one week at two pounds a day? You don’t know me, Dr Livingstone.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Nor do I want to. And watch your step, young Stanley.’

  The yellow streetlight now radiated a hostile indifference. My feet lead-heavy, and my belly resoundingly empty, I wanted to sit down somewhere for a bit of a rest. It was a desperate physical need, but I couldn’t afford to. It was a Thursday, which meant late-night shopping, and an extra hour for me to look for work. Mechanically, I went from door to door, receiving the same polite reply, leading me to conclude that when it came to politeness, the English people beat the rest of the world hands down (as they had at everything else).

  By seven I couldn’t take a step further - I had been walking the streets for twelve whole hours. Spotting a shelter in a little park in Pimlico, with a couple of benches, I sat down on one. I was angry - with the world, but more than that, with myself. Then suddenly, I felt a tear roll down my cheek.

  Dog. Why did you come to this country? To make your fortune, eh? What fortune? This?

  The bitter English December chilled my bones, the salt of tears was on my lips and hunger howled in my stomach.

  This England you loved so much.

  In spite of my anger and my tears, I knew it was pathetic to feel sorry for myself. I had to be reasonable. It was not England’s fault. Nor that of the English people.

  They simply don’t know you exist. Once they do.

  The thing was to make them aware that I existed. But how? Hadn’t I tried? Ask my feet!

  Someone came and sat down next to me on the same bench, a strange, bulbous lady. I had seen her sort dipping their grubby hands in big black bins (sometimes a shiver would run through me when I saw them do that, and if one ever looked at me while doing so, I knew what they were saying with their furtive glances – boy, you next time). The woman, who was my mother’s age – about fifty, was eating something from a conical white paper bag. She held my gaze
and smiled. It was my mother’s smile - full of warmth and comfort. I really felt I was her son and she my mother.

  ‘Poor dear.’ She dipped a hand in a pocket of her soiled coat and held out a sixpenny piece. ‘Ere. Go and buy yourself a bag.’

  I did not understand, but I smiled back, anyway.

  ‘Go on - go and buy yourself a bag, luv. The Chippie’s just round the corner.’

  I still did not understand. Smiling shyly, I stood up.

  ‘No, thank you very much, madam,’ I blurted out in my best English and, egged on by pride, I walked away from the shelter. A hundred yards on, I came to a small shop with a powerful smell of frying oil. The shop’s name was Moby Dick. Oh, yes. Herman Melville and Gregory Peck and Captain Ahab - I had both read the book and seen the film in Simla.

  A number of boys and girls of my age were coming out of Moby Dick carrying paper-bags like my tramp-mother’s. They wore black leather jackets with steel studs all over, and looked strangely beautiful. I looked at them in wonder. They stared back collectively. Then one boy flung something at me from his bag. It would have hit me in the eye had I not caught it in mid-air, being the cricketer that I was. A soggy potato chip. I hurled it back at him, reflex action. Middle stump, his chin - but he was no cricketer. A hail of potato chips then hit me on the face. I was surrounded. There was a smell of beer and my left arm got twisted behind my back. Two heavy boots pinned both my feet down. This was my first contact with my contemporaries in Fair England, the country of my dreams.

  ‘Let go,’ I screamed.

  ‘Break it,’ urged a male voice.

  ‘Let ‘im go, Tone. He aint done nuffink,’ said a girl with beautiful golden hair, pulling at the arm-twister. Without a further glance at me, they let me go and marched away, filling the air I breathed with fear.

  For sixpence I got a bagful of chips. I took it to the Shelter to eat them in the company of the kind lady. She had gone and I wished she hadn’t. Ten minutes later, I was back at Moby Dick for another bag. The man and the woman who made the chips were not English. They appeared to be angry with each other, for whenever they spoke, they did so in angry shouts. I felt afraid of them too. But they didn’t look at me while serving me. Fifteen minutes on, I turned up at their shop for the third time. The woman, short and buxom with an apple-round face and a permanent blush, studied me this time, smiling - the second person to smile at me within the same half hour. She made a bag for me and sprinkled salt and vinegar on it. Then she wrapped a piece of fried fish and placed it on the chips.

  ‘How much, madam?’ I held out my last half-crown.

  ‘Six pence.’

  ‘But the fish?’

  ‘You pay for feesh when you get job.’

  ‘If I don’t?’

  ‘You get job,’ the lady said with authority.

  The world was not all indifference and hurt, after all. Once out of Moby Dick, I walked tall, feeling for no reason that from now on, things were going to be all right. I did not really know where to go. But walking on a full stomach after two whole days of walking on one completely empty, I didn’t care which way I went. Anyway, that decision was promptly taken out of my hands. I saw the same bunch of my leather-clad contemporaries coming my way, looking more menacing in that yellow streetlight which didn’t seem to like me. Commonsense made me describe a quick about-turn.

  Ten minutes later, somewhere near Pimlico tube station, I found myself looking at a shop sign - Indian Magic, Prop: Gokul Swami. In fact it was a restaurant - one of the very few Indian restaurants in London in those days. On an impulse I went in. It was an L-shaped place, quite large with over fifteen tables, muskily dark, smelling of joss sticks and spices. The wallpaper was embossed, with velvety sunflowers in a field of viridian green. Twenty odd people were sat eating in there and it was not yet eight. At least someone was doing well.

  ‘One only?’ said a waiter in English.

  ‘I have eaten,’ I confided in him, a countryman of mine.

  ‘Then?’ The man gave me a look one gives to an idiot - if I had eaten, what the hell was I doing in a restaurant?

  ‘I have come to see Mr Swami.’

  ‘Them boss are over there standing.’ The man pointed to his boss at the till counter with shelves full of glistening bottles behind him at the far end. Mr Swami was a short plump man with a round, boyish face. He was the same age as my father, fifty-one or fifty-two. He was rubbing and re-rubbing a spotlessly clean wine glass with a snow-white napkin.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Swami.’

  ‘Good evening. Better is you come to the point.’ Mr Swami had guessed why I was there.

  ‘Sir.’ I explained my situation, ending with: ‘Anything will do. Just anything to keep me going till I can do what I’ve come here for.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘To join an English university.’

  ‘How long you been in London?’

  ‘Nearly a week, sir.’

  ‘Doing what? Sleeping where?’ I told him.

  ‘Fool boy. Why didn’t you go on the dole?’ I didn’t answer.

  ‘Too proud, eh? Show your hands.’ I showed him my hands.

  ‘You haven’t done a day’s work in your life.’ It was true. But young men of my kind of background didn’t have to work. And he knew it from my speech and how I looked. Narrowing his eyes, he studied my face for a long minute, my heart racing. ‘All I can give you is dishwasher job at four bob an hour.’ Phew!

  ‘Father’s occupation back and where?’

  ‘My father is a doctor in Simla.’

  ‘Ah, the Shimla! And he issend you here penniless?’

  ‘Sir, the Indian government allows only five pounds sterling of foreign currency. The China war.’

  ‘Any qualification?’ I showed him my degree obtained earlier that year.

  ‘Indian English MA in UK? Useless. What you learned? I’ll tell you what I learned without degree. I learned God helps those who help each other. Right? So Indian must help Indian. If not, God save Indians. I am Gujarati, you are Punjabi. So what? So I help. So it is twelve to three pm. During the daytime and seven to eleven at night, with meals thrown in. Good or not? Isspeak.’

  I was speechless - a job and food, Indian food!

  Mr Swami stood by what he had learned. He even lent me the unbelievably vast sum of five pounds, saying: ‘Remember: God helps those who help each other.’

  ‘Sir, keep my degree as my guarantee.’

  Mr Swami called the waiter I had spoken to. ‘Jagan, take boy down and show him what is where and what to do.’

  In the large and busy kitchen, Jagan showed me what I had to do. On his way back upstairs, he spoke inaudibly to the three workers there and I saw them raise their eyebrows.

  ‘Our Gujarati boss must have seen something special in you, a Punjabi,’ said someone to me with a smile - someone of my age.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean he never takes anyone from anywhere other than Gujarat. We are all Gujarati here.’

  ‘Really? But we are all Indian.’

  ‘Yeah, but. And lending you five quid just like that!!!’

  The first thing I did was to go to Moby Dick with a bunch of flowers. At last I saw a notice which didn’t say No Blacks, No Indians, No Irish. It directed me to a large house in the Finchley Road. Strangely, like every other house around, it was identical to houses in Simla, being of a mock Tudor design. It was like being in Simla without its Himalayan heights, poetry and drama, Simla on straight flat roads. My room was on the ground floor. Even though it was small, it was heaven on earth. Here I could do what I wanted to most in the world - sleep. Sleep, sweet sleep.

  Owned by an absentee Indian doctor, the house was looked after by a kindly Portuguese lady, Mrs Ferreiro. She said she could tell by looking at me that she was going to like me.

  ‘As long as you pay rent every Saturday. Two pounds ten.’ My room had two doors. One led into the hall, with its red lino floor. The other to a long misty garden
overgrown with weed, wild bush and coarse tall grass lined by leafless autumn trees. Next to this door was a half-curtained window.

  There were another three rooms on my floor and many more upstairs - on the first floor and the loft - all occupied by young Indian and Pakistani men only. This fact led the house to be called ‘the Subcontinental’ - someone here had a sense of humour. Mostly new arrivals, they were hardworking men who did overtime and had plans to set up their own businesses when they had saved up enough. They all had pained faces, as if they were being bullied by someone. I knew well by whom - by this city, the world’s greatest and ‘best’. With the same bully breathing down my neck, I wondered if I, too, had a pained face.

  Jagan was ‘permanent’ and proud of it.

  ‘What Gokul saw? I see nothing,’ Jagan said to the other ‘permanent’, Prohit, as I walked in one day.

  ‘When Gokul lent you even a tenner? And five pounds?’ Prohit rolled his eyes. Both in their late thirties, they did not like the two or three ‘hire and fire’ waiters who came and went. Whenever they spoke to me, they were doing me a favour.

  The downstairs staff consisted of the bald old Bandhu, the silent chef, his equally quiet deputy Hari and his not-so-quiet second deputy, Ranjit. Ranjit was the one who had given me that wicked smile on my first night. He was my age and height. Ranjit had a ‘lil boy’ face with unbelievably white teeth and gleaming black eyes. He was always laughing and singing Hindi film songs. When he got carried away, the song got louder and he got thumped by the boss. But he didn’t care. I called him Ranji after the great cricketer. He loved it.