Black British (29 page)

We all prized our father's reputation for honesty. It was his lifelong salute to his father whose character was equally well regarded. Our father never took bribes. We were witness to the fact that he never even accepted gifts. Every Christmas afternoon workers from the
dufta
, his office in the mill, attended our house with fruit and Indian sweets and it was my task to tell them my father couldn't accept their presents. Out of respect, the workers kept their eyes downcast while I stood a foot or two distant, bowed my head and spoke. Then, regardless of my inclination, I slowly turned and walked away, no rushed movement although I couldn't wait to be gone.

Traditionally the offer of
phal-phu
, that is fruit and flowers, was considered a gift as compared to anything more expensive that could constitute a bribe. The ruling classes from a previous generation were well known to encourage
toefa
from
their workers at Christmas time. Not satisfied with subju-gating and exploiting them in numerous other ways, they were happy to go that step further and accept presents their workers could ill afford. It added a whole new, unpleasant, meaning to the phrase
Taking food out of the mouths of babes
.

We knew our father was above that.

That evening the silence lengthened as consideration of the counter currency that plagued the country filled our minds. Presently my father continued.

“Who will you marry? There are no Christians left. They've all moved on elsewhere and you know the Indian boys will never marry you. They have to marry their own people. All the integrated marriages you see are disasters. They might become the norm in twenty or thirty years but are not acceptable now.”

In a soft voice as though he was talking more to himself than to me, my father went on. “It was hard enough in my time. When our family came north they showed a touch of genius. That moved us into another sphere of society. Though we enjoyed the spoils of wealth we became isolated from our community by virtue of education, opportunities…way of life, that sort of thing.” He paused and it was obvious that memories were popping out at him from all over the place. He was living proof that success comes with its own price, a price that is often passed on to the next generation. And the next.

“I'm lucky I met your mother,” he continued. “People say she ‘did well' in marrying me because of my wealth, but if truth be told, it is I who am the lucky one. If I hadn't met her I'd probably have remained a bachelor as the price of climbing out of our community.”

He looked around the drawing room and smiled at an inner joke. “And, look at the fun I would have missed!”

Oh dash, I thought, he's going to start on his never-ending store of embarrassing tales about us as children.

But he didn't.

“We are too different. Our culture is different, adopted from a far-off island and left over from a bygone era. Our customs are different, the songs we sing, the books we read, the clothes we wear, the respect you expect and take for granted.”

I liked the free movements possible with dresses and trousers. I didn't want the restrictive clothes that would become the norm for my classmates. I liked popular radio music and spent many hours singing along to my long-playing records. I loved reading Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Philip Oppenheim and whatever else of a similar nature that I could find. Earle Stanley Gardner paperbacks lay around the house but we were never encouraged to read them. The book covers usually portrayed scantily clad women, and the imbalance of power portrayed in the male–female relationship of the protagonist and his sidekick was something our parents found unacceptable for our exposure. Our role models were always strong, intelligent women who took respect for granted, not dizzy, vacuous blondes.

The question that begged to be asked was
Why? Why are we so different from the norm
? As my father continued to speak it gradually became clear.

“Moving from Goa to British India in the mid-1800s was an enormous undertaking for our ancestors. The language was different, the clothes, the food…everything. So, like migrants anywhere in the world, they adapted. They had no choice. They aped the more powerful people in society, their foreign
masters, as a way to facilitate their success.”

So effective was their adjustment that my Goan ancestors gave up their own culture and language. They were compelled to. If they didn't, their success would have been stymied. It worked. They were exceptionally successful in life and business and as a direct consequence my sisters and I had a marvellous childhood.

“Would you want to do without the results of their success?” asked my father, prompting me to review the minutiae of my life.

I didn't think about the big house, the motor vehicles, the security of a warm bed and enough food. Those I took for granted. Instead I remembered the fun of preparing for Christmas, the delicate handling of age-old decorations, the ingenuity of inventing lyrics to match a tune when the words were indecipherable, the resourcefulness and above all, the satisfaction of re-using what was available. I remembered about being scratched to death by unforgiving thorns when pruning roses, singing around the piano, Aunt Betty's parties and the laughter, wit and fun that was never far from the surface.

“Do you remember what Kitty said about adopting a new culture?”

Aunt Kitty had come from Goa at the tender age of seven, fluent in Portuguese and Konkani as most Goans were at that time. As children do, she quickly mastered English at her convent school and continued to use her native tongue at home with her parents.

That wasn't good enough for the nuns. As she had often told us, “I was berated severely if I was caught using the odd word in Portuguese or Konkani. They called it
that peasant stuff
.
So we gradually spoke more and more English and in time forgot our language, our music, our dances and everything that went with it. To all intents and purposes we became British. We had to become Black British!”

What Aunt Kitty didn't say, what none of us ever said, because obvious statements don't need articulation, was that Goa is the only state on the Indian subcontinent that had never been pink on the map. Our racial heritage had never included the Empire. The irony was beyond ironic.

What Aunt Kitty also didn't know, what none of us understood, was that removing a common language is a short cut to fracturing the social cohesion of a people. Language is so closely interwoven with the culture and way of life, that it bonds people together and fosters a sense of belonging. Regional languages often include words that are unique to that culture, something that cannot be translated, only explained. Take away the common language and people lose their identity and attachment to their community. Taking away our language weakened us as a people and alienated us from our roots.

I looked at my father and found him watching me intently. The subject matter had made him uncharacteristically loquacious. Without waiting for me to ask the obvious question, he continued with emphasis.

“White men lived like little tin gods in India. Some of them became self-made millionaires – something they could never have achieved elsewhere. So obviously they wanted to stay and retain their
kooshy
and easy lifestyle. But the only way they could persuade themselves that their oppressive presence in India was necessary was to convince themselves that they were superior to the Indian. They wanted to believe they had
a God-given right to enforce their will, their language and culture on the country. But it was just another way to validate
to themselves
their erroneous notion of superiority.”

The British rulers despised their Indian subjects, basing their sense of superiority on skin colour and nothing else. To choose culture or civilisation is laughable. Indian culture stretches back centuries. To pick intelligence defies logic. So they selected an irrefutable fact and conveniently dismissed the photoprotective properties of melanin, deeming it irrelevant. Skin colour was a platform on which the Empire built a system of discrimination, apartheid and brainwashing.

That evening I pulled up the sleeves of my cardigan and looked at my brown arms.

What's wrong with them? I was indignant. How stupid to hate me because I've got brown arms!

I knew there were many ways, many many ways, I could inspire frustration and dislike but having long brown arms wasn't one of them. I thought of some of the Indian girls in school who were darker skinned than I and was stunned in case that was the reason behind the nuns' hostility. Poor logic always sat uneasy with me.

In the end the Empire showed their true colours. Once the trimmings were removed, their insignificance was clearly apparent when they ran away like cowed dogs with their collective tails between their legs, leaving bloodshed and chaos behind. The excuse for their rapid departure was that time was ripe for change but in reality there was neither the money nor the energy to stay. The Empire was broke as a result of World War II, men were exhausted and people dispirited after six long years of horrendous fighting.

Having governed India with a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy, the Empire marked their leaving with formal partitioning of the country. This created cataclysmic upheaval, chaos and turmoil, especially for poor people. Taking no responsibility for their actions, they looked away from the mayhem, bloodshed and the displacement of millions of people that was the direct result of their policy. Neither did they stay around to manage the bedlam. Their hasty exit meant the new regime had no time to acquire the necessary skills to cope with the mess that India had inherited. It was as though the new government had been deliberately set up to fail so that by default, the Empire would look good.

Because of family holdings, my father had spent time travelling in the Punjab, the seat of some of the worst riots, which he witnessed first hand.

“People were frightened. Your mother remembers the
roti wallah
who used to deliver bread disappearing one day. No one knew what happened to him and in the turmoil no one cared. Everyone had to look after himself. Though I never did, Christians took to wearing visible wooden crosses on their shirtfronts to protect themselves. I understood that fear.”

And then his voice trembled with unshed tears as he transferred his gaze from my face to the far distance. “I've never been in a war zone but I've seen bloodshed and massacre. I had to close my eyes to people – little children – being hacked to death. I'll never forget the screams, the noise, the suffocating stench. Sometimes I still feel it in my sleep.”

He paused to collect himself and his voice when it came was so thin I had to lean forward to catch his words. “I'm glad I didn't have daughters then or I think I'd have gone mad.”

I had studied the Quit India Movement in school and the process that led to India's independence. But those were just facts that I'd committed to memory to regurgitate in a timely manner and pass exams. It was only in conversation with my father that evening that those same facts came alive and I recognised that the nuns, with their predilection for white-skin privilege, had skimmed over the horrors of the India–Pakistan partition. Unable to help myself at my father's anguish the words shot out of me.

“That's dreadful, Daddy. Criminal! Mountbatten should've been tried for war crimes.”

And now, twenty-seven years after Independence I was conscious that it was our turn to leave, to be displaced, albeit without the bloodshed. We had given up our language and culture to successfully integrate into what, for my ancestors, was an alien land, and now, more than a hundred years later, the current generation of my family was being uprooted and we were on the move all over again.

Faced by the enormity of other people's suffering my protest was drying up but my father hadn't finished. It was as if floodgates had been released after the pent-up pressure of many years. His focus had returned to the future, his tone said,
This is not the time or place for histrionics
.

“Of course it's cruel. Of course it's not fair! It hasn't been fair for generations. Jobs, houses, lots of things were earmarked for some people while others have been excluded. Before World War I my father was barred from buying a house on the Mall in Simla so we lived in Wexlow, our twenty-two room, three-gable home in Allandale, instead. It was only later, when the rules were rescinded that we moved into that forty-room place high on the ridge that overlooks the Mall. The one
that you've seen.” He smiled reminiscently and I knew he was seeing Delhi House in his mind's eye.

“Though that house was reputed to be the best private house in the Summer Capital, second only to Vice-Regal Lodge, Moira and I were still thrown off the Mall by some upstart officer when we were children. The same officer who was practically illiterate, who couldn't get within sniffing distance of a home like ours!” Unusually for him, contempt showed in his voice. “Though my father was a Director of the Cecil Hotel where the dignitaries stayed through the summer administration and on the Board of numerous other companies, skin colour gave that nobody, a jumped-up
mamooli
creature, the right and might to bully small children.”

We all know it takes great courage for an officer of the law astride a fifteen-hand horse and protected by uniform of the Empire, to accost an eight-year-old lad and his younger sister. According to Aunt Moira my father had pushed her behind him, squared his shoulders and stepped forward. Remembering his manners in the presence of a young lady, even though she was only four years old, he curbed his language as he consigned the officer to a very hot place. “You-you-you g-g-go to ha-ha—hades.”

That night he continued, “Your great-uncle, though he became an eminent specialist and rose to be Head of School, Tropical Medicine, in Calcutta and was awarded an MBE in 1924, was precluded from advancing beyond the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Indian army. At least he got that far. Others weren't ‘allowed' to be so lucky. Most of the Indians were
duboured
and kept down. The better jobs, better housing, better everything was quarantined for an elite few. Now it's the turn of the local people and we need to leave.