Out of India (14 page)

Food was much in evidence but people were thin. All around were sunken cheeks, faces drawn and creased beyond their years, arms and legs looking too fragile for their daily duties. Food, even when plentiful, was not taken for granted. The system, such as it was, that tied agricultural production to income and life was so precarious that it wavered continually about the point of collapse.

Later, in my readings about India, I thought of those pinched faces of Ambala and the swollen bellies on the stick-like bodies of the children when I read of famines in that part of the Punjab in 1860–1, in 1868–9, in 1884–5, in 1890, in 1896–7, in 1899–1900, and so on miserably into the next century. I hardly understood what was happening until I came across the pages of Amartya Sen, that famous and humane economist, who at the time I am writing about in Ambala was himself a child in the devastating famine of West Bengal. There was grain enough then (India is a fecund mother, though wilful and unpredictable), and it was stored ready for use. But after the hard times partly caused by the war the large rural population of Bengal had no income left to buy the grain, and so families must starve. There was not a lack of food but a lack of buying power. As in Ireland in the time of the
Potato Famine, it was deemed better that miserable indigents should perish than that the iron laws of capitalist relations should be broken. What happened was considered inevitable. However kindly, well-informed people – economically
mature
– knew better than to monkey with the market.

There was no shortage of food for us, but we did not eat well. The quarters for the families of transient officers in Ambala – in a hostel of a sort – were gloomy places, a square blocky building marooned in a well-stamped compound of bare ground. Rooms were tall and ill-lit (keep the heat out at all costs!), the light growing dim in upper corners that needed whitewash. The old paint on the shutters was sun-blistered and flaking. Senile fans, joined to the electricity supply by frayed wires, creaked around hardly able to disturb the tepid air. The servants and the cleaners, looking unconscionably elderly, padded the quiet public rooms and the corridors, weariness falling from them like dross. The whole place was suffused with an undefeatable lassitude.

The mournful dining room unnerved even us children. Our usual hearty appetites had deserted us; we pushed the food around on the plates. Mulligatawny soup was the sole triumph of the kitchen. After that, the cook fell back, as if imagination was exhausted, to soups of the Brown Windsor variety, lumps of gristly meat in swamps of
bhindi
or brinjal, drowned potatoes, followed by sweetish custardy things of a yellow hue. Outside the hostel I had seen peasants and coolies taking a midday break on their heels in the shady lee of a wall, eating interesting messes from a battered tin plate, scooping up rice and lentils, folding chapatis around cumin- or turmeric-tinged vegetables. After a time I asked my father why we could not try what even the lowest-placed servant enjoyed. My father viewed without enthusiasm the prospect of an Indian diet. In matters of food, though he was not fussy, his tastes inclined to the pork, sausage, and
pie-laden ideal of his pig-keeping Lincolnshire childhood. But he explained to me that orders had been handed down from the highest source in Delhi that British officers were not to use the standard foods of the Indian troops. Rice and chapati, in particular, were not to be eaten.

This was only a sympathetic gesture, showing consideration for a populace teetering as ever on the brink of famine. For good as well as bad reasons, what was Indian was not owed to the British, and vice-versa. Now, more than ever, it was a puzzle to know where we stood.

My father left the hostel early. Before breakfast, he roused us, coming into the bedroom I shared with my brother without ceremony. A loud ‘Now, boys, up you get’ squeezed the last sweet drops of sleep out of us, and then he was gone, a smart lanky figure in long socks and roomy military shorts, drawing on a cigarette as he strode into the oven of another Punjab day. Like a ship running before a brisk wind he scudded beyond our horizon and was temporarily lost to us. I did not know where he went or what he did.

Abandoned at breakfast, we also were in a sense lost. The door to the roadway was open, to catch the slightest breeze. Strong slanting sunlight lanced through the haze of dust in the broad military highway outside. Sepoys on errands went by, looking bright but not so eager that they worked up a lather. Then an infantry platoon might come flying along, stepping out with a swing under an NCO’s unforgiving eye. All that world was ours to make what we could of it, doing as much each day as our invention and the merciful patience of India would allow.

‘Where’s Ma?’ I would ask my brother, reaching for another piece of cold toast in the Victorian gilt toastrack.

Yet again she had not been seen this early in the day. We did not need her, but it was as well to keep tabs on her whereabouts. She had not left my parents’ bedroom.

Soon after midday we took lunch almost on the run, in
and out, unwashed and with dishevelled clothes, hardly daring to leave the scenes of the street – a donkey that kicked over a farmer’s cart, a dog maddened by heat and insects growling and tearing at its own rump, a line of women in saris carrying road-chips in head-baskets, a lorry-load of jolly soldiers giving us an impromptu and ironic salute. We begrudged the time away. This was better theatre than we had ever seen in England. Still munching we ran from the bare spaces of the hostel, away from dull echoes, and the slow tap of time passing.

Sometimes, as we fled from lunch, we would see Father returning for a short afternoon siesta. I still did not know him very well but it struck me that he often looked pulled down, walking with something less than his usual spring. He looked solemn, waving only a perfunctory salute at passing soldiers. Tucking his hat under his arm he made straight for his bedroom, shutting the door carefully behind him as if some delicate tracery of sound or structure might get broken.

At some later time, going by my parents’ door, I heard noises that made me stop. Something deep and confused was happening in there. I heard a rumble like stones in a heavy wooden box interspersed with bursts of rapid monotone pitching up towards the edge of hysteria or tears. Then a silence, too deep and too long. I wanted to knock but stopped my hand and went quickly away on tiptoe.

‘What’s the matter with them?’ I asked my brother. ‘Do you think they’re
ill
?’

My brother didn’t know. ‘Well, it’s hot, isn’t it?’ he suggested. Adults had peculiar metabolisms that left them victims to things we took in our stride. Besides, it was not our place to enquire. It was as much as we could do to make daily sense of the street-world outside. If there were something wrong close to home we would be told in good time. Instinctively, we turned from the threat of gloom. Slamming out of the hostel we rushed into the early
evening where we could hear a regimental pipe band limbering up by the maidan with rapturous squeals.

My mother did not go out much. Perhaps the hostel was the coolest place, and in any case there was little she wanted to do in the cantonment. I would see her, still in her slippers, slumped in a big cane chair under the laborious fan, listlessly turning the pages of a long out-of-date
Illustrated London News
. When she came to the dining room she would hardly eat, pushing the dish aside with a wrinkling of the nose.

‘Oh this
heat
,’ she sighed, starting to rise then sinking back in a lump on her chair. In a while she headed back to her bedroom.

‘There you are,’ she would say in surprise when our paths crossed. ‘Are you all right?’ She looked at us quizzically, as if there were things she was struggling to understand, but she was not listening for an answer. Absentmindedly, she would put out a hand to smooth our hair or straighten our clothes. ‘Just look at you,’ she sighed again, ‘such a mess.’ Offended by a dirty nose she would make a pass at one of us with her hanky, but we were off and away before her hand could fall on us.

Then we hardly saw her at all – a back disappearing behind a door, a head bowed over sewing or sock-darning, a silent profile turned away from her husband, a pale face waiting for our perfunctory goodnight kiss. Sometimes, looking up at a slight noise and expecting to see her, I discovered only an ancient servant shuffling the floor in heelless slippers with toes turned up like the prow of a boat.

My father’s face was becoming tight and stubborn. He parted and combed his dark hair with extreme care and his moustache was rigorously clipped. I was not anxious to be kissed by him, a reluctance that relieved both of us from a burdensome display of affection. We children hardly saw him, a state of affairs that seemed to suit us all.
Conscientiously, he gave us our orders, as he would to his staff, and from time to time he came down on us hard for our rowdy and quarrelsome behaviour. That was as far as he wanted to go. He did not know, at the best of times, how to speak to children. Finding himself unavoidably in our company he would clear his throat, as if ready to make a general proposition on the weather or the state of the day, but then his voice would stall. He was saved by the routine of lighting another cigarette, or calling for another beer. Before picking up his book he would enquire politely, ‘Anything you boys want? Another squash? No? Well, run along then till supper time. Don’t be late. You know your mother expects you home.’

In a while long steps took him to his bedroom door. He reached slowly for the handle and opened the door a notch, saying quietly and apologetically, ‘It’s only me, dear.’ A little click covered the finality of his retreat. Silence.

‘Perhaps they’re
both
ill,’ said my brother.

*

‘I still can’t understand why he did that to me,’ my mother said rancorously, some years after my father’s death.

I was sitting with her in her little flat, under the eaves in her block of sheltered housing apartments. She had come to rest here; her own death was not far off.

In thickening winter light the great swell of the bells had just finished flooding into the room from the tower of Wells Cathedral. It was a moment for confidences. Nervously she pulled her spectacles on and off, impatiently discarding one pair of glasses, then rubbing at the smeared lens of another pair which was equally unsatisfactory. Her rheumy eye gazed over the winter muck of the farmyard next door and rested without pleasure on the saturated Mendip hills beyond. She was not reconciled to her memories.

‘What had I done to deserve it?’ she complained. ‘There
I was in wartime England, alone for four years, scrimping and saving, worried to death by you two children – you were often little devils, you know – though of course it wasn’t your fault, you poor dears. And there he was, having the time of his life – he told me so – playing soldiers in Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad, Basra, northern Persia. No fighting, he never saw a shot fired in anger. It seemed really like one long round of pleasure, and then I think what I was going through.’

A jolly, soldier’s life, sunny days, drinks in the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel, a sympathetic ear from convenient young ladies (best to pass quickly over that bit), meals on the terrace of Lebanese restaurants by the gun-metal waters of the Mediterranean. Then purposeful plans to give some spice to the administrative day, a preparedness without any real danger, but still camping under stars (‘when sleeping on the ground,’ my father said sagely, ‘always dig a little pit for your hip’). Then dozing on long night drives without lights under the amazing blaze of the desert heavens, the endless divisional columns rumbling like a distant earth tremor. Not needed for the 8th Army push in North Africa but sidetracked into cloak-and-dagger operations beyond the line of the Atrak river, towards Ashkhabad, helping Uncle Sam supply a depleted Russian army, the Yanks refusing to stir from their base-camp until the generator for their refrigerators was in place and the Coca-Cola well-cooled. Exciting games for big boys, and no one hurt. Rapid promotion too.

‘Oh, why did he treat me like that?’ my mother wailed, pain half a century old still in her voice. ‘On that journey back to India, when I met him on the ship I was so full of joy. Life could begin once more, he and I and you two boys, whom he did not know, together in India. I wanted it to be just the way it was before the war. Then he told me in Ambala, where I was not very well anyway, that he had put himself forward for the last of the fighting in
Burma. It was with those Chindit ruffians, or whatever they were called, the final push against the Japanese. We had only been together for a few months and he was happy to abandon me again!’

He could not admit it but as a soldier he felt unfulfilled, and in truth a little ashamed also. He was a professional with twenty years’ service and he had seen no enemy action. It was not a case of heroism but almost a dereliction of duty. When he was sunning himself in the desert he knew only too well that many poor conscripts, reluctant and fearful warriors, had their laggard steps wiped out by death. War is a drug to some, a test to others. Under either case, however you looked at it, my father felt he had not had the advantage of the time. He wanted to know what he might do when the adrenalin rushed, and the spiteful bullets snickered about his ears, and the big demented shells plastered earth and gore on the living and dead, and the unwary suddenly plunged terrified faces into any patch of stones or litter only to discover later that they had soiled their breeches.

Sleepy India was all very well, and there were easy satisfactions to be gained in peacetime soldiering. But a flying moment, which appeared suddenly of overwhelming importance, was waiting to be grabbed. Now or never. My father wondered if a woman – a family – had the right to stand between himself and this moment of self-revelation, a last chance to test himself to the farthest depths of his professional being, his manhood. It seemed to him to be a reasonable question to put, though it was never answered since he was not needed in Burma.

‘He made me furious,’ said my mother. ‘Utterly wretched too. I had suffered so much. I couldn’t believe what this foolish man was saying. I was not well and I had to rest. He made me cry into my pillow. Such cruelty! He stood there at the end of the bed, as if he were suggesting … well, no more than a visit to the weekend
gymkhana. I wanted to throw something at him – a shoe or something – but I was too upset and weak. I thought that we were going to be so happy. I thought, all through the war, if only I can get back to India. And now this. I didn’t want him near me, not to touch me. Oh, I was so sick and so weak. All I wanted to do then was sleep, sleep. The doctor came but what use was he? What use are they ever?’