The Death of Mr Love, page 23
But Killy’s friends were not Sybil’s sort of people.
His favourite book is a hate-filled tome which had belonged to his father. It was written about seventy years ago, and purports to look a century ahead, to that most unthinkable of futures, a free India ruled by Indians. It’s called India in 1983. Killy is pleased to call it ‘a marvellously prophetic little book’. He brought it out the other night at a dinner party and read aloud: ‘Out of the three hundred and sixty advanced Hindu thinkers who composed the assembly, three hundred and fifty nine had announced their intention of bringing forward bills making the practice of slaughtering cows punishable with penal servitude for life.’ His English friends, even the women, shrieked with laughter. Wilmott said, ‘Gandhi wanted a ban on cow-slaughter from day one of Independence.’ Julia Wilmott chirped up brightly, ‘But they slaughtered him instead.’ This produced a silence round the table, until Killy said, ‘Yes, and it was done by Hindus . . . their minds don’t work like ours.’ He grew morose and said, ‘God help this poor country. I hope I shan’t live to see 1983.’
Often in those first months he would find her crying. ‘Why can’t you find something to do?’ Killy would ask, exasperated, as the pretty girl he had fallen for in England presented him yet again with a weeping face. ‘Join a club, find a little job. Other women keep busy. Get out and about a bit. Have some fun.’
So she got out, and gradually the city came to seem less strange. Her encounter with a Bombay paanwallah made me smile.
In a niche above the pavement outside our house sits a plump, half-naked man, selling betel leaf treats called paan. The shiny, heart-shaped leaves are graded according to size and shape and strung on threads which dangle above the betelseller’s head. For some reason I usually avoided his eye when I went past. But today I glanced at him and he smiled and gestured at his wares. On an impulse I decided to try one. He was delighted and called to a couple of men who were lounging nearby, to come and watch this amusing show. I began to feel quite silly standing there, in my English dress and straw hat. What if Killy, or worse, one of his friends, or God forbid, one of our servants were to see me? The paanwallah insisted on chattering at me in Hindi, of which naturally I couldn’t follow a word. He put all sorts of things into the leaf, topped it off with a pinch of pink shredded coconut and grinned as I popped it in my mouth. It was rather cloying and whatever was inside turned my teeth and tongue scarlet. Afterwards I felt rather proud of myself.
Killy, besides being a member of the Breach Candy Swimming Club, belonged to most of the city’s old British haunts, the Bombay Gymkhana, the Willingdon, the Royal Yacht Club. By the early fifties most of them had completed the painful process of admitting Indians to membership and Sybil met a great many of the city’s wealthier inhabitants.
I have spent too many evenings in the flats of the rich crowd. The people I met were obsessed with the same ephemera from which I thought I’d escaped. Their oh-so-dull conversations revolve around business deals, the latest adulteries and the price of whisky on the black market. Some of them like to parade their wealth in front of new acquaintances like me. I have seen a tipsy businessman empty three bottles of Scotch out of a window to prove that he could afford it. I think they are all suffering from a kind of ennui. Listless women would ask me whether I’d come to India to find myself . . . The India of the streets is, I suspect, almost as much of a mystery to them as it is to me. I want to get hold of them, especially the women, whose lives seem to be spent worrying about fashion, make-up and being seen at the right parties, and shake them. I never do though. In their company a kind of laissez-faire grips me and I can do nothing to shake it off. Every time I come back from one of those wasted, frustrating evenings, I am filled with astonishment that I didn’t simply walk out.
It was a relief to discover she was pregnant. At last, here was something wholly her own. She would devote herself to being a mother. But the pregnancy was difficult. Sybil was sick a lot. She longed for England and, surprising herself, for her mother. The baby was born after a labour that left her racked and disbelieving. Killy, summoned home from ‘somewhere up-country’, arrived in her hospital room with a fistful of flowers. She smiled feebly. By then the pain was over. She informed Killy that he had a daughter. She wanted to name the baby Barbara, but Killy insisted that she should be called Phoebe, after his mother. (For this I was grateful to him; I couldn’t imagine Phoebe as a Barbara.) Killy had another surprise for her. On his next visit he was accompanied by an old, dumpy woman in a faded ankle-length skirt.
Muffety Mai dahi malai, ghaas pe baith ke khayi.
Ek badaa saa makdaa, kapdaa ko pakdaa . . .
The child must have an ayah. Killy’s old nanny had long since retired to her village in Goa, but she had sent a younger version of herself to look after the child. How could you decide this without consulting me, Sybil wanted to ask, but was grateful when the new arrival, Rosie, immediately took over the nappying, and the bottles, and the rocking to sleep, and generally began to practise the age-old lore and rigmarole of the Indian ayah.
. . . .ur bhaag gayi Muffety Mai!
Killy, roaring with laughter, could complete the lines. ‘It’s Little Miss Muffet, don’t you see?’
Thus some years passed. Phoebe became a little girl. The ayah took over the hisaab and the dhobi and the responsibility of household rule. Sybil’s diaries of the mid-fifties reveal a different woman. She had found friends of her own. Indian friends who shared her own tastes and guided her cultural explorations. She was no longer amazed by paanwallahs. She acquired a taste for Indian music, began to read Indian writers.
Homi has taught me to hear how the way Indians speak English is actually rather beautiful, but says it is too subtle to be enjoyed except by anyone who really knows the place. He gave me a tour of the country by accent, harsh guttural Punjabi English and light, lips-and-tongue Bengali, tongue-cracking consonants of the South. Next time Killy makes jokes about what he calls ‘babu speak’ I shall tell him that it is carefully-preserved eighteenth-century English, and show him the letter I found in a biography of Lord Nelson, in which Nelson, writing for a supply of water casks to be shipped to his fleet, concludes with the typical and much-sneered at babu phrase ‘Kindly do the needful, and oblige.’
Killy was bemused by Sybil’s new friends. ‘Well, at least you’re not moping around for something to do. But be careful,’ he told her. ‘I know these people. They always want to take advantage.’
‘Of course,’ her diary indignantly records, ‘he’s quite wrong.’
He meets someone like Homi, sees a beatnik beard and has no idea at all what to make of him. He quotes old, insulting poems by nineteenth-century bigots. He cannot begin to conceive that someone like Homi has read Steinbeck, Hemingway, Camus, Beckett, Golding, Theodore Roethke, Salinger. Killy has never heard of half these people. He found me reading Catcher in the Rye and asked if it was something by Thomas Hardy.
Sybil’s friends tended to be in advertising, film or the theatre. She joined Zafyque’s Theatre Troupe and went on a tour that took Miller’s Death of a Salesman and an Indianised version of La Cantatrice Chauve, a play by a new Parisian playwright, Eugène Ionesco, to Delhi, Calcutta, Madras and, curiously, Pondicherry. (Later in the diary the reason for Pondi becomes clear. Zafyque, wanting to give at least one performance of La Cantatrice partly in the original, needed a French-speaking audience and the only place he could think of was the old French colony. The performance evidently was peculiar, with some of the actors having ‘faute de mieux’, she wrote, to speak phonetically lines which they did not understand. ‘The audience were very decent. Seemed to accept it as part of the overall peculiarity of the play.’)
Bombay, a decade after Independence, seems to have been a most cosmopolitan city. Flotsam and jetsam cast up by the war. Some names from her diaries: Pieter ‘Franzi’ Bloch, Hersh Cynowicz, Josephine Tuor, Burjor Paymaster, Sir Richard and Lady Temple, Karl Bendlin, Charmain Nadim, Feisal Wahid, Faust Pinto.
A call from the Tourist Club of India to join their Committee, and am invited to dinner and discussion at 8.30 tonight at ‘Horizon View’ with a Mr Pursram. Searched for Pursram in vain but found a Mr Bassam’s flat open. The Consul for the Dominican Republic welcomed us in: stood hands on Grundig radiogram as big and vulgar as a cinema organ and said, ‘Our dear friend Mr Bassam, a leading Arab merchant, has kindly invited us all this evening for a dance. As you know (we didn’t), we never dine before eleven.’ Several Arabs. I didn’t know anyone. Killy kept asking, ‘Well, which one invited you?’ A red light was switched on and all other lights switched off and people danced. Most eerie and I was petrified with fury! I froze into a chair under the red light and listened to the Consul for Dominica chewing peanuts. The host arrived later, lit up his radiogram with its thousand and one knobs. At dinner, leaning on the sideboard, the little mouselike Tourist Club man, Sharma, says, ‘So Mrs Killigrew, how do you like dinner-dances?’ ‘Very much.’ ‘So you will ask me to some nice parties now? Cocktail parties with lots of drinks?’ Ugh.
It was an era of parties. Bashes thrown by the advertising crowd, by film-wallahs who lived on the beach at Juhu, Bombay’s Malibu. There always seemed to be something going on at the Willingdon. There were cocktail parties given by warriors of the Indian Navy who had gone into battle, during 1939–45, in British warships, some of which now lay at anchor in Bombay Harbour. Captain Sahib’s ship, INS Delhi had once been HMS Achilles of the River Plate. Sybil took Phoebe to a lunchtime party on board and was amused when she wrote in the visitors’ book, ‘This ship is very nicely painted and has very nice drinks.’ (About eight mango juices.) There were readings, concerts and parties without end.
Her 1957 diary described a birthday party given by a man called Subramanium, an executive with a pharmaceutical company. Sybil knew his wife, Noor. The story interested me because Noor had been one of my mother’s circle. She used to come to Maya’s soirées in Ambona. For some months, according to the diary, Subramanium, or ‘Sub’, as Noor called him, had been pleading with her to stop her dalliances. ‘I am a good man. I offer you my heart, my soul, my love, my bank account.’
Noor laughed about this with her friends. ‘I always confess when I am unfaithful, but what I could never tell him is that a husband can only ever be the smile on one’s face. One’s lover is a smile in the heart.’
‘I wonder what it’s like,’ wrote Sybil, ‘to have a smiling heart.’
Sub insisted on making all the arrangements for his 40th birthday party and personally supervised every last detail. He spent hours with his servants planning the small eats, and the feast of biryanis and pulaos. He went to Crawford Market to order the flowers, and made a call to his boot-legger for half a dozen cases of smuggled Johnnie Walker. He had his driver negotiate the narrow alley near the Fort, full of printing works and leather goods shops, to stop outside Marosa’s the confectioners, where he and Noor used to meet for coffee and cake before they were married, when he was poor (Noor had never been poor). He ordered a giant cake, having first tasted to make sure that Marosa’s chocolate still smelt, as it always had, of peardrops. He collected the beautifully engraved cards he had ordered a fortnight earlier and personally filled in each name in rich blue-black ink. He left nothing to chance.
When he had invited all his friends, relatives, and particularly, every one he could name of Noor’s lovers, past and present, he drove his Mercedes north through Bombay’s crowded suburbs and out along the coast road, skirting coconut groves through which showed glints of distant silver, till he entered the forest of the Aarey Milk Colony. It took him an hour to find the perfect spot. He nosed the great car off the road into a clearing among the pines and there attached a hose to its exhaust pipe, using a rubber kitchen glove to effect an insecure coitus.
He was found next morning – the unmistakable vehicle was one of the sights of the city – by a party of Goan picnickers. A note addressed to Noor lay on the passenger seat beside him. At the same time, his cards began arriving all over Bombay at smart apartments in Malabar Hill and Marine Drive, at villas in Juhu Beach and Marve, where the film set lived.
Charles Subramanium cordially requests the pleasure of your company on the occasion of his first deathday.
Noor was in bed with Bagrani when the call came, the phone brought into the room by a bearer with averted, apologetic eyes. She became hysterical and started beating Baggy with small fists, declaring that her life, too, was finished. ‘How could he do this to me? I thought he was so strong, my companion.’
Sub would have died, had he not forgotten to fill the tank before setting off for oblivion. The engine coughed itself dry without pumping quite enough carbon monoxide to fill the car. He woke and found himself in hospital, and recovered in time to turn up as guest of honour at his own wake.
‘Typical Sub-human incompetence,’ Noor said, when she had regained her poise. ‘Couldn’t even kill himself properly.’ Tucked into the diary was a note, presumably in Sub’s writing, which said: ‘Dear Sybil, thank you for your kind well wishes. I am feeling much better today after a good rest. You asked where I scoured [sic? ] the supplies. I have jotted down a list for you.’
*Flowers from florists at Warden Road
*Garlands near Teen Batti, Nepean Sea Road
*Mogras from Teen Batti
*Pink badami gulabs from the lanes at Crawford Market
*Panir (cheese) from Parsi Dairy Farm at Queens Road
*Kulfi (ice-cream) ditto
*Big birthday cake from Marosa’s, Fort
*Samosas from that Irani café near the Metro cinema
*Chaat from Kailash Parbat in Colaba Causeway
*Rasgullas from the mithai-wallah near Kemp’s Corner
*Little mawa cakes and pav from Kyani’s
*Salad dressing from Rustom’s, Colaba
*Ditto imported cheese, dips, meat sauces
*Dhansak from Ratan Tata Institute
*Berry Pulav from the Irani Café Brittanie at Ballard Estate
*Crockery from Chor Bazaar
*Bombay Duck (the dried fish) from Sassoon Dock
*Hilsa-fish from Crawford Market
*Fresh vegetables from Grant Road
*Vindaloo from Mrs George, a nice old Anglo-Indian lady in Bandra East
*Basmati rice from our local baniya
*Those wonderful paper-thin roomali rotis from a Bhopali chef, Gangaram, whose address I would give you, but I have since heard that he is probably suffering from leprosy
*Badams, pistachios, cashews, walnuts from the American
Dry Fruit Stores at Flora Fountain
*Sev from Vithal Bhelwala near VT station
*Kebabs from ‘Bade Miyan’ at Colaba. You’ll always find a few big cars pulled up outside his stall
*Chicken from the goaswallahs of Crawford Market
*Sandwich ice-creams from Rustom’s, Churchgate, the ones with pistachio ice-cream served between two crisp biscuits
*Alphonso mangoes from the fruit-wallahs of Breach Candy and Walkeshwar
*Firangi Johnnie Walker Scotch from the black market. Like most people I tend to use Saqi Baba in Char Null, Dongri area, but don’t go there alone. Ask me and I can arrange it for you.
FIVE RUPEES A SEER (SYBIL’S JOURNALS 1956–7)
Among the people Sybil met through Zafyque’s Theatre Troupe was my mother, Maya. Both loved reading, and shared an ambition to write. Sybil loved the new Lawrence Durrell book, Justine, which had burst like an exploding box of paints upon the astonished reading public. It was only just out in England but had already been pirated by Bombay’s astuter pavement booksellers. Durrell was a genius, Sybil said. Never had there been such an evocation of a city as his portrait of Alexandria. Landscape tones: bruised plum, rose, burnt sienna. She could quote lengthy passages. Sybil imagined an equivalent novel set in Bombay, a thinly disguised account of the friends whose doings filled her journals. She had written the story of Sub and his death-day party, half-thinking that she could begin to weave a longer story around its characters.
Maya countered that with the exception of her hero, Manto (who alas had just died in Lahore), William Faulkner was the purest and truest writer alive. They soon became friends. Maya introduced Sybil to the city, showed her the best junk shops, haggled on her behalf in the bazaars.
To Chor Bazaar again with Maya, our taxi ploughing through crowds that mill on every pavement in the Muslim bazaar area, and spill into the street. The air is loud with hoots and the screeches of near-collisions as impatient taxi drivers seek to defy various laws of Newton. Maya took me to her favourite bookseller, a charming man who carries an air of learning. He has very white hair swept back from his forehead and his shop is piled from floor to ceiling with old leather-bound books that must have come from the libraries of departed sahibs. I found a complete set of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in gold-tooled leather. Hardly dared ask the price. But the man – his name is Sharif – picked up the pile, and said he guessed it would come to about twelve rupees. A little later when I had added a few more books, I asked again for a price. To my astonishment, he never once looked to see what any of the books were, nor opened them to check a price. He sorted two piles, leather bindings and cloth bindings, and proceeded to weigh each in a large brass scale, explaining to me that ‘Leather is five rupees a seer, cloth only two.’
Maya also has a bookbinder, a little Hindu who speaks and reads no English, but somehow does the titles perfectly. To him the alphabet is just symbols, as precise and inscrutable as Chinese writing is to me.
With what huge envy I read this. A seer is just under a kilogram and five rupees in those days was perhaps worth forty pence. For a moment, I was tempted . . . But it was inconceivable that such bookdealers were still to be found in the depths of Chor Bazaar.
