I asked him, ‘Aziz, do you remember how often I went to the maharaja’s in 1962?’
After 27 years, he knew precisely. He said, ‘You went to have dinner three times. One time you went for tea.’
Then I thought to ask him what I had never asked in all the months we had been together. Where had he been born? He said here, on the lake. His father had been a Kashmiri, and his grandfather too; he was a pure Kashmiri. His father had been in business. A little shop. Up to 15 years ago, he said, people in Kashmir were poor. Now people were better off; now people were ‘good’, though – as both he and Nazir agreed – there were so many more of them. But that, Aziz said, speaking now as a man who had travelled, was also the problem of Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi.
I wondered why in 1962 I had asked Aziz so little about himself. Shyness, perhaps; a wish not to intrude; but also perhaps derived from the idea of the writer that I had inherited: the idea of the writer as a man with an internal life, a man drawing it all out of his own entrails, magically reading the externals of things.
Aziz went down, and shortly afterwards I saw the shawl-merchant’s boat pull up at the Leeward’s landing stage. The merchant came up alone. His loose baggy trousers, of thin brown cotton, were tucked into thick woollen socks pulled up high. He was a man of middle age, slender, sharp-featured and impressive. With his black, kinky-curled fur cap (like Mr Butt’s), his black shoes and his black Indian-style jacket, long-skirted, hooked at the top (the top hook was visible), he looked Central Asian rather than Kashmiri. His name was Sharif.
Two lake boys brought up his small tin trunk, carrying it like a palanquin. He took off his shoes, spread a sheet on the carpet of the Leeward’s sitting room, below the tall sliding glass windows, kneeled down, took out some embroidered tunics and laid them aside, and then, reverentially, took out the small bundle of his better-quality shawls, wrapped in white cotton. I had absolute faith in Mr Butt’s management of this affair; and Mr Sharif’s reverence for his goods confirmed what I felt. His stuff was good, thin, light, very warm, suggesting, at certain angles, a kind of ripple in the weaving. He took off his fur cap, showed the needle stuck into the crown, and said – pointing to his somewhat inflamed eyes – that he was more than a seller. He was a maker of shawls.
He wanted 8,600 rupees. I asked for a better price. He said 8,500, and he was firm. I asked Nazir to go and call Mr Butt. Nazir dutifully began going down the steps. On the landing (overlooking the water my bedroom had looked out on: now stagnant, with all the new building and boats, and attracting bottles and wrapping and other litter) Nazir stopped and called me. He wanted to know where I was – how serious I was. He said that Mr Butt knew Mr Sharif very well, and had told Mr Sharif to show me good pieces and give me a good price.
Aziz reappeared. We left Mr Sharif upstairs, and went down to the office. Nazir brought down the shawl I had liked. Aziz felt it and said he would guarantee it for two years: it was what Mr Sharif had said. Mr Butt came, walking in from the front garden. And then Mr Sharif himself came down the steps. So there was a general meeting in the office around the milk-chocolate-brown shawl.
Aziz said 8,500 was too much. Mr Sharif disagreed. Aziz said I wasn’t a three-day tourist. Saying nothing, Mr Sharif left the office, and walked down the marble-floored verandah to the hotel shop. I thought he had been offended in some way.
But Nazir said, ‘He’s going to pray.’
Mr Sharif got a mat from the shop, set it down on the white marble verandah just outside the office, and, while it rained, began to bow and pray. In the office we continued to debate the issue.
Mr Butt said that Mr Sharif was a good man. They had gone to Mecca together. Nazir said that Mr Sharif led the prayers in the mosque. He was not only a man of authority, but also a man of his word.
And Mr Sharif bowed and prayed, the rain pattering on the white marble just inches away from him.
Aziz said, ‘Offer 7,500.’
That was how it was settled. The offer was apparently made and accepted without further reference to me. Mr Sharif finished his prayers, rolled up the mat, took the mat back to the shop, came back to the office, picked up an Urdu newspaper that was a couple of weeks old, began to read from it to Mr Butt (whose spectacle lenses were very thick now). Slowly, after he had finished his reading, he folded the finger-ring shawl; and then, with a similar deliberation, he wrapped the folded shawl in a sheet of the Urdu newspaper he had been reading.
While this was going on, Aziz showed me a third photograph of his trip to Mecca, and I asked Mr Butt what I had never asked him in all the months in 1962. What had he done before starting the Leeward? He said he had been a contractor; he had started the hotel in 1959, with five rooms. Thirty years later, the hotel had 45 rooms.
Much money had come to the valley; many people had risen; there was a whole new educated generation. But a good deal of that improvement had been swallowed up by the growth in the population.
The new wealth showed in the new middle-class building on the north shore of the lake, and on the lower slope of the hill with the Hari Parbat fort. At the same time, behind the houseboats, the stultifying old lake life went on (picturesque in sunlight, less so in the wet and the cold after the rain); and the lake was now more populous. More boys than ever shouted and competed for custom at the boating steps. The effect, though the setting was quite different, was like that of the Muslim ghetto of the old bazaar area of Lucknow.
An older style of life, again, seemed to go on in the centre of the old city, where small covered boats choked the canals, where the brick and timber shops were as I had remembered them, and where very quickly after rain the streets became dusty – with the dust from dried mud. At the rim of that old city, though, there were many important-looking new buildings, among them the university and a government building connected with animal husbandry. But then again, in the villages beyond this, as though the two styles of life were quite separate, was the immemorial world of rice-planting.
In small flooded fields people worked with their hands alone or with wooden ploughs. The houses were basic, brown-red brick between timber uprights, on two or more floors. The pitched roofs of corrugated iron were open at the gable ends, and in this space (and sometimes in a dormer window in the roof) were stored firewood, straw or fodder, or grain. Water ran down the hillsides in many channels; willow and poplar cast cold shadows; and boulders and tree-branches made crude and crooked fences in wet yards. And here as elsewhere wood and brick and the clothes of people were the colour of mud.
Even with this wretched-looking village life – people sitting on the platform-floor of open one-room shops, wrapped in grey-brown blankets or gunny sacks – there were the signs of big public works, as though a great effort was needed to support even that style of life, to provide electricity, to build a road, to offer some kind of transport. And always, the children: very small, in smiling groups, outnumbering the adults. The abiding memory was of the children.
Above a certain altitude it semed that people lived in treeless mud. There were little ploughed plots of sodden earth around low houses of stone or timber, with people sitting or squatting at the edge of the mud. Safe above mud and water, straw was hung in bundles on the branches or in the forks of dried or dying trees. Even here there were children, wearing loose grey or brown gowns that made them look like little adults and made it hard, from a distance, to judge their size.
I saw this on a drive to Sonamarg with Nazir. Sonamarg was on the road to Ladakh in the north-east. It was new to me; it might have been that in 1962 the road wasn’t good or wasn’t open to visitors. The road was closed in winter; it had just been opened for the season. At higher altitudes it ran between walls of snow – melting from below, creating little caverns and snow overhangs; and the just-cleared asphalt surface was being abraded and dug up by runnels of melting snow.
At Sonamarg we were surrounded by thin, shouting boys who wanted us to toboggan down the snow slopes. ‘Thirty rupees, 30 rupees.’ The boys wo
re caps and had blotched complexions. From the roadside signs, Sonamarg seemed to mark a kind of boundary between Kashmir and Ladakh. It was no more than a collection of government huts and tourist lodges and shops. There were no fields or houses; the boys must have come from a village some distance away.
Nazir would have liked me to take a slide, to do the holiday thing, and to give the boys some work. Nazir’s father was a successful man. He himself, with his nice haircut, his jeans and trainers, his dark-blue anorak (I asked him about it: it was Taiwanese, and cost 500 rupees, £25), was the picture of a young man of the middle class. But here, as on the lake, he had this feeling of solidarity with the Kashmiri children.
Going back down, back to the softer valley, getting an idea of its comparatively restricted size, returning quickly to crowds and small spaces (on the outskirts of Srinagar Nazir pointed out a little orchard that belonged to Mr Butt, but we didn’t stop), I felt again, as I had felt at some of the boating steps, that even in this setting of mountains and snow-fed rivers, people had become as hemmed in and constrained as they were in the narrow ghetto lanes of Lucknow.
At the Leeward the next day I said goodbye to them all in the late afternoon, about half an hour or so before they broke their fast at the end of the Ramadan day: goodbye to Mr Butt, Aziz, the man who ran the hotel shop (from whom I had bought nothing), and the slender young man who was the manager of the Leeward. They were all in the little white glass-walled office downstairs, with the key-board and the calendar and the two posters of Mecca showing the kaaba and a golden dome. And just before I left they asked, just for the courtesy, whether I wanted tea.
Mr Butt’s last news – the news he wanted me to take away and remember – was that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He didn’t speak of it as a penance; he spoke of it as a joy and fulfilment. It made him smile and laugh at the moment of farewell.
With Aziz my last talk was about money. His son Nazir had spent much time with me, and on our excursions had sometimes spent his own money. What would be a good recompense? There was no question of payment, Aziz said. Baksheesh was another matter: that could be one rupee, fourpence, or a lakh, 4000 pounds. That was no help to me at all, but Aziz didn’t go beyond that. When I suggested a figure, Aziz’s face remained unreadable – and that was how I left him.
In the boat going back to the boulevard, feeling the end of the Ramadan day pressing on us, I made my offering to Nazir. He took what I offered, but it was immediately clear that he had done so only out of courtesy. His face altered; he looked away. I felt I had mishandled the moment: Nazir, though he had done tourist things with me, had perhaps been treating me as a friend. I felt again, but more acutely now, what I had sensed from the beginning: that my relationship with Nazir, an unexpectedly handsome young man with his own new ideas of elegance and self, couldn’t but be more complicated than my relationship with his father.
I wanted to save the moment. I said that the gesture I had made had been made out of friendship for him and Aziz and Mr Butt. I said that twice. He softened; some recognition seemed to come to him that he too had to do something to save the moment – so soon to end, at the boating steps, and before the sunset call from the mosques.
The stiffness went out of him. And as we slipped down the busy waterway, past the small houseboat with the leather and fur-goods shop, the grocery, and the Sunshine Haircutting Saloon, we talked about his studies. In a few months he was going to get his school-leaving certificate. For two years after this he would study commerce at a college – preparing for his career in accountancy and, as his father and Mr Butt hoped, his life in the hotel business – and then he would go to the university.
From his grandfather’s little shop in the lake, to his father’s successful hotel career, to his own prospects as a graduate and acountant – there had been a step-by-step movement upwards. Would it continue?
He had never been out of Kashmir. At the moment the valley (and the mountains around it) was all the world he knew. He was still part of it. Twenty-seven years after I had got to know him, Aziz had remained more or less the same. It wouldn’t be like that with Nazir. Already he had intimations of a world outside. Already, through that monthly exchange of letters with a foreign girl, there had come to him the idea of the possibility – always in Allah’s hands – of a foreign marriage. In 27 years – hard for me now, in late middle age, to imagine that stretch of time, that boundary in the shades – Nazir wouldn’t be the same. New ways of seeing and feeling were going to come to him, and he wasn’t going to be part of the valley in the way he was now.
In 27 years I had succeeded in making a kind of return journey, shedding my Indian nerves, abolishing the darkness that separated me from my ancestral past. William Howard Russell, in 1858, had described (and commented on) a vast country physically in ruins, even away from the battles of the Mutiny. Twenty-five years or so later, from a part of the country Russell had travelled through (in such style as was available), my ancestors had left as indentured servants for the sugar estates of Guyana and Trinidad. I had carried in my bones that idea of abjectness and defeat and shame. It was the idea I had taken to India on that slow journey by train and ship in 1962; it was the source of my nerves. (It was the idea that surfaced again, to my surprise, during the writing of this book, when I first tried to read William Howard Russell’s Diary, and I found myself rejecting the book, the man, and even his great descriptive talent.)
What I hadn’t understood in 1962, or had taken too much for granted, was the extent to which the country had been remade; and even the extent to which India had been restored to itself, after its own equivalent of the Dark Ages – after the Muslim invasions and the detailed, repeated vandalising of the North, the shifting empires, the wars, the 18th-century anarchy. The twentieth-century restoration of India to itself had taken time; it could even seem like a kind of luck. It had taken much to create a Bengali reformer like Ram Mohun Roy (born in 1772); it had taken much more to create Gandhi (born in 1869). The British peace after the 1857 Mutiny can be seen as a kind of luck. It was a time of intellectual recruitment. India was set on the way of a new kind of intellectual life; it was given new ideas about its history and civilization. The freedom movement reflected all of this and turned out to be the truest kind of liberation.
In the 130 years or so since the Mutiny – the last 90 years of the British Raj and the first 40 years of independence begin increasingly to appear as part of the same historical period – the idea of freedom has gone everywhere in India. Independence was worked for by people more or less at the top; the freedom it brought has worked its way down. People everywhere have ideas now of who they are and what they owe themselves. The process quickened with the economic development that came after independence; what was hidden in 1962, or not easy to see, what perhaps was only in a state of becoming, has become clearer. The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.
A million mutinies, supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess: the beginnings of self-awareness, it would seem, the beginnings of an intellectual life, already negated by old anarchy and disorder. But there was in India now what didn’t exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea. The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness. The Indian Union gave people a second chance, calling them back from the excesses with which, in another century, or in other circumstances (as neighbouring countries showed), they might have had to live: the destructive chauvinism of the Shiv Sena, the tyranny of many kinds of religious fundamentalism (people always ready in India to let religion carry the burden of their pain), the film-star corruption and racial politics of the South, the
pious Marxist idleness and nullity of Bengal.
Excess was now felt to be excess in India. What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians now felt they could appeal. And – strange irony – the mutinies were not to be wished away. They were part of the beginning of a new way for many millions, part of India’s growth, part of its restoration.
When I went back to Bombay I got in touch with Paritosh, the film writer. Paritosh worked in the commercial cinema, and he loved the film form: it was his vocation, almost his faith. But he didn’t care for the people who made films in India. They made him suffer; they enraged him; and he had had his ups and downs.
When I had met him, five months before, he had just come out of a bad period. During this period he had turned his back on Bombay and films and had gone back to his own city of Calcutta to rest and recover. But then – having married in this period – he had come to the end of his mood of rejection, and he had come back to Bombay to start again. He was living in a mid-town area in a bare one-roomed apartment. ‘This is my only room under the sun,’ he had said, throwing up his arms, looking at the ceiling, making the room feel very small. But he had prospects: he had come back to Bombay to work on a film with a once successful producer he had known. Every now and then they met in a neighbourhood hotel and discussed the script.
Paritosh was determined to stay the course and to succeed this time. He said he felt he was going to make some money. But his cousin, who had taken me to see him, and had sat in the room with us, was gloomier. Paritosh’s temperament would get in the way; he would quarrel with someone, or something would happen; and Paritosh would be back where he had always been. I listened to what the cousin said as we walked back through the crowded streets near a market to the suburban railway station; and I had become depressed, thinking of the fine-looking writer in his bare room. Now, five months on, I wanted to know what had happened.