Who was this pocket giant, this mighty mouse? What might be the source of such display? Whence came his power, his wealth? Ameer Merchant, her good humour befouled by the Doodhwala party’s noisy advent, was in no mood for questions. “Goats,” was her snappish reply. I didn’t know what to make of that. He’d got her goat, that was plain. “Mummy? Excuse me?” She actually bleated at me in annoyance. “You don’t know goats? Mè-è-è? Billies, nannies. Don’t be stupid now. Bakra-bakri is all.” And that was all the explanation I could get.
V.V. Merchant came awake in a confused state, jolted out of deep sleep by the noise; whereupon, to his further bewilderment, his beloved wife rounded on him. “Blasted tamasha,” she snorted, explosively. “Seems like one side of this family never learned how to behave.”
Well, that was a bombshell. “We’re related? How? Where?”
The Piloo gang had come to a halt no more than forty feet away, and its less exalted members were busy laying out sheets and sweets, acting on Golmatol’s stentorian instructions, and raising a gay shamiana marquee on poles over the festive spread. A card school got going, and Piloo soon showed himself to be a fierce bidder and big winner, although perhaps his servitors, understanding where their interests lay, allowed him his successes. From a thermos flask a bearer poured Piloo a large aluminum tumblerful of thin, blue-white goat’s milk. He drank open-mouthed, careless of dribbles. Halva and Rasgulla began to wail for their own drinks, but the girl in the straw hat and swimsuit had walked off and was standing at some distance with her back to the Doodhwalas, hugging herself, and slowly shaking a disenchanted (though still largely invisible) head. And what with the musicians’ noise, the supplicants’ pleas, the thwacking of lathi sticks, the shrieks of the wounded, the young girls’ wails and the orders bellowed by Golmatol Doodhwala, it was necessary to raise one’s voice; my enquiries about these high-decibel family members were made at top volume.
Ameer clutched at her brow. “Oh God, Umeed, get out of my head just now. They’re nothing to do with me, I can tell you. Ask your father about his relatives.”
“Distant relatives,” yelled V.V. Merchant, on the defensive.
“Poor relations,” rudely shouted Ameer Merchant.
“They don’t look so poor to me,” I objected, at the top of my voice.
“Rich in goats,” Ameer bellowed into a sudden pause in the music, and her words hung irretrievably in the air, as inescapable as if they’d been lit up in neon like the Jeep sign on Marine Drive, “but poor in quality. Shoddy human goods.”
An awful stillness descended. It was a hot year, 1956, one of the hottest on record; the afternoon was well advanced, but the heat had not diminished. Now the temperature actually seemed to rise, the air began to buzz, the way it’s supposed to do before lightning strikes, and Shri Piloo Doodhwala began to swell in the heat, to redden, to exude liquid from every pore, as if he were filling up so fast with words that there wasn’t room for anything else inside him. His younger daughter, Halva, emitted a nervy giggle, got two tight slaps from her mother, began to cry, saw Golmatol Doodhwala’s hand rising again, and shut up fast. War was very close. The sand between the Doodhwala encampment and our own had become a no-man’s-land. Heavy artillery was moving into position. And at this moment the tall girl, the twelve- or thirteen-year-old in the Stars-and-Stripes swimsuit, strolled idly into that embattled zone, looked interestedly from Doodhwalas to Merchants and back again, and tilted back her big straw hat. I regret to report that I failed to control myself when I saw her face. That Egyptian profile which, many years later, I saw again in a portrait of the female pharaoh, Queen Hatshepsut, the first woman in recorded history, whom dismissive Vina, unimpressed by divine monarchs even though she became a sort of god-queen herself, referred to as Hat Cheap Suit; those sardonic eyes, that mouth so dryly twisted, caused me to let out a gasp. No, it was more than a gasp. It was a loud, strangled noise, choking, formless, and it ended in something like a sob. In short, I made, for the only time in my life, the noise of a badly smitten human male falling instantly, heavily, painfully in love. And I was only nine years old.
Let me try and remember the great moment with maximum accuracy. I had, I think, only recently emerged from the sea, my tooth braces were smarting, and I was feeling a little peckish—or else I had been planning a swim when I was distracted by the arrival of the magnificentourage. At any rate, when Ameer Merchant spoke the sentence that Piloo Doodhwala heard as a declaration of war, I had just reached down into a bag of fruit and come up with a juicy apple in my fist. Apple in hand, I gazed upon the beautiful dark girl in the Old Glory swimsuit, apple in hand I emitted my awful, naked noise of adoration; and when my feet began to move of their own accord and propelled me forward until I stood before her, gazing up into the light of her beauty, I was still holding that apple out in front of me, like an offering, like a prize.
She smiled, amused. “Is that for me?” But before I could articulate a reply, the two other girls—damn it, the two ugly sisters!—had run up with gleaming faces, ignoring their ayahs injunctions to return. “Appo,” said Halva Doodhwala, making baby eyes and affecting baby talk in a doomed attempt at appearing winsome; and Rasgulla Doodhwala, older but no wiser, poutingly confirmed, “Ppl.” The tall girl laughed, rather cruelly, and struck an attitude, head cocked sideways, hand on hip. “You see, you must choose, young master. To which of us will you offer your good gift?”
That’s easy, I wanted to say, for it is the gift of my heart. But Piloo and (especially) Golmatol were glaring at me in savage anticipation of my decision, and when, hesitating for a moment, I cast a glance at my own parents, I saw that they were unable to help me make a choice that would affect their lives as much as mine. I did not know then (though it would have been easy to guess) that the tall girl was not the younger girls’ sibling, that her place in the entourage was more Cinderella than Helen; or a curious amalgam of the two, a sort of Cinderella of Troy. But it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had known; for though my tongue said nothing, my heart was speaking loud and clear. Without a word, I held out the apple to my beloved; who, with a curt nod, somewhat ungraciously received the gift and gave it a goodly bite.
So it was that my deliberate spurning of the charms of Halva and Rasgulla, those little mistresses of the insincerely batted eyelash, was added by the Doodhwalas to my mother’s more accidental insult, and that was that. The Hindustani word kutti is inadequate for my purposes, suggesting as it does a rather petulant, almost childish level of quarrel. This was not kutti. This was vendetta. And in Piloo Doodhwala—who was now, to my horror, beckoning me to approach—I’d made a powerful enemy, and for life.
“Boy!”
Now that the point of no return had passed, Piloo had miraculously relaxed. He had lost the swollen look of a man over-full of furious vocabulary, and even the sweating had stopped. I, however, found myself being bitten by insects. It was that moment of the late afternoon when the mordant armies of the air manifest themselves, appearing like little clouds from some aerial dormitory. As I approached Piloo, who was reclining in splendour on gao-takia bolsters beneath his mirrorwork marquee, I was obliged to slap and rub at my face and neck, for all the world as if I were punishing myself for my judgement in the matter of the apple. Piloo smiled his deadly, glittering smile and continued to beckon.
“And your goodname, please?” I told him my name. “Umeed,” he repeated. “Hop. That is good. All persons should be having hop, ewen when their situation is hopliss.” He fell into a period of contemplation, munching on a morsel of dried bummelo; then spoke again, waving a piece of the fish in his hand. “Bombay duck,” he smiled. “You know what is it? You know that this bombil phish declined to help Lord Rama to build the bridge to Lanka, phor purpose of rescuing Lady Sita? And therephore he squeezed it tight-tight and crushed all its bones, so now it is boneless wonder? No, how can you know, for you are conwerts.” This word led to much shaking of the head, and many more mouthfuls of the fish, before he renewe
d his harangue. “Conwert,” he said. “You know what is it? I will tell. Religious conwersion, it is like getting on a train. Afterwards, only the train itself is where you are belonging. Not departure platform, not arriwal platform. In both these places you are totally despised. Such is conwert. It is your goodfather’s phorefather.”
I opened my mouth; he indicated that I should close it. “Seen and not heard,” he stated. “Keep your trap shut is best policy.” He munched on mango. “When man conwerts,” he mused, “it is like a powver cut. Load shedding. He is shedding, you see?, the Load of Human Destiny in a basically cowvardly way. Phundamentally an unserious phashion. In doing so he detaches himself from the history of his race, isn’t it? Like pulling out a plug, okay? And then the toaster will not work. What is life, boy? I will tell. Life is not just a single hair plucked out phrom the head of God, okay? Life is a cycle. In this poor life of ours we must pay phor the sins of our past existence, and also if appropriate reap reward of prewious good behawiour. The conwert is like a guest in a hotel who will not pay his bill. Therephore conwersely he cannot expect benephits if there is billing error in his phavour.”
Piloo’s thesis wasn’t easy to grasp, what with all the trains, toasters, cycles and hotels tumbling around in there, but I understood the essential point: he was insulting my father, and my father’s (Muslim) branch of the family, and therefore, by extension, me. Now, however, as my adult self observes the scene through my nine-year-old eyes and ears, I see and hear other things too: the class differences, for example, the note of snobbishness in my mother’s disdain for Piloo’s coarser behaviour and vulgar accent; and of course communal differences. The old Hindu-Muslim rift. My parents gave me the gift of irreligion, of growing up without bothering to ask people what gods they held dear, assuming that in fact, like my parents, they weren’t interested in gods, and that this uninterest was “normal.”You may argue that the gift was a poisoned challce, but even if so, that’s a cup from which I’d happily drink again.
In spite of my parents’ godlessness, however, the old family rift persisted. It was so deep that the family’s two branches, converts and unconverted, had erased each other from their social maps. At the age of nine I had not even known of the Doodhwalas’ existence, and I’m sure Halva and Rasgulla had been equally unaware of their distant cousin Umeed Merchant. As for the tall girl, the swimsuit queen with my apple in her mouth, I still had no clue as to how and where she fitted in.
“Umeed,” called my mother, and her voice was angry, “come back here, now.”
“Go, little Hop.” Piloo dismissed me. He had begun idly to roll a set of poker dice on his carpet. “But I wonder, when you are a big Hop, what-all you will be.”
I already knew the answer to that. “Ji, a photographer, ji.”
“So,” he said. “Then you must learn how a picture can be false. Take my photo just now, isn’t it? What do you see? Only some big sahib acting big. But this is a dastardly lie. I am a man of the people, Hop. Simple phellow, humble origins, and because I am accustomed to hard work, so I also know how to enjoy. Just now I am enjoying. But you, Hop, you and your daddy-mummy, you are the guys acting big. Too big, maybe, for boots.” He paused. There were milky crescents rimming the pupils of his eyes. “I think perhaps we have phought bephore, in other lives. Today we will not phight. But one day we will surely phight again.”
“Umeed!”
“Say also to your goodmother,” murmured Piloo Doodhwala, the smile fading from his lips, “that this sand building like a Shiv-lingam is a philthy blasphemy. To all decent eyes it is offensiwe and obscene.”
In my mind’s eye I see again my nine-year-old self, an envoy leaving the enemy camp and returning to his own. But I can also see what’s really going on, the process by which power, like heat, is slowly draining from the world of my angry mother to that of Piloo the newly cool. Which is not fancy but hindsight. He hated us; and in time he would inherit, if not the earth, then ours.
“I hate India,” my swimsuit queen mentioned savagely as I passed her. “And there’s plenty of it to hate. I hate the heat, and it’s always hot, even when it rains, and I really hate that rain. I hate the food, and you can’t drink the water. I hate the poor people, and they’re all over the place. I hate the rich people, they’re so goddamn pleased with themselves. I hate the crowds, and you’re never out of them. I hate the way people speak too loud and dress in purple and ask too many questions and order you around. I hate the dirt and I hate the smell and I specially hate squatting down to shit. I hate the money because it can’t buy anything, and I hate the stores because there’s nothing to buy. I hate the movies, I hate the dancing, I hate the music. I hate the languages because they’re not plain English and I hate the English because it’s not plain English either. I hate the cars except the American cars and I hate those too because they’re all ten years out of date. I hate the schools because they’re really jails and I hate the holidays because you’re not free even then. I hate the old people and I hate the kids. I hate the radio and there’s no tv. Most of all I hate all the goddamn gods.” It was an astonishing utterance, spoken in a casual, world-weary monotone, with her eyes fixed on the horizon. I had no idea how to reply, but a reply did not appear to be required. At that time I did not understand her anger, and it shocked me deeply. Was this the girl with whom I had fallen so hopelessly in love? “I hate the apples too,” she added, driving a sword into my heart. (But she’d eaten mine, I noticed.) Lovelorn, slapping at bugs, I turned to go on my difficult way. “Want to know what I like, what’s the only thing I like?” she called after me. I paused and turned back to face her.
“Yes, please,” I humbly said. I may even have bowed my head in misery.
“I love the sea,” she said, and ran off to swim. My heart almost burst with joy.
I heard Piloo’s dice begin to click and roll; and then, at Golmatol Doodhwala’s command, the musicians started up again, and I heard nothing else.
For a long while I have believed—this is perhaps my version of Sir Darius Xerxes Cama’s belief in a fourth function of outsideness—that in every generation there are a few souls, call them lucky or cursed, who are simply born not belonging, who come into the world semidetached, if you like, without strong affiliation to family or location or nation or race; that there may even be millions, billions of such souls, as many non-belongers as belongers, perhaps; that, in sum, the phenomenon may be as “natural” a manifestation of human nature as its opposite, but one that has been mostly frustrated, throughout human history, by lack of opportunity. And not only by that: for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers’ seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celebrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time.
No sooner did we have ships than we rushed to sea, sailing across oceans in paper boats. No sooner did we have cars than we hit the road. No sooner did we have airplanes than we zoomed to the furthest corners of the globe. Now we yearn for the moon’s dark side, the rocky plains of Mars, the rings of Saturn, the interstellar
deeps. We send mechanical photographers into orbit, or on one-way journeys to the stars, and we weep at the wonders they transmit; we are humbled by the mighty images of far-off galaxies standing like cloud pillars in the sky, and we give names to alien rocks, as if they were our pets. We hunger for warp space, for the outlying rim of time. And this is the species that kids itself it likes to stay at home, to bind itself with—what are they called again?—ties.
That’s my view. You don’t have to buy it. Maybe there aren’t so many of us, after all. Maybe we are disruptive and anti-social and we shouldn’t be allowed. You’re entitled to your opinion. All I will say is: sleep soundly, baby. Sleep tight and sweet dreams.
According to the Doodhwala version of the universe, it all started because my paternal great-grandfather “embraced Islam,” as they say: Islam, that least huggable of faiths. As a result of that prickly embrace, Vivvy Merchant (and Ameer too, and indeed every Muslim in the subcontinent, for we are all the children of converts, whether we admit it or not, every single one of us) lost his connection with history. Thus we can interpret my father’s desperate diggings into the city’s past as a quest for his mislaid personal identity; and Ameer Merchant, dreaming of Cuffescrapers and such, was likewise seeking lost certainties in visions of high-rise apartment blocks and Art Deco cinemas, in bricks and mortar, in reinforced cement-concrete.
No shortage of explanations for life’s mysteries. Explanations are two a penny these days. The truth, however, is altogether harder to find.
Always, from my earliest remembered days, I longed above all to be—to use once more a phrase to which I remain (perhaps excessively) attached—worthy of the world. To this end I was fully prepared to be tested, to perform labours. I began to learn about the heroes of Greece and Rome through Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, and of Camelot I became aware thanks to MGM’s Knights of the Round Table, starring Robert Taylor as Lancelot and Mel Ferrer as Arthur, and as Guinevere, if memory serves, the incomparable Ava, that palindromic goddess who looked just as good when seen from the back as from the front. I devoured children’s versions of the Norse Sagas (I particularly recall epic journeys made in a boat called Skidbladnir, the “ship that flew”) and of the adventures of Hatim Tai and Haroun al-Rashid and Sindbad the Sailor and Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta and Rama and Lakshmana and the Kurus and Pandavas and anything else that came to hand. However, this high moral formulation, “being worthy of the world,” was too abstract to be easily applicable to daily life. I told the truth and was a reasonably upstanding, if also rather solitary and inward, child; but heroism escaped me. There was even a brief interlude, at around the time I am describing, when I began to believe the world to be unworthy of me. Its false notes, its constant fallings-short. This was, perhaps, my mother’s disappointed idealism, her growing cynicism, leaking into me. Now, looking back, I can say that we have been more or less on a par, the world and I. We have both risen to occasions and let the side down. To speak only for myself, however (I do not presume to speak for the world): at my worst, I have been a cacophony, a mass of human noises that did not add up to the symphony of an integrated self. At my best, however, the world sang out to me, and through me, like ringing crystal.