Nothing.
Kabir swore softly in Hindustani and kicked the starter again.
Still nothing.
He swore in French. Kicked downwards again.
A cough and a backfire, then nothing.
Kabir dismounted. “Bugger it!”
A smart metallic report as his boot hit the wheel rim.
Delay, delay. Nothing to do but button down the damn canvas, retie the bloody fastening cable, relock the damn Masterlock, and set off on foot through the cobbled streets clogged with refugees to the U.S. Army motor pool.
An hour of walking and a ride in the back of an army truck brought Kabir to an officer to whom he presented his letter of authorization—possibly the most harried man in Germany, juggling transport and maintenance demands for several units.
“Motorbike? Not my specialty—but there’s a sarge back there who claims to know all about them. Guy with three up and one down.” His fingers traced chevrons on his sleeve. “Behind the deuce-and-a-half.”
In search of the lorry Kabir wended his way past soldiers in grease-streaked OD fatigues, through an obstacle course of vehicles in stages of diagnosis or dismemberment, past a field where bewildered British soldiers were learning baseball. He spotted the staff sergeant’s chevrons, three up and one down, under the open bonnet of the lorry, where he was teaching a private more about cussing than mechanics. A thoughtful, rotund face emerged, and a husky six-foot-three snapped to attention and the reflex of a salute as Kabir approached.
“At ease, sergeant.”
Kabir returned the salute, then explained, pointing back to the village. The sergeant nodded and sent the private scurrying for spare parts, a tool kit and some cans of petrol. Then back to the harried officer for permission.
“I should make you walk like us infantry,” the officer bantered with jovial disrespect. “But you RAF guys sure put on a helluva fireworks display for Hitler, so I guess old Uncle Sam should loan you a Jeep.” To the sergeant, “You get your black ass back here ASAP, get it?”
“Yes, sir!”
A Jeep pulled up and Kabir swung into the passenger seat beside the sergeant. They bounced back to the gate, past a guardhouse and back onto the road.
“Where’re you from, sir?”
A question Kabir detested.
He could have said he was from London, where he’d sported his British India passport through five years of war. He could have said Baroda, the tiny kingdom in India where his grandfather’s ancestral home was presumably still standing. He could have told this Dravidian-faced GI the name of any city in the world and, given people’s ignorance of geography, the information would have the same non-effect.
But Kabir had lived in Paris most of his life. Other men kept their beloved girlfriends or wives before them as they fought, but not Kabir. For him, Afzal Manzil—house of peace—the house Abbajaan left to him and the Sainah Foundation, was sacred ground worthy of battle. And so, because he had most to claim and most to lose in Paris, he answered, “Paris.”
Paris. Paris and all of France, abandoned but fixed in still life for four years in Kabir’s memory, had been held hostage by the Germans. His city had endured unspeakable deprivation, pain, secrets and shame. But he’d “done his bit,” as they said in England—by bombing its marshalling yards when ordered.
“But you’re in the RAF? ‘Scuse my sayin’, sir, but you don’t look English.”
“My father was from India.”
The sergeant appeared either confused or unenlightened by this. Kabir tried again.
“You know, the place Christopher Columbus was looking for.”
The sergeant swerved to avoid a pothole. “Columbus was a Wop, wasn’t he, sir? Like Mussolini—no sense of direction.” He squinted down the macadam road. “Never met anyone, and anyhow no officers, from India.”
“And I’ve never met any Negroes to talk to.”
“Yeah? Lots of us in London, sir.”
Kabir shook his head. There were swing clubs in London where, to the chagrin of their British mothers, women lily-white as Angela went dancing with Negroes, but he’d never frequented them.
“I saw Indians in London, sir, but if you’ll ‘scuse my sayin’, you’re not real dark, and you don’t wear a turban. I did figure you was too polite to be American.”
“My mother is American,” said Kabir. “From Boston.”
“Uh-huh! Thought so. You’re a mulatto.”
The Jeep tilted into a decline, then accelerated again. Kabir accepted the label warily, never having applied it to himself before.
The sergeant said after a while, “Must be some lady, your ma, marrying your pa.”
Kabir smiled polite assent.
“No, I mean it—that’s one gutsy lady. You ever see your white folks in America?”
“No,” said Kabir. Mother’s family was opaque to him, absent from her spoken recollections, which always began from the day Miss Aura Baker packed one portmanteau and a hat box and caught a steamer from Boston Harbor to London town, arriving at the Sufi Music Centre, which was at that time Abbajaan’s only doorstep, and proposing marriage. Family lore continued that Abbajaan had warned her he was a dervish, that bread and water were to be her lot, but it didn’t deter Mother. And for eight years, while Abbajaan tried to perform Indian classical music to ever sparser audiences in England, she said he’d been right about the bread and water.
“And ‘scuse my sayin’, sir, but I don’t believe you ever will see them.”
“Why’s that, sergeant?”
“Heck, sir—when your father’s a coloured man, that’s real tough for white folks to swallow. Where I come from, there are laws against it. Your pa could get lynched for less in my hometown.”
The Jeep made a detour between the drums of an unmanned roadblock set up to slow traffic. The sergeant kept his eyes on the road.
“Most unfortunate,” said Kabir.
Lame response—as if fortune were to blame for man-made laws.
His kaftaned Abbajaan was brown, not “coloured” or “black.” Kabir was nine when he first learned that the United States had only two classifications, white and black, for all people. Abbajaan had returned from a performance tour to the States, annoyed by reviewers who devoted more inches to “the lightness of his coloured skin,” his “exotic dress and accent,” than to the music he so cherished. America, said Abbajaan, had the strange idea that what it called “freedom” was possible without justice in society. Pity had surprised Kabir, a pity he’d never forgotten, imagining Abbajaan’s discomfort in the midst of his moneyed white followers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York.
“He’d be a Hindoo, like that Mr. Gandhi, right?” The sergeant was speculating again.
“A Muslim,” Kabir corrected. “Like Mohammed Ali Jinnah.”
“Oh, I get it, like Elijah Mohammed. A heathen, anyways, for your ma’s white family, right, sir?”
Kabir acknowledged this, though Mother had converted to Islam immediately upon marriage, whereupon the words “infidel” and “heathen” became applicable to her blood relatives, certainly not his father’s. Yes, it was possible, indeed probable, that Mother’s family saw Abbajaan and himself as heathens.
Still, it was no business of this stranger.
“You don’t speak like a Negro, sergeant.”
“‘Scuse my sayin’, sir, but you don’t either.” A giant guffaw followed.
Kabir smiled thinly, holding on as the Jeep bucked and slid sideways beneath him. When he was five, Abbajaan had sung a few anti-Raj songs that drew the attention of British authorities. He’d been obliged to flee London, like the Prophet to Medina, and so the family had moved to Paris. The sergeant’s comments were making Kabir glad Abbajaan had chosen Paris over Boston. In Paris, among Abbajaan’s rentier followers, blood distance from royalty, even petty royalty, was the measure of excellence, while skin colour went unnoted.
“I talk white, like you, sir,” the sergeant confided with pride. “Been working o
n it a few months now.”
“You have?”
The sergeant nodded. “When I got to London, it hit me right away: the enlisted men in the British army talked in their different accents, but their officers talked like they’re all on the BBC. That got me thinking. I started noticing how I talk. Realized that on the telephone, on the radio, even when they couldn’t see me, they could hear the colour of my skin. So I figure I’ll just talk different—fool ‘em whenever I want.”
“Been here a long time, then, sergeant?”
“A little over a year now. I was with the Red Ball Express, hauling gas and ammo from the depots to forward airfields. Got assigned to the pool afterwards—I’m a natural with machines.”
The sergeant had supplied le sang rouge de guerre—the red blood of war—when the Allied armies sped past their supply lines in late 1944. His endless hours of driving in convoys and each five-gallon jerrican he hauled had saved Allied forces from stalling on their way to the Rhine.
“How long before you go home?” Kabir asked the question foremost in every serviceman’s mind since Mr. Truman had declared a Day of Prayer throughout America and diplomats were back in split-tailed splendour on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Don’t mind if I never go back, sir, though I’m a native son. Think I’ll just settle down anywhere there ain’t no Whites Only signs. Not Germany, even though the women are real easy pickin’s here now we’re allowed to fraternize. Many of them have never seen Negro Americans like me. We tell ‘em we’re night fighters and they all doggone believe it! I’d live in Paris, maybe. Negroes do well there—I’ll have a club of my own. Can’t do that in Mississippi without a Colored sign, you know, sir. But then again, maybe you don’t know, seeing as you pass.”
“Pass?”
“Pass for white, sir.”
The Jeep ploughed past a scorched, roofless cottage. A sagged-faced woman shouted after them, pointing to her cart filled with pots, pans and clocks for sale.
Kabir kept his face impassive and looked away. His aspirations had so far been better served by identifying with Mother’s race than with Abbajaan’s. No reason to admit this to a stranger. And “passing,” as the sergeant called it, only takes one so far: Kabir wasn’t entitled to American citizenship, since Mother had lost hers by marrying an Asian Indian. American laws expressed the wishes of Mother’s family perfectly. An occasional letter arrived when a relative died, and once, a parcel had sailed across the Atlantic from an aunt in Boston.
“Right now, I must get to Munich,” he said, showing the sergeant his photograph of Noor. “I’m searching for my sister. I know she’s still alive.”
“Amen, sir. She’s about your colour; don’t you worry—she’ll be just fine.”
The spire and bell tower of the village church came into view. The Jeep closed in on its destination, dust barrelling in its wake.
“Can I ask you a question, sir?” said the sergeant as they turned into the village and bumped into the central square. “You have any trouble with the white folks in your unit?”
“In the beginning,” said Kabir, “but after a while the important thing is flying, fighting and bombing, and how well you do it.”
He wanted to add, “You have to fly better, do everything better, be more anxious, show more courage, and shout louder for King and Country,” but he was an officer, and such confessional remarks would establish an equality he wasn’t sure he wanted.
Kabir never imagined himself, and certainly not Noor, fighting for England. England was too full of lords and ladies still posturing and preening in clubs while mocking the French for their defeat and betrayal of democracy, and Indians for their nonviolent struggle for independence. His equal presence in the officers’ mess had required an effort of mental inclusion that was beyond his fellow British citizens, the normal hazing, mocking and teasing that would have broken formality becoming an extension of imperialism in the hands of the hazer, so that they and he all found themselves playing roles in a very old script.
It didn’t help that he couldn’t fit their image of an Indian—too tall, too fair, not Hindu, not Gurkha, not even Sikh. A Muslim. A Sufi Muslim, they sniggered—“sounds delicious.” And Kabir would explain earnestly and proudly. Uselessly, too, for not one, if questioned, could have repeated anything he said over tankards of beer. He became accustomed to this. It gave him the freedom to indulge in reverie out loud, to reminisce, pontificate, even pray, without concern his words would change anything or be remembered by his mates. In place of friends he gathered followers, as Abbajaan once did, prolonging his own life and career by showing unstinting appreciation to his flight crew and those who maintained his aircraft.
“You’re right, sir—I always say, if you’ve got the grits, serve ‘em.”
Kabir pointed the way to the alley behind the church. The sergeant shifted to second gear and turned. The Jeep approached the motorcycle against the church wall.
“And the white misses, sir? Would they go out with you if they find out you ain’t really white?”
Actually, the few English girls he knew would do what their mothers never dreamed of. Especially Angela. She listened to Kabir, loving his strangeness—his dark, wiry moustache, slim hands with tapering fingers, his straight white teeth. Angela listened as he vowed, when the war was over, to return to France and spend the rest of his life like a travelling curator, exhibiting Abbajaan’s Sufi ideas: peace, love, tolerance. Above all, tolerance—the simplest idea, the most difficult to teach.
And damned difficult to learn.
“No,” he replied. “But it made no difference to my girl.”
“You got a picture?”
Kabir snapped the catch of the locket on his watch, showed him Angela’s rose-touched, dreamy smile. Angela’s coquettish eyes, so unlike Noor’s direct gaze. Kabir could all but see those lashes fluttering. Fine rippled locks—light grey in the photo, but the sergeant had made a mental correction to gold.
“She gonna marry you, sir?”
Kabir closed the locket with a broad smile. “Haven’t the faintest idea, sergeant. I’ll ask her when I return to London.”
The sergeant grunted sceptically. Kabir jumped off the Jeep as it slowed to a stop. The sergeant heaved his bulk out and took his tool kit from the back. He squatted and stared solemnly at the motorcycle engine.
“Just think, sir,” he said, “you and I gotta go to all this trouble because a bunch of Kraut, Eye-talian and Jap white folks wanted to take over the world from the other white folks.”
Kabir nodded, though he’d never thought of the Japanese as white. And the war with those chaps was far from over; the U.S. fleet had just begun bombarding the main islands of Japan. In three weeks’ time Kabir would have to report for duty and could be sent to the Far East to bomb Japan. At least he wasn’t a fighter pilot who’d be called on to intercept those suicidal lunatics strapped into their bomb-loaded planes. What did they call themselves? Kamikazes.
His view of the war was rather different from those of his fellow officers. As a colonial, born in Britain of a father from an Indian princely state subservient to the Raj, he felt Britain’s historic lust for power and its rule in countries it occupied to be only slightly less virulent than Germany’s, and scoffed internally at the English view of themselves as being less racist, more humane than Hitler. Over the last four years more than three million Indians—many Muslims like himself—died of starvation in British India, thousands in the streets of Calcutta, from deprivation far worse than any he had witnessed riding through the villages of France or Germany, many times worse than privations in blitzed and bombed London. After the bombing of Chittagong and Calcutta, Churchill’s “Rice Denial policy” and “Boat Denial policy” diverted rice from the people to war-related industries; and in London, when only the tiny expatriate Indian community had protested and shouted “Famine!” it was Churchill, demigod to Kabir’s fellow officers, who refused to extend UNRRA’s war relief to His Majesty’s brown subjects. So Hi
tler caused the deaths of yet-uncounted millions by his actions, Churchill by inaction.
Was there a difference, Kabir wondered, excepting opportunity and method?
A ragtag band of blond-haired waifs gathered around the Jeep, the youngest about five, the oldest fifteen. Holding hands, whispering. He didn’t have to know German; they were debating what could be filched or begged.
The will to survive is amoral.
These children and every other survivor had a tale. Stories the newspapers could not know. They’d tell them someday, in pubs and bistros, in beer gardens and boarding houses, to anyone who would listen.
Kabir was as responsible as Churchill for the rain-filled craters in German cities. Somewhat responsible for the lost stares of these children. But now that he was on the ground, on the Continent, a single line from Mr. Gandhi’s prison cell resonated louder in Kabir than all the stentorian speeches of Churchill. When asked his opinion of Western civilization, Gandhi said, “It would be a good idea.”
Small errors compounded. The German interpretation of Darwin, and the loss of faith all over Europe, that loss of faith of which he too was guilty. Errors hardened into assumptions that clogged the arteries of intelligence, scarred the sensitivity of synapses, till European minds travelled only pre-grooved pathways. Infidel armies were drawn into battle, each fighting for their collective hallucinations and territories.
Kabir’s family had the misfortune of being caught between them. Hitler first outlawed Sufism in Germany, whether practised by Muslims or anyone else. Then, when his armies swept through Holland, the Sainah Foundation at The Hague was raided by the Gestapo and Abbajaan’s followers were arrested, thrown into camps. Before that happened in France, Kabir and his family escaped, and soon he and Noor found themselves fighting “for England.”
The motorbike stood motionless, and Kabir, in a fever to be on his way, paced the alley. Children followed like dogs sniffing at his ankles. Eventually, the sergeant, using wrenches, spanners, swear words and new spark plugs, completed surgery.
Some other time, what my Indian half shares or cannot share with the heritage and experience of this helpful, generous black man must be discussed. But now I can only ask Allah’s blessing upon him and hurry on, for Noor’s sake.