… satya ahimsa.
He bowed again, anticipating applause.
‘Satya ahimsa!’ the Commissioner shouted, stilling hands about to clap. ‘Are you mad? Truth and nonviolence, indeed. Is this what you are preaching with the Chinese about to rape your wife? Have I been wasting my breath all afternoon? This is a classical example of muddled thinking.’
The poet, holding his bow, cringed. The curtain fell unceremoniously on him.
Poor poet! He had devised a good evening’s entertainment. He had written the anti-Chinese pieces and the songs about the Motherland; yet when it came to his own poem, the one he wished to recite himself, he had lost his head. For years he had recited, to official applause, poems about truth and nonviolence. Habit had been too strong, and had led to his public disgrace.
*
Some weeks later Mr Nehru went to Lucknow. Standing on the airport tarmac, he bowed his head forty-six times to receive forty-six garlands from the forty-six members of the State cabinet. This at any rate was the story I had from an IAS man in Lucknow, and he was a little peeved. The IAS, acting on instructions from Delhi, had taken civil defence seriously in Lucknow. They had practised blackouts and air-raid warnings; they had dug trenches; they had much to show Mr Nehru. But Mr Nehru only lost his temper. All this digging of trenches, he said, was a waste of time.
In a way, the Emergency was over.
11. The Village of the Dubes
THE EMERGENCY WAS OVER. And so was my year. The short winter was fading fast; it was no longer pleasant to sit out in the sun; the dust would not now be laid until the monsoon. One journey remained, and for this I had lost taste. India had not worked its magicon me. It remained the land of my childhood, an area of darkness; like the Himalayan passes, it was closing up again, as fast as I withdrew from it, into a land of myth; it seemed to exist in just the timelessness which I had imagined as a child, into which, for all that I walked on Indian earth, I knew I could not penetrate.
In a year I had not learned acceptance. I had learned my separateness from India, and was content to be a colonial, without a past, without ancestors. Duty alone had brought me to this town in eastern Uttar Pradesh, not even graced by a ruin, celebrated only for its connexions with the Buddha and its backwardness. And it was duty that, after a few days of indecision, idleness and reading, was taking me along this country road, infested with peasants indifferent to wheeled vehicles, to the village which my mother’s father had left as an indentured labourer more than sixty years before.
When you drive through parts of western and central India you wonder about the teeming millions; settlements are so few, and the brown land looks so unfruitful and abandoned. Here wonder was of another sort. The land was flat. The sky was high, blue and utterly without drama; below it everything was diminished. Wherever you looked there was a village, low, dust-blurred, part of the earth and barely rising out of it. Every tiny turbulence of dust betrayed a peasant; and the land was nowhere still.
At a junction we took on a volunteer guide and turned off on to an embankment of pure dust. It was lined with tall old trees. Below them my grandfather had doubtless walked at the start of his journey. In spite of myself I was held. For us this land had ceased to exist. Now it was so ordinary. I did not really want to see more. I was afraid of what I might find, and I had witnesses. ‘Not that one, not that,’ cried the guide, excited both by my mission and the unexpected jeep ride, as village after village died in our dust. Presently he pointed: there on our right, was the village of the Dubes.
It was set far back from the embankment. It exceeded anything I had expected. A large mango grove gave it a pastoral aspect, and two spires showed white and clean against the dark green foliage. I knew about those spires and was glad to see them. My grandfather had sought to re-establish the family he had left behind in India. He had recovered their land; he had given money for the building of a temple. No temple had been built, only three shrines. Poverty, fecklessness, we had thought in Trinidad. But now, from the road, how reassuring those spires were!
We got out of the jeep and made our way over the crumbling earth. The tall, branching mango trees shaded an artificial pond, and the floor of the grove was spotted with blurred sunshine. A boy came out. His thin body was naked save for his dhoti and sacred thread. He looked at me suspiciously – our party was large and ferociously official – but when the IAS officer who was with me explained who I was, the boy attempted first to embrace me and then to touch my feet. I disengaged myself and he led us through the village, talking of the complicated relationship that bound him to my grandfather and to me. He knew all about my grandfather. To this village that old adventure remained important: my grandfather had gone far beyond the sea and had made barra paisa, much money.
A year before I might have been appalled by what I was seeing. But my eye had changed. This village looked unusually prosperous; it was even picturesque. Many of the houses were of brick, some raised off the earth, some with carved wooden doors and tiled roofs. The lanes were paved and clean; there was a concrete cattle-trough. ‘Brahmin village, brahmin village,’ the IAS man whispered. The women were unveiled and attractive, their saris white and plain. They regarded us frankly, and in their features I could recognize those of the women of my family. ‘Brahmin women,’ the IAS man whispered. ‘Very fearless.’
It was a village of Dubes and Tiwaris, all brahmins, all more or less related. A man, clad in loincloth and sacred thread, was bathing, standing and pouring water over himself with a brass jar. How elegant his posture, how fine his slender body! How, in the midst of populousness and dereliction, had such beauty been preserved? They were brahmins; they rented land for less than those who could afford less. But the region, as the Gazetteer said, ‘abounds in brahmins’; they formed twelve to fifteen per cent of the Hindu population. Perhaps this was why, though they were all related in the village, there appeared to be no communal living. We left the brick houses behind and, to my disappointment, stopped in front of a small thatched hut. Here resided Ramachandra, the present head of my grandfather’s branch of the Dubes.
He was away. ‘Oh,’ exclaimed the men and boys who had joined us, ‘why did he have to choose this day?’ But the shrines, they would show me the shrines. They would show me how well they had been kept; they would show me my grandfather’s name carved on the shrines. They unlocked the grilled doors and showed me the images, freshly washed, freshly dressed, marked with fresh sandalwood paste, the morning’s offerings of flowers not yet faded. My mind leapt years, my sense of distance and time was shaken: before me were the very replicas of the images in the prayer-room of my grandfather’s house.
An old woman was crying.
‘Which son? Which one?’
And it was seconds before I realized that the old woman’s words were in English.
‘Jussodra!’ the men said, and opened a way for her. She was on her haunches and in this posture was advancing towards me, weeping, screeching out words in English and Hindi. Her pale face was cracked like drying mud; her grey eyes were dim.
‘Jussodra will tell you all about your grandfather,’ the men said.
Jussodra had also been to Trinidad; she knew my grandfather. We were both led from the shrine to the hut. I was made to sit on a blanket on a string bed; and Jussodra, squatting at my feet, recited my grandfather’s genealogy and recounted his adventures, weeping while the IAS officer translated. For thirty-six years Jussodra had lived in this village, and in that time she had polished her story into a fluent Indian khisa or fairy tale. It could not have been unknown, but everyone was solemn and attentive.
When he was a young man (Jussodra said) my grandfather left this village to go to Banaras to study, as brahmins had immemorially done. But my grandfather was poor, his family poor, and times were hard; there might even have been a famine. One day my grandfather met a man who told him of a country far away called Trinidad. There were Indians in Trinidad, labourers; they needed pundits and teachers. The wages were
good, land was cheap and a free passage could be arranged. The man who spoke to my grandfather knew what he was talking about. He was an arkatia, a recruiter; when times were good he might be stoned out of a village, but now people were willing to listen to his stories. So my grandfather indentured himself for five years and went to Trinidad. He was not, of course, made a teacher; he worked in the sugar factory. He was given a room, he was given food; and in addition he received twelve annas, fourteen pence, a day. It was a lot of money, and even today it was a good wage in this part of India, twice as much as the government paid for relief work in distress areas. My grandfather added to this by doing his pundit’s work in the evenings. Banaras-trained pundits were rare in Trinidad and my grandfather was in demand. Even the sahib at the factory respected him, and one day the sahib said, ‘You are a pundit. Can you help me? I want a son.’ ‘All right,’ my grandfather said. ‘I’ll see that you get a son.’ And when the sahib’s wife gave birth to a son, the sahib was so pleased he said to my grandfather, ‘You see these thirty bighas of land? All the canes there are yours.’ My grandfather had the canes cut and sold them for two thousand rupees, and with this he went into business. Success attracted success. A well-to-do man, long settled in Trinidad, came to my grandfather one day and said, ‘I’ve been keeping my eye on you for some time. I can see that you are going to go far. Now I have a daughter and would like her to be married to you. I will give you three acres of land.’ My grandfather was not interested. Then the man said, ‘I will give you a buggy. You can hire out the buggy and make a little extra money.’ So my grandfather married. He prospered. He built two houses. Soon he was wealthy enough to come back to this village and redeem twenty-five acres of his family’s land. Then he went back to Trinidad. But he was a restless man. He decided to make another trip to India. ‘Come back quick,’ his family said to him. (Jussodra spoke these words in English: ‘buggy’ had also been in English.) But my grandfather didn’t see Trinidad again. On the train from Calcutta he fell ill, and he wrote to his family: ‘The sun is setting.’
Her story finished, Jussodra wept and wept, and no one moved.
‘What do I do?’ I asked the IAS officer. ‘She is very old. Will I offend her if I offer her some money?’
‘It will be most welcome,’ he said. ‘Give her some money and tell her to arrange a kattha, a reading of the scriptures.’
I did so.
Photographs were then brought out, as old to me and as forgotten as the images; and it was again disturbing to my sense of place and time to handle them, to see, in the middle of a vast land where I was anchored to no familiar points and could so easily be lost, the purple stamp of the Trinidad photographer – his address so clearly pictured – still bright against the fading sepia figures, in my reawakened memory forever faded, belonging to imagination and never to reality like this.
I had come to them reluctantly. I had expected little, and I had been afraid. The ugliness was all mine.
Someone else wanted to see me. It was Ramachandra’s wife and she was waiting in one of the inner rooms. I went in. A white-clad figure was bowed before me; she seized my feet, in all their Veldtschoen, and began to weep. She wept and would not let go.
‘What do I do now?’ I asked the IAS officer.
‘Nothing. Soon someone will come in and tell her that this is no way to receive a relation, that she should be offering him food instead. It is the form.’
So it happened.
But food. Though they had overwhelmed me, my colonial prudence remained. It had prevented me emptying my pocket into Jussodra’s sad, wrinkled hands. Now it reminded me of the Commissioner’s advice: ‘Once it’s cooked, you can risk it. But never touch the water.’ He, however, was of the country. So: no food, I said. I was not very well and had been put on a diet.
‘Water,’ Ramachandra’s wife said. ‘At least have water.’
The IAS officer said, ‘You see that field? It is a field of peas. Ask for some of those.’
We ate a pod of peas each. I promised to come back again; the boys and men walked with us to the jeep; and I drove back along a road that had been robbed of all its terror.
*
In the hotel in the town that evening I wrote a letter. The day had provided such an unlikely adventure. It distorted time; again and again I came back, with wonder, to my presence in that town, in that hotel at that hour. There had been those images, those photographs, those scraps of Trinidad English in that Indian village. The letter did not exhaust my exaltation. The act of writing released not isolated memories but a whole forgotten mood. The letter finished, I went to sleep. Then there was a song, a duet, at first part of memory, it seemed, part of that recaptured mood. But I was not dreaming; I was lucid. The music was real.
Tumhin ne mujhko prem sikhaya,
Soté hué hirdaya ko jagaya.
Tumhin ho roop singar balam.*
It was morning. The song came from a shop across the road. It was a song of the late thirties. I had ceased to hear it years before, and until this moment I had forgotten it. I did not even know the meaning of all the words; but then I never had. It was pure mood, and in that moment between waking and sleeping it had recreated a morning in another world, a recreation of this, which continued. And walking that day in the bazaar, I saw the harmoniums, one of which had lain broken and unused, part of the irrecoverable past, in my grandmother’s house, the drums, the printing-blocks, the brass vessels. Again and again I had that sense of dissolving time, that alarming but exhilarating sense of wonder at my physical self.
At the barber shop, where I stopped for a shave and begged in vain for hot water, exaltation died. I became again an impatient traveller. The sun was high; the faint morning chill had been burnt away.
I returned to the hotel and found a beggar outside my door.
‘Kya chahiye?’ I asked, in my poor Hindi. ‘What do you want?’
He looked up. His head was shaved, except for the top-knot; his face was skeletal; his eyes blazed. My impatience momentarily turned to alarm. Monk, I thought, monk; I had been reading Karamazov.
‘I am Ramachandra Dube,’ he said. ‘I did not see you yesterday.’
I had expected someone less ingratiating, less of a physical wreck. His effort at a smile did not make his expression warmer. Spittle, white and viscous, gathered at the corners of his mouth.
There were some IAS cadets in the hotel. Three of them came to act as interpreters.
‘I have spent all day looking for you,’ Ramachandra said.
‘Tell him I thank him,’ I said. ‘But there was really no need. I told them at the village I was coming back. Ask him, though, how he found me. I left no address.’
He had walked for some miles; then he had taken a train to the town; then he had gone around the secretariat, asking for the IAS officer who had taken out a man from Trinidad.
While the cadets translated, Ramachandra smiled. His face, I now saw, was not the face of a monk but of someone grossly undernourished; his eyes were bright with illness; he was painfully thin. He was carrying a large white sack. This he now humped with difficulty on to my table.
‘I have brought you some rice from your grandfather’s land,’ he said. ‘I have also brought you parsad, offerings, from your grandfather’s shrine.’
‘What do I do?’ I asked the cadets. ‘I don’t want thirty pounds of rice.’
‘He doesn’t want you to take it all. You just take a few grains. Take the parsad, though.’
I took a few grains of the poor rice, and took the parsad, grubby little grey beads of hard sugar, and placed them on the table.
‘I have been looking for you all day,’ Ramachandra said. ‘I know.’
‘I walked, then I took a train, then I walked around the town and asked for you.’
‘It was good of you to take all that trouble.’
‘I want to see you. I want to have you in my poor hut and to give you a meal.’
‘I am coming back to the village in a few day
s.’
‘I have been looking for you all day.’
‘I know.’
‘I want to have you in my hut. I want to talk to you.’
‘We will talk when I come to the village.’ ‘I want to see you there.
I want to talk to you. I have important things to say to you.’
‘We will talk when the time comes.’
‘Good. Now I will leave you. I have been looking for you all day. I have things to say to you. I want to have you in my hut.’
‘I can’t keep this up,’ I said to the IAS cadets. ‘Tell him to go away. Thank him and so on, but tell him to go.’
One of the cadets passed on my message, involving and extending it with expressions of courtesy.
‘Now I must leave you,’ Ramachandra replied. ‘I must get back to the village before dark.’
‘Yes, I can see that you must get back before dark.’
‘But how can I talk to you in the village?’
‘I will bring an interpreter.’
‘I want to have you in my poor hut. I have spent all day looking for you. In the village there are too many people. How can I talk to you in the village?’
‘Why can’t you talk to me in the village? Can’t we really get him out?’
They eased him towards the door.
‘I have brought you rice from your grandfather’s land.’
‘Thank you. It will get dark soon.’
‘I want to talk to you when you come.’
‘We will talk.’
The door was closed. The cadets went away. I lay down on the bed below the fan. Then I had a shower. I was towelling myself when I heard a scratching on the barred window.
It was Ramachandra, in the veranda, attempting a smile. I summoned no interpreters. I needed none to understand what he was saying.
‘I cannot talk in the village. There are too many people.’
‘We will talk in the village,’ I said in English. ‘Now go home. You travel too much.’ By signs I persuaded him to edge away from the window. Quickly, then, I drew the curtains.