The Earth is four billions years old, give or take a few millions. Mankind is 200,000 years old, give or take a few thousands. Do the maths – Earth is 3.8 billions years older than mankind. It has had more shit thrown at it than you can ever imagine.
It began as a molten mass that burned for a few millions years, then it pissed down with rain for another few million years. Enough rain to fill oceans and lakes. Then the Earth had a couple of ice ages for a few million years. The poles switched positions with the equator for a few millions, and that would confuse anyone. But not the Earth. Meteors and asteroids shot it. It shrugged off those hits.
And then it got down to business of evolution. The Earth shoved up a few green shoots, it simmered micro-organism in its warm seas. It was having fun in this chemistry lab. The organism morphed into the most fantastic, fabulous creatures that we can barely even imagine - T. rex, Triceratops, Elasmosaurus, Giganotosaurus, Ichthyornis, Ichthyosaurus, Megaraptor, Pteranodon, Spinosaurus, Velociraptor, Teratasuras, Mammoths. The list fills pages of an encyclopedia and I’m not even including the birds – Archaeopteryx, Dinornis, Phororhacos, to name only a few.
These magical creatures evolved, loafed around Earth for millions of years, though not all at the very same time, then they extinct-ed stage left. Thankfully, Man was not around to shoulder the blame for that. A massive meteor, which blotted out the sun with dust for hunreds of years, killed of the dinosaurs, our favourite beasts in films. My theory of extinction is that the Earth gets bored with what it has created, decides to shuffle its creations into eternity, and start anew.
Fast forward to our 21st Century. Here’s this bipedal creature, Man, running around screaming, ‘save the environment, save the Earth’. We’re arrogant enough to believe in our own bullshit that we can reverse global warming, fix ozone holes and save our rainforests. We’ve even scammed ourselves into Carbon Trading, whatever that means. If you take a flight you’re supposed to plant a tree or something in exchange. That just won’t work. In my book, Limping to the Centre of the World, trekking through the Himalayan landscape, surrounded by giant mountains and reduced to the size of an ant, I also evolved the theory that the Earth, Nature, has two speeds – the imperceptible and the sudden, inter-connected. The imperceptible is the melting ice caps, ozone holes, weather patterns changing, deserts creeping up on us, monsoons not monsoon-ing. Then the sudden - tsunamis, earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, plagues, famines.
We’re not going to save the Earth, so we might as well accept that as a fact, and continue to live our normal, parasitic lives – waste water, make lots of money, fly as often as we can, burn up all the coal, set off nuclear bombs, leave our lights on. Our tigers will become extinct, as will all our forests, as we grab more land for agriculture to feed our billions.
The Earth will save itself; it is a self-repair planet. It has had four billion years of experience, and knows better than us how to do that. We’ll run out of water and kill for a drop, social unrest will wipe out our civilization, paper-thin as it is. A friend argued that we’re very intelligent creations and we’ll survive, somehow. But the theory of evolution is against us. Our time will come too to extinct, stage left. Earth will win.
So, all that will be left will be our mega cities, and, we know that leave any building uninhabited for long, and nature will reclaim it. Okay, our legacy will be a few plastic bags floating around. The Earth will examine them, and absorb them back into itself. Gulp. After all plastic did come out of the Earth. Enjoy.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
DEAD MEN STATUES
Our politicans love themselves. They’re lucky, as we don’t. Ms Mayawati is so in love that she has built gigantic statues of herself, and erected them all around her state. I love them, as they show her clutching her handbag. It’s a very feminine touch. She’s not an exception. In every city, town and village in India we see statues of our wonderful politicians. The men should also be clutching bags – for the loot if not for the make up. Soon, all our universities, like Anna U, will be instituting BA, MAs and PhDs on the wisdom of our politicians. A sort of Dale Carnegie course ‘How to Win Elections and Loot the Treasury’. I can see every eager student taking up these courses to improve their financial bottom lines.
The problem with building statues and starting university courses is that people forget who the person is within a week of his or her death. Or worse still, on losing the next election. As I thought this could be only an Indian phenomenon I decided to talk to a few foreign politicians whether they had thought of building statues to themselves.
I called George W now holed up in his ranch in Crawford, Texas. I interrupted him in the middle of writing his memoirs. He had reached page two and was wrestling with trying to remember what came after that.
‘Hi George. I’m checking on whether you thought of building a statue of yourself?’
‘Hi there in India, wherever that is. Good to hear from you. I had thought of building myself a statue here in Crawford. But Dick Cheney shot that idea down as he thought there should be a statue of himself first.’
‘I’m sorry. How would you have depicted yourself?’
‘Hell, I’m a Texan and conquered Eye-raq. I’d be wearing my gun belt with a couple of six shooters, my stetson and my boots. Dick wanted his standing and water boarding a jeehadist freak.’
‘And is Texas U going to start BAs, MAs and PhDs in George W?’
‘Heck, I doubt whether there’s enough for kindergarten.’
I called Bill Clinton next. At least he knew where India was as he had wandered around the country during his presidency.
‘A statue of myself?’ he said. ‘Sure I thought of that. I figured I’d set it up in the White House but then I worried what some female intern might do to my statue when she saw it. You can’t trust these interns, as they find me irresistible, and they could damage the marble.’
‘How about degrees in what you have said?’
‘I like that idea and I’m working on raising the funding for a whole Bill Clinton department in Yale. They’re pretty interested in that project. But it will have to be a Hillary Clinton department and there would be the problem as I made president, she didn’t . Hillary and I….’
‘Thanks Bill,’ I disconnected quickly.
‘Hi Tony,’ I said to Mr Blair when I got him. ‘You ever thought of a statue of yourself opposite the House of Parliament next to Winston and Nelson?’
‘All the time, all the time. No one appreciated what I had done for the country in my three terms as PM. All they whine about is my committing troops to Iraq. I had to do it as George was such a buddy, and couldn’t find Iraq by himself.’
‘And a degree on your wise sayings at Oxford?’
‘I have suggested that but no one listens to me any more. They’ve made two films on me so far and they’re planning a third. I called the director and told him that instead of casting some wimpy look alike, I think Brad Pitt could play me and Angelina as Cherie. But he disconnected as he couldn’t remember who I was.’
Statues only remind us to be grateful the politician is finally dead and gone.
The problem with building statues and starting university courses is that people forget who the person is within a week of his or her death. Or worse still, on losing the next election. As I thought this could be only an Indian phenomenon I decided to talk to a few foreign politicians whether they had thought of building statues to themselves.
I called George W now holed up in his ranch in Crawford, Texas. I interrupted him in the middle of writing his memoirs. He had reached page two and was wrestling with trying to remember what came after that.
‘Hi George. I’m checking on whether you thought of building a statue of yourself?’
‘Hi there in India, wherever that is. Good to hear from you. I had thought of building myself a statue here in Crawford. But Dick Cheney shot that idea down as he thought there should be a statue of himself first.’
‘I’m sorry. How would you have depicted yourself?’
‘Hell, I’m a Texan and conquered Eye-raq. I’d be wearing my gun belt with a couple of six shooters, my stetson and my boots. Dick wanted his standing and water boarding a jeehadist freak.’
‘And is Texas U going to start BAs, MAs and PhDs in George W?’
‘Heck, I doubt whether there’s enough for kindergarten.’
I called Bill Clinton next. At least he knew where India was as he had wandered around the country during his presidency.
‘A statue of myself?’ he said. ‘Sure I thought of that. I figured I’d set it up in the White House but then I worried what some female intern might do to my statue when she saw it. You can’t trust these interns, as they find me irresistible, and they could damage the marble.’
‘How about degrees in what you have said?’
‘I like that idea and I’m working on raising the funding for a whole Bill Clinton department in Yale. They’re pretty interested in that project. But it will have to be a Hillary Clinton department and there would be the problem as I made president, she didn’t . Hillary and I….’
‘Thanks Bill,’ I disconnected quickly.
‘Hi Tony,’ I said to Mr Blair when I got him. ‘You ever thought of a statue of yourself opposite the House of Parliament next to Winston and Nelson?’
‘All the time, all the time. No one appreciated what I had done for the country in my three terms as PM. All they whine about is my committing troops to Iraq. I had to do it as George was such a buddy, and couldn’t find Iraq by himself.’
‘And a degree on your wise sayings at Oxford?’
‘I have suggested that but no one listens to me any more. They’ve made two films on me so far and they’re planning a third. I called the director and told him that instead of casting some wimpy look alike, I think Brad Pitt could play me and Angelina as Cherie. But he disconnected as he couldn’t remember who I was.’
Statues only remind us to be grateful the politician is finally dead and gone.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
BAMBOO CURTAINS
I recently read a report that fascinated me. At first I thought I had hallucinated it, quite easy to do in a country that has a frail grasp on reality. Then, I checked my note book. The note read: ‘a brilliant, imaginative, innovative, exciting idea by an Indian state. This is truly out-of-the-box thinking. If only other states would follow such a wonderful idea.’
The report stated that, with the Commonwealth Games bearing down on New Delhi like an express train, the Delhi government will not have time to shift the slum dwellers, and their slums, out of the way. Hey, this is our chance to prove India Inc is a 21st century country. We are going to have world class stadia, state of the art equipment, astro turf, air conditioned changing rooms, all weather tracks and countless foreigners. But, what are we to do about the poor who are an eyesore?
The Delhi government has decided to erect bamboo curtains around these slums so that our foreign visitors will not have to see such unsightly poverty. Now, don’t you think it’s a dazzling solution to an intractable problem? I bet some babu, brooding over Delhi’s eyesore slums must have come up with this idea. The ministers were so excited by this that they immediately contacted the Mizoram and Assam governments to place orders for many million bamboos. Both governments were happy to ship every piece of bamboo to Delhi.
Even I was excited by this new approach to Indian poverty. We can now ‘abolish poverty’ with a few bamboo curtains. Why spend billions of rupees in anti-poverty programmes when 99 percent of this money ends up in the pockets of our politicians and our babus? This programme will save us billions, and maybe even impoverish our politicians and babus. Every politician can now parrot another slogan ‘bamboo the poor’. No doubt, they’ll also monopolize bamboo estates to make up their losses.
I believe this concept of a bamboo curtain should be applied to the whole of India. Never let a great idea go to waste, in my opinion. For a start, every city should follow Delhi’s example. Mumbai has so many slums, especially around the airport, and the first sight the foreigner sees, descending out of a clear blue sky, are many acres of slums.
This is a two fold problem for Mumbai. First, they’ll have to build a bamboo shamayana over the whole slum. Descending foreigners will only see the beautiful carpet of yellow bamboo, and marvel at such a sight. Then, when the plane touches down, speeding past the slums at ground level, they will see a beautiful bamboo curtain. The poor and their slums don’t exist any more. At least, visually speaking, and this is what we need – make them vanish into bamboo air. Our of sight, out of mind.
Once Delhi and Mumbai have set the examples. with this great disappearing trick, other cities should follow suit. We can then drive past bamboo curtains every where without being filled with guilt. We won’t be able to see the poor. Naturally, those inside the curtain will need to come out and go in, so there should be a few discrete doorways to allow them in and out.
But our poor are not confined to our urban areas only. The BPLs are scattered across the length and breadth of this nation. For a start, we should build a bamboo curtain around the entire states of Bihar, Orissa, Tirupura and MP. As poverty is contagious this will prevent it spreading into the neighbouring states, and then across the whole country. Every state has its swathes of poverty and we can bamboo curtain off all these poor villages and their poor inhabitants. The curtains will cover two thirds of the country.
On second thoughts, it would be cheaper to bamboo curtain off the affluent of India Inc., who are just a few millions. Then the poor would not have to see them.
The report stated that, with the Commonwealth Games bearing down on New Delhi like an express train, the Delhi government will not have time to shift the slum dwellers, and their slums, out of the way. Hey, this is our chance to prove India Inc is a 21st century country. We are going to have world class stadia, state of the art equipment, astro turf, air conditioned changing rooms, all weather tracks and countless foreigners. But, what are we to do about the poor who are an eyesore?
The Delhi government has decided to erect bamboo curtains around these slums so that our foreign visitors will not have to see such unsightly poverty. Now, don’t you think it’s a dazzling solution to an intractable problem? I bet some babu, brooding over Delhi’s eyesore slums must have come up with this idea. The ministers were so excited by this that they immediately contacted the Mizoram and Assam governments to place orders for many million bamboos. Both governments were happy to ship every piece of bamboo to Delhi.
Even I was excited by this new approach to Indian poverty. We can now ‘abolish poverty’ with a few bamboo curtains. Why spend billions of rupees in anti-poverty programmes when 99 percent of this money ends up in the pockets of our politicians and our babus? This programme will save us billions, and maybe even impoverish our politicians and babus. Every politician can now parrot another slogan ‘bamboo the poor’. No doubt, they’ll also monopolize bamboo estates to make up their losses.
I believe this concept of a bamboo curtain should be applied to the whole of India. Never let a great idea go to waste, in my opinion. For a start, every city should follow Delhi’s example. Mumbai has so many slums, especially around the airport, and the first sight the foreigner sees, descending out of a clear blue sky, are many acres of slums.
This is a two fold problem for Mumbai. First, they’ll have to build a bamboo shamayana over the whole slum. Descending foreigners will only see the beautiful carpet of yellow bamboo, and marvel at such a sight. Then, when the plane touches down, speeding past the slums at ground level, they will see a beautiful bamboo curtain. The poor and their slums don’t exist any more. At least, visually speaking, and this is what we need – make them vanish into bamboo air. Our of sight, out of mind.
Once Delhi and Mumbai have set the examples. with this great disappearing trick, other cities should follow suit. We can then drive past bamboo curtains every where without being filled with guilt. We won’t be able to see the poor. Naturally, those inside the curtain will need to come out and go in, so there should be a few discrete doorways to allow them in and out.
But our poor are not confined to our urban areas only. The BPLs are scattered across the length and breadth of this nation. For a start, we should build a bamboo curtain around the entire states of Bihar, Orissa, Tirupura and MP. As poverty is contagious this will prevent it spreading into the neighbouring states, and then across the whole country. Every state has its swathes of poverty and we can bamboo curtain off all these poor villages and their poor inhabitants. The curtains will cover two thirds of the country.
On second thoughts, it would be cheaper to bamboo curtain off the affluent of India Inc., who are just a few millions. Then the poor would not have to see them.
Friday, August 14, 2009
WRITING IN EXILE
WRITING IN EXILE
I lived outside India for 30 years. That’s a big chunk out of a writer’s life.
At the start of my self-imposed exile, I had no ambitions to write. I went abroad to study engineering, a bad choice as I was lousy in maths. I had loved books ever since I could read and my father had a huge collection, ranging from science, history, philosophy, travel to fiction. Very few of them were written by Indians. And none at all for children. Only Rudyard Kipling wrote novels on India, not so much for Indian children, but for his English readers. Apart from reading, my grandmother filled my imagination with our mythical tales.
Failing miserably as an engineer, I went to McGill University to study political science and history. I became a writer there purely by chance. I had worked in a logging camp in Queen Charlotte’s Islands (British Columbia) one summer to pay my way through college. On my return to university, instead of working on a history paper, I doodled an off-beat story on my logging experience. It was journalistic fiction, a sort of short story. At that time, I admired two newspapers – The New York Herald Tribune and the (then) Manchester Guardian. They had some great writers working for them, and they both had a distinct literary style. The Tribune was just folding and, on a whim, I sent my story to the Guardian. I heard nothing further, forgot about it, and immersed myself in studies, until, fatefully, one day, I opened the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian. My story filled a whole precious page of that slim weekly. As anyone knows, seeing one’s name in print the first time is the closest to having an orgasm without the sex.
I had found my calling – to be a writer, or at least a journalist. I wrote a couple more pieces on Canadian life for The Guardian, saw them published, and, with those clippings in hand, landed a job on a small town Canadian newspaper. I was taught the reporting craft by the editor who hired me, Don Soutter. When he left for a big city job, the in-coming editor fired me immediately, as I was a brown person cluttering his all-white newsroom. He was frank – my presence, he said, disturbed him. My fellow reporters, knowing why I was fired, wanted to strike. I was touched by their loyalty, and dissuaded them from industrial action. I had other ambitions.
I moved to London and walked into the Guardian. The Guardian, embarrassed to find I was Indian, and not Italian as they had presumed from my name, gave me a subbing job. I continued to write features for it in my spare time. Back then, the Guardian published just a few pages, unlike today’s Guardian that is fat as the New York Times, and so there was very limited space. You had to have talent, write imaginatively with a distinctive style of your own. The highest back handed compliment I ever received was from the then features editor, Christopher Driver. He wandered over to my desk one day with my copy in hand, and said: ‘You’re like the rest of them here. You don’t have any grammar and you can’t spell.’ The company I kept then were Eton/Harrow/Oxford/Cambridge old boys.
Many years later when I met Amitav Ghosh, he gushed that in those days I was the only Indian writing and he had read everything I wrote. However, there was a far more famous Indian writing at the same time, V.S Naipaul. I admired his writings, novels set in the Caribbean and Africa, and for Indians, his, controversial, , ‘An Area of Darkness’. Yet, although he lived in England, he never set his works in that country. I wished he would have written about his immigrant experience. But he never did, apart from a very sharp short story published a couple of years ago in the New Yorker. I wondered about that, in some ways envious, as I could not write from such a distance.
I never wrote on India, except once. When the French film director Louis Malle made his documentaries on India, and was pilloried by the Indian government and press, I defended his right, in the Guardian, to make films on what he saw. Otherwise, I wrote only about the England I knew. I had been away from India too long, and only possessed childhood and adolescent memories of India. I did visit India annually, to see my widowed father and spent most of my time with him, though I would take a week off to travel in India.
My first novel, The Marriage, did have Indian characters but it was set entirely in Midlands, and was the first novel on the Indian Diaspora published in England. The novel, set in and around Coventry, was about first generation Punjabis with discrimination and labour problems. Entwined with the story was another about the love affair between an Indian girl, daughter of the Punjabi union organiser, and an English boy. The novel had very good, but patronising, reviews and didn’t set the world on fire. Since then, of course, there’s been a cascade of novels about the Diaspora.
My next book was a non-fiction work, The New Savages, set in Liverpool’s Toxteth area and revolved around the teenage gangs, black versus white, that battled each other along the borders of their tenement estates. I was savaged by the press and the critics. They accused me of fabricating the lives of the black and white kids and the racial tensions between them. There was a complacency then that all was well between the races, and I had disturbed that perceived harmony. A couple of newspapers did make an effort to check out my findings, and did report that I had accurately reflected the racial problems. What stung most, however, was the indignation that the ‘Man from Madras’ had dared to write on such subjects, the preserve of the white Briton. I realized then I was an outsider, and would always remain one, no matter how long I lived in England. Then near to 15 years. The English, even today, are an island and insular race. Sadly, I was vindicated in my prediction of racial problems – a year after the publication of The New Savages there was a major race riot in Liverpool, in Toxteth, exactly along the territorial lines in my book.
Someone suggested I should write on Indian gangs but I had to admit I knew little about them. I was quite well entrenched in England – with English friends, an English girl friend, playing cricket for the Guardian and other teams, including Harold Pinter’s XI, propping the pub, occasionally having a curry meal to remind me of my roots. How could I write on India from such a distance? I made a couple of attempts, neither very satisfactory and my fiction, The Oblivion Tapes and Lovers are Not People, continued to be set in the west, without an Indian in sight between the covers.
It was on one of my annual visits that I went to Mysore and, crassly, gate crashed into R.K Narayan’s home. He was a wonderfully courteous gentle man and I had read all his novels. We chatted on politics, writing, and writers over cups of tea. I returned to visit him a year later and this time he made the remark ‘How can you write about India from so far away? You only catch a glimpse of life here, like any tourist.’ That comment stayed with me a long time, though I had admitted to R.K that I hadn’t yet attempted to write a novel set in India. He very kindly replied that he hoped I would, one day.
I moved to New York and, between writing for The Guardian, and making television documentaries, Only An America, for a British TV company, I decided to write my ‘Indian’ novel. R.K was right – from that distance, I couldn’t write about the present. I didn’t know all the nuances and characters I would need to write about and, most important, if I got it wrong, the reader would notice the mistakes. I chose the safe path of the past. ‘The past is another country’ is the first line of J.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between.
I’d be safe in that country as I was the only one who knew its characters, the geography, the family conflicts. Field of Honor was published by Simon & Schuster in New York (Methuen in London) and I was privileged to have the hottest editor in the literary universe, Michael Korda, as my editor. I was invited to join him for a lunch or two at his favourite table in the Four Seasons. I’d been having an intermittent communication, not really letters, with Graham Greene, another writer I admired and I had read all his novels. I sent him the book and he sent back a note with his opinion - ‘I was very much impressed with Field of Honour’, which, of course, I used. Unfortunately, the novel vanished without a trace, though it was optioned for a film by a Hollywood producer.
‘You must write another novel on India,’ my agent encouraged me. Unfortunately, I was hit with a sort of writer’s block. I had spent many months researching and filming homicide detectives in the South Bronx and had made good friends of a couple of them. Cops are great story tellers. So, when I got down to write my next Indian novel, out came a cop story, The Shooter, a ‘police procedural’, set in New York. It had surprisingly good reviews and it did cleanse me of my cop stories.
Now, I was ready for my next Indian novel. It would be set in Madras, my home town. It didn’t happen. Instead, distracted by a disparaging remark by my wife, when we visited the Taj Mahal 25 years ago, about my ignorance of the Mughal period, I returned to New York to brush up my history to disprove her. Out came TAJ, A story of Mugal India. It became a best seller in the UK, France and in all the European languages. It is still in print and has now notched up the 17th translation – Russian. American publishers continually reject it as ‘too complex for American readers’.
As history had been my earlier passion, I returned to it with some vengeance. My next novel was set at the turn of the 20th century. The British Empire was at its very height – Queen Victoria was Empress of India and Lord Curzon her Viceroy – and looked as if it would last forever. Yet, within a few years, the end of British rule of India was beginning to end. I needed a central character for the novel, someone who reflected the ambiguity of belonging, even as I was experiencing it, living in New York. The Imperial Agent was Kipling’s Kim. Here was someone who could wander, belonging to both the British and the Indian, and he meets all the real men and women – Tilak, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal, Gandhi - who were the founders of the Indian freedom movement. As the novel was too long, my editor suggested I publish it in two parts. Any writer is delighted with that kind of suggestion, as it gets him two bites of the same apple. The Last Victory followed and it ended with the massacres at Jallianwallah Bagh. After its success, my editor, Mary Sandys, advised me to stay with historical fiction. It was easier to write, for me anyway, from that distance as it was ‘another country’.
But I began to tire of my exile. The decision to return home was made for me – my father was increasingly unwell and there were the usual property problems that he could not cope with. As if waiting for my return, my father passed away and I had to grapple with the property. Both experiences were emotionally exhausting. I squeezed out my first set-in-India contemporary novel, EnduringAffairs, published by Picador. It was a semi-political novel, set in Madras and America, but I understood what R.K Narayan meant so many years ago – I needed to be here to write, I felt.
Writing fiction can be draining and I had been nurturing ambitions to make films. I had a script, I needed the money. A couple of years of trying went by before the money came together, but on the condition that someone else directed my script. When both the director, Amol Palekar, and his cameraman, read the script, their first comment was ‘how could a desi write such a very Indian script?’ I wrote it as I had observed and absorbed the India I had avoided for so long. The Square Circle (Daayra, in Hindi) crossed over long before the term came into vogue and was generally released in the UK, France and Australia. It starred Nirmal Pandey as transvestite and Sonali Kulkarni as the stolen village girl. The Square Circle made Time magazine’s top 10 best films and won flattering reviews, for the script especially, in all the newspapers and in several languages. I did get my revenge for not being allowed to direct the film. The Leicester Haymarket Theatre commissioned me to adapt the film for the stage, and direct it. I had a wonderful actress, Parminder Nagra (later of Bend it like Beckham fame) for my main lead, as the village girl stolen from her village. Rahul Bose played Nirmal Pandey’s role on stage.
Since then I’ve written three novels – Arrangements of Love, The Small House and Children of the Enchanted Jungle – and two, what I call memoirs – My Temporary Son and Limping to the Centre of the World, a journey to Mount Kailas. I doubt I could have written any of them living far away in New York. They all needed a close embrace of the Indian daily way of life, the small incremental changes that took place before my eyes. Writers depend on their observations, and thoughts of course, to write contemporary novels as they cannot set them always in another country.
Even such a gifted writer as Salman Rushdie needs to soak in India. His previous novel, set in Italy and mughal India, was the writer’s way of ‘another country’, the secure past. Recently, the New Yorker published his short story, In the South, set in Madras, reflecting his long stays in Madras during his marriage to his ex-wife Lakshmi, a Madrasi. He couldn’t have written about the minutiae of this city’s life from frenetic Manhattan, without spending time here. Other writers in exile do continue to write about India but, for the most part, I’ve always read them as memory literature, the remembrance of things past. They do succeed in capturing an India of their memory, and I do envy them that facility.
However, I had to return home before I could write about this complex, complicated, very extraordinary society and culture called India.
I lived outside India for 30 years. That’s a big chunk out of a writer’s life.
At the start of my self-imposed exile, I had no ambitions to write. I went abroad to study engineering, a bad choice as I was lousy in maths. I had loved books ever since I could read and my father had a huge collection, ranging from science, history, philosophy, travel to fiction. Very few of them were written by Indians. And none at all for children. Only Rudyard Kipling wrote novels on India, not so much for Indian children, but for his English readers. Apart from reading, my grandmother filled my imagination with our mythical tales.
Failing miserably as an engineer, I went to McGill University to study political science and history. I became a writer there purely by chance. I had worked in a logging camp in Queen Charlotte’s Islands (British Columbia) one summer to pay my way through college. On my return to university, instead of working on a history paper, I doodled an off-beat story on my logging experience. It was journalistic fiction, a sort of short story. At that time, I admired two newspapers – The New York Herald Tribune and the (then) Manchester Guardian. They had some great writers working for them, and they both had a distinct literary style. The Tribune was just folding and, on a whim, I sent my story to the Guardian. I heard nothing further, forgot about it, and immersed myself in studies, until, fatefully, one day, I opened the airmail edition of the Manchester Guardian. My story filled a whole precious page of that slim weekly. As anyone knows, seeing one’s name in print the first time is the closest to having an orgasm without the sex.
I had found my calling – to be a writer, or at least a journalist. I wrote a couple more pieces on Canadian life for The Guardian, saw them published, and, with those clippings in hand, landed a job on a small town Canadian newspaper. I was taught the reporting craft by the editor who hired me, Don Soutter. When he left for a big city job, the in-coming editor fired me immediately, as I was a brown person cluttering his all-white newsroom. He was frank – my presence, he said, disturbed him. My fellow reporters, knowing why I was fired, wanted to strike. I was touched by their loyalty, and dissuaded them from industrial action. I had other ambitions.
I moved to London and walked into the Guardian. The Guardian, embarrassed to find I was Indian, and not Italian as they had presumed from my name, gave me a subbing job. I continued to write features for it in my spare time. Back then, the Guardian published just a few pages, unlike today’s Guardian that is fat as the New York Times, and so there was very limited space. You had to have talent, write imaginatively with a distinctive style of your own. The highest back handed compliment I ever received was from the then features editor, Christopher Driver. He wandered over to my desk one day with my copy in hand, and said: ‘You’re like the rest of them here. You don’t have any grammar and you can’t spell.’ The company I kept then were Eton/Harrow/Oxford/Cambridge old boys.
Many years later when I met Amitav Ghosh, he gushed that in those days I was the only Indian writing and he had read everything I wrote. However, there was a far more famous Indian writing at the same time, V.S Naipaul. I admired his writings, novels set in the Caribbean and Africa, and for Indians, his, controversial, , ‘An Area of Darkness’. Yet, although he lived in England, he never set his works in that country. I wished he would have written about his immigrant experience. But he never did, apart from a very sharp short story published a couple of years ago in the New Yorker. I wondered about that, in some ways envious, as I could not write from such a distance.
I never wrote on India, except once. When the French film director Louis Malle made his documentaries on India, and was pilloried by the Indian government and press, I defended his right, in the Guardian, to make films on what he saw. Otherwise, I wrote only about the England I knew. I had been away from India too long, and only possessed childhood and adolescent memories of India. I did visit India annually, to see my widowed father and spent most of my time with him, though I would take a week off to travel in India.
My first novel, The Marriage, did have Indian characters but it was set entirely in Midlands, and was the first novel on the Indian Diaspora published in England. The novel, set in and around Coventry, was about first generation Punjabis with discrimination and labour problems. Entwined with the story was another about the love affair between an Indian girl, daughter of the Punjabi union organiser, and an English boy. The novel had very good, but patronising, reviews and didn’t set the world on fire. Since then, of course, there’s been a cascade of novels about the Diaspora.
My next book was a non-fiction work, The New Savages, set in Liverpool’s Toxteth area and revolved around the teenage gangs, black versus white, that battled each other along the borders of their tenement estates. I was savaged by the press and the critics. They accused me of fabricating the lives of the black and white kids and the racial tensions between them. There was a complacency then that all was well between the races, and I had disturbed that perceived harmony. A couple of newspapers did make an effort to check out my findings, and did report that I had accurately reflected the racial problems. What stung most, however, was the indignation that the ‘Man from Madras’ had dared to write on such subjects, the preserve of the white Briton. I realized then I was an outsider, and would always remain one, no matter how long I lived in England. Then near to 15 years. The English, even today, are an island and insular race. Sadly, I was vindicated in my prediction of racial problems – a year after the publication of The New Savages there was a major race riot in Liverpool, in Toxteth, exactly along the territorial lines in my book.
Someone suggested I should write on Indian gangs but I had to admit I knew little about them. I was quite well entrenched in England – with English friends, an English girl friend, playing cricket for the Guardian and other teams, including Harold Pinter’s XI, propping the pub, occasionally having a curry meal to remind me of my roots. How could I write on India from such a distance? I made a couple of attempts, neither very satisfactory and my fiction, The Oblivion Tapes and Lovers are Not People, continued to be set in the west, without an Indian in sight between the covers.
It was on one of my annual visits that I went to Mysore and, crassly, gate crashed into R.K Narayan’s home. He was a wonderfully courteous gentle man and I had read all his novels. We chatted on politics, writing, and writers over cups of tea. I returned to visit him a year later and this time he made the remark ‘How can you write about India from so far away? You only catch a glimpse of life here, like any tourist.’ That comment stayed with me a long time, though I had admitted to R.K that I hadn’t yet attempted to write a novel set in India. He very kindly replied that he hoped I would, one day.
I moved to New York and, between writing for The Guardian, and making television documentaries, Only An America, for a British TV company, I decided to write my ‘Indian’ novel. R.K was right – from that distance, I couldn’t write about the present. I didn’t know all the nuances and characters I would need to write about and, most important, if I got it wrong, the reader would notice the mistakes. I chose the safe path of the past. ‘The past is another country’ is the first line of J.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between.
I’d be safe in that country as I was the only one who knew its characters, the geography, the family conflicts. Field of Honor was published by Simon & Schuster in New York (Methuen in London) and I was privileged to have the hottest editor in the literary universe, Michael Korda, as my editor. I was invited to join him for a lunch or two at his favourite table in the Four Seasons. I’d been having an intermittent communication, not really letters, with Graham Greene, another writer I admired and I had read all his novels. I sent him the book and he sent back a note with his opinion - ‘I was very much impressed with Field of Honour’, which, of course, I used. Unfortunately, the novel vanished without a trace, though it was optioned for a film by a Hollywood producer.
‘You must write another novel on India,’ my agent encouraged me. Unfortunately, I was hit with a sort of writer’s block. I had spent many months researching and filming homicide detectives in the South Bronx and had made good friends of a couple of them. Cops are great story tellers. So, when I got down to write my next Indian novel, out came a cop story, The Shooter, a ‘police procedural’, set in New York. It had surprisingly good reviews and it did cleanse me of my cop stories.
Now, I was ready for my next Indian novel. It would be set in Madras, my home town. It didn’t happen. Instead, distracted by a disparaging remark by my wife, when we visited the Taj Mahal 25 years ago, about my ignorance of the Mughal period, I returned to New York to brush up my history to disprove her. Out came TAJ, A story of Mugal India. It became a best seller in the UK, France and in all the European languages. It is still in print and has now notched up the 17th translation – Russian. American publishers continually reject it as ‘too complex for American readers’.
As history had been my earlier passion, I returned to it with some vengeance. My next novel was set at the turn of the 20th century. The British Empire was at its very height – Queen Victoria was Empress of India and Lord Curzon her Viceroy – and looked as if it would last forever. Yet, within a few years, the end of British rule of India was beginning to end. I needed a central character for the novel, someone who reflected the ambiguity of belonging, even as I was experiencing it, living in New York. The Imperial Agent was Kipling’s Kim. Here was someone who could wander, belonging to both the British and the Indian, and he meets all the real men and women – Tilak, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal, Gandhi - who were the founders of the Indian freedom movement. As the novel was too long, my editor suggested I publish it in two parts. Any writer is delighted with that kind of suggestion, as it gets him two bites of the same apple. The Last Victory followed and it ended with the massacres at Jallianwallah Bagh. After its success, my editor, Mary Sandys, advised me to stay with historical fiction. It was easier to write, for me anyway, from that distance as it was ‘another country’.
But I began to tire of my exile. The decision to return home was made for me – my father was increasingly unwell and there were the usual property problems that he could not cope with. As if waiting for my return, my father passed away and I had to grapple with the property. Both experiences were emotionally exhausting. I squeezed out my first set-in-India contemporary novel, EnduringAffairs, published by Picador. It was a semi-political novel, set in Madras and America, but I understood what R.K Narayan meant so many years ago – I needed to be here to write, I felt.
Writing fiction can be draining and I had been nurturing ambitions to make films. I had a script, I needed the money. A couple of years of trying went by before the money came together, but on the condition that someone else directed my script. When both the director, Amol Palekar, and his cameraman, read the script, their first comment was ‘how could a desi write such a very Indian script?’ I wrote it as I had observed and absorbed the India I had avoided for so long. The Square Circle (Daayra, in Hindi) crossed over long before the term came into vogue and was generally released in the UK, France and Australia. It starred Nirmal Pandey as transvestite and Sonali Kulkarni as the stolen village girl. The Square Circle made Time magazine’s top 10 best films and won flattering reviews, for the script especially, in all the newspapers and in several languages. I did get my revenge for not being allowed to direct the film. The Leicester Haymarket Theatre commissioned me to adapt the film for the stage, and direct it. I had a wonderful actress, Parminder Nagra (later of Bend it like Beckham fame) for my main lead, as the village girl stolen from her village. Rahul Bose played Nirmal Pandey’s role on stage.
Since then I’ve written three novels – Arrangements of Love, The Small House and Children of the Enchanted Jungle – and two, what I call memoirs – My Temporary Son and Limping to the Centre of the World, a journey to Mount Kailas. I doubt I could have written any of them living far away in New York. They all needed a close embrace of the Indian daily way of life, the small incremental changes that took place before my eyes. Writers depend on their observations, and thoughts of course, to write contemporary novels as they cannot set them always in another country.
Even such a gifted writer as Salman Rushdie needs to soak in India. His previous novel, set in Italy and mughal India, was the writer’s way of ‘another country’, the secure past. Recently, the New Yorker published his short story, In the South, set in Madras, reflecting his long stays in Madras during his marriage to his ex-wife Lakshmi, a Madrasi. He couldn’t have written about the minutiae of this city’s life from frenetic Manhattan, without spending time here. Other writers in exile do continue to write about India but, for the most part, I’ve always read them as memory literature, the remembrance of things past. They do succeed in capturing an India of their memory, and I do envy them that facility.
However, I had to return home before I could write about this complex, complicated, very extraordinary society and culture called India.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
TIBET JOURNEY
Excerpted from my travel memoir
LIMPING TO THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.
A journey to Mount Kailash
(Penguin)
INTO TIBET
I do have a sense of moral unease at being on Tibetan soil, especially as I have friends who wear ‘Free Tibet’ badges, and I agree with their sentiments. Another friend, a Tibetan American, cannot enter his motherland. Sadly, slogans are mere mantras against bullets and jackboots. China’s interest in Tibet dates back to the early days of the Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) when it sent in a huge army to free that country from the Tartars. Although the then Dalai Lama remained the ruler of Tibet, the Chinese appointed an Amban (High Commissioner) to Lhasa to ‘advise’ the Dalai Lama in political affairs. Centuries of invasions and internecine warfare left little time for an Indian army to invade another country, until the British came. But thirty years after Napoleon’s debacle in Russia, a Dogra General, Zorawar Singh, commanding the Maharaja of Jammu Gulab Singh’s army, marched into Tibet. I may now even be sitting at the very pass that his 6,000 troops poured through down to the plain. Unfortunately, news of Napoleon’s defeat by General Winter had not yet reached Zorawar Singh. He had some early successes and then Tibet’s General Winter, and the high altitude, decimated the invading army. The Sino-Tibetan army had 12,000 men, warmly clad, who didn’t have to lift even a weapon, as Zorawar’s men retreated and died in the freezing weather. Zorawar was also killed in the final battle. Yet, strangely, China did nothing when the British, uneasy with a mysterious kingdom directly north of India and growing paranoid in their ‘great game’ with Russia, sent an expedition (army) under the command of Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband to invade Tibet. The invasion and conquest had taken place in the year of the Wood-Dragon and had been predicted many years previously by an oracle. The Tibetan army, in heavy armour, with bows and arrows and muzzle-loaders, was no match for the Indian soldiers armed with Gatling guns. Photographs show robed monks too, fumbling with antique rifles and hoes, dying in the hail of bullets. Younghusband reached Lhasa in August 1904—the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia—and concluded a generous treaty (the 1914 Simla Agreement) with the regent Ganden Rimpoche. According to the treaty, Tibet recognized Sikkim as a British protectorate, agreed to free trade with India and, in Clause 9, stated in no uncertain terms: ‘Without the consent of Great Britain no Tibetan territory shall be sold, leased or mortgaged to any foreign power whatsoever; no foreign power whatsoever shall be permitted to concern itself with the administration of the government of Tibet, or any other affairs therewith connected; no foreign power shall be permitted to send either official or non-official persons to Tibet – no matter in what pursuit they may be engaged – to assist in the conduct Tibetan affairs; no foreign power shall be permitted to construct roads or railways or erect telegraphs or open mines anywhere in Tibet…’
Younghusband then returned to India, but as a changed man for the rest of his life. In Lhasa, it is said, a strong impulse made him climb a hill above the city and he sat on a boulder. There, he had a very powerful spiritual experience and entered a state of mystical ecstasy, that serenity seeped into his very soul. He felt himself enter a state of nothingness.
The British closed the passes and any traveller needed the government’s permission to enter Tibet. This was always denied and even the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, a friend of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, couldn’t get into Tibet from India. Tibet once again became the forbidden and unreachable kingdom.
Three months after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Radio Peking announced on New Year’s Day 1950 that ‘the tasks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for 1950 are to liberate Taiwan, Hainan and Tibet.’ Tibet had only 8,500 troops to guard its long border with China and, knowing it didn’t stand a chance against the PLA, appealed to Nepal, Great Britain and the United States for support. The Dalai Lama also appealed for help to the only country which had close ties with Tibet – India. Tibet and a colonised India had signed the 1914 Simla agreement. When the sun sets, empires leave behind the legacy of their arrogance (‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty and despair.’) for those colonised nations to disentangle themselves from imperial machinations. Our then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was required to deny Chinese suzerainty over Tibet until China recognized Tibet’s autonomy. Nehru spoke of this suzerainty as ‘vague and shadowy’ which signalled to China that India accepted China’s claim over Tibet. China in turn warned India that receiving ‘an illegal delegation (from Tibet)’ would mean ‘entertaining hostile intentions against the Chinese People’s Republic.
So, on 9 September 1950 three thousand soldiers of the 18th Route army marched into Lhasa, followed by another 30,000 two months later. The Tibetans lined the streets to greet the invaders by spitting and clapping, their ancient practice for driving out evil, and children threw stones. To no avail. In 1951, the PLA forced the Tibetan representative of the Dalai Lama to sign an agreement affirming China’s sovereignity over Tibet. (Neither the PRC nor the Republic of China have ever proven this sovereignity).
During the 1950s, the Chinese cracked down on the lamas, who realized that their political power would be broken by Communist rule. According to the Chinese version of Tibetan history, over 700,000 Tibetans, out of a population of 1.2 million, were serfs who were treated very harshly. Those who tried to escape their serfdom were imprisoned, tortured and executed. The Dalai Lama denies this brutal past, though he admits that it was a feudal society in which some head lamas were corrupt and dictatorial. For the most part, he says, the Tibetans were a happy race.
In 1959, China then created the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) which included the Tibetan plateau, the highest region on earth, and Lhasa to be administered jointly by Tibet and the PRC. The Tibetan government in exile insists TAR is an independent nation while the PRC maintains it’s a self-governing region within China.
In the same year, the PRC treated the Dalai Lama with ‘disrespect’ and, by establishing communes, sparked a rebellion against their rule. It began first as a riot in Lhasa, and then spread into open rebellion. The marriage between Tibet and the PRC was immediately dissolved.
‘The following order is hereby proclaimed. Most of the kalons of the Tibet local government and the upper-strata reactionary clique colluded with imperialism, assembled rebellious bandits, carried out rebellion, ravaged the people, put the dalai lama under duress carried out rebellion, tore up the Seventeen-Point Agreement on Measures for the peaceful liberation of Tibet and on the night of March 19 directed the Tibetan local army and rebellious clements to launch a general offensive against the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Lhasa. Such acts which betray the motherland and disrupt unification are not allowed by law. In order to safeguard the unification of the country and national unity, the decision is that from this day the Tibet local government is dissolved.’ -Order of the State Council of the Chinese People’s Republic, March 28, 1959
The uprising was also fuelled by the CIA. About 1,000 rebels, between 1962 and 1964, were flown to the U.S. and trained in intelligence gathering and handling armaments at Camp Halle in Colorado. When they returned to fight the good fight, they were each given one pistol! Later on, the CIA financed a training base in Mustang on the Nepal border and spent around $2 million a year on the operation, providing the rebels with sophisticated weapons and communication systems. India was a reluctant partner in this programme and did not want any trouble on the border with China. However, in 1969, just before Henry Kissinger’s visit to China, the Americans pulled out the rug from beneath the rebels. (Now where have I heard that story before?) By this time the Dalai Lama had fled to India and set up a Tibetan government-in-exile at Dharamsala.
The PRC broke up the monastic estates and, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, Tibetans among them, destroyed thousands of monasteries and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were imprisoned or killed. The number of Tibetans killed during the Cultural Revolution varies between 200,000 and 400,000. In their later census, the PRC claimed that 300,000 Tibetans were ‘missing’. Today the population of Greater Tibet (and I have no idea what this is) is 7.3 million, of which 5 million are ethnic Tibetans. There have been some economic reforms in Tibet but, like the rest of the PRC, no political ones. Since 1950, the PRC claims, the GDP of Tibet has risen 30 per cent; from no roads there are now 22,500 miles of roads; infant mortality has dropped from 43 per cent to 0.6 per cent; life expectancy has risen from thirty-five to sixty-seven; and there are twenty-five scientific research institutes against none in 1950. Since 1980, 300 million Renminbi has been spent maintaining and protecting Tibetan monasteries.
Almost immediately after the 1950 invasion, the Chinese built a highway to Lhasa from Chengdu(from where?), and then roads to the Indian (I’m looking at one), Nepali and Pakistani borders. Warmed by the sun and still waiting at the pass, I reflect that Tibet will never be free.
LATER IN TAKALAKOT
After dinner, comforted by our filled bellies, Menon and I decide to explore Takalakot. There’s more to explore, at least a longer stretch of this road, when we turn left, passing the sizzling bar-b-q. I feel as if I’ve landed in the ‘Twilight Zone’, an old science fiction television series. We’re in that black and white age – the black of the dusty plain and silhouetted mountains in the distance, and the white of this place. I can’t call it a village, it doesn’t have that enclosed feel of neighbourliness, nor a town as it’s not big enough. It’s just been beamed down here, a long chain of shops dropped with a thud from a passing spaceship. The sky is still tantalising clear and reachable, a space ship would have no problem navigating down.
Taklakot is skinny; it only has length, with scarcely any breadth at all, and seems only frontages, like a Universal studios movie set. The shops are dimly lit, throwing faint patches of light onto the pavement. Every block or so, the continuous row is punctuated by gates, similar to the entrance to our guest house, that open on to inner courtyards. There are a few PLA soldiers wandering around or sitting in restaurants, starring out into the void, no doubt dreaming of their distance homes. Chinese women, with overweight kids, straggle past us, avoiding us pointedly. Tibetans wander too, aimless as ghosts searching for a final resting place. They’re shabbily dressed for the most part, not in traditional costumes but western clothes, and the women wear white nose/mouth masks as a protection against the swirling dust. I intend to buy one too, the wind and the dust are constant and my nostrils feel blocked. The brightest lit shops are hair-dressing salons. As we walk, I start counting them. By the end of the road I’ve counted eight. Why eight for a visible population that couldn’t number even five hundred? They’re open to the street, cheerfully furnished, with painted walls and wall-hangings, and stylish reclining chairs and wash basins. Pretty women in their early twenties, like nightingales in an open cage, await their customers, gossiping or flicking through glossy magazines. They look Chinese, or even fair Nepali, and they all wear brand-name jeans and silken tops, chic as any fashion-conscious woman in Manhattan. Only a couple of the salons are patronised by the PLA, at the moment, and at least there’s laughter between the soldiers and the women fussing over them. In every one of the establishments are narrow stairs at the rear, leading up to the floor above. And from above come the faint strains of music.
Menon has been more observant. ‘You can get massages here too,’ he says with joy in his voice. ‘I must find out how much they cost and get one. I need it, my muscles still ache. What about you?’
‘You check them out first,’ and add with no sense of prudery but amusement. ‘But I doubt the massages are for those kinds of muscles.’
‘There must be a large PLA garrison here,’ the admiral conjectures. ‘Though there aren’t that many of them on the street. They’re probably somewhere behind those hills when we Yatris are in town.’
London, New York, Paris, every city has ‘massage’ parlours but I’m sure in proportion to their inhabitants they can’t match Taklakot. Soldiers, many as Menon guesses, need to be entertained, rocks need to be released. The saloons couldn’t be patronised by the Tibetan men, they’re hanging around the street wearing crumpled sports jackets and baggy trousers or else playing pool on worn-out tables in the open, off the pavement. They look as if they don’t have a Yuan between them. And while I’m counting as we walk, I also notice five discotheques, always above the saloons with frosted windows and shadowy figures behind them. There are two side streets of not more than a 100 metres long. The one that runs east is a dirt lane with mud and stone homes, the simple architecture similar to the homes in the Kumaon. The lane is cluttered with garbage and narrow streams of black sewage, Tibetan children in very grubby clothes play in the lane with a bicycle tyre. The children run out to say ‘Hello’ in English, giggling, and I hand out the boiled sweets stuffed in my pocket, wishing I had my biscuits as I don’t want to rot their teeth. The street to the west is cemented, wide as the one we’re on too, and lined with brick and concrete buildings. At the end of it, they’re constructing a large one, four floors and a half block long.
We wander in and out of the stores, the mini-departmental ones have the same clutter of consumer goods and, if they’d had the space, probably jammed in a couple of Land Cruisers and a truck to complete their inventory. I spoke too soon. In the next mini-department store there’s a massive, glittering red and chrome Kawasaki. Like the Land Cruisers it’s ideal for this menacing landscape which isn’t for the faint-hearted scooters or compacts. These mini-department stores all have Chinese women behind their counters. And they all have their televisions running, on mute or a low volume, showing Chinese programmes, of course. I’m told that these women, and their families, have come from all over China to populate Tibet. They’re as imported as their goods, and no doubt the cause of their sour miens. The other shops along this long mall are smaller, dimly lit, selling the basic items – fresh fruits, vegetables, rice, barley, flour - have Tibetan women sitting patiently on their stools waiting for customers. No counters in these shops. And even when we do enter to buy apples, they gaze past us as if we don’t exist until we hold out our purchases. Menon is a seasoned shopper, he knows how to bargain. I pay for whatever they ‘quote’ and this is done with a calculator. They punch out a number, Menon punches out his number. The price lies in-between. In the somewhat centre of this road, a pivotal point, is the sprawl of the China Agricultural Bank, where we’ll change our dollars. It’s very firmly shut, and barred, and there’s a sign in Chinese on the wall beside the entrance. It looks as if it opens from 8-12 each morning. Or so we presume. Further along, in one of the courtyards is the fresh vegetable market, closing down for the day, and in the next courtyard is the Indian market. The goods are ‘Made in India’ but there isn’t an Indian in sight, which is strange as I’ve met my fellow-countrymen in outlandish and unexpected places, from the banks of the Orinoco River (Menen’s Restaurant) and the Texas badlands to the Canadian backwoods. Towards the end of the main street, a third road leads west, cemented too, passes a large parade ground, with a reviewing stand, and ends at a four floor building, the possible barracks of the PLA. The main street also ends very abruptly here, even as it had begun, and a dirt road meanders into the darkness towards the mountains.
We turn, and trudge back up. Menon looks up at one of the masts spiking the skyline to the south, his military senses alert. ‘That’s a missile guidance system, I’ve seen enough of those.’ The mast has three dishes, one below the other.
‘Where do you think their silos are located?’
‘In those hills.’ He sighs loudly. ‘I guess we’re the target for those missiles.’
I’m not at all surprised, though I would not have recognised a missile guidance mast from a wireless communication one. Way back in 1950, the New York Times had reported on a massive influx of Chinese troops into Tibet and of a huge garrison near Lake Mansarovar. This probably explains why wandering pilgrims are barred from their parikrama of the lake. In 1954, after months of hostile negotiations, Jawaharlal Nehru signed a non-aggression pact on Tibet with the PRC. With the command of such a height we’ve had a dangling Damocles sword north of us for decades, and it’s been a constant threat. And yet, I remember back in school, when Chou en Lai, the PRC Prime Minister, visited India, we were taught to chant “China-India bhai, bhai.” That brotherly feeling ended abruptly in the 1962 war when all the passes between India and Tibet slammed shut. Maybe it’s because of India and China’s antiquity that we have grown tired of each other’s company over the millenniums. India exported Buddhism to China and, though we weren’t exactly friends in that first millennium A.D., we exchanged scholars who studied Sanskrit, Buddhism, mathematics, architecture, medicine, music, linguistics and science. Buddhism didn’t last long in China, a few centuries, as Confucius ousted it. An Indian scientist, Gautama Siddhartha, even became the president of the China’s Board of Astronomy in the eighth century. Chinese scholars such as Faxian, Xuanzang and Yi Ling travelled in India, between the fifth and seventh century A.D., to study Buddhism and the other subjects. At that time, China considered India the western kingdom, it being the middle one, but Faxan, because of his belief in Buddhism, on his return home referred to India as the ‘middle kingdom’, and China as a frontier country. No doubt this upset the insular Chinese. In Amartya Sen’s essay, he also mentions that the first printed book in the world, 868.A.D. was a Chinese translation of the Sanskrit treaties ‘Diamond Sutra’ which was for free distribution. No doubt exhausted by such intellectual exchanges, India and China had little contact in the second millennium.
On our way back up the road, two cop cars, Land Cruisers marked with ‘Police’, cruise past us. We merit scarcely a glance from the uniforms, who are definitely Tibetan, and even two cars for this strip of a place seems excessive security.
‘You notice there are no beggars around,’ Menon remarks in a pleased tone of voice.
‘Probably begging’s against the law in China,’ I reply and look up at the pock-marked hill, barely visible now, and wonder how those cave dwellers earn a livelihood in this place.
Apart from the shops there’s not much industry around. But at least, those who have some spare cash, gamble. There’s a game of dice on, off the pavement, behind some bushes. The dice are large as bricks and made of wood. The ‘table’ is L-shaped and large enough for the dice to roll down from the top of the vertical line of ‘L’, which has a gate operated by the croupier. He’s a young Tibetan, smiling at his suckers, wearing an open-necked shirt and jeans, with a folded, beaten-up leather jacket beside him. He looks foot-loose and fancy free, blown in with the wind, and has a few gamblers around him. The sides of the dice have Tibetan animals painted on them – a horse, leopard, yak, bird, bear, rabbit, deer, wolf. He places the dice above the gate and when he opens it, two dice tumble down onto the table, and the bet is that both will have the same animal face up. In this fading light, the animals are barely visible, the dice are well used indeed. Probably, loaded too. The stakes aren’t high, a few one Yuan notes lie on the table. As a high roller I delight the croupier by dropping a whole five yuan on the table. It’s big enough to swell the ranks of the gamblers and watchers who smile encouraging at me. Go for broke. I choose the discoloured leopard to bet on, probably an already extinct species. I haven’t gambled since I lost a week’s salary playing poker in a Canadian logging camp during my college days. The croupier loads the dice behind the gate, smiles and opens it. The dice roll down and crash against each other. A yak and a wolf come faces up. The money vanishes from the table as fast as the eye can follow the young man’s hand. No one’s going to get rich, or get poor, quick at this table, it’s just a way of passing time together, a brotherhood of losers finding solace in their conquered land.
I sense the Chinese don’t actually see the Tibetans; the Tibetans look through the Chinese, as if they’re passing spirits in a nightmare. Through history, there must be the same sense of separateness, in any country, between the conqueror and the conquered. No conquest is ever a benign one, including that of Britain and India. We too lived separate lives and Indians suffered under colonial rule. If China killed a few hundred thousand Tibetans, under British rule between 12 and 29 million Indians were deliberately allowed to die during the 1877/78 famine. Under orders from the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, grain merchants exported 320,000 tons of grain to Europe during these years. We were also economically suppressed. In the eighteenth century an Indian labourer earned more than his counterpart in England. But between 1757 and 1947 there was no increase in India’s per capita income and we became a poor, third world country. Conquest is exploitation and enrichment for the conquerors. Still, there was an upside- we learned cricket, the English language and practice democracy.
LIMPING TO THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD.
A journey to Mount Kailash
(Penguin)
INTO TIBET
I do have a sense of moral unease at being on Tibetan soil, especially as I have friends who wear ‘Free Tibet’ badges, and I agree with their sentiments. Another friend, a Tibetan American, cannot enter his motherland. Sadly, slogans are mere mantras against bullets and jackboots. China’s interest in Tibet dates back to the early days of the Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) when it sent in a huge army to free that country from the Tartars. Although the then Dalai Lama remained the ruler of Tibet, the Chinese appointed an Amban (High Commissioner) to Lhasa to ‘advise’ the Dalai Lama in political affairs. Centuries of invasions and internecine warfare left little time for an Indian army to invade another country, until the British came. But thirty years after Napoleon’s debacle in Russia, a Dogra General, Zorawar Singh, commanding the Maharaja of Jammu Gulab Singh’s army, marched into Tibet. I may now even be sitting at the very pass that his 6,000 troops poured through down to the plain. Unfortunately, news of Napoleon’s defeat by General Winter had not yet reached Zorawar Singh. He had some early successes and then Tibet’s General Winter, and the high altitude, decimated the invading army. The Sino-Tibetan army had 12,000 men, warmly clad, who didn’t have to lift even a weapon, as Zorawar’s men retreated and died in the freezing weather. Zorawar was also killed in the final battle. Yet, strangely, China did nothing when the British, uneasy with a mysterious kingdom directly north of India and growing paranoid in their ‘great game’ with Russia, sent an expedition (army) under the command of Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband to invade Tibet. The invasion and conquest had taken place in the year of the Wood-Dragon and had been predicted many years previously by an oracle. The Tibetan army, in heavy armour, with bows and arrows and muzzle-loaders, was no match for the Indian soldiers armed with Gatling guns. Photographs show robed monks too, fumbling with antique rifles and hoes, dying in the hail of bullets. Younghusband reached Lhasa in August 1904—the Dalai Lama fled to Mongolia—and concluded a generous treaty (the 1914 Simla Agreement) with the regent Ganden Rimpoche. According to the treaty, Tibet recognized Sikkim as a British protectorate, agreed to free trade with India and, in Clause 9, stated in no uncertain terms: ‘Without the consent of Great Britain no Tibetan territory shall be sold, leased or mortgaged to any foreign power whatsoever; no foreign power whatsoever shall be permitted to concern itself with the administration of the government of Tibet, or any other affairs therewith connected; no foreign power shall be permitted to send either official or non-official persons to Tibet – no matter in what pursuit they may be engaged – to assist in the conduct Tibetan affairs; no foreign power shall be permitted to construct roads or railways or erect telegraphs or open mines anywhere in Tibet…’
Younghusband then returned to India, but as a changed man for the rest of his life. In Lhasa, it is said, a strong impulse made him climb a hill above the city and he sat on a boulder. There, he had a very powerful spiritual experience and entered a state of mystical ecstasy, that serenity seeped into his very soul. He felt himself enter a state of nothingness.
The British closed the passes and any traveller needed the government’s permission to enter Tibet. This was always denied and even the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, a friend of the former Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, couldn’t get into Tibet from India. Tibet once again became the forbidden and unreachable kingdom.
Three months after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Radio Peking announced on New Year’s Day 1950 that ‘the tasks of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for 1950 are to liberate Taiwan, Hainan and Tibet.’ Tibet had only 8,500 troops to guard its long border with China and, knowing it didn’t stand a chance against the PLA, appealed to Nepal, Great Britain and the United States for support. The Dalai Lama also appealed for help to the only country which had close ties with Tibet – India. Tibet and a colonised India had signed the 1914 Simla agreement. When the sun sets, empires leave behind the legacy of their arrogance (‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty and despair.’) for those colonised nations to disentangle themselves from imperial machinations. Our then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was required to deny Chinese suzerainty over Tibet until China recognized Tibet’s autonomy. Nehru spoke of this suzerainty as ‘vague and shadowy’ which signalled to China that India accepted China’s claim over Tibet. China in turn warned India that receiving ‘an illegal delegation (from Tibet)’ would mean ‘entertaining hostile intentions against the Chinese People’s Republic.
So, on 9 September 1950 three thousand soldiers of the 18th Route army marched into Lhasa, followed by another 30,000 two months later. The Tibetans lined the streets to greet the invaders by spitting and clapping, their ancient practice for driving out evil, and children threw stones. To no avail. In 1951, the PLA forced the Tibetan representative of the Dalai Lama to sign an agreement affirming China’s sovereignity over Tibet. (Neither the PRC nor the Republic of China have ever proven this sovereignity).
During the 1950s, the Chinese cracked down on the lamas, who realized that their political power would be broken by Communist rule. According to the Chinese version of Tibetan history, over 700,000 Tibetans, out of a population of 1.2 million, were serfs who were treated very harshly. Those who tried to escape their serfdom were imprisoned, tortured and executed. The Dalai Lama denies this brutal past, though he admits that it was a feudal society in which some head lamas were corrupt and dictatorial. For the most part, he says, the Tibetans were a happy race.
In 1959, China then created the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) which included the Tibetan plateau, the highest region on earth, and Lhasa to be administered jointly by Tibet and the PRC. The Tibetan government in exile insists TAR is an independent nation while the PRC maintains it’s a self-governing region within China.
In the same year, the PRC treated the Dalai Lama with ‘disrespect’ and, by establishing communes, sparked a rebellion against their rule. It began first as a riot in Lhasa, and then spread into open rebellion. The marriage between Tibet and the PRC was immediately dissolved.
‘The following order is hereby proclaimed. Most of the kalons of the Tibet local government and the upper-strata reactionary clique colluded with imperialism, assembled rebellious bandits, carried out rebellion, ravaged the people, put the dalai lama under duress carried out rebellion, tore up the Seventeen-Point Agreement on Measures for the peaceful liberation of Tibet and on the night of March 19 directed the Tibetan local army and rebellious clements to launch a general offensive against the People’s Liberation Army garrison in Lhasa. Such acts which betray the motherland and disrupt unification are not allowed by law. In order to safeguard the unification of the country and national unity, the decision is that from this day the Tibet local government is dissolved.’ -Order of the State Council of the Chinese People’s Republic, March 28, 1959
The uprising was also fuelled by the CIA. About 1,000 rebels, between 1962 and 1964, were flown to the U.S. and trained in intelligence gathering and handling armaments at Camp Halle in Colorado. When they returned to fight the good fight, they were each given one pistol! Later on, the CIA financed a training base in Mustang on the Nepal border and spent around $2 million a year on the operation, providing the rebels with sophisticated weapons and communication systems. India was a reluctant partner in this programme and did not want any trouble on the border with China. However, in 1969, just before Henry Kissinger’s visit to China, the Americans pulled out the rug from beneath the rebels. (Now where have I heard that story before?) By this time the Dalai Lama had fled to India and set up a Tibetan government-in-exile at Dharamsala.
The PRC broke up the monastic estates and, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards, Tibetans among them, destroyed thousands of monasteries and thousands of Buddhist monks and nuns were imprisoned or killed. The number of Tibetans killed during the Cultural Revolution varies between 200,000 and 400,000. In their later census, the PRC claimed that 300,000 Tibetans were ‘missing’. Today the population of Greater Tibet (and I have no idea what this is) is 7.3 million, of which 5 million are ethnic Tibetans. There have been some economic reforms in Tibet but, like the rest of the PRC, no political ones. Since 1950, the PRC claims, the GDP of Tibet has risen 30 per cent; from no roads there are now 22,500 miles of roads; infant mortality has dropped from 43 per cent to 0.6 per cent; life expectancy has risen from thirty-five to sixty-seven; and there are twenty-five scientific research institutes against none in 1950. Since 1980, 300 million Renminbi has been spent maintaining and protecting Tibetan monasteries.
Almost immediately after the 1950 invasion, the Chinese built a highway to Lhasa from Chengdu(from where?), and then roads to the Indian (I’m looking at one), Nepali and Pakistani borders. Warmed by the sun and still waiting at the pass, I reflect that Tibet will never be free.
LATER IN TAKALAKOT
After dinner, comforted by our filled bellies, Menon and I decide to explore Takalakot. There’s more to explore, at least a longer stretch of this road, when we turn left, passing the sizzling bar-b-q. I feel as if I’ve landed in the ‘Twilight Zone’, an old science fiction television series. We’re in that black and white age – the black of the dusty plain and silhouetted mountains in the distance, and the white of this place. I can’t call it a village, it doesn’t have that enclosed feel of neighbourliness, nor a town as it’s not big enough. It’s just been beamed down here, a long chain of shops dropped with a thud from a passing spaceship. The sky is still tantalising clear and reachable, a space ship would have no problem navigating down.
Taklakot is skinny; it only has length, with scarcely any breadth at all, and seems only frontages, like a Universal studios movie set. The shops are dimly lit, throwing faint patches of light onto the pavement. Every block or so, the continuous row is punctuated by gates, similar to the entrance to our guest house, that open on to inner courtyards. There are a few PLA soldiers wandering around or sitting in restaurants, starring out into the void, no doubt dreaming of their distance homes. Chinese women, with overweight kids, straggle past us, avoiding us pointedly. Tibetans wander too, aimless as ghosts searching for a final resting place. They’re shabbily dressed for the most part, not in traditional costumes but western clothes, and the women wear white nose/mouth masks as a protection against the swirling dust. I intend to buy one too, the wind and the dust are constant and my nostrils feel blocked. The brightest lit shops are hair-dressing salons. As we walk, I start counting them. By the end of the road I’ve counted eight. Why eight for a visible population that couldn’t number even five hundred? They’re open to the street, cheerfully furnished, with painted walls and wall-hangings, and stylish reclining chairs and wash basins. Pretty women in their early twenties, like nightingales in an open cage, await their customers, gossiping or flicking through glossy magazines. They look Chinese, or even fair Nepali, and they all wear brand-name jeans and silken tops, chic as any fashion-conscious woman in Manhattan. Only a couple of the salons are patronised by the PLA, at the moment, and at least there’s laughter between the soldiers and the women fussing over them. In every one of the establishments are narrow stairs at the rear, leading up to the floor above. And from above come the faint strains of music.
Menon has been more observant. ‘You can get massages here too,’ he says with joy in his voice. ‘I must find out how much they cost and get one. I need it, my muscles still ache. What about you?’
‘You check them out first,’ and add with no sense of prudery but amusement. ‘But I doubt the massages are for those kinds of muscles.’
‘There must be a large PLA garrison here,’ the admiral conjectures. ‘Though there aren’t that many of them on the street. They’re probably somewhere behind those hills when we Yatris are in town.’
London, New York, Paris, every city has ‘massage’ parlours but I’m sure in proportion to their inhabitants they can’t match Taklakot. Soldiers, many as Menon guesses, need to be entertained, rocks need to be released. The saloons couldn’t be patronised by the Tibetan men, they’re hanging around the street wearing crumpled sports jackets and baggy trousers or else playing pool on worn-out tables in the open, off the pavement. They look as if they don’t have a Yuan between them. And while I’m counting as we walk, I also notice five discotheques, always above the saloons with frosted windows and shadowy figures behind them. There are two side streets of not more than a 100 metres long. The one that runs east is a dirt lane with mud and stone homes, the simple architecture similar to the homes in the Kumaon. The lane is cluttered with garbage and narrow streams of black sewage, Tibetan children in very grubby clothes play in the lane with a bicycle tyre. The children run out to say ‘Hello’ in English, giggling, and I hand out the boiled sweets stuffed in my pocket, wishing I had my biscuits as I don’t want to rot their teeth. The street to the west is cemented, wide as the one we’re on too, and lined with brick and concrete buildings. At the end of it, they’re constructing a large one, four floors and a half block long.
We wander in and out of the stores, the mini-departmental ones have the same clutter of consumer goods and, if they’d had the space, probably jammed in a couple of Land Cruisers and a truck to complete their inventory. I spoke too soon. In the next mini-department store there’s a massive, glittering red and chrome Kawasaki. Like the Land Cruisers it’s ideal for this menacing landscape which isn’t for the faint-hearted scooters or compacts. These mini-department stores all have Chinese women behind their counters. And they all have their televisions running, on mute or a low volume, showing Chinese programmes, of course. I’m told that these women, and their families, have come from all over China to populate Tibet. They’re as imported as their goods, and no doubt the cause of their sour miens. The other shops along this long mall are smaller, dimly lit, selling the basic items – fresh fruits, vegetables, rice, barley, flour - have Tibetan women sitting patiently on their stools waiting for customers. No counters in these shops. And even when we do enter to buy apples, they gaze past us as if we don’t exist until we hold out our purchases. Menon is a seasoned shopper, he knows how to bargain. I pay for whatever they ‘quote’ and this is done with a calculator. They punch out a number, Menon punches out his number. The price lies in-between. In the somewhat centre of this road, a pivotal point, is the sprawl of the China Agricultural Bank, where we’ll change our dollars. It’s very firmly shut, and barred, and there’s a sign in Chinese on the wall beside the entrance. It looks as if it opens from 8-12 each morning. Or so we presume. Further along, in one of the courtyards is the fresh vegetable market, closing down for the day, and in the next courtyard is the Indian market. The goods are ‘Made in India’ but there isn’t an Indian in sight, which is strange as I’ve met my fellow-countrymen in outlandish and unexpected places, from the banks of the Orinoco River (Menen’s Restaurant) and the Texas badlands to the Canadian backwoods. Towards the end of the main street, a third road leads west, cemented too, passes a large parade ground, with a reviewing stand, and ends at a four floor building, the possible barracks of the PLA. The main street also ends very abruptly here, even as it had begun, and a dirt road meanders into the darkness towards the mountains.
We turn, and trudge back up. Menon looks up at one of the masts spiking the skyline to the south, his military senses alert. ‘That’s a missile guidance system, I’ve seen enough of those.’ The mast has three dishes, one below the other.
‘Where do you think their silos are located?’
‘In those hills.’ He sighs loudly. ‘I guess we’re the target for those missiles.’
I’m not at all surprised, though I would not have recognised a missile guidance mast from a wireless communication one. Way back in 1950, the New York Times had reported on a massive influx of Chinese troops into Tibet and of a huge garrison near Lake Mansarovar. This probably explains why wandering pilgrims are barred from their parikrama of the lake. In 1954, after months of hostile negotiations, Jawaharlal Nehru signed a non-aggression pact on Tibet with the PRC. With the command of such a height we’ve had a dangling Damocles sword north of us for decades, and it’s been a constant threat. And yet, I remember back in school, when Chou en Lai, the PRC Prime Minister, visited India, we were taught to chant “China-India bhai, bhai.” That brotherly feeling ended abruptly in the 1962 war when all the passes between India and Tibet slammed shut. Maybe it’s because of India and China’s antiquity that we have grown tired of each other’s company over the millenniums. India exported Buddhism to China and, though we weren’t exactly friends in that first millennium A.D., we exchanged scholars who studied Sanskrit, Buddhism, mathematics, architecture, medicine, music, linguistics and science. Buddhism didn’t last long in China, a few centuries, as Confucius ousted it. An Indian scientist, Gautama Siddhartha, even became the president of the China’s Board of Astronomy in the eighth century. Chinese scholars such as Faxian, Xuanzang and Yi Ling travelled in India, between the fifth and seventh century A.D., to study Buddhism and the other subjects. At that time, China considered India the western kingdom, it being the middle one, but Faxan, because of his belief in Buddhism, on his return home referred to India as the ‘middle kingdom’, and China as a frontier country. No doubt this upset the insular Chinese. In Amartya Sen’s essay, he also mentions that the first printed book in the world, 868.A.D. was a Chinese translation of the Sanskrit treaties ‘Diamond Sutra’ which was for free distribution. No doubt exhausted by such intellectual exchanges, India and China had little contact in the second millennium.
On our way back up the road, two cop cars, Land Cruisers marked with ‘Police’, cruise past us. We merit scarcely a glance from the uniforms, who are definitely Tibetan, and even two cars for this strip of a place seems excessive security.
‘You notice there are no beggars around,’ Menon remarks in a pleased tone of voice.
‘Probably begging’s against the law in China,’ I reply and look up at the pock-marked hill, barely visible now, and wonder how those cave dwellers earn a livelihood in this place.
Apart from the shops there’s not much industry around. But at least, those who have some spare cash, gamble. There’s a game of dice on, off the pavement, behind some bushes. The dice are large as bricks and made of wood. The ‘table’ is L-shaped and large enough for the dice to roll down from the top of the vertical line of ‘L’, which has a gate operated by the croupier. He’s a young Tibetan, smiling at his suckers, wearing an open-necked shirt and jeans, with a folded, beaten-up leather jacket beside him. He looks foot-loose and fancy free, blown in with the wind, and has a few gamblers around him. The sides of the dice have Tibetan animals painted on them – a horse, leopard, yak, bird, bear, rabbit, deer, wolf. He places the dice above the gate and when he opens it, two dice tumble down onto the table, and the bet is that both will have the same animal face up. In this fading light, the animals are barely visible, the dice are well used indeed. Probably, loaded too. The stakes aren’t high, a few one Yuan notes lie on the table. As a high roller I delight the croupier by dropping a whole five yuan on the table. It’s big enough to swell the ranks of the gamblers and watchers who smile encouraging at me. Go for broke. I choose the discoloured leopard to bet on, probably an already extinct species. I haven’t gambled since I lost a week’s salary playing poker in a Canadian logging camp during my college days. The croupier loads the dice behind the gate, smiles and opens it. The dice roll down and crash against each other. A yak and a wolf come faces up. The money vanishes from the table as fast as the eye can follow the young man’s hand. No one’s going to get rich, or get poor, quick at this table, it’s just a way of passing time together, a brotherhood of losers finding solace in their conquered land.
I sense the Chinese don’t actually see the Tibetans; the Tibetans look through the Chinese, as if they’re passing spirits in a nightmare. Through history, there must be the same sense of separateness, in any country, between the conqueror and the conquered. No conquest is ever a benign one, including that of Britain and India. We too lived separate lives and Indians suffered under colonial rule. If China killed a few hundred thousand Tibetans, under British rule between 12 and 29 million Indians were deliberately allowed to die during the 1877/78 famine. Under orders from the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, grain merchants exported 320,000 tons of grain to Europe during these years. We were also economically suppressed. In the eighteenth century an Indian labourer earned more than his counterpart in England. But between 1757 and 1947 there was no increase in India’s per capita income and we became a poor, third world country. Conquest is exploitation and enrichment for the conquerors. Still, there was an upside- we learned cricket, the English language and practice democracy.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE
THE BIG PEOPLE
Standing on the southern bank of the wide river that separated them from the jungle, were
three people. It was dusk, but even the fading light couldn’t hide the greed in their eyes as
they stared at the dense tangle of trees so temptingly near. They didn’t notice the beauty
of the setting sun brushing the tops of the trees a pale golden red or the flocks of crows,
parrots, mynahs and koels flying across, calling loudly as they returned to their nests deep
in the jungle. In the minds of two of the three persons, the jungle was already razed and
they were calculating their wealth from such destruction. They would become multimillionaires
from selling the timber and exploiting the cleared land. But for the third
person, who stood slightly apart from the other two, and had no interest in money, the
jungle held a secret that she had searched for many years.
Varang was taller than her companions, slim and shapely, and wore a fine black silk
outfit and black, knee-high boots.
She had an oval face which could have been beautiful, but it
was marred by a triangular beak of a nose which she caressed
as if to reassure herself it hadn’t moved. She had once
2 CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE
considered having the shape changed by plastic surgery into something more suitable—a
gentle curve with a bob at the end—but it was a genetic inheritance and she was
ultimately reluctant to change the feature that made her so mesmeric to strangers. People
could never take their eyes off her cruel nose. Her eyes were as black as the clothes she
wore. They were like dead zones in her face and because of that it was hard to read
Varang’s moods. On her left wrist was a bright gold Rolex watch, man-sized, which she
looked at frequently, and on the fingers of both hands she wore rings with precious stones
inset in them. Every now and then her fingers flexed out like talons, clawed the empty air
and returned to the folds of her garment. She paced a few feet away from her two
companions and stared out across the silvery river. Bhask noticed her impatience and felt
uneasy. He was a round, short man with a bald head and a fringe of greying hair
surrounding the bald. He wore a white shirt of the finest material, white pyjamas, and he
rattled with gold—chains, bracelets, rings—whenever he moved. Every now and then he
ran his small tongue over his lips, already salivating over the money he would make from
this venture. All he ever thought of was how to make as much money as he could with as
little effort as possible. Beside him was his son, Rhask, a boy of around seventeen, who,
like his father, was also fat and small; but he had a head of thick, black curly hair. He also
had the face of a spoilt child—petulant lips and sullen eyes hidden by dark glasses.
‘How many children live in the jungle?’
Varang asked no one in particular, but expected a reply. Her voice sounded frail at first,
but then one realised that there was a steely resolve behind each word. She was much
older than she looked too; there was an ancient timbre in her voice, as if she came from
another era, another place. ‘What’re you talking about?’ Bhask said. ‘I didn’t know
children lived in the jungle. If they are living there, I’m surprised the animals haven’t
eaten them up. Not that they’d make much of a meal for anyone.’ He laughed out aloud at
his own wit.
‘Does it worry you that there are children in there?’ Bhask laughed. ‘Why should it?
They’ll be driven out when we begin cutting down all the trees.’
Standing apart from them, Shyam overheard the exchange. He was a gaunt man with sad
eyes, dressed in threadbare clothes—a patched shirt and a grubby pair of pyjamas. He
was barefoot. He had been summoned to stand behind them at the water’s edge and he
waited nervously.
Two small boys, thin and scruffy, with large anxious eyes, came towards the gathering.
They could not have been more than six or seven years old and each carried a wooden
tray with cups of tea and plates of biscuits. They could barely keep their trays steady as
they passed each person, who took a cup without even looking at the boys. As the weight
shifted on the tray, one of the boys, unable to adjust the balance in time, dropped two
cups of tea. Rhask took a step towards the boy and, without saying a word, but with a
smile, slapped him across the face so hard that the boy fell. Bhask smiled in approval at
his son’s action and Varang ignored it. The boy’s companion stood trembling as the last
cup was removed from his tray and it was only then that he helped up the other boy, who
was crying. They remained standing behind
THE BIG PEOPLE 3
4 CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE
the group, waited till they retrieved the empty cups and returned to their chores in the tent
kitchen further up the slope.
‘I asked a question,’ Varang snapped.
‘We don’t know,’ someone spoke out behind them.
‘Come here,’ Varang ordered.
Shyam stepped forward timidly. He’d not meant to open his mouth. He had a few days’
stubble, which had turned his face a ghostly white, and his toes curled in the dirt with
nervousness. Varang frightened him.
‘You’re from this part of the country?’
‘Yes.’
‘So, can’t you people count? Ten, twenty … more?’ ‘We’ve never seen the children.
They are there but when we look for them, we can’t find them. We believe they’re
ghosts.’
‘They’re not ghosts.’
Shyam knew they weren’t ghosts. The children were there in the jungle. As were two of
his babies. His wife had given birth to twins, both boys, but they had been born blind.
How could they afford to raise two blind boys? They would be a burden all through their
lives. They wouldn’t be able to go to school or work in the fields. They would only sit at
home and that was two extra mouths to feed. And yet, they were beautiful babies. Shyam
knew about the children of the jungle. They would care for the babies and maybe in the
jungle being blind didn’t matter. At least in the jungle they might live awhile, he and his
wife had reasoned, and they would be cared for. So one night, he and his wife had carried
the two babies, swum across the river and left them in the reeds. They had kissed their
babies goodbye, and crying softly, had swum back to the other side. This had happened
over ten years ago and he imagined that the babies would have grown up by now into
young boys. Of course, they would not know he was their father—babies didn’t have that
memory. Even if they did have that memory, how would they recognise him? They were
blind.
‘And no one has seen them?’
‘No one. Sometimes, we can hear them calling to each other, walking on the dry leaves,
we can see a branch bending under a child’s weight. We have heard singing too and
while the singing is heard, nothing within hearing distance in the jungle can move. Every
animal, serpent, bird and insect is so enchanted that they stop whatever they’re doing.
Only when the singing stops can they move again.’
‘That’s all nonsense, superstitious nonsense you village people believe in. Do you know
where they live then?’ ‘In the jungle,’ Shyam said, thinking it was a stupid question since
Varang knew the children were in the jungle. ‘No, no, no … I know that, you idiot,’ she
said angrily. ‘They must be living in a certain place, a hiding place. A cave maybe? A
secret ravine? They must be living near … something.’
‘We don’t know where they live.’
‘We will, very soon,’ she said and turned to Bhask. ‘When do you start cutting down the
jungle?’
He checked behind him. Where the ground sloped upwards and flattened out were around
a hundred men milling around fourteen large yellow machines. These were bulldozers
with huge, shiny blades which could flatten anything in their path. Some of the men were
unloading
THE BIG PEOPLE 5 6 CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE
chainsaws from the back of a truck. They made a great noise, talking and testing the
chainsaws.
‘Soon, Madam, very soon.’
‘Your work will not be as easy as you think. This jungle is unlike any other that you’ve
destroyed.’
‘Why not?’ Bhask laughed ‘The land has no voice, it’s helpless. We can do with it what
we want. There are only animals, snakes and birds in it, like in any other jungle, and of
course, now the children. What can they do but die?’ She hesitated, not certain herself.
‘The children could fight you.’
‘Children fight me?’ He laughed so hard that he began to cry.
He stopped and snapped his fingers at a man standing further up the slope. The man ran
to join them, carrying his AK-47 machine gun. Bhask took it, snapped off the safety
catch, aimed at the distant jungle, and fired a long burst of bullets, shattering the silence.
Birds cried out and flew up into the sky, and this made Bhask laugh even louder. ‘That’s
what will happen to them if the children even think of fighting me,’ he boasted, and threw
the weapon back to his bodyguard. As the woman made him nervous, he hesitated for a
moment before plunging on. ‘But why do you want the jungle destroyed, Madam?’
‘I told you once already, for the money, of course,’ she lied easily.
He would never know that a source of unlimited power over the world, and even up to the
stars, was somewhere in the jungle, near the children.
A CHILD MEETS PERYTHALA
The ferocious tiger, Perythala, arrogant as a prince, heard the ruckus of birds calling out
their warnings that he was lying in the shadows of a peepul tree, and rose. He was
waiting for a child of the jungle.
He growled his impatience, ‘Hurry up, child,’ he said to himself, as he prowled back and
forth. He spoke in a low, slow, deep rumble, almost from the back of his throat, which
was barely audible.
It was a fine morning, cool and grey. Night still lingered on, not wanting to leave, with
fresh dew clinging like tears on the flower petals and sliding down blades of long grass.
It had been a good monsoon, after a long sweltering summer which had withered the trees
and grass and dried out the ponds, and now the jungle was a bright, exuberant green.
Bougainvillae and frangipani had burst into colours like fireworks, wild jasmine and
tangerines scented the air, butterflies with wings patterned like cathedral windows and
medieval crests fluttered in thousands. But in his worry, Perythala didn’t notice these
small wonders around him.
8 CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE
The coal-black crows croaked harshly: ‘He’s waiting under the tree.’
The brown mynahs sang out in more melodious voices:
‘Be careful.’
The black koels, with long tails, always so proud, sang out in rising scales: ‘Tiger … tiger
… tiger.’
High above, Keee, the speckled brown kite hawk, also keened, but not about Perythala.
He called down to the jungle ‘Trouble … trouble … across the river … be warned.’ As he
circled from his great height he saw everything below with his sharp eyes.
Ambornath, which meant ‘where all life exists’ in the local language, was a large jungle
of many, many square miles, dense with trees, but with extensive patches of grassland
that looked, from above, like bald spots on a man’s head. Lakes too, like scattered silver
coins, broke the tight pattern of trees. It even had a biome, a dense hothouse with rare
plants and herbs, near the eastern edge of the river. The broad river bordered the jungle in
the shape of a giant silvery ‘C’ and, where the open points of the ‘C’ didn’t close on the
north, there was a low mountain with sheer sides blocking any entrance to the jungle
from that side. Crowning the mountain was the high, granite wall of an ancient fortress,
which curled all around, though here and there it had fallen down leaving gaps. Inside the
fort was the ruin of a long forgotten kingdom. So, in some ways, the jungle was almost an
island and the only way to enter it was to cross the river. The dazzlingly coloured
peacocks, safe on a low branch called like night-watchmen: ‘Myuurr … myuurr, trouble,
river trouble …’ Tigers hate peacocks. When they hunted, the peacocks screamed out the
loudest warnings, ‘myuurr … myuurr’, and every living creature scattered away to hide.
But, as Perythala listened now, he heard also an undertone of panic in their calls. It
wasn’t him alone they called about. Something else was disturbing them, but at this
moment he would not be distracted from waiting for the child.
While the tiger sat, it was almost invisible in the jungle. The play of sunlight and
shadows on its yellow coat with its irregular black stripes made it difficult to see. The
stripes were never complete, they broke off midway and sometimes there was a patch of
yellow in the middle of a black strip. It was as if the tiger knew how to play with light
and shadow, to camouflage itself. Only when a tiger moved could it be seen and even
then, it would blend into the jungle’s shadows, and seemingly vanish. Perythala’s yellow
eyes were slits and he had such powerful jaws he could break a deer’s neck with one bite.
He had muscles like steel under his rippling coat. He padded through the undergrowth so
lightly that hardly a leaf was disturbed under his paws where he trod. Perythala saw the
child coming towards him, calling back and up to the birds, swinging a clay pot in his
hand. He wouldn’t have to move; he judged the child would have to pass within a foot of
him.
Coolclear rounded a thick clump of wild bamboo—pale shiny yellow trunks with narrow
green leaves—when he saw the tiger blocking his path. He stopped whistling, stopped
walking, stopped swinging the clay pot. His stomach knotted and he broke into a sweat.
His eyes, large as they were, grew even larger, almost filling his whole face. This wasn’t
a tiger he knew.
A CHILD MEETS PERYTHALA 9
10 CHILDREN OF THE ENCHANTED JUNGLE Tigers had their own territories and he
knew around eight of them who roamed nearby, but he knew also that when they hunted
they could travel up to twenty kilometres in a day. This tiger was a stranger to this part of
the jungle, and it was the biggest tiger he had ever seen. It was a full grown male with a
huge head, and from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail would have measured at twelve
big paces, maybe fourteen. Nor could he read the tiger’s mood. Was it hungry? Was it
wounded? Was it angry? Its growls were low but continuous. Its tail swished from side to
side but its ears were not laid back. It wasn’t about to charge. Or was it making up its
mind to?
THE JUNGLE
My Temporary Son, an orphan's story.
1
MY TEMPORARY SON
An orphan’s story.
A MEMOIR
By
Timeri N. Murari.
(Pub date: Penguin India, September 2005. All other rights
available)
An Extract from the non-fiction book.
The opening chapters of the book tell the story of the baby’s immediate rejection by its
rural natural parents, and its long pain-filled journey, through orphanages and hospitals,
to our home.
.
JUNE
Bhima came to our house in mid-June, the nineteenth to be precise. When I returned
home from playing tennis there was no baby in the downstairs guest room that had been
lovingly prepared for him. It had a bunk bed and Maureen had pushed another single bed
against that, stacked it with pillows, to prevent him from rolling off. The guest room was
also partly an office with my filing cabinets and a work table.
I went up to our bedroom. It is a very large room with a high ceiling furnished
with a four-poster double bed, cupboards along the walls and a television set. Along with
my sisters, brother and three aunts, I was born in this house and now sleep in the very
room I was born in. This is a strange feeling, having lived away so long in apartments in
New York, London and elsewhere, to return to one’s exact birthplace. It’s comforting in
one way, there’s some permanence in my life after years of wandering, yet unsettling as I
feel at times I’ve never ever been away and all those years in exile are only an illusion.
Maureen was lying on the bed, proud as any new mother, with a sad-faced baby,
thin and fragile as a mosquito, beside her. Bhima watched me warily, teetering on the
2
brink of tears. His eyes were round, large and mesmeric. He looked more like a girl with
his thick curly hair and delicate round face, and I could see why there had originally been
doubt about his gender. No doubt he was worried, afraid and bewildered by this further
change in his environment. Where were the iron-barred cots, the rows of babies crying in
their pens, the orphanage women, familiar sounds? And here was yet another stranger
staring at him.
‘He’ll be here a few days. That’s if it’s okay by you.’
I was surprised that my permission was needed as, like other husbands, I didn’t
have such an authority of refusal in my home. Bhima was watching me strip off my
sweaty tennis outfit.
‘Sure,’ I said, and headed for the shower, his eyes following me around the room.
‘When he’s well, he’ll go back to the orphanage,’ she added.
Then he began to weep, not with any anger or pain, just sadly for himself. A
‘Where am I? Who are you? What’s happening to me?’ weeping, I thought. Who could
blame him for those tears? He was barely fourteen months old and in his brief, tragic life,
had had five major moves.
I let Maureen comfort him while I went into shower. I returned in shorts to lie on
the bed, and watch the football world cup on television. Bhima sat between us, sniffling,
watching me, and then slowly, tentatively he stretched out his thin hand to touch my arm,
and began to stroke it. I have hairy arms and we realised he had never ever touched a
man before, that this feel of hair was a new sensation for him. I was a man, the same sex
as him, within touching distance. Up to now, the only men in his life had been doctors
who had held him at a clinical distance, never giving him an intimate moment. Women -
the orphanage women, nurses, Maureen - had been his sole human contact. He looked to
see if I would reject him as so many had before but, when I smiled, he grew a bit bolder.
He shifted his hand to caress my hairy chest and tugged the hairs gently. Still, his face
remained solemn and those large eyes were watchful and wary. When I put my hand out
to him, he withdrew and sitting between us on our large bed, began to weep again. I
wanted to hold him and tell him he need never be afraid again but I let Maureen do that
as he was more used to her arms. Yet, strangely I felt he already trusted me, and that it
had happened in the instant he had touched and stroked my arm.
3
From that first touch, I had become his father. But how does one behave as a
father with no experience of it and so late in life? What was I supposed to do? How
should I communicate? My friends, when their children were babies, used baby talk -
‘pinky-winky wants her milky-wilky’, ‘lovesy bunsy wants to plays-waysey’. I couldn’t
wrap my tongue around such a vocabulary for this watchful baby. He was expecting more
intelligent communication. Uncertain, I kept an emotional distance from him, though he
had no such inhibitions about me. After all, I thought, he would return to his orphanage
very soon.
Maureen lifted up his cheap cotton blouse to show me the livid scar of Bhima’s 9-
hour operation for vesicale exstrophy. His whole abdominal area was an angry red but
between his legs was a distinctive, tiny penis. The next few weeks were vital for his life
as the bladder could still be infected by reflux - urine flowing back and not being
released. He was on medication, both for strengthening the bladder and against infection.
His medicine shelf also held baby-strength painkillers, baby-strength analgesic and the
baby sedative pedicloryl. He needed to take his medications thrice daily and he always
resisted at first before swallowing them. We would have to monitor him very closely as,
even to my amateur eye, he looked a very sickly child. We knew he would have
continence problems all his life and prayed that the bladder would strengthen over time
for him to be able control his passing urine.
I was not used to babies or children, felt awkward around them as we had not had
children. We had tried many years ago when we were living in New York. Maureen had
become pregnant but unfortunately miscarried. We decided to consult a doctor about
artificial methods and saw a doctor in London, Terry Solomon who was a specialist. He
tested me and found I had a low sperm count but this could be overcome and suggested
all the ways we could have a child. Maureen and I went into another huddle. Did we
really want to subject ourselves to all these clinical ways and means? Admittedly, we
were not desperate to become parents. If it happened it happened, if not not. Selfishly,
we thought it would restrict our travelling and my work as a writer and film maker. I
would have to get a job, do real work for a living as a reporter or an editor, to support a
child. That did not appeal to me. I did not think of myself as old - one never does- even
when looking into the mirror each morning, yet the scars of time lay on my face and my
4
hair had receded. I was 60 years older than this baby watching me, Maureen only a few
years younger than me. We were an elderly couple. Young men and pretty women
called me sir and her ma’am.
Our ‘babies’ were our dogs, Griffin and Apu, a mother and daughter. Do animals
also have destinies? A watchman had found Griffin and brought her home, if only to keep
him awake at nights. So her life was altered by this chance encounter, one dog out of the
many who roamed our streets. It was her luck, her good luck, friends said, that she ended
up in our house to sleep on soft chairs, eat two square meals a day, with Marie biscuits
for a late night snack, to wear a collar, to be brushed and bathed and to sleep in an airconditioned
room. Griffin was a small tawny-haired Indian prairie dog, a contrast to her
daughter, Apu’s, blackness and size, and a very affectionate dog. Apu, like me, had been
born in this ancestral home and we had lavished our love on her. She was to play a very
important part in Bhima’s life.
I’m not macho but as a writer I have always been a self-contained man. I am
exasperatingly laconic in conversation. I am shy too. My emotions are channelled into
my writings, as are my thoughts. As I am childless, people remark ‘his books are his
children’. They are in a way; writers are puppeteers, creating figures on paper, breathing
their emotions – anger, lust, love, hate, fear- into them. I’ve certainly experienced many
of those emotions: broken love affairs are the most agonising for everyone is helpless in
the maelstrom and it takes months, even years, to emerge cleansed finally on the other
side of the darkness. Because of my peripatetic life style, wandering for thirty years
between Canada, Britain, the States, India and, as a writer, not making the kind of money
to support a child, I had closed my mind to it. I tolerated friends’ children but never
became emotionally involved, even with my nieces and nephews. I visited, I chatted with
them but I couldn’t quite figure out children and how to behave with them. I was stiff
and uneasy around them, and always relieved when they went away to play. I was
nervous about picking up Bhima. I had never held a baby before. Partly, I was afraid I
would drop it. Partly, I did not want him to shit, pee or vomit, which babies do, over my
delicate sensibilities. His arms and legs were so skinny; I thought they would break if I
handled him too roughly.
5
NIGHT TERRORS
After his evening milk bottle, I picked Bhima up finally. He was light and so fragile. He
came to me naturally, with not a moment’s resistance or doubt, that he would be safe. He
wrapped his legs as best he could around my waist, put one hand on my shoulder and
with the other took a tight grip on my tee-shirt. I didn’t know then that babies do this only
when they feel secure with someone. I carried him around gingerly, afraid to drop him,
but he held on securely.
Our house is not exactly baby-friendly. There are two steps to enter the house and
different levels of flooring that even trip us up at times. And the stairs go up half a flight
to a landing, before continuing up to the second floor. ‘Devasolai’ is a large, very old
house with sixteen-foot ceilings and two-foot-thick walls. It had been begun in 1911 by
my great grandfather and completed by my grandfather. I’m not sure whether they
employed an architect or whether they just winged it, as it rambled all over the place.
We had nothing, apart from the bed, milk and medicines to offer our tiny houseguest.
As Maureen was worried about his bed not being safe, we borrowed a wooden
play- pen from Irene, whose children had out grown it. It had bars also in the base so I
was sent to buy plywood to place over the bars and Maureen found a Dunlopillo mattress
that fitted. She made up his bed carefully. But Bhima screamed his head off the moment
he was lifted into it and drew up his legs so as not to touch the sheets. The pen was too
much a reminder of the iron pen in which he had spent his entire life. He craved to
escape bars, no doubt as desperately as a convict. It was to take many months before he
entered it voluntarily through a gap, but only to snatch at whatever toy lay inside for him.
It became a repository for his toys of which he accumulated many in no time at all.
Our evening routine, as an elderly couple set in our ways, if we are not going out,
is to have drinks in the living room when we chat about the day or read or I make notes,
more inspired after my second drink, about whatever I am working on. And there is
always music on my stereo. We both like western classical music but we also have jazz
and Indian music, classical as well pop, like A.R. Rehman CDs. ‘Dil Se’ is a favourite as
I used a couple of short tracks from it for my play, ‘The Square Circle’, that I directed at
the Leicester Haymarket Theatre. Quite consciously, while Bhima was with us before he
went to bed, he listened to the music. When we saw his interest in music we bought him
6
musical toys. His favourites were one shaped like an old-fashioned juke box, a large
tortoise with buttons which, when pressed, played different tunes, a learning computer
and an electronic key board. They all played different tunes and he wore out the batteries
regularly with constant music. However, when I played ‘Dil Se’ once too often, Bhima
quickly learned to crawl over to the system and hit the ‘off’ button. When I played Bach
or Ravi Shanker, he would sit and listen for a minute or two, savouring the music, before
continuing with what he was doing. But ‘Dil Se’ drove him nuts whenever I tried to play
it.
We learnt that first night, and for the next six months of nights, why Bhima slept
badly. His room was quiet, as we were some distance from the road, a fan cooled him, he
had stacks of pillows to roll on and Uma lay beside him. We were asleep when our
intercom rang at around one in the morning. We both ran down, hearing Bhima
screaming. Uma had tried to put him back to sleep and called us in desperation. It was
frightening watching this thin, undernourished baby reveal such lung power. More
terrifying was trying to hold onto him. It was like trying to cling onto a frightened,
squirming, struggling baby seal. He arched his back like a bow until I thought his spine
would snap with the force and fought against us. Maureen tried to calm him, and then I
did. We walked back and forward together, trying to soothe him, singing, whispering,
embracing him. Nothing worked. He screamed and arched, and we could not pacify him.
No doubt he had done this in the orphanages too- it must have somehow relieved the pain
of his condition- but no one had held him and tried to comfort him. Now, after the
surgery, there was new pain. The doctor had warned us he would remain in pain for a few
weeks as his wound healed and the nerves slowly joined. The pain killers, baby strength,
didn’t work. He had slept for maybe an hour, when he awoke and began screaming. The
pain would wear off as his body healed itself. But pain, we discovered, was only part of
the reason.
The other part was his night terrors. What dreams haunted this poor baby, I
wondered. What did he see in those dreams that terrified and woke him screaming in
fright? There was more than enough; his past was littered with rejections, loneliness,
pain. Possibly, more than any other orphan. We realised too that he wasn’t really awake,
that even as we walked and held onto him, he remained locked in his nightmares. It must
7
have been an hour before he finally calmed down, exhausting his meagre energy. He
took his milk bottle, drank his fill, and then dozed off. He never ever slept well or fully.
Every midnight or around three or four when the soul is at its lowest ebb and vulnerable
(to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald), Bhima would awake screaming. Over those first six
months, we became as haggard as any young parents nursing a new baby and wondered
how much longer we would have the resilience. We even woke at his first whimpering
cry, attuned to his pain.
Because he needed twenty-four-hour hour monitoring, we had two girls working
shifts. Maureen had brought Uma from the orphanage as she knew his bottle habits and,
as she had been with him around the clock, he was comfortable with her. Maureen had
found an agency that provided home-care support in the form of young girls who had
been given three months training in the hospital and were then sent out for hospice care.
She had had to wait a few days as the agency said there was one good girl able to look
after babies but she was busy with another job. Once released, she had gone bounding
into the hospital to relieve to Uma. That same evening that Maureen brought Bhima
home and agreed that Sarala would come to look after Bhima during the day, and Uma
would do the night duty. Sarala was a pretty, somewhat buxom girl of twenty, poised at
the age for an arranged marriage. She lived in Red Hills, a two-hour bus ride away from
our house.
Maureen went about her normal life, at first. The ayahs were there to care for
Bhima. She had Cheshire Homes to look after, attended meetings for Dakshnachitra (of
which more later) and, as treasurer for the OWC, spent days accounting for every rupee
spent on Bhima. It was on the second or third day, when Sarala didn’t show up, that
Maureen realised that she had committed herself to Bhima, and had to look after him.
She knew nothing about babies and borrowed books on baby care from Irene and Aruna,
and swotted up desperately. I only knew of Dr. Spock, but he had fallen out of favour
with mothers around the world.
In those first few days, I saw little of Bhima. He drank his milk, took his
medicines and slept. I watched these ministrations with an emotional detachment. He
went about his life of healing, while I went about mine of working. I had a non-fiction
book contract about a murder in Mumbai and postponed the trip for a few weeks while
8
Bhima was with us. There were also a film project and a novel doing the rounds. I was
selfishly absorbed while he was constantly watching for me should I enter his line of
sight. And then his calm would be broken and he would wail and hold out his arms to
me. Already, he had a fierce grip and if his sitter was carrying him, he would catch my
shirt as I passed near him, and hold on with all his strength. I would un-grip his hand,
placating him with a ‘Later, Bhima, later’ but of course for a baby only the immediate
moment is important. There is no meaning to ‘later’. He would give heart breaking cries
until one of the girls carried him out of earshot. He had not yet begun to crawl and had
to be carried everywhere. When we put him down on the carpet, he would roll over or sit
and play with his soft toys. He drank three bottles of milk during the day and another
three during the night when he woke in fright and we had to calm him. Was milk enough
for a baby? We knew nothing of baby nutrition and Maureen rang all her friends to get
their advice. Soft foods we were told, chicken broth, biscuits, rusks. We do not have
instant baby food in India, so we had to make do with what Ethiraj, our cook, could
conjure up for him in the kitchen, rice and mashed vegetables to start with, then later
pieces of chicken or other meat.
During these early weeks, I flippantly referred to Bhima as ‘my house guest’. He
was the subject of my dinner party conversation. His life, like his body, was opened up
like a book for friends and acquaintances to observe. They admired us for our act of
charity and compassion for a discarded baby. I was always quick to point out that it was
Maureen’s compassion that had brought Bhima into our home. I was, at that time, merely
the host for this small house guest. My continual use of the word ‘guest’ emotionally,
and mentally, kept him at a distance.
But to him, I wasn’t his host. I was his father, the father he had never had, the
man with whom he had first had tactile connection. I was blind to his heart and mind
through this pretended detachment. Yet, subconsciously, and I didn’t explore it further
then, I was acutely attuned to him. I heard him if he cried in his distant room or in the
garden, anywhere in the house, and immediately responded, stopping mid-sentence,
cutting off a call so that I could be by his side to comfort him. Next door there was a
baby, around his age, who had a similar ‘whaaaaa’. But I knew the difference, without
9
knowing how. I thought then, when I did give it thought, that I was just caring for this
orphan. After all he would leave fairly soon.
All love affairs begin, and end, differently. Sometimes, it’s a slow, sublime
emotion that gradually builds between two people. Rarely, is love instant and those lovers
are fortunate in that doubt never enters their minds or hearts. For me, it was instant, at
that moment of touch, though I was not truly aware of it then. He was just a baby, I
thought, just passing through my house for a few days before going back to his familiar
iron railed cot and the casual affection of his minders.
Bhima was more in touch with his emotions than I was. For him love was instant.
Being ignorant of children, especially of babies, I had no idea of this instant love. Of
course, a baby has a shorter distance to travel to its heart; the journey is swift and
instinctive. Our friend, Subbu, a grandfather now, told me later that babies and children
were far superior to adults, intellectually and emotionally. Though Bhima’s journey to
my side had been torturous, his little heart wasn’t cluttered with too many experiences.
He knew more about his heart than I did of mine.
I, as an adult of sixty, had little true knowledge of how I felt at that moment. The
road into my heart was confused with broken love affairs in the past, and by being the
youngest in a dysfunctional family. I had married late; my meeting Maureen was also a
quirk of destiny. I had been living in New York when I had to return to London to adapt
my non-fiction book, The New Savages, into a script for the English film director, Hugh
Hudson. I had arranged to stay with a friend. Maureen, (coincidentally also a Hudson!)
flying in from Australia, had also arranged to stay with the same confused friend, and I
had ended up on the couch. Now I was safely content in my marriage, expecting no
further emotional upheavals nor wanting them.
So I was protected. I was strong and Bhima was weak and tiny. Enough harm
and befallen him already, and I wanted him to feel safe. Compassion and protectiveness
were what I thought I felt for him; I had no idea how badly I had mistaken my own
emotions.
JULY-The Decision
After four days and four sleep-broken nights, Maureen and I found we could not just
return Bhima to the orphanage to languish in his iron cot. He was healing, physically and
10
emotionally, and a return would only harm him, we felt. He was still sickly, catching
colds and wheezing. Orphanages are rife with diseases and, in his still-weakened state,
he could die from an infection.
He was classified as a ‘special needs’ child because of his condition. This meant
he could be offered for adoption abroad, and that the Indian government would pass his
adoption papers quickly, and without a problem. We expected this to happen in a few
weeks.
Bhima fell in love again, this time with Apu.
Not only did he adore this wary black dog, but the very first word he spoke was
‘Apu’. It was an easy word for him, and gradually it took on various meanings in his
baby language. Apu did not reciprocate his love, she shied away, and he would crawl
after her in pursuit. Sometimes I held her so that he could embrace her, though she was
too big for his small arms, and he would smile beatifically, this embrace fulfilling his
whole purpose to be alive. As he had been shut away in the orphanages all his short life,
Apu was the first animal he had ever touched, or even seen. We had worried about Apu,
and consulted dog- loving friends. While her mother was alive, she remained
independent, preferring to sleep downstairs on her sofa most of the time. But with
Griffin’s death, she had become totally dependent, following us from room to room,
sleeping in my study all day or else in our bedroom. I’ve always believed that every
living creature has emotions, and that Apu was revealing her mourning to us during those
months. Now, having been our baby for so long, she was displaced by this other, human,
baby.
In fact, before Bhima came to us, we had asked friends whether we should acquire
a pup to give Apu company. They had advised against it as she would feel displaced and,
besides, she wouldn’t have the energy to deal with a playful companion. At her age we
should give her as much love and attention as we could. Now, she found herself dealing
with an adoring baby as well as our emotional distraction. If I gave her too much of my
attention, Bhima would crawl over as best he could to place himself between us. And if
Bhima should get our attention, Apu would thrust herself between us.
As I had never known or observed a baby, I wasn’t aware of their sense of awe.
For a baby, everything is new, brand new, never witnessed before, never existing before.
11
As adults, we have lost this sense of wonder at the ordinary. Even the extra-ordinaryspace
shuttles disintegrating, volcanoes exploding, bombs falling- might fill us with
surprise, but not awe. Bhima’s first delight in his expanding world was flowers; the
colours, reds, purples, yellows, against the green, drew his eye and we had to pluck them
for him daily. He would carry around a fistful. Sarala and the other girls would either
tuck flowers behind their ears or pin them in their hair. Bhima, already observant,
stuffed the flowers into his ears. We would laugh and pluck them out, then tuck them
behind his ear.
Our house is fifty yards down a lane. One morning, I carried him up to the road,
for a morning constitutional. This was the first time he had ‘set foot’ outside our
compound. At that moment, five buffaloes ambled past us on the road. Bhima’s eyes
grew large and his jaw dropped. If, as a writer, I had written those words - ‘Bhima’s jaw
dropped’- I would have deleted them with embarrassment. But his jaw did drop. I could
not imagine an Indian child of sixteen months never having seen a buffalo or a cow. It
was as if an American or European child of the same age had never seen a car or
television. If he had remained in his village, buffaloes and cows would have been a daily
sight. These common beasts, scarcely-noticed pedestrians on our Chennai roads, had
inspired awe in this baby’s life.
Another child his age would have experienced many things when his parents
proudly carried him out into the world. But Bhima, imprisoned in his orphanage
dormitories, had never seen the outside world at all. When he was transported from one
orphanage to another and on his visits to hospitals and labs, he would have lain on
someone’s lap, and stared up at the interior roof of the vehicle. Bhima’s awe made me
look again at these slow, lumbering black beasts as Bhima commanded me - pointing and
crying out excitedly ‘Apu…Apu…’- to follow them down the road.
Maureen told the Social Worker, Shaila, to put him up for adoption and, as she
was the only one who knew Bhima intimately – the details of his affliction, the many
tests, the operation, and the problems he would face all his life- wrote up her report on
behalf of Shaila. In her ‘Child Study Report’1 Maureen detailed his background, his
physical problem, the successful operation and his physical and emotional recuperation.
1 Appendix
12
She did not mention he was living with us. The report would be circulated eventually,
along with his photograph, to adoption agencies in Europe. Maureen then ‘transferred’
Bhima, on paper, from the Orphanage 1 to another orphanage over which she had some
control.
At that time, our only thought was to find a good, secure home for this lost waif.
Some where he could come to rest and enjoy childhood, puberty, become an adult and
grow old surrounded and cosseted with love.
The report was signed by Shaila and sent Parallel Universe I, the Indian one, into
motion.
Another social worker, a young woman, visited us from the Voluntary Coordinating
Agency for Tamilnadu. She had Bhima’s file and had come to inspect him
before they moved the paperwork further. Maureen removed his nappy to show her the
scars of the operation. It tallied with her medical reports. Then she checked her file
photograph that Bhima was one and the same baby.
On the form2 she had filled in- ‘Indian Placement Not Possible’- words which
condemned him to a possible life of exile. The reasons were not obvious but were
entangled with Indian culture. Indian couples, who are increasingly turning to adopting
orphaned babies, have the choice of perfectly healthy ones. They would not want ‘a
special needs child’ who would require medical attention and be a burden to them. Apart
from that, Bhima might not be able to father a child. Indian parents want grandchildren,
even if their child has been adopted. Indian history and society is littered with adoptions.
Childless maharajahs and nawabs have adopted nephews, distant cousins and, in one case
in Jodhpur, even a village boy who, according to legend, was one of several children to
be invited to a meal hosted by the maharani. He observed how she ate and copied her.
He became the next maharajah. Childless couples, from many economic and caste
backgrounds, also adopt the children of relations who may have a child or two to spare.
‘Special Needs Child’!! The magic words were Bhima’s passport to leave India,
the ambition of most Indians, admittedly. I had left India when I was eighteen like many
others who leave for higher studies, and surprised everyone, including myself, when I
decided to return. Every friend and relative of mine has a son or daughter, often more
2 Appendix
13
than one, living in the States, Australia, UK, Europe. It’s as if a Pied Piper had piped us
all away.
At this early stage of our relationship with Bhima, we saw only this rosy future
for a baby, rejected by its parents and dumped in an orphanage, to soar away and be
given this golden opportunity.
‘Once we got this clearance certificate’, Shaila told us about the procedures, ‘we
have to wait 60 days, in case the birth parent should change their minds about the
surrender. We couldn’t even know whether the parent would have given his real name.
How can we verify such a thing? I remember once searching in a small village for the
parents of a child adopted abroad who wanted to meet them. No one knew anything but I
am certain the mother was listening because when I returned to make further enquiries, I
saw the same woman listening again. They will never admit to giving away a baby.’
(Which was why when I later visited his probable village I didn’t expect to meet
his parents or for them to acknowledge that they had given away their baby)
Shaila is a wonderful, earth-mother kind of woman, both physically and
emotionally, who did her Masters in Social Work in the States. She radiates warmth and
humour. She has to have the patience of a Buddha too as she spends her days in pursuit
of the countless documents from bureaucracies and the courts necessary for a child to be
adopted. She has a fund of anecdotes about the fifteen years she has been doing her
work, and has somehow retained not only a sense of humour but of compassion for these
orphaned babies.
‘Then after sixty days, we circulate the child’s details within the state adoption
agencies to see if anyone within the state will adopt it. We wait thirty days for a
response, then, if there isn’t one, we send the certificate and the details of the baby to the
Central Adoption Resources Agency3 (CARA) in Delhi for clearance for the child to be
adopted by a foreign couple.
So Bhima’s file was sent to CARA in Delhi. Every piece of paper that had
accumulated on him within the fifteen months of his life was in that file - three copies of
every medical certificate, details of his operation, of his recuperation, Maureen’s report,
the Certificate for adoption, the clearance. Each piece had to be notarized, every piece
3 Appendix
14
had his baby photograph attached to it with the notaries’ seal. No child can be sent
abroad for adoption without the CARA clearance. This is theoretical, as illegal adoptions
do take place. We were also told it would take a couple of weeks for CARA to give its
clearance.
By chance, we had a friend in Madras who came from An European Country. He
suggested that we put Bhima up for adoption in his country. Though admiring the
country, we just felt that Bhima would grow into a too-precocious teenager. I had met
quite a few teenage children from the States visiting relatives here, and though bright,
there was grating American edge to them. We thought of Spain, as we both liked the
country and the people. Denmark was also in the running.
I went into the web to find out more about my friend’s suggestion. His country
was wealthy, stable, democratic and, I thought, safe from the new plague of terrorism. It
seemed to be an island of tranquillity in an increasingly dangerous world.
And so we made the decision for Bhima about his whole life and believed this
European country would be his safest haven. Of course that depended on whether there
was a couple who would want to adopt him.
AUGUST
Up to now, he had smiled seldom. There was a gravity in his persona, a quiet
watchfulness, as if aware that his life could change any moment. It had taken us nearly
two months to bring out the gift of a small chuckle, and now he was learning to laugh.
Sometimes he would crane his head down and around to look at us and give us a stunning
smile, knowingly captivating us and, more frequently as the weeks passed, bursting into
laughter.
However, at night, our routine had not changed. He would awake screaming.
Sarala would try to pacify him, and then hit the intercom button in desperation. And we
would stumble down, haggard from so many nights of broken sleep. In desperation I
suggested we should occasionally, not too often, give him Pedicloryl, the baby valium.
Shaila, the mother of a bright ten-year-old boy, advised against it, especially for such a
young baby, as sometimes it could cause fits. I could now understand the frustration and
15
exhaustion of a sleep-deprived mother, coping alone, who could so easily lose her temper
with a screaming baby.
At first Maureen thought it could be his teething trouble. She took him to Dr
Thomas who examined Bhima’s mouth. His teeth looked well formed and there was no
infection. Dr Thomas told her that because Bhima had been incarcerated in his cot all the
time, he had not picked up any infections through crawling on the floor and then putting
his fingers in his mouth. This was what caused infection, and teething problems, in other
babies, he said.
Having ruled that one out, I went onto the web, the lifeline of the desperate and
the ignorant, to search for wise counsel from expert strangers. I came across scant
advice. One site briefly explained the causes. ‘Night terrors are mysterious sleep
disturbances that preschoolers and older children are occasionally subject to, always
during the deepest part of non-dreaming sleep, usually within one to two hours of falling
asleep. During a night terror — which can last anywhere from ten to forty minutes —
your child may bolt out of bed, thrash around and scream, or run wildly through the
house. While his eyes may be wide open, he is not awake and will not be aware of your
presence. Unlike with a nightmare, he will fall right back to sleep after the episode and
have no memory of the incident the next morning. About 5 percent of all children will
have an episode of night terrors.’ This wasn’t our Bhima. He thrashed around in our
arms and screamed but he had not yet learnt to run wildly. The site went on to suggest -
‘Don’t try to intervene in the middle of a night terror. Let your child scream it out, and
unless he is in danger of hurting himself, don't try to physically restrain him. If you
attempt to hold your terrified child it could lead to wilder behaviour. Instead, speak
calmly and place yourself between him and anything dangerous.’
These remote advisors had no idea of Bhima’s past. If we hadn’t restrained him
he would certainly have hurt himself badly. Being such belated and inexperienced
‘parents’, we discussed his problem with each other, and with other parents too. Irene
reassured us that night terrors were quite common and that her son had had them when he
was eight.
THE ACCIDENTAL MANTRA
16
His problem was not neurological but emotional. It was going to take time for him to
come to terms with it. Americans spend a fortune on their shrinks but there is no absolute
cure for our emotional ills, only a brief interlude from them. They are too deep seated,
though quick to surface in a crisis.
One night, by chance, I did find the secret to lulling him back to sleep while he
was screaming, twisting and arching his back. It was instant but needed to be repeated
over and over again until the terror was vanquished. We knew he was still asleep, though
his eyes were open, and somehow I had to break through to his terrors and reassure him
that he was in a real, safe world. There were no demons or devils in pursuit of him, he
wasn’t falling into an endless dark abyss, he wasn’t alone and abandoned, he wasn’t…
What was his great fear, I wondered, what did he see in his terror. Bhima had night
terrors, according to the baby experts. I didn’t know there was a difference in what
frightens us, as children or as adults, when we sleep. Whatever, it awaits us all.
On this night, Maureen and Sarala were sitting slumped and exhausted. I was
taking my turn with our screaming baby. As I walked Bhima up and down, struggling to
keep a hold, I thought I’d try some imaginative psychology. He was not reassured by the
human touch, which had been cursory, careless, indifferent, given and taken away
impatiently while he was awake in his iron cot. Adults were his betrayers, not his
saviours or safe havens. What was real to him, truly real, more real than a human touch or
voice, that would penetrate his night terror? What would reassure him that it was solid
and strong enough to draw him out of his terrors?
I spoke softly by his ear: ‘Apu’s here. Apu will look after you. Apu will guard
you. Apu loves you, Bhima. See Apu’s standing here, Apu…Apu…Apu…Apu’
To our total surprise, ‘Apu’ was the mantra that penetrated his dreaming mind and
drew him out of his terrors. Bhima’s screams lessened, they became sobs; he
straightened, relaxed and took deep breaths. He fell asleep. The sleeping dog never
knew what magic she had wrought on this baby. Big Apu was his secure present; she
was the first animal he had ever touched and held and what he had felt was reassuring.
Animals are a natural force, more earthbound than we humans, and Apu gave him her
strength. ‘Apu’ worked every time we used her name to calm him down.
17
I had led a selfish writer’s life and now had to turn outwards - I am known as a
recluse by most people- and embrace this house guest who demanded so much attention.
Like all babies, he drank, slept, defecated, pee'd, woke, cried, needed comforting. I
began to pay much more attention to him since he had bonded with me with that initial
touch. And I still was not sure how I should respond. He would be leaving us soon but I
could not reject his constant overtures without harming him. As he lived downstairs,
with frequent visits upstairs to our bedroom throughout the day when we carried him up,
I remained upstairs. He could not yet make that long flight of stairs by himself, so if I
went down on an errand and he saw me, he would immediately reach out for me.
Maureen was a natural mother. I wouldn’t say it’s instinctive in all women as I have seen
friends’ wives awkward and uncomfortable with their own children but she had infinite
patience with Bhima’s physical and emotional problems. He desperately needed
nurturing and love and she gave it, unstintingly. It took me longer but not much. I
enjoyed the fruits of Maureen’s and Uma’s work of cleaning and feeding him. Uma
stayed for a month but she had to return to the orphanage. Sarala became his most
constant baby sitter, alternating between days and nights with other young women who
came and vanished back into the city. Some stayed a month, others a day or two, mostly
defeated by this baby whose sleeping pattern kept them awake at night when they had
thought it would be an easy job.
Our baby did have a temper, and showed it. If he didn’t want to scream, he would
pull Sarala’s, or another girl’s, hair. His tiny hand had a surprisingly strong grip, and she
or I would have to gently prise open one finger at a time to release her hair. But as one
finger opened, the others would close. He would look at us with those beautiful innocent
eyes as if saying ‘Am I doing something wrong?’, knowing he was. We soon discovered
that he was also an angry baby. He was angry with the world, and we could not blame
him. He had every right. But my surprise was how a baby could already feel such a rage
at his unjust treatment. It hadn’t been nurtured by us, in fact the opposite. So it had to be
something in his nature woken by his experiences. We’re born with every emotion –
hate, love, anger, envy, greed, sloth - an instant broth in our genetic make up. Which one
rises to the surface and commands his life’s pattern depends on the nurturing of the baby.
Pain and neglect were the fuel for Bhima’s rage. He could suddenly throw a tantrum,
18
quite uncontrollable, as if he remembered how bad his life had been and felt that we were
to blame. We believed his anger was internalised against the wound in his body that had
caused his pain. The battleground was his mind. He was divided between his past and
what was occurring in his present with us. It took us months to leach this anger out of
him.
MY TEMPORARY SON, BHIMA
I began to e-mail friends outside India about our little house guest. Briony, a good friend
in London we’d known for many, many years, replied and called him ‘your temporary
son’, correcting my casual reference to him. I had not thought of the word ‘son’ until
then. Was he the son we had not had?
So Bhima became my son. And I became his father, though not temporary for
how can a baby not believe in permanence? It has no idea of time, apart from feeding
needs, and time is infinite. In his eyes and feelings, being permanent meant I could not
begrudge fulfilment of any of his emotional needs when he turned to me. A few days
after Briony’s letter, I was downstairs when he woke from his morning nap and came out
of his room crying, wearing only a drooping nappy. A small, fragile human, vulnerable
and alone. We were the room’s length apart and when I knelt and put out my arms, he
ran into them, stopped crying and sighed. No baby/child in its right mind had ever
voluntarily come to my arms. They usually turned tail and bolted, screaming ‘mamaaa’.
His nappy was wet and I took him to his room and laid him down and he allowed me to
change him. I was getting pretty good at this by now, especially as they had Velcro
fasteners. I kissed him. He would placidly allow us this proof of our love for him. He
returned my kisses only much later in our relationship.
Over the next few days, I probed my emotional defences as delicately as a dentist
picking at an infected tooth. A large gap had opened up, and Bhima had slipped through.
My defence against adopting Maria had been that being handicapped, she would lead a
better life in the States. The question of emotion did not enter the equation then. She had
spent only intermittent times with us. And now the adoption question rose again. But I
was sixty years older than Bhima. This gap yawned wide as a gorge. I just didn’t know
how I could bridge such a chasm and remained stranded one side, Bhima on the other.
19
When he was ten, I argued with myself, I would be seventy, and I saw him orphaned
again when he was a teenager. My father and his sister had lived well into their eighties
but I led the more sinful life style of smoking and drinking admittedly, countered by a
daily regime of tennis and jogging. So when Bhima was twenty, I could be eighty.
Maureen would no doubt outlive me. But for how many years? Bhima could be orphaned
again by his early twenties. Or even earlier, at ten or twelve or fifteen.
I have had an intermittent interest in astrology, inherited from my father and from
my culture. At my birth, the astrologer who cast my horoscope, predicted I would either
die at the age of twelve or, if I did not, I would live a very healthy life. Sadly, he had not
predicted my mother’s early death, so it was left for my father to worry about this
prediction. The astrologer had been fairly accurate. I had been a sickly child and at
twelve came down with a complication of jaundice and influenza. I nearly did die; I
remember the family gathered around my sick bed to bid me goodbye. I survived the dire
prediction and since then have had a mild interest in astrology. At this time, I had not
seen an astrologer for years but two of them had predicted I would die in my mid to late
seventies. Seventy five, seventy six, seventy eight? This cut-off date played in my mind
with Bhima’s future.
What would be Bhima’s future with us? I tried to place myself in Bhima’s mind.
How would he feel having such aged step-parents? I imagined us at the local PTA
meetings, Bhima’s friends’ parents would be in their mid to late twenties or early thirties.
Maureen and I were ancient measured against such youth and life styles. Parents I knew
bonded, made friends, and socialised through their children. We would be out of place
among them, they would be another generation. Not ‘another’ but two generations
younger. Bhima would be embarrassed, maybe even ashamed of us. I know from my
own childhood that I was embarrassed and ashamed that my stepmother was white, while
all my friends had brown mothers. I wanted to have one too, instead of this stranger who
would appear, out of place, among all the brown faces at sports days and PTA meetings.
I disliked her and wrote two novels about our family experience. The first one, Field of
Honour, was set in Bangalore and although Graham Greene, a writer I admired
tremendously, wrote to me that he was ‘very much impressed with Field of Honour’ (he
rarely quoted and gave me permission to use his comment). The English reviewers were
20
not. They attacked my depiction of this horrid Englishwoman, as if I had slandered all
Englishwomen. The second novel, Steps From Paradise, was more autobiographical,
and set in Madras. The novel didn’t fare any better with the English reviewers for the
same reason. The lesson I learned from those two novels was that an Indian writer had
better depict Englishmen and Englishwomen in India as heroic, upstanding, selfsacrificing
and pure.
The memory of my stepmother was reinforced, thought not as extremely, by
Elizabeth who was also adopted. ‘I loved my step-parents dearly,’ she told us, ‘but they
were older than my school friends’ parents. I remember being very embarrassed at
seeing them drive up in this old car to attend our school functions.’ Would Bhima cringe
at the sight of his, not even elderly but old, ‘parents’ attending his school sports days and
prize giving days?
These thoughts ran in my head continuously like a rat in a maze, unable to work
out an escape route, unable to find the way to free myself from old age. I knew also that
no court would allow a couple over sixty to adopt an eighteen month old baby. Forty was
the upper age limit for adoption. The law was the same in the UK, and other countries.
The age barrier then seemed insurmountable for us, not only legally but more importantly
intellectually. Logic was locked into both our minds as if in a bank safe with an
impossible combination which could never be opened. To some friends, age did not
matter. ‘So what?’ was my good friend, the Madras historian Muthu’s comment, while
Nicki Mackie e-mailed from London to tell me she had been adopted too, and her
husband was sixty years older than their ten-year-old son. But then she was much
younger than her husband. There wasn’t that comforting cushion in the age gap between
Maureen and me.
Bhima then had been with us three months and we were all still unaware we were
in love with him. Looking back, I believe he had no doubt about his love for us. I
remember thinking and telling friends, almost boastfully: ‘Just look how destiny has
changed for this baby. He was born was a dreadful affliction, dumped in an orphanage,
found, operated on and is now living in a large rambling house with us. And then his
destiny will take him away to Europe and he’ll grow up into a fine young man.’ I spoke
so lightly, just cocktail and dinner party conversation, passing time. Who had set this
21
destiny in motion? How does it work, what forces shape our lives? It seemed so
arbitrary - a chance visit by a few foreign women and his whole life changed. Was that
meant to happen? Was it fore-ordained that the time and place should bring his small
hopeless life into collision with total strangers? I’m not a practising Hindu, but at times
the feeling and sense of karma controlling our lives overwhelms me. We invent words –
karma, destiny, ill-luck, bad luck, good luck, fate, inshallah- to try and rationalise the
forces that distort our lives and cannot explain them either to ourselves or to others. The
words are meaningless balms with no curative powers but just band-aids to cover the
suppurating wounds. If we believe in the continual cycle of re-birth then we are getting
the rewards and punishment for our deeds in a previous life. I have always believed it
unfair that I should suffer for things done by someone or something before I was born.
People think such belief is Indian fatalism; I don’t think of it that way. Some things are
fated over which we have no control. Also our lives are entangled with so many others.
It was my karma and my mother’s karma that she should die and my life became
dislocated. Despite the shortcomings of the astrologer’ art, I wanted Bhima’s horoscope
to be cast. I wanted a vague glimpse into his destiny. Unfortunately, not having his star
or his precise moment of birth (the day was not enough), no astrologer would draw up the
chart. Later on I tried a palm reader but she refused to read a baby’s palm and I thought
it wise of her. She said his life lines had yet to form. I would have to wait to see how
and where his destiny took him.
22
OCTOBER-A COMMITMENT
On October nineteenth Maureen returned home depressed. She had been to the office and
seen Shaila.
‘A couple have committed to adopting Bhima’ she told me. ‘They’ve started the
processing of their documents.’
‘How long?’ I managed finally, trying to absorb the news, now depressed too. I
had no idea what documentation was required for the adoption.
‘By Christmas he’ll be gone.’
‘We can adopt…’
‘You’re over sixty,’ she reminded me gently. ‘No court….’
I was angry now about my age, something I had previously accepted gracefully.
If only I could lose ten, twenty years, we could adopt Bhima. It seemed cruel to have a
cut-off age at sixty when we both still had plenty of energy and, most importantly, a great
of love for this baby.
How could we measure the quantity of energy required to raise Bhima to
manhood, to see him off to Oxford/Cambridge/Yale/Princeton/Harvard university? In
my family, like any other Indian family, education was paramount. From the richest to
the poorest, we all wanted our children educated. In the slums, mothers scrubbed their
children clean daily, washed their faded uniforms, and sent them to the free corporation
schools. Drive into rural India, along the highways and byways, at an early hour and you
will see streams of children, even there in uniforms, trudging off to schools in the nearest
town.
The practicalities were a different drain on energy. I knew parents having to beg,
bribe, grovel to get their children admitted to schools and colleges, because of the huge
number of applicants for limited places. They ran with their children from one school to
another, then another, until they got their child admitted. India’s education system creaks
and groans and buckles under the demands of an exploding population of children.
Nearly 20 million children are born annually and, statistically, India needed to build a
school a day to absorb them. Of course, India has not done that.
23
I saw myself spending the next dozen years chasing schools, then colleges to get
Bhima admitted, driving him back and forth, and then because of the fierce competition
for good grades, driving him to special tutors. My friends with school-age children spent
their days shuttling around the city with them to tutors and waiting outside to take them
home again. It sounded exhausting.
‘Can you do all that?’ Maureen asked, reading my mind.
‘Why not?’ But I was not sure I could. ‘Who are this couple wanting Bhima? Do
they know he is a Special Needs child with problems?’
‘They must know. It’s all written down along with medical reports.’ She was
concerned too and asked Shaila to check and double check that they understood Bhima’s
medical needs.
I remember Bhima interrupted our discussion as he came wobbling in to be
scooped up, unaware that his future was being shifted around again like a chess piece on
an inter-planetary board. Stars were being shunted around to accommodate a destiny that
had been decided by us in one way, yet also by his unfortunate start in life.
‘Why have they chosen Bhima?’ I asked over his head.
‘Shaila said they fell in love with his photograph.’
I knew the photograph she meant – a thin solemn baby with large and an unruly
curly mop of hair staring sadly into the camera, wearing an American football jersey with
the number One on it. I looked down at Bhima. He had changed since then - his cheeks
were plumper and he had grown taller by almost a head. He was no longer that solemn,
sad baby of the photograph; he was a cheerful one most of the time. However, he did
have mercurial moods, one moment laughing and playing, the next screaming his head
off. ‘Whaaaaaaaaaaaaa’. But now he was not screaming in pain but because we had
denied him something.
WHAT HAPPENED
Bhima lived with us a year and we were hopelessly in love with each other. His adoptive
parents came and spent two weeks in our house to bond with him. Of course he didn’t
bond and we were in confusion and hurting. When we took them to the airport he kept
calling for Maureen and me to ‘come’ with him. Of course, we couldn’t and for weeks we
24
were numbed with pain and in mourning. Bhima had ‘died’. We later heard from his
parents that for a month he had cried out, calling for us. He stopped eventually and went
on with his life.
One year later, Maureen was invited to be his godmother and for us to stay in
their house. When Bhima first saw us, he frowned, trying to remember why he knew us.
We spent four days with his family and the consolation was that he’s loved deeply by his
parents and is surrounded by grandparents, uncles, aunts and friends who adore him. He
began to spend more time with us too and remembered bits and pieces of his past with us.
But the time was all too short. We had thought this visit would have been a closure. But
there never is a total closure, not until love dies or we die.
©Timeri N. Murari.
(The book runs to 75,000 words and includes an appendix on the adoption
procedures for Indian babies).
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