The Impressionist (31 page)

On Tuesdays and Thursdays Mrs Macfarlane introduces Bobby to scientific spirituality. The Theosophical Society meet in a large hall, hung with banners proclaiming the wisdom of the Himalayan Masters and the nobility of the hermetic quest. Bobby attends these with his mistress and is much admired. How his soul shines through, murmur the middle-aged ladies and gentlemen. He is surely destined to be an Adept. Bobby discovers that good-looking boys have always played an important role in the work of the Society. The World Teacher himself, currently on a lecture tour in Europe, is by all accounts an extremely handsome young man.

They sing songs and take collections and listen to lectures about the significance of the pyramids, the authority of the Vedas in the modern world, and the need for a synthesis of Eastern and Western thought to heal the psychic wounds of the war. Sometimes Bobby pays attention. Sometimes he just looks around and marvels at the peculiarity of this congregation, where Indians and Europeans mingle without seeming to notice. The atmosphere is fevered, millenarian. Throughout history, the people of the world have cried out for knowledge of a Key, a Path. Now is the time for that wish to be granted. Now, with the world rent apart, with the war-driven increase in traffic between dead and living, between the astral and the gross materiality of the physical, it is finally time for the Society to lead mankind forward into Bliss. Membership is blossoming. The meetings are packed, and from the lectern the officers read out dispatches from Australia, from the Netherlands, California, Brazil. Cast your thoughts westward, urges a speaker from Adyar. Out of the waters of the Pacific will rise a future race, one that will supersede the Indo-Aryan leaders of today.

There is controversy when a meeting is addressed by a German woman. Swiss, insists the Chairman over the uproar. Frau Doerner is a distinguished teacher of Eurythmics. And she is Swiss. Some members walk out in protest, but Frau Doerner is allowed to speak, tugging nervously at the border of her sari as she outlines her philosophy of sensuous ritual movement and the liberation of the Instinct.

Politics and spirituality have become oddly mixed, since on the material plane Congress has promised swaraj within one year, and every few weeks Bombay is paralysed by another strike. Mill workers, dockers and sailors walk out, and a general hartal shuts down the city for several days. Union leaders stride on to Theosophical platforms, following speakers on occult chemistry and Christ’s training as an Egyptian Mason. Theosophists are urged to work for Indian Home Rule, for such is the message the Lord of the World gave to Mrs Besant when the immortal Rishi Agastya (Himalayan Master with special responsibility for India) arranged for her to have an interview at Shamballa, the Brotherhood’s secret mountain HQ. Political freedom for India means spiritual freedom for the world. Please put your change in the tin.

Bobby discovers that for people so focused on mind and spirit, the Theosophists still find an unusual amount of time for the body. At an afternoon party, while the others are standing around in their robes drinking tea, the formidable Mrs Croft (wife of the Assistant Inspector of Works) manoeuvres him into a storeroom. There she informs him she is a Sensitive, and thus she knows of his sacred mission. However, he is not to worry since his secret is safe with her. Then she tears open her blouse to expose her breasts. Anoint me, Chandra, she breathes. Place your lips upon these rosy aureoles. Bobby, whose mind is filled with images of court rooms and all-white juries, tells her he has taken a vow. Of what, she asks. I think I hear someone coming, he lies. You had better button yourself up. On another occasion young Mr Avasthi happens upon Bobby in the WC and wonders aloud whether he might, just once, beg leave to perform a particular service. Bobby lets him get down on his knees, then tells him that unless he hands over a certain sum of rupees, he will tell the other members of the terms of their arrangement. Mr Avasthi pays up, and flees. Afterwards Bobby feels a twinge of guilt. Mr Avasthi is shy and works as a clerk in a shipping office. Unfortunately business, first and foremost, is business.

Mrs Macfarlane is pleased by Chandra’s inquiring mind, and his touching willingness to attend to higher matters. She would probably be disappointed were she to learn that his main reason for attending Theosophical meetings is to spy for Mrs Pereira. Mrs P. has many Theosophical clients, and finds information about their personal lives, likes, dislikes, hopes and dreams immensely useful in producing satisfactory contacts with the spirit world. She maintains a network of drivers, hotel porters, ayahs, bearers and punkahwallahs who supply her with tidbits of information. Bobby has been a committed team member since the week after his first seance.

Bobby made it a condition of service that Mrs P. showed him how she did it. It took a lot of argument, but eventually, with much wheezing and grumbling, she sat down at her seance table and demonstrated certain technical aspects of mediumship not known to the general seance-going public. Displaying unusual agility for such a large woman, she showed him how to tip a table by flicking it up with the nape of the neck, how to free a hand from the control of a neighbouring sitter and how to use various parts of the body to produce spirit clapping; she also briefly outlined the advantages of a light construction when attempting table levitation. With a certain pride she pulled up the rug to show the system of bells and electrical control switches she had installed to help with more complex manifestations. Warming to her topic, she even sketched (thankfully without demonstrating) some of the methods of storing and producing ectoplasm, techniques which explain why female mediums have such an advantage in this fast-growing area. Mrs P. explained that she no longer made a habit of ectoplasmic manifestations, after a scrape where a sceptic forced her to drink a cup of coffee before the sitting, and the muslin came up brown. Bobby went away thoroughly enlightened, though a little depressed for Mrs Macfarlane.

Because of the unusually fluid moral outlook imposed on him by his work, Bobby often finds himself lost. Though the Macfarlanes have given him a home, there are certain barriers to emotional honesty. No one else takes an interest in him. He belongs to no group or gang. There is nothing much he feels connected with at all. Bombay is large, and the violent flows which surge through it are enough to scare highly trained British administrators, with uniforms and codes of honour and portraits of the King to give them backbone. So it is hardly surprising that Bobby sometimes jumps at shadows, and has recurrent dreams about spider-webs and being chased through forests. When he feels like this he goes to visit Shuchi, who is a year older than him and works at the Red House. If she has no clients she will curl up with him on her bed and watch him sleep. Bobby also sometimes turns up at Madame Noor’s on a quiet night, to visit the girl the others call Gul. Madame Noor used to deduct it out of his commission, but she stopped. Something has to come for free in this life, she says, sucking philosophically on her waterpipe.

One morning Bobby strolls out of the Mission on his way to pick up a new suit. He is full of anticipation, though disturbed to see that someone has daubed red paint over the church door. A hammer and sickle. Reverend Macfarlane will not be pleased. He already suspects that his wife has Bolshevist sympathies, and believes that the new unions springing up across the city are satanically inspired. Bobby shrugs. Not his problem. Today is a good day, too good to be spoilt by one of the old man’s moods. Later he will call at the Red House to show Shuchi how he looks. Perhaps he will even take her out for a promenade. He imagines her dressed like an Englishwoman in a long embroidered dress with a big straw hat on her head. And a parasol. Amused by the idea, he bounds up the step into Shahid Khan’s shop, stepping past the apprentices hunched over their sewing machines and calling out to the tailor, who is drinking tea in the back.

The suit is a delight. Shahid Khan has lined the cream-coloured linen with yellow silk, and done so at half the price he initially said was the minimum necessary to subsist for a single day in this debased age. The jacket is tight and double-breasted, its flap pockets fashionably angled down. The trousers end in generous turn-ups that break on Bobby’s leather shoes just so. Full of praise, Bobby pays up, and Shahid Khan tells him he is taking food from his children’s mouths but looks pleased all the same, in the way that a tailor always looks pleased when his work is being worn by someone who shows it off well.

Bobby decides to take a stroll down the Hornby Road, to look in the glass windows of the European shops. He slides down the street, feeling (with some justification) that he looks a thousand times better than all the sweating English and scruffy Indians he shoulders past on the busy thoroughfare. He is looking at a display of portable typewriters (light and sturdy enough for travel and camp use’) when the shop door opens and an elderly white man in the uniform of an infantry officer steps out, carrying a wrapped parcel.

‘Good morning,’ he says.

‘Good morning,’ replies Bobby, surprised to be addressed.

‘Hell of a day,’ says the officer. ‘You sure you should be out without a hat? Terribly fierce sun, you know. Pays to be careful.’

Bobby is about to speak, but the man has already started off down the road, whistling tunelessly. He is puzzled. That oddly complicit tone. One man to another. No distance. No reserve. A hat? Then he realizes. The man thought he was English. Two Englishmen, talking about the weather. An hour later, Bobby goes into Laidlaws and buys an enormous Curzon topi, which sits on his head like a minor classical monument. Instead of going to see Shuchi he spends the afternoon walking around, tipping it to English people. Sometimes they tip their hats back.

After the hat incident Bobby starts to play a new game. He loiters in places where English people are to be found, and tries to engage them in conversation. Not for money. For fun. The Apollo Bunder is a good spot. When the huge packet steamers make port, the dock is alive with people, and among them are always plenty of newcomers in need of assistance. Weaving between piles of mail sacks and chalk-marked luggage, he scouts for candidates, avoiding those being met by friends, searching for the ones who look hot and confused, who will be grateful for a helpful young man to shoo away the touts and recommend a good hotel.

The point is to tell them a story. Any story will do, so long as it is English. Or rather about
being
English. Hello, my name is Walker, Peter Walker. John Johnson. Clive Smith. David Best but call me Bestie. Everybody does. I work for a petroleum company. A rubber company. The school board. A department store. I’m here visiting my cousin. An old school friend. And you?

The thing is, they believe him. They hear an accent and see a face and a set of clothes, and put them together into a person. After a while, a few begin to sense there is something wrong, something they cannot put their finger on. Were you brought up in the colonies, Mr Best? Rarely does this sense congeal into anything definite, and by then Bobby has moved on. Unless, that is, he makes a mistake.

There is the time with the old woman and her niece. He is at the docks, watching a car being lifted out of a cargo hold by crane. Disinterred from its crate, it sits on a wooden pallet, gleaming expensively. Chains have been passed underneath, which jerk tight as the stevedores shout to each other, winching it round. The car clears the deck and swings precariously overhead, a large black shadow shivering across the quayside. Bobby hears a gasp and sees the two Englishwomen scurrying out of the way.

‘Oh – my case!’

Bobby nips back and rescues a little valise, hands it (with a tip of the hat) to the elderly lady. He is rewarded with a gracious smile.

‘Oh, you are kind.’

‘Not at all. Just arrived?’

‘Yes. On the
Viceroy.
You too? We didn’t see you on board.’

‘Oh no. I was waiting for my sister. I thought she was due on today’s boat, but I think I must have got the date wrong. I’m such a duffer with dates.’

‘Oh I do know what you mean. You poor thing. I’m sure she’ll turn up.’

Soon he is rounding up porters and arranging for their luggage to be transferred to the Taj Mahal Hotel. They believe him implicitly. Nigel Watkins, Junior Land Surveyor. The old lady fusses around, loses things, finds them again, worries that someone will ‘make off’ with the smaller items, and all the time thanks her white knight profusely. The young one, who is pretty, dispenses seductive smiles from beneath her hat. Everything is going well. Perhaps too well. Before he knows it Bobby is inside the hotel, following his new friends through one of the small courtyards. You must stay and take tea with us. We absolutely won’t take no for an answer. I’m sure Virginia has a hundred questions about Bombay.

While they go to settle themselves in their rooms, he waits at a table under a big canvas umbrella, looking up at the rows of wrought-iron galleries which loom over the garden on all sides. The place feels like a prison yard. Bearers sleep on mats outside their masters’ rooms, or squat in groups to gossip. He starts to wonder if any of the men idly leaning over the railings will recognize him. Not impossible. A lot of people know Pretty Bobby. He begins to feel nervous, exposed. Perhaps this is not such a good idea. Just as he has made up his mind to leave, the Englishwomen come back and sit down with him. Virginia starts talking about tigers and snake charmers and other things she has heard are to be found in India. He answers distractedly. Yes, it is true that scorpions can be dangerous, but as long as one remembers to shake out one’s shoes in the morning, one is unlikely to be stung. A waiter brings tea. And winks at him, he is sure of it. The man walks away, his elaborate puggaree bobbing up and down as he disappears into a passageway. He is probably en route to the manager, to tell him about the conman in the garden.