Baumgartner's Bombay (12 page)

‘Clever she was, Gisela, and Om Sahni was not the first man she made a fool of – there had been enough in Shanghai. That was where I first heard of her – never met her of course, my family moved in different circles, had nothing to do with cabaret – but there used to be these posters, I saw them myself, of The Lily of Shanghai. And before that Singapore, before that Macao, before that – she
said
Russia.’ Lotte sputtered with laughter. ‘Grew her hair long, dyed it dark red like a
beetroot,
painted her cheeks blue to look hollow, and began to speak like a Russian. Quite an actress, that one,’ Lotte chuckled admiringly. ‘She even said she was a refugee, a czarina I suppose, fled from the Reds. Where were her jewels, her furs? One day I called that Russian I knew – that Besauloff who used to travel in the Himalayas, you remember? He was from a good family in Russia – his mother came to see him once and she was a countess, I think. So I asked him to come and meet Gisela, ask her some questions, but when she heard – she ran away! She had appointments – doctors, dentists, everybody was waiting for her – and she could not stay to lunch and she could not meet him. Of course not!’ Lotte laughed and laughed, so that Baumgartner had to join in although he had heard the story often enough. ‘But it did not matter to Gisela. If she had not brought her Russian furs and jewels with her, she found people like Om Sahni to buy them for her in Calcutta, temperature fifty degrees Celsius, and he bought furs from Kashmir that he said were beaver and fox but I think just jackal. Yes, yes, jackal – that piece she wore round her neck with two eyes and four paws and a little tail hanging down. But that was only the beginning for our Gisela, wasn’t it? After that, that Raja of – of what, Hugo? – he came to Prince’s, saw her in her ballet slippers, asked her to teach his wives and daughters ballet and off she went to the jungles with him. To collect some real furs and diamonds, she said, and you know how her eyes gleamed to think of that.’ Lotte laughed raucously, as if in approval of her friend’s greed and cunning and success. ‘Everyone was like that in the war, was it not so, Hugo? People made money, made fortunes – then vanished – phut – like that. Only we stayed, like fools. Here, amongst the thieves, the cholera, the mosquitoes –’ she slapped her arms in rage.

‘Where could we go, Lotte? Where could you and I have gone?’ Baumgartner had taken out his handkerchief again and sat twisting and crumpling it.

‘Hmm,’ she muttered, scratching her arms thoughtfully, brooding. ‘Yes, there was nowhere to go. Germany was gone
– phut
. Europe was gone, all of it. Let us face it,
Liebchen
, there is no home for us. So where can we go? Hah? Tell me.’

‘Venice,’ said Hugo unexpectedly, wiping his face and then raising it so that it shone above the soiled rag. ‘If I could go, if I could leave, then I would go to Venice.’

Her jaw dropped. For a while it attempted to utter some sound, but hung emptily. ‘Venice, he says,’ she said at last. ‘Venezia – no less. As if he were a duke, or a count. You a millionaire, maybe, in your dreams?’

Baumgartner laughed, shamefacedly. ‘Only an idea, Lotte,’ he apologised. ‘Once I was there – for seven days. I caught the boat to India from there. It was so strange – it was both East and West, both Europe and Asia. I thought – maybe, in such a place, I could be at home.’

‘At home – in Venice?’ she screamed, beginning to shake with volcanic laughter.

Hurt, he retreated. ‘Let me be, Lotte,’ he muttered, and struggled out of the chair. He blundered about the room, bumping into furniture till he found the kitchen shelves and there he clattered about amongst the pots and pans, hoping vaguely to find a piece of bread or some fruit or cheese, anything that would give his stomach a little comfort, a little solidity so it would not ache from emptiness or slosh with fluids. In one pot he found a coating of cooked, yellow food and turned away in disgust: he was not hungry enough for that. Dropping it, he blundered his way to the divan and sank down on it like a large bag dropping and settling. ‘Is so late, Lotte,’ he complained, not quite knowing what he meant, and then pulled off his shoes and lay down, rolled over to face the wall, shut his eyes and after an initial swirl of giddiness, felt himself falling through layers of oblivion, grey upon grey, each darker than the last, thicker, blocking out colour and sound. ‘“Lilli Marlene”,’ he muttered, ‘I remember that, Lotte – “Lille Marlene”,’ but was too deeply embedded in grey felt to hear her reply.

Eventually he felt something press against his back. He thought with sleepy affection that it was his cats who had
come
to lie on his chest or beside his pillow, and purr. He put out his arm to enfold Fritzi and Mimi, Miese and Lulu. Instead of their stifling, adhesive fur, he met only Lotte’s hairless smoothness and bareness. The human, womanly quality of her slack old skin, soft as flour, drew a groan of pleasure out of his empty stomach – it was good, like bread. He turned and put his arms around her, rubbing her back, again forgetting she was not a cat, murmuring ‘
Wie geht’s dann
, Lulu, eh? What is it you want?’ Like a cat she pressed upon him, nuzzling, nibbling, without speech. With small groans they made themselves comfortable against each other, finding concavities into which to press their convexities, and convexities into which to fit concavities, till at last they made one comfortable whole, two halves of a large misshapen bag of flesh, and then they were still and slept the heavy noontime sleep of the tropics, sighing and snoring less and less till they became totally immobile, silent.

CHAPTER FOUR
GAP PAA.ORG

IT HAD SEEMED
bedlam when he disembarked and walked on to what he was assured was Indian soil – the crowds, of Indians, Britons, Americans, Gurkhas – coolies carrying their luggage – cabin trunks and bed-rolls – officers stiff with laundry starch and gleaming with Brasso and boot polish – hawkers and traders scurrying around with baskets and trays –
memsahibs
and blonde children with lopsided basin-shaped topis on their bleached hair – Indian women in shapeless garments squatting passively with their baskets or babies – and over it all, congealing them into one restless, heaving mass, the light from the sky and the sea, an invasion of light such as he had never known could exist – and heat like boiling oil tipped out of a cauldron on to their heads, running down their necks and into their collars and shirts.

He stood for a long time, unsteady on his legs, so long used to the pitching of the ship, trying to find the courage to make his way through this tumult, find a hotel, the address he had in his pocket. The coolies did not trouble him – he had no luggage they could carry – he was left to himself. On that first day as on every other day, left to himself.

He would have wanted, on that day, to have a hand settle on his wrist, lead him. Or at least a signboard. In a familiar language. A face with a familiar expression. He could not read these faces, or their expressions – joy? agony? panic? He felt his own panic going out, mingling with theirs. Then his paralysis
gave
way, he made a move – when the crowds stopped swirling and began to drain through the gates to the city. The crowd had thinned so there were empty spaces between the people through which he could see a way, so he picked up his duffel bag and moved at last.

This was his entry into India.

To the tonga-wallah, on climbing into the creaking carriage that stank of horsedung, he said, ‘To the Taj Hotel, pliss,’ because it had been described to him as an eastern palace. Having also been told that the engineers had mistakenly built it with its entrance to the city bazaar, its back to the ravishing sea-front, thus driving the architect, an Italian, to suicide, he was not perturbed when the tonga ambled through the bazaar, its horse narrowly escaping death a hundred times, its driver screaming abuse and directions till blood ran from his mouth – Baumgartner took it to be blood, but in the East colours were not, he knew, the colours they were in the West – and deposited him on the steps of the dingy green front of a multi-storeyed but narrow house of rusty iron and stucco in a lane filled with vehicles of a greater variety than Baumgartner had imagined were possible. This was the famous, or infamous, back-to-front, he told himself and climbed out. He carried in his own bag since there was no porter at the door as might have been expected from the lyrical descriptions of Eastern luxury he had heard from his fellow voyagers. On entering the lobby that was just a narrow passage, reeking of food and streaked with the red that the alarmed Baumgartner took to be blood from a gun battle, he found himself in a seedy house with no lighting and was shaken by grave doubt. He would have fled if it had not occurred to him that this was a place he could better afford than a suite in a luxury hotel. After standing around helplessly, he finally cleared his throat – and found it hurt. A germ? A deadly illness? All seemed possible, too possible, in this setting. Eventually a woman appeared, seemingly from the cracks of the floor above, sidling down the staircase,
adjusting
her hair and her cotton garments as she did so, with a wet, dripping hand.

‘Wanting room?’ she screamed at Baumgartner, aggressively thrusting out her chin in a challenge. ‘One upstairs – room fourteen free.’

Following her up the wooden stairs, Baumgartner cleared his throat again, this time to ask, hesitantly, ‘This Taj Hotel?’

She turned upon him like a jungle cat, spitting. ‘Yaiss,’ she screamed, ‘this Taj Hotel. Why not Taj Hotel, heh? Only one can be Taj Hotel? Ten, twenty Taj Hotels in Bombay – no one can tell me this no Taj Hotel, this Bombay Hotel, Goa Hotel, Hindu Hotel, I no listen!’ she screamed. ‘I say Taj Hotel, then
this
Taj Hotel,’ and she marched on down the dark passage to a door at the end that she flung open. ‘Wanting?’ she challenged him, crossing her arms to wait for an answer.

Baumgartner meekly bent his head and walked in past her, too exhausted and too nervous to argue. He had had trouble recognising her language as English; it had seemed to him more like the seeds of a red hot chilli exploding out of its pod into his face. He mopped his face and turned to ask her some necessary questions but she disappeared, banging the door shut. It took him a while to get used to the dark. Not only did the single window look out on a concrete wall some six feet away, preventing all light and air from entering, but the excessive dirt that coated every surface from the light bulb to the cotton mattress and the floor added to the gloom.

He stood by the window, studying the scene with great seriousness, knowing himself to be tricked. It was the first of India’s tricks. But was it a trick?

Was it not India’s way of revealing the world that lay on the other side of the mirror? India flashed the mirror in your face, with a brightness and laughter as raucous as a street band. You could be blinded by it. But if you refused to look into it, if you insisted on walking around to the back, then India stood aside, admitting you where you had not thought you could go. India was two worlds, or ten. She stood before him, hands
on
her hips, laughing that blood-stained laugh: Choose! Choose!

The man behind the office desk, fanning his face with a folded newspaper, was not what Baumgartner had been told to expect. At least, he declared he was not. ‘No, no, quite wrong, quite wrong,’ he kept repeating, as Baumgartner tried to question him, in his new and hesitant English, about the business the Gentleman from Hamburg had assured him existed in Bombay. The man behind the desk seemed puzzled at the mention of Hamburg, timber, shipping . . . every word that Baumgartner managed to summon out of his new language, dragging it off his tongue with a reluctance bordering on paralysis, the bald, dark man in the long white cotton shirt with small gold buttons shook his head at in mystified denial. On the wall behind him hung a picture of an eleven-armed goddess, and over its frame was draped a garland of tinsel. Baumgartner found himself staring at it in his frustration – it drew and held his attention and seemed increasingly weird, foreign, exotic and inscrutable to him.

Then he chanced to find the word ‘Ex – port’. ‘Ex-phott,’ he said, and the fat, puzzled, perspiring man seemed to roll himself up into a ball, tight with excitement, and then explode out of his seat.

‘Ex-pawt!’ he gasped, clutching the side of his head. ‘Ex-pawt.
Of course
, ex-pawt. Germany, Europe. Shipping, timber – I know, I know.’ He charged around the desk, grasped Baumgartner by the hand and pumped it up and down, then slapped his shoulder for good measure, and began to babble at such speed that Baumgartner gave up even trying to follow. Instead he gazed at the eleven-armed goddess for an explanation – perhaps she had brought about this flood of communication, perhaps she was the goddess of good fortune. Certainly the tinsel draped around her winked and gleamed as it turned and susurrated lightly in the breeze from the electric fan.

He waited till the man had run through all the gestures and
tones
of excitement and sat down to mop himself with his large bandanna. Then he took from his pocket the letter from Herr Pfuehl and handed it over.

‘Letter from Foo-ol? You have?’ The bald man’s face emerged from behind the bandanna, beaming, but it was clearly no longer necessary. ‘Please have lunch with me. We will go out, and eat, and talk.’

On their way to a restaurant, bowling along the sea-front in a horse carriage, Chimanlal waved an arm at an imposing pile of stone that lined and overlooked the bay. ‘The Taj Hotel,’ he said, proudly showing off the sight, and seemed gratified when Baumgartner swung around in his seat and stared as though he had seen something he never expected to see in all his life.

‘
That
– Taj Hotel?’ Baumgartner wonderingly enquired.

Chimanlal nodded, pleased to see him so impressed, but instructed the carriage driver to go a little further. ‘Vegetarian restaurant, vegetarian food,’ he explained, on dismounting, ‘is famous for. You are liking vegetarian?’

Actually Baumgartner could not have told if what he put in his mouth was fish, flesh, fowl or foliage – the sauce in which all the bits and pieces floated was so fiery it scalded the coating of his tongue and made him burst like a fountain into perspiration.