Baumgartner's Bombay (24 page)

‘And what can I do in Bombay?’ Baumgartner asked tiredly, the very thought of having to move exhausting him. ‘How to start there?’ He wanted to explain to Habibullah that their situation was not very different – and equally hopeless.

But Habibullah did not think so. From somewhere, he had retrieved hope, retrieved confidence. He spoke very firmly and precisely. ‘Go to Chimanlal,
sahib
. He sent you to me. He is good man. A Bombay man, knows all Bombay business. He will give you business. He will help.’

‘How?’ asked Baumgartner.

‘How? Are you not English, European
sahib
? Have you no European connections? You can help him with export business –’

‘Europe has had a war, Habibullah,’ Baumgartner reminded him. ‘My country is – finished. What business can I do?’

But Habibullah had no more conception of Baumgartner’s war, of Europe’s war than Baumgartner had of affairs in Bengal, in India. Tapping his fingers on his desk authoritatively, he promised to write out a letter to Chimanlal about Baumgartner that would take care of everything.

‘And in Bombay is your friend, Mr Bommgarter!’ he
suddenly
added with a yelp of exuberance. ‘You will meet old friend again.’

‘Friend?’ Baumgartner was mystified. ‘Who?’

‘Lola!’ Habibullah exploded. ‘My God, you are not knowing? Madam Lola is married and living in Bombay. To who? To who? To Kantilal Sethia, Mr Bommgarter. Yes, yes, married, those two. When police came to tell Madam Lola she must go to camp like you, Kantilal did say, no, he will marry Madam Lola, make Indian lady of her, then no camp.’

Baumgartner found himself blinking, laughing with amazement and disbelief. ‘Lola married – to Kantilal? Lola has become Indian lady?’

‘No, no, no,
sahib
. So clever is that Kantilal, so cunning – he had
secret
marriage with Madam Lola, which is meaning not
real
marriage, only fake,
jhoota
. Fake priest, fake ceremony. All the time it is happening,
sahib
, all the time. These Hindu men not supposed to marry again, so what they do? They have fake marriage instead of real one. And you know what Kantilal do? He take Madam Lola to his house –
yes
, he take her to his own
house
– and tell his wife, this is governess for our sons,
English
governess. And poor lady, she cry and shout and scream, but what can she do? Madam Lola already standing there in the house, with bag and clothing and everything. Madame Lola has to pretend she English governess and give lessons to Kantilal’s son. What lessons? I don’t know, Mr Bommgarter, you must ask her. Singing lessons? Dancing lessons? I don’t know. But already fighting is taking place. Mrs Sethia, she very very angry. Mrs Sethia is making faces and putting chilli powder in all the food and showing to Madam Lola the – what you call? – tongs, kitchen tongs? And Madam Lola getting frightened and running out of house, and all the neighbours looking and seeing. So poor Kantilal, he think better take Madam Lola away. Mrs Sethia he cannot send away, Mrs Sethia staying. So he take Madam Lola to Bombay, buy her nice flat. She say she have no money. He tell her give lessons, be teacher, but she say no, she will not be governess again. So Kantilal buy her shop – yes, yes, yes, I
have
heard this myself – he buy a shop for Madam Lola. In Bombay.’

Baumgartner found himself smiling. He found himself cheered, at least for the moment. Deciding to leave Habibullah in these good spirits, he got up and went, promising to think over the matter of Bombay.

Instead, he made his way to the old, crowded, slum-like house off Free School Street, in the lane too narrow for traffic but wide enough for people, pigs, stray dogs, even a few intrepid rickshaws. It was a complete contrast to the European quarter he had known before the war with its air of an eastern colonial port, its great houses with deep verandas and green shutters, high walls and tall palms, and the European life of Park Street with its hotels, confectionaries, bars and shops.

To enter this lane, Baumgartner had first to walk through the Anglo-Indian quarter that separated the European from the Bengali. Here the tailors’ shops were hung not with the little blouses Hindu women wore with their saris but with the cheap frocks, skirts and blouses the Anglo-Indian clerks and secretaries wore to work. Even the butchers’ shops were different and Baumgartner wondered why they made him so queasy, a German used to the sight since childhood. It was after a considerable time that he realised he had grown used to the sight of the Hindu butchers’ shops with their goat carcasses and was now shocked by the huge carcasses of cows and buffaloes that hung in this Anglo-Indian, therefore Christian quarter. Even the dogs, he noticed, skirting one fierce gang that snarled and fought over a gigantic bone flung down by the Muslim butcher, were bigger, sturdier and more aggressive than he had seen elsewhere.

Baumgartner found no joy in the streets where he walked aimlessly, compulsively, in order to put off going back to his room. The congestion of the streets and the odours in the heat were overpowering; debris was piled everywhere – banana peels, coconut husks, ashes and cinders from the fires the householders lit in their small brick-stoves with cakes of
cowdung
soaked in kerosene, a lethal substance that let out billows of choking yellow smoke. In the evenings, the smoke rose to meet the mists that descended from the river and the swamps and mingled to form an impenetrable quilt that made one gasp for breath and cough.

Had it always been so? Baumgartner wondered, coughing into his handkerchief, or had he simply not noticed in the old days when he lived in the pre-war Calcutta of bars, dances, soldiers, prostitutes, businessmen, fortunes and fate? Perhaps if he went to the 300, to Prince’s or Firpo’s, he could find some of his acquaintances. But he could not bring himself to do so: that life and that time was a closed book, or like a pack of cards – finite in number.

Yet he remained there, hoarding his small savings, for more than a year, watching the fires that burnt in the city, their hot glow reflected by the smouldering mass of fog and smoke that buried them all and did not allow the flames to escape. At times there were screams to be heard in the dark and footsteps pounding along dark lanes just as in badly made thrillers for the cinema. Processions wound endlessly through the city, chanting slogans like dirges, slipping into sudden outbreaks of activity, to overturn buses and set trams on fire. Or there would be a strike – of taxis, of trams – and the streets would be deserted, waste paper slowly swirling from one end to the other, like ghosts or – again – like the cinema. There were barricades in the streets, police with helmets and batons and rifles, mobs sullen or infuriated – one could never tell.

Halted at a barricade, watching the police with their rifles at one end, the mob with their screams and gestures at the other, he turned in bewilderment to ask, ‘Why?’

‘They are protesting against the trial of the twenty thousand men who fought in the I.N.A.,’ he was told by a fellow onlooker.

‘The I.N.A.?’

The man looked at Baumgartner with fury. ‘You do not know, about the Indian National Army and the war it fought against the British? In Burma and China? On the side of the Japanese?’

Baumgartner was speechless. Nodding rapidly and apologetically, he retreated from the barricade. He heard the increasing frenzy of the mob, the growing tension of the police, and told himself, ‘Not here, not this, Hugo. No, no,’ and slipped away.

His war was not their war. And they had had their own war. War within war within war. Everyone engaged in a separate war, and each war opposed to another war. If they could be kept separate, chaos would be averted. Or so they seemed to think, ignoring the fact that chaos was already upon them. And lunacy. The lunacy of performing acts one did not wish to perform, living lives one did not wish to live, becoming what one was not. Always another will opposed to one’s own, always another fate, not the one of one’s choice or even making. A great web in which each one was trapped, a nightmare from which one could not emerge.

He could only shuffle away down the side lanes, keeping close to the wall, his head lowered. That did not mean he did not see what there was – the misery, the filth. Empty ration-shops, hungry people outside. Those English newspapers that he read told him there had been a cyclone that had wiped out a year’s crop of rice, that there were crop failures, shortage of grain, that the Viceroy, Wavell, had regretfully cut the caloric ration of each man to 1200. But out on the
maidan
where he sometimes drifted to hear the speakers who collected crowds whose size varied according to the volume and anguish of their voices, he heard talk of food stocks having been transferred to the British army, of scorched earth tactics by the British army under Japanese threat, of wilful destruction of resources. Moving from one group to another, listening to the speeches in their full flood of oratory and condemnation, Baumgartner retreated to the ranks of the peanut sellers and idle urchins, the pecking crows and stray
dogs.
Here, too, at any moment, someone might have grabbed him by the neck, seeing it was white. Rubbing the back of it, thoughtfully, Baumgartner shuffled away, back through the brown, stained lanes to the house.

On the twelfth of February the whole city closed down in a general strike after a tremendous rally in Wellington Square that Baumgartner did not attend. He stayed in. More and more now, he stayed in.

Not that the house provided any kind of shelter from the city. Down at the bottom of the lane there was a gap in the wall where the gate had once been and one entered through that into the walled compound that was really only partially walled since the wall had crumbled and in many places disappeared, allowing beggars, cattle, stray dogs and vendors of the whole locality to wander in and set up wherever they found space. There were always rows of supine bodies covered with white sheets so that they had the appearance of corpses in their shrouds but were only people lying in rows outside the house and its once gracious, now decayed portico – those who slept in the day were labourers who worked on night shifts, and those who slept at night were families that lived in the cracks and crevices of the building like so many rats, or lice, but came out for a little air after dark. Within the walls, sewing machines whirred, typewriters clacked, printing presses thumped, motor mechanics hammered at rusting automobiles, paint was splattered on tin and wood, chickens were plucked and slaughtered and, all the time, the single tap in the courtyard ran and ran over slabs of green and shining stones. Here women washed toppling mountains of pots and pans, filled buckets and kettles, scrubbed screaming children, bathed and washed their hair and carried on a seemingly endless war upon filth. The first sound of the morning, long before daybreak, was the chink of a metal pail set on the stone slab beneath the tap and then the rush of water as it filled. Late in the night when the last bit of washing was done, water still ran from the rag that was tied to the brass tap to prevent
splashing
and one might have imagined a perpetual stream ran through the courtyard. Yet nowhere could one see any sign of cleanliness – the tap only created a morass of mud and slime; children squatted anywhere to urinate or defecate; the washing did not turn the clothes white, only muddier. These clothes, that were washed daily and it seemed hourly, hung in long festoons from every window and balcony of the building, covering its mottled walls with flags – or shrouds – six-foot-long saris and dhotis forty inches wide. The whole building seemed to tremble and sway in every breeze as the garments flapped or floated or hung limp like the hide of an emaciated beast or the bedraggled feathers of a moulting bird.

Even when he had parted these curtains, entered the house, mounted the stairs, careful not to step on the beggars and lepers and prostitutes who inhabited every landing, and at last achieved the small cell that was his room, he had no sense of being walled away from the outer world as he had had in the camp. Here the world forced its way in without being asked: a hundred radios invaded it, either with the mournful songs so beloved of the Bengalis, full of regret, sorrow and sighs, or the rapid gunfire of news bulletins that marked the hours of the day and night. Always there was the nervous flutter of typewriters, the hum and whirr and clack of machinery. There were the inevitable sounds of quarrels and violence at night when the illicit toddy brewed in the closed sheds and garages and odd corners of the compound was bought and consumed; then wives were beaten, children threatened, or else the drunkards themselves abused and thrashed. (One of them howled customarily: ‘Beat me, beat me. I am so wicked, you must beat me!’) To sleep was only to know a tired semi-consciousness, stirred involuntarily by the sounds of human and insect life. Yes, that too, for in one corner of the compound mosquitoes bred in a still, scummy well and rose at dark to invade the house, defend itself as it might with the ringing of bells, the blowing of conch shells and the waving of joss sticks – the daily ceremony of dusk – and there devour its
inhabitants
till the early hours of the morning when they dropped off and flew sibilantly away.

In time his anonymity and the anonymity of his neighbours broke down, and identities, individualities were revealed.

Out in the compound a frail grey wisp of a woman in a widow’s white sari pottered about with a watering can, irrigating the trees she planted compulsively all over the compound, only to have them eaten by the goats and chickens or trampled by the motor mechanics or the football-playing children. Whenever she saw Baumgartner, she came to him – she was very light-skinned, with the papery whiteness of the Zoroastrian and she seemed drawn to his complexion – and quavered tearfully about the latest losses: ‘Six mangoes in a row I did plant, and today not one left – and last week my frangipani eaten by the buffaloes –’ while he nodded and nodded with weary sympathy. He watched her from his window as she stood over her wretched little servant boy with a surprising authority, ordering him to dig pits and plant the saplings she acquired from some mysterious nursery he could hardly believe existed in this city. Her doomed attempts to create a garden in this city-world awed him and horrified him by their persistence. Then he learnt – from a clerk who also sought him out more than he wished and tried to establish the bond of education by reading to him from the newspapers he carried around all day, and occasionally quoting poetry in a rhetorical thunder that sounded to Baumgartner uncannily like German – that she had once owned the house and still lived somewhere in its uppermost regions even after it had been sold and halved and quartered beneath her, and then the persistence seemed a mere habit of ownership. The clerk seemed to admire her proprietorial instinct but one who mocked it was a young man who lived in a kind of loft built above the landing outside Baumgartner’s room. After watching one of Baumgartner’s encounters with the landlady, he said sardonically, through his cigarette, ‘These people who own land – they think even the grass grows for them.’ ‘And it doesn’t?’
Baumgartner
asked, smiling. ‘No,’ he snapped, ‘the grass is the people’s, the land is the people’s.’ ‘Ah, a Marxist?’ Baumgartner queried, and the boy nodded.