Baumgartner's Bombay (25 page)

Sometimes he came down and asked Baumgartner for a match, then Baumgartner would offer him a cigarette as well. It turned out that he was not so young after all – had been involved in what he called, with dark pride, the ‘Alipore bombing case’ and been exiled to the Andaman islands for thirteen years – ‘But how old were you? A boy?’ Baumgartner asked, and the young man made a gesture of his hand by the waist to show how tall he had been then – and that was where he had learnt his Marxism. He laughed as he told Baumgartner, ‘All British are highly educated, we think, but we used to order Karl Marx, Trotsky, Lenin, anything we wanted, for our library and they would get for us. They didn’t know what they were giving us to read.’ He had not only infinite scorn for his erstwhile captors but also an implacable hatred. The day he discovered that Baumgartner was German, he lit up with admiration as if in the presence of a war hero. ‘But a Jew, a Jew, not a Nazi,’ Baumgartner tried to deflect his misplaced ardour but this meant nothing to Sushil who had renounced religion for politics and had no interest in Judaism; nor would he entertain any criticism of the German regime. ‘If they had defeated the British, then they would have helped Japan to drive them out of India. They are our friends, Japan and Germany.’ When Baumgartner stammered that they were not his friends, Sushil politely changed the subject, saying, ‘Now I am not so political, now I want to learn other things.’ He had learnt yoga in order to build up his body, and taken a course in radio mechanics. That was his greatest passion in life now and, released from the Andamans, he had set up an intricate array of radios in his loft in which the babble of a hundred voices thrummed, knitting themselves into a web of eery sound. Swinging himself up into the loft like a pilot into the cockpit of his aircraft, settling the ear-phones over his ears to emphasise this similarity, he would become engrossed as if taking off into space, bemused as a space-traveller, in a way that Baumgartner
found
enviable. From that abstract height he would occasionally smile at Baumgartner, say softly, ‘Tokyo radio’ of ‘Voice of Moscow’ and then his eyes would glaze over. Only sometimes his erstwhile friends would visit him, climb up after him, voices would be raised in argument, the air grow fraught in a way that would alarm Baumgartner. When they left, he would come to his door and call, ‘Sushil, is everything all right?’ and the boy would sigh, ‘These men – old friends – they won’t let me go. I want to listen to my radio, I want to learn more and more. Bombs, guns – those games I don’t want to play any more.’ ‘Games, Sushil?’ Another sigh. ‘Ah, bombing here, killing there. It goes on all the time – why ask me to join?’ Then he would settle the earphones over his thick black curls and cup his chin in his hand, pick up his pencil and notepad and seem to forget the earthbound world below.

So it might have continued if the city and pre-partition violence had not closed in upon his hiding-place. The nights were hideous with screams, gunfire, the sounds of rioting, the smell of burning. The days were strangely calm and empty. Baumgartner even went out sometimes, oppressed by the house, by his room, by the summer. There were times he felt he could not breathe the city air, that he was being suffocated, and then he would be filled with a panic to leave, to return to the camp and see if that orderly schoolboy world still stood, slip through the barbed wire and return to the barracks where he had lived in austerity and simplicity that had seemed his natural element – at least now, in retrospect, seemed his element. Then he found himself searching the streets for someone from that world with whom he might associate. He even wandered on to Park Street, the forbidden area of the past. Here, in normal daylight, he found himself staring in at the big plate-glass windows of Flury’s. As if in answer to his enquiry, he saw a group of blonde women having coffee at a table and imagined one of them was Annemarie. Her pale hair, her fine neck, her back to him – surely it was Annemarie? He stood there, waiting patiently – impatiently for her to turn.
When
she did, he saw of course it was not her. Annemarie would not have had coffee and cake in Flury’s. Nor should he. He too turned and left, hurried back to the nightmare house where he lived, to which he now belonged.

That night the house itself was engulfed by a riot. He woke to screams as he often had before and only turned on to his back, resignedly folding his hands over his chest and preparing to postpone sleep till the latest domestic quarrel had died down. But when guns were fired, he jumped to his feet and went to the window to see the ghosts in their white shrouds fleeing and running pell-mell as men in theatrically blood-soaked clothes entered through the gap in the wall with torches and knives, screaming those slogans of religious warfare that were raised everywhere now. The buffalo calf in the shed bawled in hysterical fear to its mother who bawled back. Footsteps thundered up the stairs from below and Baumgartner hurriedly moved his chair and bag against the door, trying to secure it against intruders. The loudest scream came from his landing, from the loft above it – a male scream, somehow more intolerable than a woman’s or a child’s. His heart hammering inside him, Baumgartner moved the chair away and opened the door to go out and see – and met the marauders as they leapt down from the loft and ran down the stairs past him. When he climbed up to the loft and called, ‘Sushil? Sushil?’ he saw the radio buff’s chair overturned and the boy lying face down on the floor. The blood streamed. Women came up the stairs, wailing. Pushing past them was the little landlady in white. She stood and stared at the corpse. ‘Tcch,’ she said, ‘I always knew this boy was bad.’ ‘Madam,’ Baumgartner stammered, ‘the boy is dead.’

In his sleep, in his dreams, the blood was Mutti’s, not the boy’s. Yet his mother – so small, weak – could not have spilt so much blood. Or had she? The blood ran, ran over the floor and down the stairs, soaking his feet which stood in it helplessly.

When he went to see if Habibullah was safe and unaffected by the night’s violence, he found the office empty, ransacked. A
beggar
picked through the rubble. Baumgartner asked him, in his cautious Bengali, ‘Where is he, the
sahib
, Habibullah?’ but did not understand the reply. Outside the morning street was normal, humdrum, except for the gutted buildings, the shattered glass and the smoke from the night’s fires which were after all commonplace now. Baumgartner felt himself overtaken by yet another war of yet another people. Done with the global war, the colonial war, only to be plunged into a religious war. Endless war. Eternal war. Twenty thousand people, the newspapers informed him, were killed in three days of violence in Calcutta. Muslims killed Hindus, Hindus Muslims. Baumgartner could not fathom it – to him they were Indians seen in a mass and, individually, Sushil the Marxist, Habibullah the trader. He wondered if Habibullah had fled to safety in East Bengal and not left it too late. He must not leave it till too late. He must take Habibullah’s advice, he knew, and leave for Bombay. He returned to his room, packed his bag, carried it down, went to Howrah Station – the rickshaw puller scuttled through the city as if in fear – and bought a ticket. He spent the intervening time in the railway rest room, unable to face the sight of the destroyed buildings or the panic-stricken population. Refugees from the city poured on to the station platform, filled it to overflowing with families and belongings, and in the end he had to fight through them, climb over them and claw past them on to the train that carried him to Bombay.

So Baumgartner came to Bombay. The glitter of the noon sun on the waves in the bay struck his eyes. It was reflected by the white walls of the houses along Marine Drive on which traffic rolled in an orderly way that suggested affluence and Westernisation of an order that Baumgartner had lost touch with in Calcutta. He was astonished by the way the streets sloped sharply and even curved; by the way houses were named, not numbered – all Europeanisms that he had forgotten, now brought back. He felt intimidated rather than reassured: he shrank, his eyes blinked. It made him realise how much a
native
he had become. Baumgartner, a native of Hindustan. He smiled, thinking of what Mü would have said to that. And yet he had not met a single snake other than in a snake-charmer’s basket on the city pavements – he must tell her that. But – he forgot constantly, again and again he stopped and was brought up against the fact he could not admit: he would never hear from her again, there would be no more communication. He wrote to people, to addresses he remembered; he never had a reply; all of Germany might have been wiped off the face of the earth. That made him sort out the matter of his papers, his passport, his nationality, and found himself become an Indian citizen, the holder of an Indian passport. Holding it, he wondered if it meant that he would now never leave India and realised that, for all that it was a travel document, it did.

It was Chimanlal who made it possible for him to stay, who provided the mooring – instantly, generously, sympathetically. He had had Habibullah’s letter, he said, but did not seem to require anyone’s recommendation; he acted according to his own instincts which were large, free, always hospitable. Putting aside his work, he took Baumgartner out to lunch. Himself eating only rice and yoghurt, he ordered for Baumgartner an excellent Parsi dish of mutton and dal at the Victory Club that looked out at the sandstone arch of the Gateway of India and the islands floating in the sea like upturned bowls of tan and ochre ceramic. The ships stood still on the sea, metallic and dart-shaped, but the boats bobbed lightheartedly up and down along the quay. There were still British soldiers in khaki swarming everywhere but Chimanlal said, with a clap of his hands, ‘Like this – they will go. Soon all will go and we will be left alone.’

‘You are sure?’

‘Of course.’ Chimanlal bounced up and down in his chair with confidence. ‘You should have seen – if you had been here in February, you would have seen – the naval strike. Here, Mr Bommgarter, right here, on the HMS
Talwar
. The ratings went on strike because British officers were insulting them
and
giving them poor food also. Next day, twenty-two more ships in the harbour went on strike, and the men in the Castle and Fort barracks also. They flew our tricolour on their masts, Mr Bommgarter, I wish you could have seen, it was so fine. Then the army arrived, and there was fighting in the barracks, and the ships were providing artillery, and bombers were going to destroy the fleet. All of us brought food for the brave ratings, Mr Bommgarter. I offered them everything I had. But the strike spread all over the city – CPI called for a general strike – and there was fighting in the streets. Nearby, Mr Bommgarter, in Parel and de Lisle Road. Oh, we were winning, we would have won – but what did the Congress do?’ He made a disgusted face. ‘Gandhi-ji in his white cap – he came and said, “No fighting, no violence.” And the ratings had to surrender, and it came to an end, our glorious revolt.’

Baumgartner made a vague, sympathetic gesture of his hands over the empty trays of food; he knew it was not for him, an outsider and a foreigner, to comment.

He did not need to; Chimanlal was ebullient again. ‘But they will have to go – soon, soon. Now they themselves are saying they will go, they cannot stay. So you will see our flag flying soon, Mr Bommgarter – British flag will go, Union Jack will go,
our
flag will fly instead from the top of the Red Fort, and we will not sing ‘God Save the King’, we will sing
our
own anthem written by our great poet Rabindranath. In Calcutta you must have heard of our great poet Rabindranath Tagore?’

Baumgartner nodded, but at the mention of Calcutta could not refrain from asking, ‘And the Muslims, Mr Chimanlal?’

Chimanlal gave him a surprised look. The delight on his face became tempered. ‘You are worrying about the
Muslims
, Mr Bommgarter?’

‘I am worried about Habibullah,’ Baumgartner admitted to that, no more. ‘He was so good, so kind to me. He gave me much business – before the war, before I went to the camp. But last time I went to the office – he was gone. The office was burnt – I think looted. Where did he go?’

‘Ah, my friend, you don’t need to worry about Habibullah. Habibullah is much cleverer than Hindu
goondas
, Hindu thugs. He will have taken all his wealth with him – he must be in Dacca now, the home of his ancestors, happy and safe.’

‘You think so?’ Baumgartner looked doubtful. He had no reason to believe in such fairy-tale escapes. ‘And his family?’

‘His family also,’ Chimanlal assured him in his sunny manner. He did not allow any cloud near him, repelled them by his warmth and the sunshine of his optimism, as Baumgartner was to learn over the years. Now he dipped his fingers in a bowl of water and wiped them desultorily. ‘And Habibullah sent you to me, eh? We are going to do business together, eh?’

Baumgartner had his doubts, his uncertainties, but Chimanlal never entertained any. Baumgartner could not discover why he took up a homeless foreigner, not even one with the prestige of having been an erstwhile ruler, a part of the colonial might and power, but simply a stray, a pariah in the eyes of the raj, clearly the most powerless of all. Perhaps Chimanlal had a sense of history after all and felt it morally just to support someone who had been on the right side during the war, a fellow-enemy of the British. But such a motivation crumbled when Baumgartner learnt how hazy an interest Chimanlal really had in politics and history. Chimanlal had made his first fortune, he confessed, in the family’s jewellery business, through another Jew, a Russian who had fled from the Bolsheviks by way of China and, landing in a small port on the coast of Gujarat where Chimanlal’s family had its base, sold that family the gems he had brought in the linings of his jacket, gems he said had belonged to the Czar and Czarina of his abandoned land, and that Chimanlal was able to sell, on his behalf, to the Nizam of Hyderabad, earning a considerable commission for himself. Baumgartner wondered briefly if the fact that he had made this fortune through a Jew had influenced his generous behaviour towards Baumgartner, but found out later that Chimanlal’s thinking was of a much more ignorant, uninformed and mercenary order. Who was that Russian Jew?
Baumgartner
questioned. Where had he come from, how did he come into the possession of the Czar’s jewels? Chimanlal was embarrassed, could not answer. He thought the man’s name was Gin – Gin – Bug, something like that. Ginzburg? Baumgartner asked. Yes, yes, Ginzburg, came from Russia. Where in Russia? Chimanlal smiled, spread his hands, showed that they were empty of information. ‘I am not educated much,’ he told Baumgartner.