Cedilla (44 page)

Mum’s sense of drama was still rudimentary – she didn’t yet feel entitled to make any sort of scene. Granny had drummed into her the idea that anyone who raised his or her voice in an argument was wrong by definition. If ever Granny broke that rule and raised her voice herself, without stopping being right, other people were normally too alarmed to find the inconsistency.

From her position in the back seat, head thrust forward and turned round, she may even have felt that I was being stubborn in not meeting her gaze – being stiff-necked, as people say. She said, ‘Listen, JJ. It’s not too late to call this whole trip off. There’s no shame in admitting you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. We can just turn round and go home. No one will think the less of you. Your father and I will never mention it again. Dad can get you a ticket for somewhere nearer and just as nice.’

‘It’s not a trip, it’s a pilgrimage. I’m not going there because it’s
nice
!’ Perhaps this wasn’t the most tactful line to take, but I was beginning to feel genuinely claustrophobic about Mum’s need to control me. How threatened she was by hints of independence on my part! And I suppose, seeing it from her point of view, she had her reasons: what was the meaning of her life, unless it was to make mine possible? She had forged an identity for herself by chaining us together.

I wonder what would have happened if I had given in to the pressure, the parental front united for once. I can imagine Mum breaking out the tin of Roses from my case right away (I’d forgotten to charge Peter with their removal), passing them round in hysterical relief and stuffing her own cheeks with sweets, tears running down her face in her gratitude for the reprieve she’d won herself, by staving off my maturity. After that, she might have signalled Dad to pull over again, and vomited serenely in the bushes. Beyond that, I can’t guess. I wonder if I would even have taken up my place at Cambridge, if I’d lost the battle for India.

Before I said yes to their offer of a lift, I had made Mum and Dad promise they wouldn’t wait until my plane took off. Otherwise, I told them, I would take the Mini and let it take its chances for five weeks in the car park. They hung around rather helplessly after they’d helped me check my case in until I reminded Dad of his promise, and of how much he hated goodbyes and all that emotional claptrap. After that he led Mum away, though he did explore the furthest tender reaches of his vocabulary by calling me ‘Chicken’ when he patted me goodbye.

In 1970 Air India advertised itself as
The Airline that Treats You Like
a Maharajah
, and I can’t argue with that on the basis of its performance that year. Of course I can’t vouch for anything but First Class. Ladies in saris started serving me dainties almost immediately. Caviar, smoked salmon,
pâté de foie gras
, all these got the thumbs-down from me, but they did a nice line in spicy nuts, and there was pink champagne, served in proper fluty glasses, which suit my hands better than any other shape.

Pinkness was a definite theme, so that the first-class cabin had almost the feel of a boudoir. There were pretty pink tablecloths and proper napkins. Luxury seemed to be a female preoccupation, though in all those hours I only glimpsed one or two Maharanis in First Class.

The ladies in saris seemed a little disappointed that I wasn’t going to order a nice juicy steak, which was what Maharajas with my skin tone normally plumped for. That must have been a major part of their training, to offer taboo fare without showing disgust, up above the clouds where the cold international air strips scruples away.

My nearest Maharajah (as pale-complected as me) was a little distance away, thanks to the luxurious width of the seats, but I could see that he was making more work for the staff than I was. They couldn’t do enough for him. He had loosened his tie, a procedure I’ve never managed to understand. Obviously I’m not the person to ask about the finer points of formal dressing, but doesn’t that produce the worst of both worlds, encumbrance without the faintest possibility of elegance?

The ladies in saris kept popping juicy things into the beak of this burly cuckoo. I suppose
pâté de foie gras
is juicy – I have no plans to find out. His fantasy of luxury was clear, that he should be catered to as intensively as possible, to get the maximum value out of every costly minute (costly to his employers, I imagined, rather than to him personally), even if the unnaturally accelerated intake of food and drink made him go very red and sweaty in the face.

My notion of luxury was very different, and I was living it out very fully. Mostly I waved the attentions of the ladies in saris away, I gave little shakes of the head. I would graciously accept snacks from time to time, perhaps a small bowl of pilaff, and a little light topping-up of my elegant glass, but I declined the immoderacy of a full meal.

The theatrical show the cabin staff put on for my neighbour began to seem actively oppressive to me. I had seen similar rituals performed at the Compleat Angler, but everything looked very different at twenty-five thousand feet and six hundred miles an hour. A steward in a tunic came pushing a trolley before him, then reverently removed its polished metal cover to reveal a slab of roasted flesh, which he then carved with the gravest ceremony on to my neighbour’s plate. He made great play of tossing salad high in the air, virtually juggling it with adroit tongs, so that the dressed leaves in their tumbling came within inches of colliding with the ceiling panels (necessarily low),
where they would have left faint imprints flavoured with garlic and mustard.

This should have seemed merely droll, but for me it had a nightmarish aspect. The flushed businessman being fed so relentlessly seemed to be on the receiving end of a torture rather than a treat. It was as if I was being given a vision of his karma, a terrible locked pattern like a recurring equation, in which he was alternately a goose being force-fed grain until its liver slowly exploded inside it, and a man being force-fed that liver.

My own experience of force-feeding was modest, extending only to the time at Vulcan when the demonic matron Judy Brisby had stuffed congealing pilchards into my mouth and held my nose, but it had left its mark. I felt the sort of shiver which Mum always interpreted as a goose walking over her grave – in this case a goose that wanted the return of its liver, rudely confiscated, pressed in jelly, and sold on.

All this restaurant pantomime was no more than a game of status, disconnected from any matter of appetite. The stewards might just as well have spared my neighbour the labour of greed by placing in front of him a gorgeously illuminated calligraphic parchment reading:
Mere feet behind you, screened by curtains and the impalpable screens of
caste, tourists, families and lesser businessmen are wrestling with sachets of
salad cream and trying to unpeel slimy layers of cold meat from the bottom of a
plastic tray, or else peering with distaste at bowls of sloppy curry … and you,
perhaps, honoured sir, would care for a cheese and pickle sandwich (freshly
made of course)? We have tomatoes!

As it was, the staff were presumably struggling in a tiny galley just out of sight, trying not to bump into each other, the steward plying a blow-torch to give the surface of the roast the appropriate savoury blisters, one of the ladies in saris pulling the leaves off a dishevelled lettuce, rinsing them over a miniature sink with water poured carefully from a bottle.

My fantasy, of course, was that in the middle of all this finicky drudgery one attendant would say to the other, ‘If only they were all like the little chap! He’s no trouble at all …’ Only in these supremely
artificial circumstances could I bask in the luxury of being ‘no trouble’. Normally it isn’t an option for me to be no trouble. I can only hope to be worth the trouble I cause.

I resolved to remember the name of the champagne, so that I could ask Granny if it was a good make. Moët et Chandon. It seemed nice. I’d have to ask her without any men around, otherwise she would defer to their judgement, pretend not to know the names of brands, and refer to the drink itself, so lively in its molecular traffic, simply as ‘fizz’. Somebody behind me, another lucky soul reincarnated for a few hours as a Maharajah, got the hiccups. Shortly afterwards so did I, whether because of champagne, altitude, suggestibility or some combination of the three. It struck me that since the state airline was part of the government of India, the country itself had paid my travelling expenses. Not only that, India had given me the First Class treatment. I was much more than a tourist, and in a special category even as a pilgrim. I was a national guest, as I lolled above the clouds in a cloud of hiccups, nicely flustered by fizz.

For me the experience of air travel was one of a marvellous levelling. Up there in the air, as I realised, we’re all the same. The plane is a big box full of people who can do nothing for themselves. It’s not just me. We passengers displayed our caste marks less legibly than usual. If I needed more help than my fellows to go to the toilet, then it wasn’t much. I was calm even when the plane lurched in turbulence and my fellow-travellers murmured anxiously. I was at an advantage. I’d had plenty of practice at sitting still.

The only disadvantage was visual. My eyes work reasonably well, but I’m partially sighted all the same. I’m partially sighted on planes because I don’t have a view even if I have a window seat. At best, with my flexibility at its maximum, I can look out but not down, and down (when you’re many thousands of Maya-feet up in the air) is where the view is.

The food came in small portions at short intervals, which is just what this body likes. Eventually the hiccups stopped and I dozed off. When I woke I was in a panic. I was convinced that the plane had landed at Bombay, and somehow I had slept through the whole thing, so that the plane had taken off again and I was now on my way somewhere else. I called the stewardess for reassurance. She managed
the same beautifully measured smile as she had when she had poured my champagne. She told me there were still three hours to go.

What in a semi-conscious state I had interpreted as my missing my stop, as if this was that other exotic mode of travel, a bus, must have been our Boeing 707 landing in Bah. rain, a detail of its itinerary which I had somehow forgotten. I was sorry to have missed the ‘reality’ of Bah. rain since I liked the name so much with its diacritical fleck, the dot under the
h
like a stowaway clinging to the undercarriage of the word.

Now, suddenly, I found I had run out of patience. Those three hours were harder to live through than the years I had spent in bed forbidden to move. I thought that I would go mad, now that I was definitely moving, and still not getting where I wanted to go. I didn’t enjoy the way my life seemed to offer an endless cumulative proof of Zeno’s paradox, that the arrow will never reach the target, since it must cover half the distance, and then half that, then half
that
… Patience is only tenderness in its chronological expression. At this point I had no time-tenderness left.

In my mind I tried to knock off the
o
-apostrophe-
s
to turn what was blocking my path into a more congenial Zen paradox, the one about the Zen master who always hits the target although (
because!
) he doesn’t bother to look and is wholly indifferent to the result. Then all I had to do was become indifferent, all of a sudden, to everything I’d struggled for all my life.

I didn’t see my gormandising co-Maharajah again after Beirut. Perhaps that was as far as he was travelling, or perhaps he was sleeping it off. Or else vomiting it out.

Before we landed at Bombay I was told the drill. I should remain in my seat while the other passengers ‘deplaned’. After I had myself deplaned, of course, I would re-emplane for Madras. I was transplaning.

On hand for the deplanement was an attractive young man in white trousers and jacket, an Air India official of some sort who was helpfully holding on to a child whose mother was struggling to organise herself. He offered to take my carrier bag for me when everything was arranged for this little family and he had a hand free.

Dad had warned me to be careful in India, in fact anywhere outside
England. In England there were rules, but anywhere else it was mayhem and anarchy. You could trust no one. At Bombay airport, in my first conversation with an unknown Indian, I was unwilling to part with the bag – which was of course open to the world and contained my passport and traveller’s cheques, not to mention my wash bag, flannel and perspex bum-wiper. My doubts must have shown on my face, because the white-clothed official said sweetly that he was only trying to help. That was his job! He wasn’t going to run off with my bag, and he certainly didn’t want to make me uneasy. I should hold on to my bag if that made me happier. But when he was finished with his current task was there something else he could do for me?

Ramana Maharshi compared anxious seekers after self-realisation to people on a train insisting on carrying their luggage. Put everything down! It’s all coming with you! I wasn’t sure that a similar analogy applied to my situation, now that the plane had landed and I needed to take charge of my belongings again.

Meanwhile, what did I want this young man to do? I wanted to go on looking into his eyes, which meant I wanted him to carry me slung in his arms in the appropriate position. Not very practical. I certainly didn’t want him to push me in my wheelchair – that way I wouldn’t be able to see him. It would be better if he pushed someone else in a wheelchair, ahead of me, while someone else (someone less rewarding to look at) was pushing me.

My mouth tasted sour, of old champagne and bad sleep, and I realised it was high time I brushed my teeth. It was thinking about my wash bag, and whether to trust it to a stranger, which reminded me. I decided I should greet the Indian Nation with gleaming teeth and fresh minty breath, and this suddenly became a worry, that I might greet the Nation with an unworthy smile. The beautiful brown man in his white clothing had handed the toddler back to its mother, and was now turning his entire attention to helping me. I told him that I wanted to visit the lavatory and also to brush my teeth. He said ‘That is very fine.’ He pushed me in the wheelchair as far as the Gents, then helped me out of it.