No Country: A Novel (21 page)

“Did you hurt yourself, child?” asked a young lady in a white dress.

“What’s your name?” asked another woman, with blond hair and a lined face. Her fingers glittered with stone rings.

“I am Robert Patrick Aherne, sir, and I am not hurt at all.” I wanted to blurt out right then that I planned to be a soldier.

“Where is your father, Robert Patrick Aherne?” The old lady frowned. “Here?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, feeling very grown-up. “My father is Brendan Aherne. He is at home.” I added, “We live on Elliot Road.”

“Elliot Road, did you say?” snorted the old lady, glaring at the army officer. “Lieutenant Harrison, am I to understand that Anglo-Indians are coming here today?” The lady in white began to move away. The army man looked discomfited and absently put his palm on my head as I looked up at them.

“He’s just a child,” he began.

Her eyes blazed as she shook her shiny yellow head, and I watched fascinated as she licked her grey teeth with a slippery pink
tongue. Her neck was mottled, and her cheeks splotchy with rage.
Chee Chee
, she hissed at me.
“Chaalo idhaar se.”
Get away from here, it meant in Hindustani. I knew that.

“Harrison!” she said.

The army man picked me up under my arms and swung me back into my father’s brougham. Sonu-amma was staring openmouthed in fright, her hands clutching me. The army man would not meet my eyes, but pressed a coin in my palm, without saying a word. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down above his regimental collar with its gold fretwork.

“It’s for Europeans only,” he muttered. I don’t know if he said this to me, to Sonu-amma, or to himself. Even before the brougham moved off, I flung away the coin in anger. A number of brown beggar children appeared from nowhere and began a screaming fight over the coin, right in front of the flower-decked entrance. The last I saw of them was the army man kicking about in a frenzy, trying to get the nimble, laughing children of the streets away from the grand gate.

After all these years, I still remember the sting.

Then I saw the soldiers marching in formation. Our brougham had to stand aside to let them pass. I did not know then that the Great War of 1914 had just been declared and this was its celebration. The bagpipes were strident.

I have often thought since then of the numberless columns of Indian soldiers in formation behind their British officers, many of them Irish, who died of bullets, poison gas, or despair, in soggy trenches and bomb-cratered fields, in places with unfamiliar names like Ypres, Passchaendale, and Verdun, beginning their first march towards death here in Calcutta. Those who survived would return to a different world, both changed irretrievably.

At home that evening, when Sonu-amma told my father what had happened, he called me into his study. I could see he was upset.

“It is their army. It is their war, Son,” he said.

“I want to be a soldier,” I wailed.

He looked completely taken aback. After a while he asked, “Why?”

“I want to be a soldier so I can wear a uniform,” I said. It seemed impossible that he could not understand.

“Why would you want to kill anybody?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled. I remembered feeling my anger turn against him for making me feel foolish. Young as I was, I wanted to have authority, power over others. This was what I felt in the playing fields of my school, even in our boyish games and scuffles.

But this was the moment, seven decades ago, when I began to understand not just my place as an Anglo-Indian, but also that my father and I were different. I stood sullen and silent in his study, a baffled boy, not yet ten.

•  •  •

T
HE NEXT DAY
he surprised me with a full set of illustrated books of Robert Louis Stevenson. I decided to read deep into the night, and my father let me. I knew this was my father’s way to comfort me. I called him Baba, in the Bengali manner, rather than Daddy or Papa as most Anglo-Indians did. It was what my father had wanted.

After what had happened to me at the Strand, Baba began to explain that when the English, and especially the Irish, had first
come to India in the eighteenth and earlier parts of the nineteenth centuries as soldiers or clerks of the East India Company with little hope of bringing their women, the church encouraged marriage with native converts, preferring that to concubinage and unprovided children. Many, including English aristocrats, married Indian women.

“What is concubinage?” I asked him.

I remember how he stumbled about to explain, then decided to recite the roster of famous Anglo-Indian names: Sir Eyre Coote, Clive’s assistant at the Battle of Plassey, loved and honoured his Indian wife; General Hearsey, who was Scottish and Indian—as was the great James Skinner, founder of India’s best cavalry regiment; and Anglo-Indian Lord Roberts, who later became supreme Commander of the British Forces in Africa.

“Then there was Lord Liverpool, Britain’s Prime Minister, whose maternal grandmother was an Indian woman from right here in Calcutta—just as yours was! We Anglo-Indians,” concluded my father, “well, we used to think ourselves pillars of the Queen’s Indian empire.”

“We don’t now?” I asked. “What happened?”

“History,” he said, fiddling with his pipe. I waited for him to explain.

“When Creoles in the West Indies revolted and slaughtered English colonists sixty years ago, there spread distrust for people with mixed blood.” He stopped briefly. “Half-castes and half-breeds they were called now, synonymous with treachery. English officials from those islands brought their views here.”

“But didn’t the English know better?” I asked indignantly.

“There were now other factors too, Robert. Cheap and fast steamers through the new Suez Canal,” said my father, putting
down his pipe. “Missionaries came in droves. Widows and daughters from England began arriving at the ports—Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. The ‘Fishing Fleet’ they were called, and received an official allowance for a year, after which the unwed were shipped back, now called ‘Returned Empty.’ The army arranged balls, and it became a great social falling-off now if the English married, not a white woman from Oxney or Ealing, but a native bride. Missionaries openly said that marrying us would sully Anglo-Saxon purity.”

“But doesn’t the Bible say all people are equal in God’s eyes? You said that too.”

“No matter, Son. The English rail against Hindu idolatry and its caste system in the churches, and then set up their own pantheon of gods. They have their own caste system, as full of taboos as any to be found in the remotest Indian village.”

“But what about the Irish?” I protested.

“They have perched their own place on that caste ladder. You see, the Irish joined the army and the police in such numbers that they were a social force to reckon with. They are discreetly sneered at by the English, but they all close ranks and hold themselves aloof from boxwallahs.”

I had heard of boxwallahs. “Do boxwallahs carry boxes on their back? I have never seen any of them.”

My father laughed aloud. “No, no, Son, they are in business, you know, tradespeople from the likes of Brixton or Camberwell, or Jewish merchants from Europe and Syria, or Armenian traders.”

“But they are all hardworking people!”

“It’s all snobbery and snootery, Robert. These are people who daily have to haggle and rub shoulders with Indians in the rough
and tumble of local markets. And here’s another funny thing, Robert, if you think this sort of thing funny: You know that Calcutta is lighted with electricity supplied by Mr. Ezra, the Jewish merchant? Indians in one neighbourhood named a street after him.”

“Oh yes, and we’ve been to Ezra Street, I remember.”

“Mr. Ezra wasn’t allowed inside the British clubs.”

“Is that why you gave up on your father’s business?” I interrupted him. “Grandpa traded with the Indians, but not you, because you do not want to be called a boxwallah?”

My father looked stricken. He shook his head slowly, as if to clear it. I felt for a second that I had slapped him.

He looked directly into my eyes, “I have no head for business, Son. I did try. My father was a big enough man not to hold it against me. I am sorry I disappoint you, Robert. My father had never a word of disrespect for his mother, who kept a small shop. Parents owe their children no more than they can afford.”

I felt quarrelsome and small. My father was right, but I resented his being so.

•  •  •

M
Y SEVENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD GRANDFATHER
Padraig Aherne had died in his sleep in 1907 when I was only two, but he was ever-present in my father’s stories.

He married my Bengali grandmother Kalidasi late, many years after he had built this house on Elliot Road where I lived with my father, Brendan. She had been born into an orthodox Brahmin family. Married at seven, widowed at nine, she did not much remember her marriage or the groom—since a bride is sent to her husband’s home only at puberty, my father recounted. She was
in her twenties and my grandfather Padraig almost fifty when he heard her singing voice behind a courtyard wall. How they managed to meet is one of our family mysteries, but they fell in love and she eloped.

Grandfather Padraig, who seemed to like breaking rules, offered to convert to Hinduism. That caused a furor among the British, and he was told severely by Hindu priests that nobody becomes a Hindu: You can only be born one. Besides, Hindus did not allow widow remarriage. Padraig had managed to offend both Christians and Hindus with his usual panache. My grandmother became a Christian instead, in a private ceremony conducted by Reverend Bandopadhyay. So the conversion and marriage ceremonies were solemnized and celebrated by outcasts, which must have suited my fiery Irish grandfather perfectly.

Kalidasi’s Hindu family cut her off—as if she were dead. Patrick gave her the Christian name Euphonia when she insisted upon one at her conversion. I do not know what he called her at home, Kalidasi or Euphonia. He adored her, said my father.

Years after her conversion, Kalidasi used to go under veils to a temple during the Puja festival and take my father along and offer flowers and
laddoos
; her pet name for her son was Brindaban. “One god or many gods,” Padraig would chuckle, “let them sort it out among themselves without getting us humans involved, or have us kill each other on their behalf. The more powerful some people think their god is, the more they have to do the killing for that particular almighty.”

My grandfather kept fine horses which were stabled nearby, at Chitpur, but my father told me that my grandmother did not enjoy taking our brougham along the Esplanade or next to Fort William, where the English walked stiffly with their ladies and raised their
hats like wind-up toys when they passed their compatriots. No one raised his hat to my grandmother Kalidasi’s carriage, which was far grander than most of theirs, because she was a black Hindu woman. The English went to take the air, trying to decide whom they might acknowledge and who was beyond the pale, but Kalidasi went to the Strand when she felt the need to look at the sacred Ganges. She died of influenza when my father was twenty-four.

The following year Grandpa Padraig sent my father to Bombay, presumably to learn about business from his friend, the Parsee businessman Cowasjee, out from under his long shadow. There, my father met and married my mother, Susannah Estelle O’Reilly, the daughter of Michael Edward O’Reilly, an elderly Anglo-Indian violin teacher. He returned to Calcutta with a great reverence for Mozart, Telemann, and Purcell, loads of sheet music, and his young wife, but with little sense of how businesses are run. Apparently my grandfather Padraig doted on his young daughter-in-law, and the house was a happy place again, until my mother Susannah died of something called puerperal fever four years later, soon after my birth.

Sometimes I used to say her full name to myself when I played alone in our backyard, a private chant: “Susannah Estelle O’Reilly Aherne.” I used to peer into my mother’s portrait, her complexion lit by some gentle lamp within her, fascinated by her long eyelashes and perfect eyebrows.

I also had a maternal uncle, Raphael Iain O’Reilly, but I remember seeing him only twice in my life. He had a freckled bald head and enormous ginger eyebrows and whiskers. He ran a business exporting grain and fruits from the Punjab through the port of Karachi to Mombasa, Aden, and other places. With no reference to my birthdays, which he generally forgot, Uncle Rafe would
send me strange gifts: a mechanical clown with terrifying eyes; an elaborate Arabian maze puzzle inlaid with ebony and pearls; and a razor-sharp Afghan dagger with an agate-encrusted sheath—an odd gift for a seven-year-old.

My father had my grandmother Kalidasi’s serene face, delicate hands, and large brown eyes. His hair was greying prematurely, and he wore thick glasses and spoke, everyone said, with a lilt in my grandfather’s Irish manner. He was very attentive to his fine Darjeeling and Oolong teas, his briar and meerschaum pipes, his Burleigh or Latakia tobaccos, his sheet music and books, especially the ones of painting reproductions and photography of landscapes. He loved music, and played his violin—quite beautifully, I thought—or read scores, and immersed himself in his books while he settled into a contemplative middle age as I was growing up.

When the Great War of 1914 came, many people like my friend Krikor’s father, Mr. Aratoon, made quick fortunes in wartime trade, but our family business of timber and grain export went from the brisk gallop of my grandfather Padraig’s days to a limp, and soon was knackered. Mr. Aratoon bought our horses and the brougham. My father seemed indifferent to the losses. I missed our horses, George and Eddie.

Now Krikor, who lived around the corner, was driven to school in our old brougham, while I walked there. On the first day Krikor offered me a ride back home, and I hit him on the nose, making it bleed, as if my father’s business ineptitude had been compensated by that blow. Krikor did not complain at school or to his father. The next day, after Krikor was driven to school, I made up a jingle: