Gweilo (4 page)

Shortly before eight o'clock every evening, and the sounding of the chimes for dinner, my mother would return to the cabin with two silver-plated bowls. One contained salted potato crisps, the other small, pickled gherkins speared by variously coloured satinized aluminium cocktail sticks shaped like arrows and bearing the ship's name. I had never come across either delicacy in England and saw them as harbingers of a new and wondrously strange life to come.

My mother detested Bombay. The streets were dirty, the beggars persistent and frequently mutilated, either by accident, design or disease. Like the beggars, the buildings were in various states of decrepitude. Even the monkeys in the public gardens were a ragged, flea-ridden lot. The liberty with which cattle wandered about, dunging where they chose, also disturbed her, not because they left steaming piles behind them but because no-one bothered to clean it up.

'It would not have happened before independence,' my father declared in hushed tones, perhaps in case the Algerian assassin had a cousin who had migrated eastwards. 'Standards were maintained.'

I asked what cows were doing wandering in the city and sitting in the middle of the road. In my experience, they lived in fields, slept in barns and ate grass.

'They're considered holy,' my mother said. 'People here worship them.'

This struck me as too bizarre to be true. She had to be pulling my leg. Yet, with each port of call, I was realizing the world was not as I had previously anticipated it.

'What about the elephants?' I enquired, having seen several walking sedately down a wide street, their mahouts balanced cross-legged on their necks and armed with a vicious-looking iron spike with which they intermittently jabbed their mount behind its ears. 'They mess in the road, too.'

'That, too, is disgusting, but in India,' she went on, 'elephants are beasts of burden. Like Nanny's milkman's horse.'

By my mother's reasoning mind, this somehow allowed the elephants their defecatory habits and expunged them of all lavatorial responsibility.

'Doesn't anyone grow roses in India?' I asked.

'What?' my father, who had not been following the conversation, responded sharply.

'Nanny puts the milkman's horse dung on her roses.'

My parents exchanged glances and we crossed the road. A passing car ran through a particularly fresh and fluid cow pat which spattered my father's shoes and indelibly stained his socks.

Later, I was shown – from a discreet distance – the Parsee death tower. My father explained to me that the Parsees did not bury their dead but left them for the vultures to eat. No sooner had I been told this than a flurry of plump crows took to the wing from the tower, several of them trailing ribbons of flesh from their beaks. They flew into a nearby park to squabble over their bounty, tugging it between them. One of them tossed a finger into the air for another to catch and fly off with, cawing jubilantly. Meanwhile, the vultures with their vulgar naked necks and hooked beaks perched in the flame-of-the-forest trees laden with scarlet blossoms, preening themselves and letting go pressurized streams of excrement on to the flowerbeds and monkeys below.

Yet the memory of Bombay that was to linger was that of a scrawny cat on the dock. It came each of the two evenings the
Corfu
was berthed alongside. Slinking out of the shadows, it moved with its belly flat to the ground like a leopard stalking a gazelle. Its ribs and shoulder blades protruded through its skin and it had a bloody, torn ear. I tossed it a gherkin which it ignored but it relished the potato crisps. The night before we were due to sail, I spent a long while trying to persuade my mother we should give it a good home but she resolutely refused to cave in. Finally, she allowed me one concession. In the warm dusk air, she led me down the gangway and along the quay where I placed two cocktail sausages and a pile of crisps on the quayside, to keep the cat going at least until its ear healed. I was then given my bath and climbed into my bunk just in time to watch through the porthole as an urchin detached himself from the shadows of the warehouse, ran to the food, crammed it into his mouth and fled.

In contrast, Colombo was paradisiacal. We arrived in the early afternoon, tying up to a mooring about a mile out. In the distance were beaches of coral sand fringed with palms. No sooner were the ship's engines shut down than a plethora of small naked boys no older than I was appeared in the sea off the starboard side. Bronzed and lithe, they must have swum out from the shore, for they had no boat. Like marine nymphs they cavorted in the sea, oblivious to the dangers of jelly fish or sharks. Shouting up to the passengers, they invited us to throw money down to them. As each coin struck the surface, it quickly sank. The boys, thrusting their bare brown bottoms into the air like ducks did their tails, dived after them. They missed not a coin but, as they were stark naked, I could not understand where they stored their booty.

'They put the coins in their mouths,' my mother said.

'What if they swallow them?' I asked, aghast at the thought.

'They don't,' my father said perfunctorily. 'If they do, they get beaten.'

After half an hour, a canoe arrived on the scene sculled by a wizened old Fagin and a girl of about twelve. The passengers, sensing the show was over, drifted away. The boys clambered into the boat, arched themselves forward and either spat out or retched up – I was not sure which – a substantial amount of small change. The old man rowed back to shore, the boys following him like brown porpoises.

That evening, we went ashore in a motorboat to a wooden jetty.

'Who are we going to see?' I enquired as the wavelets lapped against the side of the boat.

'Uncle Bud and Auntie Cis,' my father replied.

'But I don't have any uncles and aunts,' I remonstrated.

'Out here you call a man "uncle" if he is older and wiser than you,' my mother informed me. 'It's a term of respect.'

This seemed to me to be as bizarre as worshipping cows but I decided to keep that opinion to myself.

We were met by my newfound 'uncle' and 'aunt' who were, in fact, my father's cousin Cis and her husband, Bud. They piled us into a vast black Humber saloon and drove us to their home at Mount Lavinia, on the coast south of Colombo. It was, I realized as we made our way along a tree-lined road in the tropical twilight, swerving to avoid potholes, the first time I had set foot in a foreign land at night.

Our destination was a rambling bungalow with a wide veranda on three sides. The pillars supporting the roof were ornately carved with glaring, snarling demons. Upon the veranda stood rattan furniture and a number of collapsible roorkee chairs. Oil lamps hung from hooks or stood on the table. Drinks were served by an almost black-skinned, barefoot man in a patterned sarong. The whites of his eyes shone in the lamplight. My parents drank gin and tonic but I was given a tall glass filled with an opaque liquid in which were suspended small white flecks. I tentatively sipped it. It was exquisite, cooling and strangely sweet. I asked Uncle Bud what it was.

'Coconut juice,' he replied.

'Where do you buy it?' I enquired, hoping I might successfully implore my mother to purchase a supply.

'We don't,' Uncle Bud answered. A ripple of night breeze teasing the lanterns was followed by a dense thud in the darkness. 'There's your answer.'

Uncle Bud called the manservant who led me into the night to pick up a coconut the size of my head.

'Now you know why we don't park the cars under palm trees,' Uncle Bud declared. 'When I first came out, I did so. Once. Didn't think. Had to get a new bonnet shipped out from the UK. Terrible cost. . .'

When we had eaten, I sat on one of the roorkee chairs and looked out into the night. Bats the size of English thrushes wove their shadowy flight through the darkness, issuing barely audible squeaks. Atlas moths as large as my outspread hand, with antennae like feathers and translucent windows in their forewings, fluttered round the lamps. Tiny grasshopper-like insects no bigger than a grain of rice scorched themselves to death on the hot lamp glass while beetles the size of my first thumb joint flew into the circles of lamplight with a whirring clockwork sound but were wise to the heat and avoided it.

The most fascinating creatures to be drawn to the lamplight were the geckoes. No more than a finger long, these tiny lizards gathered round the ring of light to pick off any insect they felt they could handle. They stalked their prey, made a headlong dash at the last moment and delicately chewed on their quarry, a bulbous tongue folding wings and legs into their maws. When they swallowed, one could see the insect they had eaten in their stomachs, sometimes twitching to escape. Fascinated by them, I caught one in my cupped hands. It quickly escaped, however, shedding its tail which, for a minute or so, thrashed to and fro on the floorboards between my feet.

Sitting there, the adults talking in the background, I gradually became aware of someone standing just over my shoulder and turned. Beside my chair stood a beautiful Singhalese girl of about my age. Her eyes were as wide and as black as a starless night, her hair long and cascading like threads of jet upon her shoulders.

'Hello,' I said. 'I'm Martin.'

Her response was to put her hands together as if in prayer and bow to me. This formality over, she sat on the floor by my side and remained there unspeaking until we left for the ship. I tried several times to take her hand for I was utterly smitten by her, but she demurely shunned any physical contact with me.

Returning to the
Corfu
in the motorboat, I watched the shore recede with a curiously heavy heart. The quayside lights rippled on the sea with a clarity that I had never before seen. It was as if the balmy tropical air transformed it into something magical and I was leaving behind a singular, mystical place I knew I would never find again.

Two days out of Colombo, we sailed past the Great Nicobar Island, changed course, skirted the northern tip of Sumatra and headed east across the Strait of Malacca, bound for Penang. A small British colony founded in 1786, it consisted of an island bearing the main settlement of Georgetown and a parcel of the Malayan mainland opposite. Once again, we went ashore to walk along an esplanade, drink a lemonade that was ubiquitous east of Gibraltar and look at a number of sedately squat nineteenth-century colonial buildings, one with a tower, the only building above three storeys in the town. Sated with colonial architecture, my parents then decided we should take the funicular railway to the summit of Flagstaff Hill from which, my father declared, one was afforded a panoramic view of Georgetown. Quite why one should particularly seek out this vista escaped me but my father had his binoculars round his neck so perhaps he intended to ensure that the Imperial Japanese Navy was not poised for a sneak attack, as – he informed us several times – it had been in 1941.

The funicular consisted of a single carriage resembling the hybrid of a horse-box and a guard's tender with open windows. Moving at not much more than a walking pace, it took twenty minutes to arrive at its destination, passing over viaducts and through dense expanses of jungle.

Halfway up the mountain, the carriage slowed. As it did so, a troop of several dozen macaques materialized out of the luxuriant undergrowth and invaded it. The first we knew of this simian assault was the patter of their hands and feet on the roof: then they swung in through the windows into the carriage. Pandemonium broke loose. The monkeys grabbed what they could with the well-rehearsed proficiency of an experienced pirate boarding party. One seized on my father's binoculars and, finding them attached to him by a strap, proceeded to chew through the leather. My father batted it away with the back of his hand only to have a second monkey take its place. Another, to my considerable gratitude, grabbed my sombrero lampshade hat and made off with it into the tropical undergrowth.

'Let him have it!' my mother wailed. 'Let him have it!'

I willingly complied.

'Don't resist! Don't let them bite!' one of the other passengers from the
Corfu
yelled whilst at the same time lashing out with a black furled umbrella at a large male, and swearing in what I took to be a local language.