No Country: A Novel (27 page)

“But you drink that Dyer beer, don’t you?” I pointed out to my father.

“You’re right, Robert!” My father sprang up, summoning Mathur, who got all our provisions, and forthwith banned Dyer beer, popular throughout India, from our larder.

“Reginald Dyer now speaks as if he is Ireland-born; in turn, Irish-born O’Dwyer pretends to be English, and writes continually of his brilliant Oxford days and his First in Jurisprudence, of all things, from Balliol College. Tipperary O’Dwyer must be so irked by the inconvenient uprising for Irish independence!” My father raged over his morning tea, shaking his
Morning Post
. The colonial social comedy was making him ill. There was anger in the house nowadays, and a good bit of it was mine.

I wanted to grow up with certainties and hierarchy, like . . . like Tony Belletty, I thought guiltily. His dad did not rage over newspapers, turning right away to the sports pages.

A week later I found my father clutching a newspaper at arm’s length, as if holding a mirror before himself. His left hand was trembling slightly. “Now he has written an article for
The Globe,
” he muttered.

“Who has?” I asked, sleep still tendriling within me.

“Damned Dyer,” he said thickly.
India,
he read out,
India does not want self-government. She does not understand it. Any opposition to the British government is a perversion of good order, for British administration brings administration of justice to all men.

Suddenly my father drove his fist through the page, his face
pale with rage. He stood up abruptly, his chair falling with a clatter behind him, and without a glance he walked towards his room. “He is Irish?” he shouted, slamming the door after himself.

“Are you all right, Baba?” I asked outside his door after a while.

“Yes,” he groaned. He was in bed—quite unusual for him at this time of morning. “What happens to some Irishmen in India?” I heard him muttering.

Mathur came in and asked me what I wanted for dinner that day—soup, baked fish, salad and blancmange, or Bengali food. I told him to make cream of tomato soup, followed by mutton pilaf, then mangoes with fresh English cream—my favorite dessert.

As I sipped my tea, I realized that the very menu I had designed was part Indian, part European. The problem of identity was even part of our daily meals, I thought wryly.

I looked around for the newspaper my father had flung away. In the middle of the torn page was the now familiar picture of Reginald Dyer. He was pasty pale. A thin moustache crawled carefully above a weak mouth. His eyes were puffy and feline in a face that might have been handsome once. My father’s punch had torn him in two.

•  •  •

J
UST AS
I recall the spells of anger and its outbursts all these decades later, I also recollect the pains of love, lost or recalled, the people who had departed my life, my mother and grandmother who had remained pictures on walls all my life, or the one who turned into a different kind of picture altogether. I remember Estelle O’Brien Thompson.

If I do not speak of her now, it will be as if she never was. But
her name rings a gong through my being, and memory plays on my mind, a violin bow wringing an unfinished phrase of a melody that lingers in the corners of my heart.

I can close my eyes and see her as she enters the auditorium of the school where she steps in, and I, just eighteen, look at her, and am impaled by her fleeting glance. It is as if she stood in an aureole of light—and yet a part of me knows she did not, that it was only the dusty auditorium, hollow and full of echoes. I breathe with the utmost difficulty even today as I recall it. Call it heartbreak, soul-struck, what you will. But nobody in all human history has seen Estelle Thompson as I did at five o’clock in the evening, reading for a part in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
for the Calcutta Amateur Dramatic Society.
Estelle Thompson, Estelle Thompson.
I knew then that it was quite possible to die of love.

Nowadays, with a magnifying glass, I often pore over books of reproductions, for this is how I make do in my little world in Calcutta, never having gone to the fabled museums of Europe or New York. I look at the great paintings, imagining myself into these precious pages. I throw myself at the mercy of that space, breath bated, one eye closed, the other peering into the bulging magnifying glass, entering perhaps a
quattrocento
world, or within a gilded medieval story held inside a rectangle of palpable script, or some Biblical moment under some vast treed space before an unwinding panorama of rivers glinting into oblivion. The world is lambent under the painters’ gaze. I often imagined myself pacing over these vistas, wondering about the need for these deeply painted landscapes—for, surely, the casual eye is meant only to fix on the figures in the foreground: a grim St. Jerome holding the Book, an untrammeled virgin giving pap to a beautiful child, or a feral Baptist bowing before the Awaited One.

I slowly came to understand why the wide vistas are there. Nothing looks tawdry or mundane when viewed within a vast perspective. Even as the eye glances away from the painting, even before I turn the glossy stiffness of the page, I think how the miraculous and the mundane must exist side by side to make possible these ageless moments—these loci of inward radiance—surrounded by the everyday earth and light. They become a pentimento in my memories, so that the unforgettable can be held in the palm of memory.

What would happen if we remembered everything? What would our world become under the terror of such accumulation? Every sunrise blessedly dries the damp spots of some previous unbearable rain, and the smudges take the place of the shocked midnight foot coming down upon a floor terrifyingly afloat in water. We need the vistas, I decided. The Old Masters knew the reasons of the heart and what it can bear in this world of ours.

I take stock at this far end of my life, sitting in my shuttered study in this crumbling monsoon-tormented house on Elliot Road. And if anyone should scoff—what does a half-breed policeman from a dead empire know about any of these matters?—I can only turn my cheek for other insults to follow. Half-caste I am. Who is not? There is enough difference between any man and any woman that their offspring will be just that, a hybrid. And as a policeman, I indulged my curiosity under the aegis of a bullying empire. What I had learnt about life and the subterfuges of the human heart would be grist for many a raconteur.

But one thing I cannot explain, and look for explanations in the great paintings, in my readings, in the everydayness of existence as years go by: What is the cause of love? I seem doomed never to know the answer, just as I do not understand the mystery
of breath or sight. I think of Estelle Thompson and try to put my life into a vast perspective to make that memory bearable. I do not know if I succeed, all these years later. I am alive. That has to mean something.

•  •  •

S
O MANY
A
NGLO
-I
NDIANS
attempted all our waking hours to be English, yet at some turn in the street, the glance of some Englishman coming out of a shop or a carriage clearly meant
“Chhee-chhee,”
or local Hindus sneering
“Anglo,”
making us aware by that half-word what we were not, fully. But onstage, I could let myself be reinvented. Tony had talked me into auditioning for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Inside the yawning school auditorium, with its cobweb-ridden rafters, we shed our own identities, our tongue-tied selves. I was chosen to play Bottom, and wore my ass’s head and turned into another half-creature: half man, half ass. I became English in a stage-land that was and was not England—a Greece that was not Greece—no country.

I could not take my eyes off Estelle, looking away with a sudden awkwardness if she glanced at me. But from behind my unwieldy mask, I could look at her, unobserved. My Titania, when she spoke, made my ass’s head swoon. She spoke what she thought was a queenly English, a drawl imitated from the wives of English clerks shopping among the warrens of Hogg Market. But when Estelle spoke, the accent became unlike the tawdry original, for there was that in her voice that made it a little outlandish, something hard to place, mysterious.

I learnt my lines and had no problem saying them to my fellow actors, but time and time again, when I had to speak them to Estelle,
I would look into her violet eyes and begin to fumble. I could feel blood rush to my face and words becoming a blur, until one day, as I ground my teeth at the
heh heh
braying of Tony Belletty and was about to spin around to face him angrily, I felt a cool palm on my arm.

“Robert,” Estelle said in a whisper, leading me away to a corner of the stage, “we’ll say our lines alone.”

Mr. O’Brien, the Anglo-Indian director, nodded. She sat at the very edge, while I sat on the scuffed stairs, at her feet. I looked up at her, lost in a way I had not thought possible, unaware what my eyes gave away.

Then, on a Tuesday exactly nine days later, after a long rehearsal, I went behind the front curtain and struggled to take off my mask. Titania came and helped me. When I had the head off, maskless, naked, my awkwardness returned to me. Estelle picked up the mask from my hands, and kissed it on its ridiculous mouth—as she had done during the rehearsal. What came over me I will never know. Leaning forward, blood pounding at my temples, I kissed her mouth and felt her tongue move on mine. The mask dropped to the ground as she held my face between her palms and kissed me deeply. Then she pulled away, looking at me, and chuckled. “First kiss?”

I wanted to boast that I was much-kissed, experienced in the ways of the world, but I was tongue-tied, and the truth was out. “Sweet boy,” she said, as if she were far older. I towered over her, but was a small bird in her hands.

“You may call me Queenie,” she said.

All these years later I can still remember that moment perfectly, the down on her arms, her tongue on mine, my palm on the swell of her breast, the dizzy spin of the universe called Estelle behind my closed eyes. A kiss was never like this, ever before, ever after.

By the time I had replaced the ass-head in the props closet, she had left. Tony came in and slapped me heartily on my back, but I shrugged him off irritably.

“Our football captain’s in a daze, Mr. O’Brien, heh-heh.” The director, checking his notes, glanced at us absently. “Terrible, you know,” continued Tony, “how her dad was killed.” I stared at Tony, who prattled on. Estelle told Cheryl Demeder that he died in a hunting accident. Shot.”

“Really?” Mr. O’Brien said in surprise. “She told me he died climbing the Alps.”

“He was pure pukka English,” Tony said reverently.

“Her mother?” I could not help myself.

“Estelle came as a poor student supported by the Foundation from Bombay.”

“Her mother?” I asked again.

Mr. O’Brien shook his head. I could not quite fathom what I felt, or why it was of any importance to me. Was I drawn to her because she was English? A part of me brusquely rejected the thought. But I realized also that it was only a part of me.

•  •  •

A
LL THROUGH THE
next ten weeks during and after the rehearsals, I spent time with Queenie. She did not talk about herself. She had an odd power of turning the flow of words so that others spoke of themselves. I told her of my father, of Uncle Rafe, and then with greater difficulty about Nathwa and my car, and what had happened at the Bagh. She was the first person in whom I confided everything, even about my motherless, womanless home. But I sensed that she held a vital part of herself secret, as if to tell would mean the end of what made her live.

After the rehearsals, Queenie had permitted me to walk with her, back to the street where she lived. After the play was staged, we had no more official reason to see each other.

Now it became a secret treasure map of my own within my native city. I would walk along the familiar pavements of Park Street, wander beyond the Albion Cinema House, turn at the Grand Opera House, go past Firpo’s restaurant to 15 Lindsay Street, where I had seen her enter, hoping to run into her.

I would stand for hours, leaning against the street-lamp at the corner of Queenie’s street. Perhaps she would look out her window and see me. Would she guess that I kept my vigil, afternoon after blazing afternoon, under the Calcutta sun? I could never bring myself to take the few steps to her doorstep.

And then one evening, at the end of a week’s vigil, just as I was about to turn back wearily to go home, head humming with the thought of Queenie—imagining her in bed, turning carelessly in her afternoon siesta, hair rumpled, a little sweat on her parted upper lip—I was startled to see her front door open. I stood, heart-stopped. She came right up to me, smiling, and held my hand between her palms, showing no surprise at all.

She was dressed in a floral print, her splendid dark hair setting off her delicate face. I could see the coral of her lips, and her eyes were luminous, as if it were one of the happiest days of her life. I barely noticed the maid who held the door open for her. Something about her tugged at my attention, but I only had eyes for Queenie.

“Dear Robert.” Queenie smiled. She let my hands go, and turned about, her skirt swirling. “Take me to the bioscope.”

I nodded, though I had not a
paisa
with me. The Elphinstone Picture Palace was a little farther down the street, and Queenie put
her arm through mine. I held her palm as it lay on the cradle of my elbow. I worried that she would hear the pounding in my chest as we walked. Beyond the potted plants of the elegant Elphinstone lobby, the blue spread of the carpet was spangled with stars, and the elongated motif of a bouquet stretched up the stairs and into the bioscope hall. I also saw Mr. Edward Dorsey, its Anglo-Indian manager, with his neatly brushed hair parted in the middle, a maroon kerchief folded in his breast pocket. His nickname, I knew, was Tiddly.

A balding Englishman, escorting a thin Englishwoman with a brown mole on her neck, walked past me, flicking away his cigarette stub as he strode into the lobby. He turned to the manager, saying casually, “I’ll have my office boy bring you the rupees tomorrow, Dorsey,” and sauntered in. The manager bowed deeply, his grey teeth a perfect match with his face. “Of course,
heh heh
, of course, Mr. Forbes-Morton, most certainly, sir! Good evening, Miss Tippit. You-all will be needing a private box, no?” He straightened up and adjusted the kerchief in his coat pocket.