What Am I Doing Here? (41 page)

He was a shy, frail boy shaking with nerves. He wore steel-framed glasses and a black cap. He was a Muslim divinity student.

‘Murderess!' he shouted, as the Sikh bodyguards bore down on him. ‘She killed my friend. She put my teacher in prison. And my father! And my grandfather! Why shouldn't I call her a murderess?'

The Sikh in the ice-blue turban clamped his hand over the boy's mouth, and dragged him away.

 

 

Around five in the morning, Mrs G. dipped herself in the Ganges. She did not want to be photographed, so her secretary gave us the wrong time and the wrong place.

We returned to the Circuit House where a splendid breakfast was being prepared. The place was so nineteenth-century in atmosphere that one half-expected the sound of braying English voices.

Mrs G. sat at the head of the table flanked by her faithful ex-Minister of Railways, Mr Kamlapathi Tripathi, and a local Congress-I politician. I sat next to the politician, and on my right sat the Congress-I Youth Leader for Delhi. He had bad gums.

Mrs G.'s face was working wrathfully. What she knew – and we did not yet know – was that Sanjay had been arrested in the night and put in Tikhar fort.

‘Permit me to ask you, Sir,' asked Youth-for-Delhi, ‘which varsity in England did you attend?'

‘It was in Scotland,' I said, ‘I went to Edinburgh.'

‘It is not possible!'

‘It is possible.'

‘Edinburgh was my father's varsity.'

‘He was probably a medical student.'

‘How could you know that?'

‘Indians who come to Edinburgh are nearly always medical students.'

‘And which was the subject of your study?'

‘Archaeology,' I said. ‘But I also learned some Sanskrit.'

‘Sanskrit, yes. Language of the Ancient Aryans!'

‘Correct.'

‘Tell me, Sir, have you ever heard of the Greek Philosopher Plato?'

‘I have.'

‘He came to India to learn about the Ideal State from the ancient Brahmins.'

‘Plato in India?' Mrs G. piped up. ‘I knew he was in Greece, but I never knew he came to India.'

‘Oh! but he did!' Youth-for-Delhi warmed to his theme. ‘And shortly after his visit, some Brahmins travelled all the way to Germany taking with them their sacred vision symbol, the swastika . . . '

A look of utter disgust passed across Mrs G.'s face. She gave me a filthy look as if it were my fault for having lured her into this ridiculous exchange. In a far corner of the room Rajiv was having a tumultuous row with the ice-blue turban, who accused us of ‘abusing Mrs Gandhi'.

 

I was pro-Indira that morning: she seemed so bizarre and eccentric. I felt that anyone who aspired to rule India was bound to end up a bit barmy.

But Eve was down on her and, as a real pro, intuitively spotted her chance. I overheard snatches of her honeyed words. She had photographed so many facets of Indira's life: in a crowd, talking to villagers, to politicians or to her grandchildren. The one thing missing was the spiritual dimension.

Mrs G. obviously needed time to think, yet I was unsurprised when the two of them made for the old Club Room, and locked the door. They stayed there fifteen minutes. Then Mrs G. re-emerged, entirely cool and collected, and set about receiving a stream of well-wishers.

‘I really got her this time,' said Eve. ‘Here, come and have a look!'

She had prevailed on Mrs G. to sit meditating in the lotus position on a splay-legged coffee-table, at one side of which stood a jardinière with an aspidistra. Behind these hung an English hunting print:
The Quorn take a fence
.

‘What a picture!' said Eve.

 

We parted in Benares. I took the train to Sultanpur to investigate the story of a wolf-boy. Eve had things to do in Delhi.

I returned around lunchtime the day she was due to take the night flight to London. She had been forced out of her hotel room at twelve, and was waiting in the lobby. We went upstairs to my bedroom. I had hardly set foot through the door when the phone rang.

‘Hello, is that you, Bruce?' came a crisp voice. ‘It's Indira here!' She had not called me Bruce before.

‘You know I'm a little bit worried about one of those photos Eve took of me in Benares. She wanted to show the spiritual side of my character – and of course I am a Kashmiri Brahmin. But we have so many different religions in India. We have Buddhists, we have Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Parsees, Christians. I don't want to favour one religion over another. I wonder if you'd mind not publishing it with the article?'

I clamped my palm over the mouthpiece:

‘She doesn't want the photo published with the article.'

‘Great!' said Eve. ‘I could make the cover of
Time
with that picture!'

‘Of course,' I said to Indira, ‘we won't publish it with the article.'

‘Well, that's very kind,' she said. ‘When are you coming to see me again?'

‘We've seen a lot of each other lately.'

‘No. No. I'd love to see you again. Why don't you drop in for coffee tomorrow? I'll expect you at 10.30.'

 

 

That evening I called on Mrs G.'s deadly foe, the Rajmata of Gwalior who is a very orthodox Hindu.

‘I've just come back from Benares,' I said, ‘where Mrs Gandhi dipped herself in the Ganges.'

‘Sacrilege!' said the Rajmata.

She described her time in Tikhar fort during the Emergency. H.H. Jaipur was in the next cell, and spent most of her time reading the
Memoirs of Saint-Simon.

‘But I'm no great reader,' she said. ‘I was an ordinary girl who happened to marry a maharajah. So I decided to take this opportunity to meet the kind of women one would never normally meet – prostitutes, murderesses and so on. They would come to my cell at five o'clock. We called it The Gwalior Club . . . '

Around the same hour H.H. Jaipur was in the habit of taking her bath, into which she always put a lot of bathessence. An open drain ran along the balcony.

‘The women loved it,' she said. ‘They would get down on their knees and smell the scented water.'

 

 

The news from Azamgarh had come in. Mrs G.'s candidate had a majority of 35,385 votes.

‘Yes,' she said, as she poured the coffee, ‘we are quite pleased with the result. Of course, we expected some rigging and that's why we made as much noise as possible.'

Sanjay's arrest had also helped: ‘People came up and said, “Our son is taken away.” '

All she wanted was reassurance about the photo, yet she felt obliged to launch into a monologue: ‘What the women in the villages need is cheaper potatoes. I say to my people, “If the women in the villages don't get cheaper potatoes, how are they going to live?” '

I cut her short.

‘Well,' I said, ‘it's been a very interesting time since I last saw you. A wolf-boy's been found. They've taken him to Mother Teresa's orphanage at Lucknow.'

‘Like Mowgli?' said Mrs G.

‘Yes.'

‘I've always heard about those wolf-children but I've never actually seen one. Will the child ever talk? It would be very interesting to know what it was like to be brought up by a wolf-mother.'

‘No,' I said, ‘I'm afraid he won't. If any child is deprived of human speech during his early years, the frontal lobes — which deal with speech and symbolic thought - will fail to develop.'

‘How old was the child when it was found?'

‘About five or six.'

‘Well, Sanjay didn't speak until he was six . . .

‘But we knew a family in Bombay whose children didn't speak until they were eight! AND THEY WERE PERFECTLY NORMAL!'

Silence.

She looked utterly stricken and all too human. I was sitting quite close to her and brushed her hand.

‘Don't worry,' I murmured.

Gradually, she resumed the conversation. I was amazed to hear her say the word ‘Thatcher'.

‘Quite a different personality!' she said. ‘How that woman wants to be PM! When she came here to Delhi she was so nervous. I felt like telling her, “If you want to be PM that badly, you'll never make it.” '

 

 

I called Eve the evening of my arrival – to hear how the photos had turned out.

‘Come over right away,' she said.

She was very agitated.

‘What did you
do
with that roll of film I gave you in Benares? . . . It's incredible,' she said.

‘Out of your hundred-odd rolls, there was one dud . . . She hexed you,' I said.

 

 

I
n
In Patagonia
I suggested that the Albatross which hung from the neck of the Ancient Mariner was not the Great Wandering Albatross but a smaller black species: either the Sooty Albatross or the Black-browed. The Sooty is the likelier of the two. It is a streamlined bird that keeps to the open sea. I think I saw one off the south-east coast of Tierra del Fuego. The Black-browed is everywhere, in the Magellan Strait and the Beagle Channel, and resembles a large Greater Black-backed Gull.

On the south side of the Beagle Channel is the Chilean island of Navarino, with its naval base at Puerto Williams. I hoped to walk around the coast and get a glimpse of Hermit Island, which is the breeding colony of the Black-browed Albatross. The wind and the rain drove me back.

East of the naval base there is a row of shacks in which live the last of the Fuegian Indians – the Indians Darwin mistook for the ‘missing link'. He compared their language to the ‘grunts of animals', being unaware that a young Fuegian spoke as many words as Shakespeare ever wrote.

Most of the Fuegians on Navarino are half-bloods. But I met one old man, Grandpa Felipe, who was said to be almost pure. He was a frail old man, mending his crab-gear. He had never been strong. He had watched his wife die. And all his children die.

‘It was the epidemics,' he said – and whenever he said the word
epidemias
, it sounded as a mournful refrain.

The Fuegians were as skilful canoers as the Eskimoes.

A year and a half later, when
In Patagonia
was in press, I went to the island of Steepholm in the Bristol Channel. My companion was a naturalist in his eighties. The purpose of our visit was to see in flower the peony that is supposed to have been brought here as a medicinal herb by monks from the Mediterranean.

I told my friend the story of how, in the nineteenth century, a Black-browed albatross had followed a ship north of the Equator. Its direction-finding mechanisms had been thrown out of line. It had ended up on a rock in the Faroe Islands where it lived for thirty-odd years and was known as ‘The King of the Gannets'. The Hon. Walter Rothschild made a pilgrimage to see it. Finally, it was shot, stuffed and put in the Copenhagen Museum.

‘But there's a new Albatross,' the old man said. ‘A female bird. She was on Bass Rock last year, and I think she's gone to Hermaness.'

Hermaness, at the tip of Unst in Shetland, is the ultimate headland of the British Isles.

From my flat in London, I called Bobby Tullock, the Shetland ornithologist.

‘Sure she's on Hermaness. She's made a nest among the Gannets and she's sitting proud. Why don't you come and see her? You'll find her on the West Cliff. You can't miss her.'

I looked at my watch. It was nine o'clock. I had time to get to King's Cross Station before the night train left for Aberdeen. I put on my boots and packed a bag.

There was a hold-up on the tube. I almost missed the train. I ran down the platform at the last minute. The sleeping-car attendant was a craggy white-haired Scot in a maroon uniform with a gold braid. Beside him stood a small dark young man, waiting.

I was out of breath.

‘Have you got a berth?' I asked.

‘Aye,' said the sleeping-car attendant. ‘If you don't mind sharing with that!'

He jerked his thumb at the little man.

‘Of course not,' I said.

The man jumped into the upper bunk. I tried to talk. I tried English, French, Italian, Greek. Useless. I tried Spanish and it worked. I should have guessed. He was a South American Indian.

‘Where are you from?' I asked.

‘Chile.'

‘I have been in Chile. Whereabouts?'

‘Punta Arenas.'

Punta Arenas on the Straits of Magellan is the southernmost city in the world.

‘I was there,' I said.

‘I come from Punta Arenas. But that is not my home. My home is Navarino Island.'

‘You must know Grandpa Felipe.'

‘
Es mi tio
.' ‘He is my uncle.'

Having exceptional powers of balance, the young man and his brother found work in Punta Arenas as refuellers of the light-buoys at the entrance to the Magellan Strait. In any sea they would jump onto the buoy and insert the fuel nozzle. After the fall of Allende, the brother got a job with an American oil company, using his talent on off-shore rigs. The company had sent him to the North Sea oil field. He had asked for his brother to join him. They would each earn £600 a week.