good buys – it seemed to be an article of faith among the British, when shopping among Indians, that prices were to be beaten down so that every purchase became a bargain – she wandered in the maze of bazaar streets to the north of Crawford Market, taking a bearing on the golden pinnacleof the temple to the mouthless Mumba Devi, poking among the blind cubby-holes of the Bhuleshwar Market. She returned to the hotel drawn and tired, dragging her feet into the darkened room. She lay down with a damp towel over her eyes, counting the throbs of her headache.
So we left her and began the wary process of getting to know a father.
My father was not athletic – very far from it. He moved in a clumsy way – a left-hander who had not adapted to the world being the wrong way round – and he was rather lazy, having been spoilt in childhood by the clutch of women in his household. Walking, which he enjoyed, was the only concession he made to exercise, and nature had equipped him well for this. His long legs swung forward briskly, and his lean frame was not much affected by heat and humidity. So, driven forth from the hotel, we set out, the tall fellow with sleek dark hair, in well-ironed tunic shirt and trousers of razor-edge creases and soft suede shoes, tugging in his wake two rumpled boys, heated with sun and argument and exuberant energy, with pale winter skin and grimy knees and socks about the ankles.
Crossing the knife-edge of shade into the broiling street, we walked with no particular direction or purpose in mind. We seemed free and easy, but this was a complicated time. We were taking a look at India, getting reacquainted, as it were, with a forgotten birthright. And we were trying to re-discover a family, separated for too long by war, for which absence there was some unspoken rancour against our father in our young hearts, and no doubt some sorrow and regret in his. He had some explaining to do, some persuasive gestures to make to smooth away the rough memories of the last four years. These words and gestures would not come easily. Trained in the reticence of country folk, stamped by Methodism and poverty, he had so little practice in the language of the emotions. But he could begin by showing us around,guiding his whelps to a home territory; for my father regarded India, not England, as his home range, where he had lived most of the years beyond his youth, and had become confident in manhood and prospered and hoped to end.
But where should he begin? What a maze history leaves! Deposit after deposit, shards of strange species, evolving, enduring, then degenerating. Holding on against a current whose course is always obscure and eventually contrary. There were arguments here too labyrinthine for the tidy military mind, and of course way beyond the understanding of children. The best approach was to sample the city and let the weight of the past sink in.
We strolled down Colaba, through fashionable streets, making a circuit and returning along Apollo Bunder between city and sea. There was an unlikely familiarity in the names. Ormiston, Barrow, Henry, Walton. Who were these men (we may take it for granted that they were not women)? Now, I see sun-red faces and wigs dusted with cornflour, coarse confident visages as in a Kneller portrait. They washed in and out with the tides of time. Once, they were imperial actors, but for India, what did they intend? That was a tangled knot that history was still trying to undo. Today, their names remain, largely forgotten but still markers of a sort, alien words sounding peculiar in the mouths of local postmen.
We walked, and came upon questions not answers. Later, with luck, we would know something, or at least begin to feel something in our bones. For the moment we registered only questions. What was the meaning of that alarming fish-stink, creeping up from the southern streets as bold as an invading army? Those lofty houses in Arthur Bunder Road – they had an anomalous air.
So we left her and began the wary process of getting to know a father.
My father was not athletic – very far from it. He moved in a clumsy way – a left-hander who had not adapted to the world being the wrong way round – and he was rather lazy, having been spoilt in childhood by the clutch of women in his household. Walking, which he enjoyed, was the only concession he made to exercise, and nature had equipped him well for this. His long legs swung forward briskly, and his lean frame was not much affected by heat and humidity. So, driven forth from the hotel, we set out, the tall fellow with sleek dark hair, in well-ironed tunic shirt and trousers of razor-edge creases and soft suede shoes, tugging in his wake two rumpled boys, heated with sun and argument and exuberant energy, with pale winter skin and grimy knees and socks about the ankles.
Crossing the knife-edge of shade into the broiling street, we walked with no particular direction or purpose in mind. We seemed free and easy, but this was a complicated time. We were taking a look at India, getting reacquainted, as it were, with a forgotten birthright. And we were trying to re-discover a family, separated for too long by war, for which absence there was some unspoken rancour against our father in our young hearts, and no doubt some sorrow and regret in his. He had some explaining to do, some persuasive gestures to make to smooth away the rough memories of the last four years. These words and gestures would not come easily. Trained in the reticence of country folk, stamped by Methodism and poverty, he had so little practice in the language of the emotions. But he could begin by showing us around,guiding his whelps to a home territory; for my father regarded India, not England, as his home range, where he had lived most of the years beyond his youth, and had become confident in manhood and prospered and hoped to end.
But where should he begin? What a maze history leaves! Deposit after deposit, shards of strange species, evolving, enduring, then degenerating. Holding on against a current whose course is always obscure and eventually contrary. There were arguments here too labyrinthine for the tidy military mind, and of course way beyond the understanding of children. The best approach was to sample the city and let the weight of the past sink in.
We strolled down Colaba, through fashionable streets, making a circuit and returning along Apollo Bunder between city and sea. There was an unlikely familiarity in the names. Ormiston, Barrow, Henry, Walton. Who were these men (we may take it for granted that they were not women)? Now, I see sun-red faces and wigs dusted with cornflour, coarse confident visages as in a Kneller portrait. They washed in and out with the tides of time. Once, they were imperial actors, but for India, what did they intend? That was a tangled knot that history was still trying to undo. Today, their names remain, largely forgotten but still markers of a sort, alien words sounding peculiar in the mouths of local postmen.
We walked, and came upon questions not answers. Later, with luck, we would know something, or at least begin to feel something in our bones. For the moment we registered only questions. What was the meaning of that alarming fish-stink, creeping up from the southern streets as bold as an invading army? Those lofty houses in Arthur Bunder Road – they had an anomalous air.
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