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Hindu Trail Clutching my Libertarianism to my Bosom, Not Memsahib July 9, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Europe, India, London, Rail Pass, Sightseeing, Tickets, Tour, Trails, Travelling Bag, Trip , trackback

Every time I heard the word memsahib I wanted to take an ice-pick to the user. I’d gone on the Hindu trail clutching my libertarianism to my bosom, a cosy cocoon from which I could rationalise and contain the shrieks from the inferno — not that Dante, I’m sure, ever went to Calcutta. Very right-on. Very arm’s-length. But keep your liberal sensibilities Gandhi-pure? Emerge unscathed? Forget it.

Sympathy, empathy, had long since given way to simmering hysteria, cringing shame and a seething, at times uncontrollable rage which was generalised in its target but oh so localised in its pain. It wasn’t even a consolingly righteous anger at the pulverising poverty, the callousness of caste or the stalinisation of women — more a deep-seated disgust and hatred welling up from deep down and spewing out over all humanity, most of all myself . . . Well, OK, you try and make sense of the matchstick people of Madhya Pradesh, the execrable excrement of Bombay and Dehli, the obscene opulence of Jaipur jewellers, the blinding, vivid hues of Rajasthani women’s skirts — and all of it sinking in one great ubiquitous quicksand of suffocating, strangulating bureaucracy.

I arrived in Srinagar, Kashmir’s tourist paradise, demented and not exactly in holiday mood.

“J and K Palace” houseboat was where my companion and I were headed — on the bizarre recommendation of an English couple encountered on a camel in the Great Thar Desert. I asked one of the shikara boys to paddle us over — much to the incredulity and amusement of the whole Lake Dal Wild Bunch. Ten minutes later I could see their point. A forlorn and faded chicken shack that floated is what it looked like. Our arrival caused something of a tidal wave — hysterical joy and wild terror chasing hard on the heels of utter bewilderment. It took a good fifteen minutes of hard talking to convince Gulam, the youngest of three brothers and self-appointed front man, that he actually had paying guests on his hands. When the wonder of it had finally penetrated, he clasped us tearfully to his bosom and cucumber sandwiches appeared as if by magic. It was at this point that we entered the fantastical world of Rajarama through the looking-glass.

Travel GuidebookCoughing and spluttering as, with a flourish, he majestically whipped off the dust covers from forty years of unrequited Anglophilia, he ushered us into a faded English drawing-room, circa 1930, choked up with the solid, silent self-satisfied paraphernalia of the past. Here was one patch of water where the memsahib, evidently, still ruled the waves. And I was expected to fill the daunting doyenne’s snug smug slippers. Terrific. Funnily enough, though, Gulam was never in danger of an ice-pick. Unlike the deeply distressing, scraping obsequiousness encountered along the road, his kow-towing to the Brits had been refined to an art form.

He was a chancer of the first order; a half-deaf alcoholic with the backside hanging off his trousers and the swagger of a screen idol. He had a languorous air about him, heavily tinged with the melodrama of the star-crossed. And, indeed, the gods did seem to have had it in for him. He was slowly drinking himself into a coma, an apparently irreversible process of disintegration triggered by the drowning of his beloved only son. Now he was the talk of the lake because he insisted on dressing up his little daughter as a boy. They could be seen everywhere together, he shooting his mouth off, she looking pained and wounded about the eyes — tattered, fractured Laurel and Hardy reflections shimmering in the shikara-splintered waters of the lake . . . But he had charisma — and he loved the camera. There but for the grace of God walked Valentino. I quickly learned to make my financial transactions with Ali, the long-suffering middle brother, arch-pragmatist and solitary beacon of reason, moderation and the good old Moghul work ethic.

Ali was desperately trying to make a little money. Not an exorbitant ambition, surely. But as hard as he would bale out water in futile but ever-giggling attempts to keep the operation afloat, either Gulam or Abdul, the eldest brother, would lurch towards a mirage (alcoholic or metaphysical) and up-end the lot. The Marx Brothers, it seemed, were alive, well, drinking and kicking in Kashmir.

Except that Abdul didn’t drink. He didn’t eat much either. And he wasn’t exactly a wow at social intercourse. He spent most of his time crouching gloomily behind three big black cooking pots whence came, every night, a magnificent feast, deep-frozen since Independence. It was absolutely pointless — more, it was a downright insult — to ask him to cook anything Indian. “Rubbish,” as Gulam would say when, with flattened ears and shifting feet, we tentatively suggested that a curry might be nice for a change. “What you like? Roast duck? Roast chicken? Apple pie?” And so it would inexorably come, course after course, vegetable after vegetable, jam roly-poly after spotted dick. A miracle.

Ali normally waited on us with his usual no-nonsense aplomb during the (duck) soup, whereupon, on a good night, Gulam, fresh from his fourth bottle of gut-rot would lurch in, sweeping mediocrity in front of him like Dorothy Lamour’s skirts scattered men, and brandishing a dirty napkin over one arm and an expression of pained patronising subservience. We had no choice but to comply. They expected us to play the Raj duet and, after all, it was the least we could do. And so it was that we’d sit like relics in that creaking, lugubrious dining-room, under the extravagant gaze of the gaudy plastic flowers, primly playing culinary cricket with Lady Bracknell — while outside .. . the mighty, barbaric Himalayas as a backdrop and the primeval shrieks of a suspected child molester, burned to death and then thrown in the lake, echoing in our ears. It was unhinging, to say the least. But I wouldn’t have offended Abdul for the world — and the world, for him, was his English cooking.

He was the nearest I reckon I’ll ever get to one of Gurdjieff’s remarkable men. A fine tortured soul. The nights were often fractured by his wailing. He was a failed Sufi mystic, a marked man — one fatal Shakespearian character flaw, the gossips on the lake would have it, having led to a lifetime of spiritual flagellation. His nocturnal crying was a fearsome, heart-rending lament which still haunts me .. .

It was usually thrown into grotesque relief, however, by the pantomime which preceded it — to wit, normally a ding-dong of cataclysmic proportions if Gulam had drunk one bottle too many. Indeed, the cook first impaled himself on my memory during one of these fraternal fracas. Gulam was running amok with a burning log that night, stopping frequently to plead for my approbation regarding fratricide or, at the very least, boat-burning — when a supercilious, black, sooty face peered round the doorway and, with plummy BBC vowels, invited him to desist as he was “disturbing” the guests. And all the while Ali sobbed, drowning the sofa in his tears ..

But things began to look up for “J and K Palace” — as I noticed on my return from a trip to stern and seductive Ladakh. Rowing out from the jetty long after dusk, it felt like I was coming home. But what was this? I saw the lightbulbs first, beckoning promiscuously where before there’d only been dark, deep, time-pocked sockets. Then the ebb and flow of contented murmurings. I boarded the boat to find, to my horror, that the plastic flowers had been replaced by real ones. And there were current copies of the Times of India on the coffee table. I felt cheated, abandoned and, yes, usurped by the new guests. I couldn’t help it. I’d taken the brothers to my heart and, like a lover, I was sensitive to the smallest slight, the smallest indication that my moon was on the wane.

But, oh God, maybe this was just the memsahib bug sitting up and biting me at last. Maybe I’d simply grown to like being top dog — a Brit in a country which, maddeningly, still looks up to its one-time

Overload, however mediocre s/he was back home. From Simla to Bangalore the miracle of the nobodies into somebodies.

At any rate, I needn’t have worried. I was greeted like a prodigal daughter. They’re hanging on to the runaway rickshaw until the Return of the Memsahibs, you see. Abdul, in particular, is riding shotgun, in the firm conviction that the “London Government” is poised to regain the handlebars any moment now. And then we’ll be back to the grand old days of bear-bagging in the mountains, gin slings on the veranda and telegrams across the lake. That’s why he’s keeping his English cooking on the boil and his white turban in the trunk. You never quite know when the call for creme caramel might come again.

Until then he’ll have to make do with stragglers like me. I’m not exactly Jewel in the Crown material, he knows — but we can all pretend. There’s no harm in that . . . Is there?

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Hindu Trail Clutching my Libertarianism to my Bosom, Not Memsahib

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