Life Among the Scorpions Page 8
We organized solidarity meets between Tibetan and Burmese democracy activists and called meetings of MPs from all parties to support their campaigns. However, eventually, counting on individuals who would consider putting themselves out to sort the Burmese or Tibetans’ issues, seemed not quite enough. The new crop of Parliamentarians was largely interested in their constituencies, elections and trips as part of Parliamentary committees to various parts of the country. Trips abroad were more in the nature of junkets and no one was keen to arrange a delegation to a country like Burma. Everyone was sympathetic, but ultimately it came to be left to a couple of NGOs, a few individuals and the socialist establishments connected to George Fernandes to support the cause of these refugees from Burma.
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Burma, at the time we were there, was in an economic slump with continuing insurgencies among various ethnic minorities. We hardly ever left the confines of Rangoon to explore the country as we had done in Japan because it was simply too dangerous. Once, we were invited by U Myint Thein, the Chief Justice of Burma, and his wife, to spend a weekend at their home in the hill station of Kalaw. The government insisted we had to be accompanied by an escort of uniformed army men in open jeeps facing in all directions with weapons that were frightening to look at. As the vehicles crawled up the mountain roads, tense and alert, imagining insurgents to be all around, it hardly seemed like a pleasant holiday. It is not surprising that I remember nothing else of that short period away from Rangoon except for the pine trees that surrounded the wooden cottage we stayed in.
Mrs Myint Thein, a dignified woman, became a very close friend of my mother’s. Later, when she suffered a degenerative muscular disease, my mother arranged for her to be treated with ayurvedic massages at our other family house in Trichur. While we stayed with her throughout the period of her treatment, Valiamma and the usually ill-behaved but saintly Valiachan, put their best feet forward to take care of her. Valiachan, of course, engaged her in highly intellectual discussions in English to demonstrate his superiority over the others who also happened to be around.
U Nu was very affectionate with my parents and always spoke to me kindly when we happened to meet, usually on Republic Day celebrations. My father worked closely with U Nu and Jawaharlal Nehru to prepare for the Bandung Conference of 1955. The importance of that conference seeped into my subconscious even at that age as the spirit of Asian-African nationalism was becoming a topic of active interest that my father discussed with my mother and to which I listened quietly. The sponsoring nations in the conference were India, Pakistan, Burma, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Its grand finale saw the adoption of Nehru’s five principles of peaceful co-existence on the lines of the Panchsheel Treaty subsequently signed between India and China. All 29 countries that participated in the Conference, lent their voice to the joint declaration to fight colonialism in all its forms which was supported by a moderate-sounding Chou En-Lai, the Chinese Premiere. U Nu went to Imphal in 1953, and in October 1954, Nehru visited Rangoon on his way to China. Much effort and preparation went into the historic Bandung Conference that remained in my memory, but the success of the Conference soon dissipated. Within a decade, China had forgotten all about cooperation, and marched into India in 1962.
Another vivid memory of mine helps recall the visit of Vijayalakshmi Pandit in Burma. That she was a keen shopper wherever she would travel to, was well known. Hence my mother was expected to take her shopping, and of course, everyone who went to Burma had to acquire the ‘pigeon-blood’ rubies for which it was famous. They found a jeweller who made the most exquisite ruby bangles, some with rubies graded in size but all as large as pomegranate seeds, and others with tiny dark red rubies cut into squares the size of large grains of sugar. Sure enough, a pair of bangles worth nine thousand rupees were bought. The price of the bangles was certainly far more than my father’s salary for the month. Nevertheless, Vijayalakshmi Pandit left Rangoon without paying the bill. My father paid for it eventually. My mother grumbled about this while my father, typically, chuckled quietly, and let the subject rest. As for me, I was getting acquainted, in a very nuanced manner, to the misuse of status by people in power but I was too young to come to any firm conclusions at that time.
Every week, my father would take me with him to a bookshop on Phayre Street near the Schwedagon Pagoda where we would pick up the latest magazines and buy a couple of books. My father loved books and liked nothing better than spending time browsing in bookshops, and reading. Books became a necessary part of my lifelong intellectual nourishment apart from being the only constant companion to a child who did not have siblings. There has not been a day that I have not been engrossed in a book at hand. The characters and places I inhabit when lost within the pages of a book provide me with a sense of comfort and security. The feel of paper while reading has always held a special fascination since an incident where a French school book got wet and its smooth shiny pages became wavy. As I read it, I remember being absorbed in running my fingers back and forth unconsciously across the bumps on the top of the pages in utter fascination. Over the years, the texture of paper, the unmistakable aroma of a newly printed book, the gentle rustle of a page turning in the silence of the night apart from the wonderful other worlds and people within the stories themselves, have continued to come together to stimulate my senses. The exercise of reading for me is not just one of absorbing information or being told a story, it is an all-embracing experience, which changes the extent of my knowledge and understanding of the world just that little bit. This feeling re-visits me every time I pause for thought after having finished the last line of the last page and come to rest at ‘The End’.
In Rangoon, it was Enid Blyton’s ‘Famous Five’ and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot that held my attention. We were at an age when countless hours were spent with friends admiringly gazing at double-page colour spreads of American swimmer Esther Williams’s legs, actress Betty Grable’s blonde curls, and actor Tony Curtis’s dark eyes in movie magazines imported from the USA. We avidly collected all the small posters and publicity flyers that were distributed those days at the cinema halls. They were usually two-colour printing jobs, with all the details of the movies and photos of the stars. Magenta-hued stars acting in the Thief of Baghdad or The Count of Monte Cristo, Farley Granger’s pouting lips in emerald green, and occasionally, if we were lucky, we would even come across a four-colour folder announcing the arrival of movies starring Piper Laurie or Janet Leigh. I had nearly a hundred of these wonderful papers, collected, hoarded, exchanged and gloated-over lovingly for two years. They do not seem to have surfaced anywhere else in collections of movie memorabilia and would probably be worth a fortune now in the hands of those who auction such stuff.
When we were packing to leave Rangoon for Brussels in 1954, I insisted that all these movie posters, my voluminous scrapbooks full of photos of my favourite movie stars, and boxes containing a vast collection of sheets of decorative silver paper—a fad of the early fifties among schoolgirls in Rangoon—be packed carefully and sent to Belgium. I kept following my mother around the house as she supervised the packing, reminding her to pack my bulky collection of valuables. She kept saying ‘yes, yes’ in an irritated and absent-minded way, but I did not find them in the trunks that we unpacked in Brussels. I felt terribly cheated, and remained furious with her for a long time for having been so callously disregarding of my treasures. However, I forgave and forgot when, following a full two years from the time of this incident, I lost my father at the age of thirteen. Suddenly, I had to grow up.
*Soe Myint, Burma File: A Question of Democracy, India Research Press, 2003.
6
BELGIUM AND ENGLAND
Lessons in Loss
MY FATHER WENT AHEAD TO Brussels as India’s Ambassador in 1954 accompanied by our Lhasa terrier, Trixie, while my mother and I followed later. We went by sea from Colombo to London after staying for a few days with Sir John Kotlawala, the Prime Minister of Ceylon, at his residence in Templ
e Trees. My father complained, partly in amusement, that Trixie had to go to office with him every day as she refused to stay at the Embassy residence among unfamiliar people. She had wet the carpet and chewed up some pencils, horrifying the office staff who had ‘never seen this kind of diplomat before’.
The Indian Embassy residence in Brussels was a beautiful rented house set amidst a dense forest between Brussels and Waterloo where the famed battle of Waterloo was fought. The battle sight was a fascinating stop for tourists who got to see a vast panorama of the battle in a big exhibition hall. Our house had a thick thatched roof, tall windows in every room that allowed a view of the tall pines, a huge sloping garden with a tennis court at the bottom end and so many rooms that our small family of three could spread ourselves across five of them for various activities during the day. I preferred to read, write, draw or dream while sitting on the main carpeted staircase, usually getting into the way of all those who went up and down. We had an Italian couple, Marco and Maria, as concierge and cook, with Balan and Meenakshi from Kerala to cook the Indian dishes and look after my mother’s daily needs. The old Kerala habit of aristocracy needing a personal maid was still a part of my mother’s psyche at that time. My father fell so in love with the house that he negotiated an excellent deal with the elegant landlady and bought the property on behalf of the Government of India, which still owns it. The landlady sent me chocolates in a huge box with a deep red velvet cover and gold baubles and ribbons in celebration. Today that box contains old photographs, including one of my father, playing golf with King Baudouin of Belgium.
Brussels was dominantly under the influence of the French-speaking population, with the Flemish comprising the working class. The former were sophisticated, slim, well turned out, occupying important positions in government, while the latter were bucolic, and seldom seen in the company of those who belonged to the upper classes. The European Commission was an idea that had taken root as the coal and steel amalgam of Europe, but Brussels was still a mere cultural adjunct of France.
I was enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart there, which was a forty-five-minute drive from our house. My first term at school coincided with the onset of winter. I had to wake up at six and be ready to leave for school by seven in the morning, when it was still dark, to reach before eight when classes began. I was driven back by the chauffeur when school finished at four when it was already getting to be dark again. By the time I reached home it was like night-time. I never got to see my home in daylight until the weekend.
At school, all lessons were in French. Since I wasn’t good enough at it, many special classes during the day went in learning French so that I could catch up with the others in class. It was terribly dreary, as in the classes meant for the local students I could not understand what was being taught. Our uniforms were white shirts with stiff detachable collars, navy-blue pleated skirts, and a navy-blue and green plaid pinafore over these. We had to bow and curtsy to all the nuns we passed by in the corridors. Lunch was served in a vast high-ceilinged hall with long wooden tables. The hall was very stark and grim. The drink served to all the students along with lunch was pale brown and bitter tasting, with froth on the top. ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est (what is it)?’ I asked. ‘La bière’ (beer), was the cheerful answer. My parents did not know whether to be shocked or amused that this prim convent served beer, albeit a mild one, to the students for lunch. It added to the reasons why they decided to send me to a boarding school in England.
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On a map, if you connected London, Ashford in Kent, and Canterbury, where the great cathedral and the Archbishop were, it would form a neat triangle. Ashford had the famed Ashford School for Girls, and this was where I was deposited, with my grey felt hat, red- and grey-striped tie, pinafores, long grey socks, warm and cold underwear, alongside everything I possessed, including my toothbrush, with labels containing my name attached to each of the things I brought with me. The principal, Miss Brake, was popularly called Cherub, and looked like one, but apart from her, there were no soft contours to boarding school life in the Great Britain. Life was regimented beyond imagination. From the home of a diplomat, with every luxury available to me and the warmth of my parents’ presence, I entered a grim world of lights out at nine; baths permitted to each student only twice a week, with the tubs allowed to be filled only quarter of the way; and stiff, rough, toilet paper in the loo with no water tap or mug for our Indian ways.
On Sunday afternoons, we had to go for 10 mile walks even if it meant walking through deep snow. My feet froze with ice around them and I developed huge chilblains. During one long walk, one of my tiny diamond earrings fell into the snow. It caused a big commotion among the teachers since I had needed special permission to wear them in the first place. They even asked if a search party should be mounted for it. Imagine looking for a tiny diamond in the sparkling white snow! I wanted to close the subject and forget I ever wore earrings.
Common Place was an excellent system followed at Ashford which required each student to read at least twenty-one books each term and write a synopsis of each of them with critical comments. They could be novels, travelogues or biographies. For those who loved to read, it gave the discipline of intelligent appraisement. I never ceased to thank Common Place for giving me the facility to review a book for newspapers or magazines. When I came back to Delhi in 1977, editors of national newspapers slowly discovered that I could write.
At Ashford, apart from studying, we had to scrub bathtubs, clean toilets, wash dishes and dry them, lay the tables for dinner, and run many errands for the senior girls. Even when I had chicken pox and was lying in the sanatorium along with others who caught the epidemic spreading in school, we had to get out of bed and sweep and mop the floors before the fever subsided and the scabs fell off. Other than being visited by a hugely built, loud-voiced male doctor who loomed over us, peering over his spectacles and asking, ‘Are you feeling bettah?’, we were pretty much left to mend ourselves without any fuss.
My mother fretted while my father grumbled at her for having decided to send me away to a place that sounded like a Siberian work camp. However, they reassured themselves that I was fine by telephoning me every Friday night. This was highly embarrassing for me as no other parent ever telephoned their children and some girls sniggered about the special treatment I received. But it was 1954. British life was dull and staid, without the cosmopolitan sensibilities it acquired later. While the effects of being a colonial power had not fully worn off, the country had yet to recover from the damages of the Second World War. Even in a school like Ashford, most families were not from an aristocratic stock, and came instead from small towns and families with modest means. Many girls asked me why the palms of my hands were pink when the upper portions were brown. I had no answer and felt miserable about being different.
During the Easter holidays, I took two friends home to Brussels. The huge embassy house, the Cadillac car and four servants made them envious and unpleasant although generally they were sweet girls. They insisted on washing the masala off the chicken pieces in the curry under the tap before eating them, and upon our return, spread rumours in school that my father sat in office with his feet up on the office table. I felt hurt and betrayed although I never discussed it with them.
In my second year, a witty, defiant and brilliant girl from British Guiana (Guyana) joined my class and we became close friends overnight, cursing white ways under our breath and vowing we would never marry English men. We both did exceedingly well in our studies and I was happy that apart from getting good marks in all our subjects we could spice up our conversations with ‘shoot, man!’, ‘bloody limeys’ and odd bits of West Indian talk and accents. Many years later, the girl, Patty Ann, sheepishly confessed in a rare letter that she had married an Englishman, John Lloyd, after all.
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On vacation, my parents welcomed me home with a hired television to watch the wedding of Grace Kelly, the American actress, to Prince Rainier of Monaco. T
elevision opened up a magic world, but most times our ears were glued to ‘Mrs Dale’s Diary’, a radio version of the soap serials on television today. On weekends, my parents would often go to Luxembourg to attend official receptions since my father was the accredited envoy to this charming little country as well. Its cobbled streets and old town houses were charming facets of the typical European landscape. I entertained myself with sightseeing, listening to music in record shops and eating chocolates, while my parents went about their social duties.
I remember one occasion though when my mother decided to sulk about something and caused my father both irritation and distress. In a way, my mother was quite childish. She wanted to be fussed over and cared for like she would have been in Kollengode, and if my father did not do it just right, she would not forgive him for days. As a twelve-year-old, this annoyed and troubled me greatly as I somehow always found myself sympathizing with my father and wondering why my mother wasn’t satisfied with things as they were. She let him choose the books she read and the clothes she wore for evening parties, but I began to notice that she never really cared to keep him company, or express pleasure when he came home from office. She grumbled to me about his keeping company with his office staff. This was particularly the case with a cheerful, gentle, warm-hearted young woman named Sophie de Croy, who was a social secretary in the Indian Embassy despite coming from a highly aristocratic family. I loved being with her as well. She took me to her family castle to meet her little cousins, to bookshops and ice-skating shows. Sometimes my father would also come along, but increasingly, my mother grew more sullen and cheerless. She would even refuse to join my father and me for a walk in the garden where he would tell me the names of all the flowers and share with me his deep love of gardening. There was nothing between Sophie and my father, but my mother chose to make it a subject of contention, seeking the attention she was actually simultaneously rejecting. Meanwhile, it was almost a relief that the Easter holidays were ending.