Читать книгу Evening Is the Whole Day - Preeta Samarasan - Страница 9

IN 1899, Appa’s grandfather sailed across the Bay of Bengal to seek his fortune under familiar masters in a strange land, leaving behind an emerald of a village on the east coast of India. Barely had he shuffled off the boat with the rest of that vast herd in Penang when a fellow offered him a job on the docks, and there he toiled, sleeping four or five hours a night in a miserable dormitory, sending the bulk of his wages home, wanting nothing more for himself than to be able to pay his passage back home someday.

What changed his dreams in twenty years? All Appa’s father, Tata, knew of it was that by the time he was old enough to stand before his father in knee-length khakis for morning inspections before school, his father was saying: “Study hard. Study hard and you won’t have to be a coolie like me.” Every single goddamn morning he said it, the milky coffee frothing in his mustache. Study hard and the world will be yours. You could be a rich man. With a bungalow and servants.

And so Tata studied hard enough to get himself a clerk’s position with the Cowan & Maugham Steamship Company when he left school at sixteen, and somewhere in all that hoping and studying and preparing, something else changed: India ceased to be home. Sometimes it glimmered green and gold in Tata’s father’s tales of riverbank games and ten-day weddings and unbreakable blood bonds. At other times it was a threat, a nightmare, a morass in which those who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape still flailed. But Tata had no pictures of his own to attach to his father’s word for India: Ur, the country. This, this flourishing, mixed-up, polyglot place to which they had found their way almost by accident, this was his country now. Malays Chinese Indians, motley countrymen they might be, but countrymen they were, for better or for worse. What was coming was coming to them all. It would be theirs to share.

This was what Tata, eyes shining in the dark, told his pretty wife. It’s our country, not the white man’s. And when she said, But they’ve only been good to us, he insisted: You don’t know. You don’t know their dirty hearts. But you’ll see what this country can become without them. You’ll see.

To his five children—Raju the good-for-everything, Balu the good-for-nothing, and their three inconsequential sisters—Tata regularly said: We’re lucky to live here. It’s the best place on earth, none of India’s problems. Peace and quiet and perfect weather. Just work hard and the world could belong to you here. Then he’d ruffle the hair on Raju’s attentive head and box distracted Balu’s ear.

By the time Tata retired, in 1956, he owned a shipping company that rivaled his old employer’s. A wry sun was setting with a vengeance on the British Empire. Tata decided to buy himself a house that would declare his family’s stake in the new country. A great house, a grand house, a dynastic seat. He would leave Penang and look for such a house in Ipoh, far away from the dockyards, hilly, verdant, the perfect place to retire.

The house of Tata’s dreams belonged to one Mr. McDougall, a dyspeptic Scotsman who had owned two of the scores of mines that had sprouted up in and around Ipoh in the 1850s to tap the Kinta Valley’s rich veins of tin. He had already sold the mines to a Chinese towkay; now he had only to get rid of his house.

Mr. McDougall had three teenage children who’d been born and bred among the Chinese miners’ offspring in Ipoh, running around in Japanese slippers and eating char siu pau for breakfast. He also had a mistress and a bastard child, whom he kept in relative luxury in a bungalow in Tambun. Mr. McDougall’s life had meandered pleasantly along its course for years—mornings visiting the mines, afternoons with the mistress, evenings at the club—when he decided to leave the country, for two reasons. The first was that Her Majesty’s government was preparing to withdraw. The second was that his mistress, sniffing Mr. McDougall’s own flight in the air, had begun to demand a bigger house, a chauffeured car, and a wedding ring. If you don’t leave your family, she told him, I’ll come and pull you away myself. I’ll drag you off with my hands and my teeth, and your wife can watch.

In response, Mr. McDougall had whisked his wife—Elizabeth Mc-Dougall, née Fitzwilliam, a colonel’s daughter and in her time a great beauty whose attentions all the British bachelors of Malaya had coveted—and their three children off to a home they’d never known in the Scottish Highlands. And the mistress? For attention, for revenge, or out of simple, untainted despair, she had drowned herself and her six-year-old daughter in a mining pond. If Mr. McDougall had learned of her demise, he had never given any sign of it.

“I’m not sure his legitimate children fared any better,” Appa would say whenever he told the story of the house. “Wonder what happened to them. The father simply uprooted them just like that and packed them all off lock stock and barrel.”

Lock, Stock and Barrel, three men in a tub.

One said roll over and another said rub.

It was Suresh who penned these two inspired lines on the inside cover of his science textbook. He was nine years old at the time, and he entertained the idea of sharing the couplet with Appa, who would surely roar with laughter and pat him on the shoulder (if they were standing up) or the knee (if they were sitting down), the way he laughed and patted Uma whenever she displayed a wit worthy of her genes. But in the days after Suresh composed the verse Appa was hardly ever at home, and when he was his mood was so uneven that after three weeks of waiting, Suresh scratched the lines out with a marker pen to avoid trouble in case of a spot check by the school prefects.

“Going home it seems,” Appa would snort, recalling Mr. McDougall’s final words to Tata. “That’s what McDougall told them. What nonsense! His home, maybe, not theirs. Their skin may have been white but they were Chinks through and through, let me tell you.” Chink was a small, sharp sound that made Amma suck her teeth and shake her head, but this only encouraged Appa. “Probably wandering the moors looking for pork-entrail porridge,” he’d go on. “Wiping their backsides with the Nanyang Siang Pau’s business pages. Shipped specially to them by courier service.”

Then Uma would giggle, and Suresh, watching her, would giggle with equal intensity, a number of giggles empirically guaranteed to flatter Appa without risking a mouthslap or a thighpinch from Amma. Only Aasha never joined in, for amusing as she found Appa’s portraits of the McDougall children, her heart was with the little drowned girl, who wore her hair in pigtails; who had eyes like longan seeds and lychee-colored cheeks; who sometimes, on close, moonless nights, begged to be let in at the dining room window. Please, she mouthed to Aasha, can’t I sit at the table in my father’s house?

Don’t talk rubbish, Appa and Amma and Uma and Suresh said when Aasha told them. And when once she opened that window, she got a slap on the wrist for letting in a cicada.

WHEN MR. MCDOUGALL fled to the Scottish Highlands, it had been nine years since King George VI had relinquished the cherished jewel of his crown. To be more precise: he’d dropped it as if it were a hot potato, towards the outstretched hands of a little brown man in a loincloth and granny glasses; a taller, hook-nosed chap in a still-unnamed jacket; and three hundred and fifty million anonymous Natives who’d fiercely stayed up until, by midnight, they’d been watery-eyed, delirious with exhaustion, and willing to see nearly anything as a precious gift from His Majesty. Down, down, down it had fallen, this crown jewel, this hot potato, this quivering, unhatched egg, none of them knowing what would emerge from it and yet most of them sure—oh blessed, blissful certainty!—that it was just what they wanted. Alas, the rest, too, is history: in their hand-clapping delight they’d dropped it, and it had broken in two, and out of the two halves had scurried not the propitious golden chick they’d imagined, but a thousand bloodthirsty monsters multiplying before their eyes, and scrabble as they might to unscramble the mess, it was too late, all too late even for them to make a last-minute omelet with their broken egg.

Now, in 1956, a slip of a nation just across the water prepared to lower the Union Jack forever, convinced (and correct, in a way) that here things would be different. This land awakened, shook out its hair, and readied itself for a decade of casting off and putting on names as if they were festive raiments. The Federation of Malay States. Malaya. Malaysia. Before another crowd of breathless, bright-eyed Natives, another Father of another Nation cleared his throat. Tunku Abdul Rahman, Oxbridge-educated, like so many new Fathers. Fond of his Yorkshire pudding and his steak and kidney pie with lashings of gravy. But bravely he cast these from his mind (or tried to), exchanged his morning coat for a baju melayu whose rich gold threads chafed his skin, and rose, adjusting his tengkolok on his head, to lead his people from their paddy fields, their family plantations, and their one-room school-huts to a new age of glory. They’d never had Yorkshire pudding or steak and kidney pie, but they trusted him: in his veins ran good Malay blood, and that, they believed, could not be diluted by any amount of bad English food.

Mr. McDougall knew the people of Malaya all too well; he’d helped to create them, after all, he and his fellow settlers. They’d brought the Chinese and the Indians out here on lurching boats for their brains and their brawn, for the raking in of taxable tin profits and the slaving under the midday sun. Like God, Mr. McDougall and his compatriots had watched their word take miraculous material form, Malay and Chinese and Indian stepping up unquestioningly to fill the roles invented for them. The Malay peasant sloshing about halfheartedly for a few hours a morning in the rice paddies of his divinely ordained destiny, content the rest of the day to squat in the shade under his hut-on-stilts. The Chinese coolie sniffing his diligent way to tin and opium. The indentured Indian, so high on betel juice that he could dig ditches for twelve hours, happy as a water buffalo in mud, burning his brown skin black under the sun and shuffling home at night to drink cheap toddy and beat his wife. For seventy years they’d all lived in harmony with the white men who ran the country, but for a few isolated incidents: a governor stabbed while he bathed, a ragtag protest. On the whole, things had gone according to plan.

Mr. McDougall couldn’t say with any certainty when it had all begun to change, but he’d taken notice when the Chosen Few had started to get too big for their boots. That’s what he and his chums at the miners’ club had called the boys His Majesty’s government had been specially grooming for the Malay Administrative Service and God only knew what else. Those scrubbed little weasels, schooled at the Malay College or the Victoria Institution or the Penang Free School and shipped off to Oxford and Cambridge to keep the Natives happy. For a while a pat on the head here and a promotion there had been enough to keep them going when they got home, but even then he had smelled trouble coming, seeing them return in their robes and powdered wigs. This Tunku chap was the worst of that lot. Before Mr. McDougall had time to say I told you so, the boys from the Malay College had begun to rouse the rabble. Them on one side, and on the other the bloody Chinese communists, wretched turncoats: the very weapons the British had given them to fight the Japanese were now being used to murder Briton and Native alike.

King George was gone. His daughter now wore his plucked crown: above her solid English face it sat, with a large hen’s egg of a hole smack above her forehead, a pair of smaller round holes to the left, and to the right a row of tiny emeralds and rubies, loose as a seven-year-old’s milk teeth, waiting to be knocked out.

It was precisely because Mr. McDougall knew the Tunku’s people so well that he saw what would hatch from this latest little jewel-egg: nothing but the same old kind of trouble that had swamped India and Burma and the Sudan. Shifting their weight from foot to worried foot, their eyes glittering like wolves’ in the dark, the Chinese and the Indians were already waiting on the sidelines. That was to say, those who hadn’t already joined the communists, whose “insurgency”—Mr. McDougall chuckled bitterly every time he heard this namby-pamby word—they’d be lucky to put down before they left. Oh yes, no doubt about it, this was going to be a circus, a zoo, and a Christmas pantomime all rolled into one.

What with his mistress raving and raging at his heels, threatening to bring the outside world’s insanity into his high-ceilinged house, Mr. McDougall wasn’t wasting any time. On the fifteenth of December 1956 he had his lawyer draw up the bill of sale for the house and its adjoining acres, coconut trees and all; on the eighteenth he broke camp and headed home to Scotland, resigned to the prospect of spending a puking Yuletide on the high seas. He’d sold the house at a loss, but he didn’t care, not even when he saw the self-satisfied glint in the eyes of the wog who bought it. This man was a walking symptom of the softening of the empire. When a dockyard coolie could send his son to Oxford, thought Mr. McDougall as he signed his half of the unevenly typewritten, smudgily cyclostyled contract, that’s when you knew it was time to cut your losses and flee. The Rise of the Middle Bloody Class all right. That’s all we need.

“So!” he said aloud to the fellow, looking at him from head to toe and back. He was all spiffed up, this chap, decked out in a spotless white shirt and a bow tie just to come and sign an agreement in the back room of the miners’ club. “Got yourself a deal, eh?”

“Yes, yes,” said Tata. “Thank you very much, and good luck on your return to Scotland, Mr. McDougall.” He held out his hand, and Mr. McDougall took it with distaste, unable to shake the feeling that the fellow was having the last laugh.

He was right, of course, that Tata was pleased with himself for one-upping a vellakaran, for making off so effortlessly with such a bargain. “This,” he said, holding the deed out to Paati where she stood peeling onions for the day’s chicken perital, “this is the beginning of a new age. For us and for Malaya.”

Paati, her hair still black, her hands still soft, nodded uncertainly. “Maybe,” she said, “maybe so. But when the British are really gone for good, we’ll miss them.” And under cover of her onion-peeling, real tears, earnest and round, ran down her face. She wept for the Englishmen who would be booted out unceremoniously for the supposed sins of their fathers, sins she had never known, for she had known nothing but a glorious, sturdy contentment in her childhood. She wept for old times, for her missionary schoolmistresses and her red-bound Royal Readers, for “God Save the Queen” and the King’s Christmas Message on the radio. She wept for old, lazy-eyed Mr. Maxwell, the overseer at the Cowan & Maugham Steamship Company; for Mr. Scotts-Hornby, the late manager whose position Tata had filled; for Lieutenant Colonel Phillips and his wife, who had rented the bungalow behind the house to which Tata had brought her when they were newly married. And she wept for one Englishman in particular, whose name she did not speak, even to herself.

“Tsk,” said Tata now. “How many times have I told you to peel the onions under water and wear your glasses while doing it? Aadiyappa, how you women let vanity rule your lives!”

Obediently Paati dropped each onion with a plop into a large ever-silver bowl of water, and no more was said of the British on that day.

BY THE TIME Mr. McDougall packed away his coconut-frond fans and his tropical-weather Wellingtons for good, Ipoh, never the cultural hub of British Malaya, had begun to split her thin colonial skin, and a new town peered out from under it, its pavements wet with phlegmy spittle. Bustling kopitiams sprouted around derelict whiskey bars like toadstools around rotting logs. Inside them flocks of old Chinamen squatted at marble-topped tables, dipping fluffy white bread in their morning coffee, slurping their midday bak kut teh. The Cold Storage, with its gleaming, chrome-stooled milk bar, closed forever on a quiet Saturday afternoon. In its place arose an establishment shifting uneasily between supermarket and wet market, alive with flies, slick with the sanguine juices of fish and fowl. The University Bookstore folded, and all over town, small, disreputable-looking bookstalls, with Chinese names and Indian film magazines strung across dark doorways, popped up. The raucous revelry of Chinese businessmen and Indian doctors expelled the last ghosts of Englishmen’s subdued scotch-and-cigar evenings from the richly paneled rooms of the Ipoh Club.

Having selected an auspicious moving day from their Tamil calendar, Tata and Paati packed up their house in Butterworth and drove to Ipoh with her rosewood trunk on the back seat and his wiry old bicycle strapped to the roof of their maroon Bentley. Tata’s pleated khaki trousers bulged with assets and liabilities: a hefty balance at Lloyd’s Bank, various and sundry investments in the industries of the inchoate nation (so that when he died the obituary writer at the Straits Times fanned out for his readers the entire pack of catchy double-barreled monikers Tata had amassed: Rubber Baron, Cement King, Duke of Durians, Tapioca Tycoon, Import-Export Godfather), a wife still fresh and dimpled at fifty-eight, and three unmarried daughters. His two sons were away: Raju had got a job with a law firm in Singapore after coming down from Oxford, and Balu, newly married, was winning ballroom-dancing competitions all over Europe.

“Useless bloody fool,” Appa was to growl years later, pointing out Uncle Ballroom to Uma and Suresh and Aasha in old family albums with moldering construction-paper pages. And, jabbing with an index finger the pictures of Uncle Ballroom’s doomed garden-party wedding: “Tangoing and foxtrotting his way to penury. Foxtrotting only he found his fox. Too bad she could trot faster than him. He was chachaing this side, she was choo-chooing that side. Bloody idiot got outfoxed by his own fox. Hah!” “And probably eating steek,” Suresh would whisper to Aasha when they were out of earshot, “with a knife and fork. And sleeping with no shirt on. Like J. R. Ewing only.”

But in 1956, Tata was untroubled by visions of his profligate son’s future. As the country charged towards birth and impetuous youth, he embraced his twilight years with a grateful sigh and a settling-in sense. Hiring servants only to cook and clean, he busied himself with his rose bushes and his vegetable garden. He harvested ripe chilies and twined tender tomato plants around stakes. He pruned, he weeded, he mowed twice a week. He planted trees: guava, mango, tamarind. He put up garden walls and trellises and came in for tea at ten past four, sweating but radiant, smiling around his kitchen at the rightness, the in-placeness of it all.

In a shed hastily erected in the garden, he spread mail-order instructions out on a workbench and built and varnished strange pieces of furniture he had previously only read about in books: secretaries, hall trees, cane stands.

He ordered a chandelier from France and, when it arrived, spent six days sitting in front of the opened crate, turning each part around and around in his hands. On the seventh day, a sudden fire roaring in his belly, he stayed up well past his usual bedtime to assemble the chandelier by the light of a kerosene lamp, frowning and muttering at the poorly translated directions, struggling, struggling, lipchewing, jawgrinding, squinting at the diagrams, until finally, at one minute to midnight, he dragged Paati from her bed in breathless triumph. They raised their faces towards the hanging chandelier in numinous expectation. Tata put the index finger of his right hand to the switch, took a deep breath, and flicked it on. At exactly midnight on the thirty-first of August 1957, there was Light …

… at precisely the same moment as, two hundred hopeful miles away, Tunku Abdul Rahman raised his right arm high on a colonial cricket ground and saluted the country’s new freedom to the accompaniment of an aroused-and-rousing cheer of “Merdeka!” —Freed om! —and the eager choreography of the flag boys: in perfect synchrony, the Union Jack was lowered and the new flag raised. There, too, was Light. The blazing Light of a dozen fluorescent streetlamps, the crackling Light of a hundred flashing cameras, the (metaphorical, now, but no less real) inner Light of pride and ambition that shone in a million patriotic breasts just as it had shone in other breasts at other midnights.

Convinced that the Big House should grow and glow and celebrate sympathetically, Tata consulted a firm of architects about several extensions. An extra guest room. Two extra bathrooms (one with a clawfoot bathtub). An orchid conservatory. A music room–cum–smoking room (although there was but one gramophone, and no one smoked). An English kitchen equipped with a gleaming Aga range, in which the cook refused to set foot, preferring her outdoor Indian kitchen with its squealing tap and its gaping drains ready to receive fish guts, vegetable peelings, and leftover curries. And finally a servant’s room under the back staircase, although neither Tata nor Paati got around to hiring a live-in servant to occupy it. Paying no heed to Mr. McDougall’s conservative taste, Tata had the new wings built in a proud local style: solid wooden slats on a concrete base, patched willy-nilly onto the austere symmetry of the original grey stone structure, so that in less than two years the house metamorphosed into something out of an Enid Blyton bedtime story. Unnecessary corridors met each other at oblique angles. Additions, partitions, and covered porches seemed to rise out of nowhere before the eye. Green mosquito netting thumbed its nose at the Battenburg lace curtains in the next room. Sweat and steam and coal smoke from the hot Indian kitchen invaded the immaculate English kitchen and smeared its shiny surfaces. And above it all, the house’s bold features—the quick, damning eyelids of the shutters, the sharp gable noses so different from the flat roofs around them—shuddered with a Scotsman’s thin-lipped rancor. These bloody Nati’es. That’s whit ye gie when ye gie a boorichie ay wogs ’eh reit tae rule.

Tata’s last home-improvement venture before he died was to paint the outside of the house an unapologetic peacock blue, as if to stamp upon the building his ownership, his nation’s liberty and his own. It was a color Tata’s neighbors were accustomed to seeing only in wedding sarees and Mughal miniature paintings. Now the house practically glowed in the dark. The Big House. 79 Kingfisher Lane. You can’t miss it, people took to saying when giving directions. It’s nothing like the others. Appa’s one concession to the mawkish sentimentality of the Indian son, as far as his children were ever able to tell, was to select the same blinding color every five years when he had the house repainted. “Any other color just wouldn’t be the same,” he’d say with a regretful headshake. “Got to honor the old man’s magnificent jasmine-and-marigolds curdrice-and-pickle Madras-masala aesthetic sensibilities.”

WHEN TATA keeled over in his vegetable garden one luminous May morning in 1958, Paati ordered her daughters to summon their oldest brother. Then she settled herself on the south-facing porch (noncovered, alas) to wait, squinting at the horizon as if she could see the hump of Singapore rising like a turtle’s back through the blue water three hundred miles away, and astride that hump, like the Colossus of Rhodes, her fearless firstborn, ready to clear the Tebrau Strait in a single leap and come lumbering across the land into this manless garden, law degree in one hand and hoe in the other. At dusk her daughters begged her to come indoors; at eight, despairing, they brought her mosquito coils and a pillow for her back. But she barked her questions without looking at them. At what time had the telegram been sent? Had a response been received? At what time was Raju to start from Singapore? In the morning she was still there in her rattan chair, covered in red bites the size of grapes, her voice hoarse from the smoke of the useless mosquito coils. Scratching furiously, she got up to greet Appa as his pea-green Morris Minor pulled into the driveway.

“I dropped everything and sped straight home, foof!” he was to tell his children years later. “Just like that I had to tender my resignation. Tup-tup-tup and I was standing here consoling the old lady and taking charge of everything.” Tup-tup-tup and three snaps of his fingers. So magical had been his haste, so uncanny the lightning progress of the Morris Minor on the old backcountry byways. “Just imagine,” Appa would say, “just try and imagine if you can. Zipped home just like that.” And dutifully the children would feel the wind of that speed in their faces, and see unanimously the image each one had purloined without a word from the thoughts of the other: a young Appa zooming through the brightening air with one arm stuck straight out before him like some undersized, chicken-chested superhero.

After Tata’s funeral, Appa bagged a coveted associateship in the venerable law firm of Rackham Fields & Company. Though his bosses were all British for now, they’d be throwing up their jobs and leaving one by one, and whom would they choose to fill their shoes if not a fellow who’d come down from Oxford with first-class honors? Both precedent and informed speculation suggested that such a job would provide the perfect sparkling counterpoint to the meteoric political career Appa envisioned for himself. He had inherited —oh, most precious of legacies! —his father’s uncompromising ambition. With a bit of work everything would be his: a Mercedes in the driveway, a Datukship on the King’s birthday, the country itself. The whole country, his for the taking, his generation’s. What an inheritance! They would not squander it. They would make this country the envy of all Asia, even of the bloody British themselves.

As part of the understanding that he would see his sisters well settled, Appa had also inherited an ancillary tripartite legacy: 1) the Big House, that twisted, hulking setting of his father’s twilight years; 2) half of the shipping company; 3) the lion’s share of Tata’s wisely invested nest egg.

The house welcomed its new lord with wide-open doors and a garland of vermilioned mango leaves strung across the top of the front doorway. But the shipping company, managed these past two years by a loyal secretary, could no longer be kept. “I’m a barrister, not a bloody boatman,” Appa declared to anyone who would listen. “And my brother is a fool. Amateur and professional. You think sambaing and rumbaing will keep the boats afloat or what?” So the company was sold, the rubber, cement, durian, and tapioca investments divided, and Uncle Ballroom’s share grudgingly forwarded to him in Europe per his instructions. Appa gave the boy five months (in the end it took seven) to spend it all before he began dashing off desperate pleas for more. Ah, well. The luckiest of men had thorns in their sides, and unlike some, he, at least, didn’t have to worry about a younger brother who would stumble into an unsuitable match with a dimwitted troglodyte, spawn six snotty brats, and ensconce himself and his family in a spare room upstairs whence they would all descend in a cavalcade for free idli sambar at each mealtime. No, such burdens would almost certainly never be his: on the shelf in the dining room sat his brother’s latest All-Round Ballroom Champion trophy and a framed photograph of him and his partner in some obscenely gilded ballroom in Vienna, in exactly the same pose as the faceless gold-trophy couple. Thus freed of the firstborn’s burden, Appa invested his half of the nest egg twice-wisely and pondered his place in the newborn nation.