Muneeza Shamsie
Muneeza Shamsie (1944– ) was born in Lahore, educated in England, and has lived in Karachi for most of her life. From 1975 to 1982 she taught music and mime as a volunteer at a special-education school in Karachi. She is a founding member of The Kidney Centre, a Karachi hospital.
Shamsie is a Pakistani critic, short story writer, and the editor of three pioneering anthologies: A Dragonfly in the Sun: An Anthology of Pakistani Writing in English (Oxford University Press, 1997), Leaving Home: Towards a New Millennium: A Collection of English Prose by Pakistani Writers (Oxford University Press, 2001), and this volume, And The World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women (Women Unlimited, 2005; The Feminist Press, 2008). She is the managing editor for a work in progress, The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan and is also currently writing a critical book, Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of a Pakistani Literature in English (working title). Shamsie is on the editorial board for the bibliographic issue of The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (UK) and contributes to Dawn and Newsline (Pakistan), The Daily Star (Bangladesh) and The Literary Encyclopedia (online). She has spoken at many literary forums, and was a fellow of the 1999 Cambridge Seminar.
“Jungle Jim” is a literary rendering of Shamsie’s view that the colonial construct is patriarchal, as is its emulation by South Asia’s Anglicized elite. For this ruling class, English is connected to power, governing, and control, while the arts by their very nature are related to freedom of expression and are thus subversive. The conflict inherent in this becomes apparent in the portrayal of Uncle Jim. His drawings of World War I war victims, his opinions on the shikar, and his scandalous marriage to an Englishwoman challenge the foundations of Empire and its narratives. The plot, which cuts across three generations, also shows the tenacity with which Jo’s grandmother, Nani Jaan, and her sister tie down Uncle Jim to an incompatible arranged marriage in an attempt to subvert modernity.
The tale that Jo hears at her school in England and the racist interpretation that British society gives to to the story of Uncle Jim and Frances embody the imperial stereotypes and notions of Otherness, which are integral to Jo’s nightmares and her paintings.
The backdrop of the two World Wars and Partition shows the way in which the latter was inextricably linked to the former and the painful choice Indian Muslims confronted in 1947 when the division of the subcontinent led to the unforeseen division of families.
The story brings out another colonial subtext, that because all the people who lived in the British Empire, anywhere in the world, were considered British subjects, they traveled on British passports. Jo’s father, who deplored independence, exercised the option of remaining British in 1947. He assumed that because he spoke fluent English, had adopted English ways, and was a World War II veteran and an aristocrat, he and his family would be regarded as equals in Britain. The loss of their social status in London is contrasted with the family’s privileged standing in Amarkot, where the one-time ruler, His Highness the Nawab of Amarkot (HH for short) is an ex-classmate, and his wife, Her Highness the Begum of Amarkot, a cousin.
• • •
I paint. That’s all I do. That’s all I have ever done. But no, I don’t talk about my paintings much, because I don’t know how to. I suppose the best I can do is to tell a story—about myself, Raynard’s Wood, and Amarkot.
1. 1956
My sister Lalla and I joined Raynard’s Wood School in the autumn of 1956. My father, Commander Syed Mohsin “Mo” Ali Baig, drove us down, through the narrow winding roads of Hampshire flanked by overlapping trees. Begum Sitara Ali Baig exclaimed over the autumn colors, the school grounds, and the splendid white Wyatt building. I thought she was overdoing her enthusiasm—we had been there before.
There was a hub of voices, a crush of parents, girls, suitcases, and trunks, but the moment we entered a hush fell. Everyone stared. My mother was in an emerald green coat and pale silk sari; my father, in a dark overcoat, a hat in his hand. The majority of parents were in casual tweeds, sheepskin jackets, thick sweaters, and sturdy shoes: One woman was in gumboots. We stayed close together, the four of us.
An elderly woman in a white coat—the school matron—bustled toward us. She announced in a firm, confident voice. “More new girls, Lalla-Rook and Marja-Been.” (Not surprisingly we came to be known as The Margarines.) Someone whispered, “Aren’t they sweet?” Another voice said, “I wonder if they can speak English?” I was shocked, the color rising to my ears.
At supper, in the dormitory, in the classroom, I had to answer numerous questions about myself. No, I hadn’t come from a foreign country, I said. I lived in London. I had been to a day school in Kensington. I spoke English at home. I seldom ate curry. Everyone called me Jo, which was short for Majjo, which was short for Mahjabeen. My sister, Lalla Rukh was just Lalla. I was eleven. I listened to other girls talk about fathers and brothers. I chipped in: One of my uncles—called Jim—had been to Sherborne and Oxford, too, and my father to Dartmouth. “During the war Daddy was almost captured by the Japs in Singapore,” I said.
The school was haunted. I discovered this quite soon.
My newly made friends, Sarah and Lucy, said we were not allowed to talk about it because the “little ones” got really frightened. She meant the junior-most girls, to which group Lalla belonged. Mandy, who shared my bedside locker, said ghosts did not exist. But in bed, after lights, we told ghost stories. One day Cilla with the auburn hair, began: “Once upon a time, long long ago, Raynard’s Wood belonged to a man with a wooden leg—”
Goosebumps ran all the way up my arm.
I knew his name: Sir Roger Allis.
“He was a bit soft in the head and didn’t have any friends,” said Cilla. “He thought England shouldn’t fight Germany, and the British Empire was all rubbish. He had some friends in India or Africa or somewhere. They brought home this native boy. The man didn’t have anyone else to talk to. He took him in and treated him like a son. Everyone said no good would come of it.”
My heart was beating so loudly that it seemed to echo in my head. I knew she was talking about Uncle Jim.
“Well, he had a daughter called Fanny—”
The room was pitch black; not even a faint light seeped through the curtains opposite. I longed to cry out, to protest, but I couldn’t.
“The next thing everyone knew was, this native and Fanny wanted to marry! Well! That woke the father up. He threw him out. She was very beautiful—quite The Deb of the Season. She got married in no time. But the native wasn’t going to let go just like that. Oh, no. He began to meet her secretly. Her husband caught them. He divorced her for adultery.”
Adultery!!
Uncle Jim and Aunt Frances had committed adultery.
“She wanted to keep her children but the judge refused, quite rightly. Daddy says it was all in the papers. It was a huge scandal. Her father blamed himself, of course. He died quite soon—on October 10. Ever since, on that day, at midnight, his ghost roams the corridors with his wooden leg going thump, thump, thump. And his voice floats across crying, “Fanny! Fanny!”
I stopped breathing. Voices and gasps washed over me.
“How terrible!”
“How awful!”
“What happened to her?”
“That’s the worst part. He took her away from England to some far-off country. They didn’t have proper doctors there or anything and he didn’t bother with her, anyway. So she caught typhoid or cholera or some local disease and died.”
I couldn’t sleep.
2. 1952
Uncle Jim impinged himself on my consciousness when I was seven and Lalla was five. My parents in England were going through a difficult time financially. They left us with our maternal grandmother, Nani Jaan, for some months in India. She lived in Amarkot, an erstwhile princely state which had merged with India at Independence.
At first, Uncle Jim was merely one of our many relatives. The only difference was that he didn’t fuss over us (which was both a relief and a disappointment) and nearly always spoke in English or an awkward Anglicized Urdu. To me, he looked quite the English gentleman in his sola topi, tweeds, and pipe.
One morning, dressed in my new red dungarees, I perched myself on the white balustrade with my back to the lawn. Nani Jaan was attending to the household accounts, beyond the fluted arches that divided the covered verandah from the brick terrace. Her metal-rimmed glasses were angled on her pointed nose and her gray hair was tied into a neat bun. A shawl fell over her rounded shoulders. I thought she looked quite like a fairy godmother.
There was a slight winter nip in the air. I swung my feet between the curves of sunlight and shadow created by the balustrade. I breathed in the lovely, smoky smell of peasant fires. To my right, where the verandah led away from the terrace, I glimpsed Lalla in a pink smocked dress (the one I loathed and refused to wear), half-merged with the roses in the rose garden. Our nanny, An’na Bua, was helping Lalla feed the the goldfish in the lily pond. Another maidservant shuffled past with a tray full of sweet, white, fluffy batashas, an offering at our private mosque beyond the guava groves.
There were signs of straggly grass and damp on the walls that caused Nani Jaan to sigh and lament the changing times, but I hardly noticed. I thought Amarkot was much nicer than living in London with its black, half-bombed buildings, drizzle, and rationing.
Suddenly, there was the loud and uneven tooting of a car horn. Uncle Jim hurtled down the drive in his shining green Bentley. Dozens of servants scurried around. I was whisked off the balustrade. Nani Jaan exclaimed in Urdu, “If he has to drink, he should stay at home. He shouldn’t inflict himself on decent people.”
Before I knew it Uncle Jim had maneuvered his car at an angle, pressed down the accelerator, and zoomed up all five steps, right onto the terrace! His car whirred and screeched. He drove around and around that enclosed space. He paused to wave and shout, “I’ve done it! I’ve done it! I bet a thousand rupees that I could!” He drove his car down the steps in the most terrifying manner, swung it to the left with split-second timing, and roared off toward the tall wrought-iron gates in a crunch of gravel and a cloud of dust.
In retrospect, I realize it was a rather skilled piece of driving. I don’t suppose Uncle Jim was drunk at all. I picked up the servants’ gossip. What did the servants mean when they whispered that Uncle Jim’s wife, Shahla Momani, complained that he couldn’t control himself when he was “in the mood”? I asked Nani Jaan. What did this have to do with the odor of whiskey? Why did this result in the servants feeling sorry for her? And what did it mean that she was fertile and had borne three sons, while his English wife, Aunty Frances, had been barren? How were children born anyway? And was it true that after Aunty Frances died he wanted to marry my mother, not Shahla Momani?
Nani Jaan was not in the habit of telling children half lies. Either she told the truth or she commanded them to stop pestering her. In this particular instance she summoned all the servants, admonished them in no uncertain terms, and forbade them from discussing Uncle Jim ever again.
My interest in Uncle Jim grew.
3.
In Amarkot, Nani Jaan knew few children for Lalla and me to play with. Her friends and family had served in HH the Nawab of Amarkot’s administration, but had now been replaced by minor Indian government officials. The brutalities and the exchange of populations at Partition, the exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and the influx of Hindu and Sikh refugees meant that many of her neighbors were strangers. Two of her sons had migrated to Pakistan; her third was posted in Delhi. Uncle Jim’s children and HH’s were away at exclusive boarding schools in the hills.
One day, Lalla and I were playing in Nani Jaan’s mango groves beyond the lawn. Our plump and bosomy An’na Bua settled under a tree, cracked her knuckles and looked on. Lalla was a beautiful, blond princess caught in a wicked witch’s spell; I was the gallant tawny-haired prince battling through forests with a huge sword. Leaves rustled above my head, twigs crackled under my feet as I galloped to Lalla’s rescue.
Uncle Jim was taking his evening walk. He emerged from a pathway and growled, “I am a fierce and fearful tiger. I am coming to get you!” Lalla and I squealed and giggled. We ran from tree to tree. He chased us around and around until he caught us and tickled us. “Oh, if I had a daughter, what wouldn’t I do for her!” he exclaimed in accented Urdu.
“Then why do you have so many sons?” Lalla asked.
“Because it is God’s will,” said Uncle Jim, “unfair though God might be.”
“Jim Sahib,” exclaimed An’na Bua. “For the fear of God, never say such a thing!”
He laughed. He took our tiny hands in his large, strong ones and allowed us to lead him through the mango grove. We emerged by a field. A bullock was chomping grass beside a rusty well. A peasant woman in bright swirling robes collected cakes of cowdung and heaped them onto the fire outside her hut. We watched silently. Somehow Uncle Jim seemed to know that we were more fascinated by the cakes of cow dung than anything else in India.
We were torn between the temptation to pick them up (after all, the peasants did) and our polite upbringing. Lalla became restless and ran off, with An’na Bua panting behind. “Lalla Bibi! Thero! Lalla Bibi! Wait!”
Uncle Jim and I strolled back. I asked him the one question that had been bothering me for some time. “Uncle Jim,” I said. “Why, when we like it so much here, do we have to go back to London?”
I shook my head.
“Well,” he said. He lit a pipe. “The English were here for a very long time. Now they have left.”
“Like Aunty Frances,” I said. I knew I was venturing into forbidden territory.
“No. Aunt Frances—or Fanny as I called her—died of tuberculosis. The best doctors in India, England, and Switzerland couldn’t do anything for her. There was no cure. In any case, she was my wife so she was one of us.”
Uncle Jim and I walked through leafy shadows. He puffed his pipe, thought a bit, and began again.
“You see, Jo, the English ruled us for many years. Now they don’t. Now we are independent. But the country has been divided. Many, many people have been killed. My sisters, your uncles, and many others, have left for the new Muslim country, Pakistan. I, like your grandmother, wish to live and die here, where I was born. Your father, on the other hand, thinks very highly of the English. He’s decided to settle in England.”
Somehow this did not seem a very satisfactory explanation, but I soon realized that it was all I was going to get. Besides, Uncle Jim had seen Nani Jaan approaching. He became boisterous again. He rumbled and roared like a tiger and chased me until I sought refuge in Nani Jaan’s silk sari.
“Jim Mia, will you never grow up?” Nani Jaan said.
“Never,” he declared.
“Never?” I asked. “Like Peter Pan?”
He laughed and ruffled my hair. “Yes, Jo. Like Peter Pan.”
Of course this was quite wrong, I decided, because Peter Pan had only been a boy while Uncle Jim was quite grown up. He was even older than my mother and father, though he was much more fun than either of them. And he knew about Peter Pan.
4.
“Uncle Jim,” I said. “Have you ever been to England?”
Uncle Jim gave a short laugh that made me think I had said something very stupid. But then he smiled and said, “Yes, Jo, I’ve been to England.”
He had invited us to tea. We hardly noticed the peeling paint and faded surfaces in his stately colonial home. In his wood-paneled study, leopard and cheetah-skin rugs lay at our feet; antlered heads gazed at us from the wall with shining glass eyes. A wood fire warmed us.
“England?” said my grandmother. “Why he was almost born in England.”
“Were you?” asked Lalla.
Lalla was half swallowed up by a leather chair, her hair tightly scraped into two neat bunches, hands very white and small against the armrests.
“No,” he answered. “No, I wasn’t.”
An elderly servant in green and white livery served crumpets, sandwiches, scones, and sponge cake in silver dishes. Uncle Jim’s pallid wife, Shahla Momani, poured tea. Lalla and I were almost afraid of being too boisterous in her presence in case she fainted, or of bumping into her in case she fell. She seldom contributed to a conversation, unless it revolved around her misfortunes.
“If his father, the Judge Sahib, had had his way, probably he would have been born in England,” said Nani Jaan. “The way he carried on, you would have thought anything Indian was a sin. He had to have English governesses, English food, English furniture. . . .”
“Then what happened?” I asked
“What do you think happened?” she said “He sent him to school in England in 1912. When he was nine.”
Uncle Jim’s mother, Nani Jaan, and my father’s mother had all been sisters.
“Then why don’t you live in England?” asked Lalla.
“Yes,” Shahla Momani suddenly spoke up. Her small beady eyes danced; her thin bloodless lips compressed into a feline smirk. “Ask him why.”
Uncle Jim didn’t answer.
Instead, he took us off to his piano. His strong, manicured hands pounded and slithered rapidly over black and white keys. We sang with him, clapped our hands, and did a twirl or two.
Lalla and I began to visit him often.
Uncle Jim taught us to play chopsticks. He helped us fly kites. He sketched us. He used an easel where I, too, liked to stand and draw. He encouraged me to portray the jackals I had glimpsed near the waterfall at the far end of his garden, or the hyenas I heard after dark. He would hold my attempts up for scrutiny, pointing out minor improvements I could make. But he warned us, these were wild animals. They lived in the snake-infested vegetation and tangles beyond the shrubbery, though there had been beautiful cane fields and secluded walks there, once. The government had taken the land away from his family, after Partition, but it was too boring to explain. He showed us the water colors he had painted some years ago, of the trees and arbor and stream, as well as squirrels, flowers, and birds. Oh yes, he said, the paintings in the house of Shahla Momani, their sons, HH’s pink palace, the bazaar, and fort, were all done by him.
Suddenly Shahla Momani loomed in the arched doorway. “It is six o’clock,” she announced.
“Oh,” said Uncle Jim. “Right. I’d better get these children home, hadn’t I?” He added in a conspiratorial whisper, “Your grandmother’s a stickler for time, you know.”
In time, he introduced us to his favorite trophy: an enormous stuffed tiger with a fierce snarl, pointed teeth, and glistening green eyes, which stood in a large, musty billiard room. “Isn’t it beautiful?” asked Uncle Jim. Lalla and I were paralyzed. How were we going to get past without being devoured?
Uncle Jim laughed.
“It’s not real,” he said, “look.” He stroked the tiger, touched its teeth, and put his hand into its mouth. He persuaded us to do likewise.
“It’s very special, you know,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it was a man-eater. It had eluded capture for many, many years, but I finally caught up with it. It had killed lots of people in the villages my father owned.”
“Did it eat them, too?” I asked with held breath.
“Yes, I am afraid it did.”
“Then why didn’t it eat you?” Lalla asked.
I blushed at her lack of tact and discretion.
“It very nearly did,” Uncle Jim answered. “Twice, when I thought I’d caught it, I discovered I had shot some harmless animal. In the end I tracked it down. I had calculated it was a little ahead of me when I almost walked into it. I saw it just in time. I stood absolutely still. It looked at me like a satisfied cat just before it sprang. I brought my gun very, very slowly into position. I shot it, and in that moment it leaped.”
After that, Uncle Jim became our hero. We loved to hear about his exploits. We learned about distinguishing pug marks, the importance of wind direction, the individual habits of a tiger. Uncle Jim said the tiger was the most magnificent of animals. It stood fearless in the jungle, until men intruded into its territory with guns, elephants, and beaters, and shot it down in cold blood from a tree. Uncle Jim had vowed that once he caught up with his man-eater, he would never hunt again.
He showed us the bullet marks that had killed the tiger. He pointed out the wound and the broken teeth that had made it difficult for it to find food and had turned it into a man-eater. We played around and around the tiger—and our favorite game became Jungle Jim and the Man-eater.
5. 1953
“Well, Sitara, Mo. What do you think of your children? Haven’t they grown up?”
Uncle Jim was among the first to greet my parents, along with Nani Jaan, Lalla, and me, that sweltering summer morning when they alighted from HH’s limousine, which had motored them down from Delhi.
“You have been so kind to them, Jim Bhai,” said my mother. My mother had had her hair cut and permed; her eyebrows were plucked into a fashionable arch; she wore bright red lipstick, as always.
Lalla hurtled toward her, but I was conscious that I was too big for that now. I flung myself on my sturdy, comforting father instead.
“Hello, Old Girl,” he said and hugged me. My mother gave me a kiss on each cheek and was soon chatting away with relatives in the drawing room. I kept trying to interrupt, to show her my paintings of tigers and jackals, jasmine and double jasmine, of peasant huts, but my mother said, “Jo, can’t you see I’m conversing?”
She was regaling her cousins, the Begum of Amarkot and Shahla Momani, with an account of the chiffon saris you could buy on Jermyn Street.
“Sitara, the child is pleased to see you,” Uncle Jim interceded, “she wants a little attention.”
My mother turned toward me and smiled valiantly. “Yes, Jo,” her face creased in lines of concentration. “What do you want?”
I was so confused I couldn’t think of anything to say. I had forgotten how we taxed her patience in London and how often, in our sparse, dark, and creaky Kensington flat, she would break down and cry, “I can’t cope. Oh, I just can’t cope.”
The ceiling fan whirred overhead. I could hear the zap and snap of the cotton-lined bamboo blinds being unrolled by servants on the verandah outside to block the midday sun. I shuffled sideways to a space somewhere between Uncle Jim and my father. I tried to tell my father about the Man-eater.
“Man-eater?” my father said. His dark hair was slicked close to his head; his feet were planted squarely on the ground and a signet ring glistened on his finger. “What Man-eater?”
Uncle Jim was stuffing his pipe, but golden strands of tobacco scattered on the rich blue Persian carpet. Suddenly, I was conscious of the gray that peppered Uncle Jim’s hair and the lines etched on his face. Nani Jaan pressed him to stay for lunch, but he left shortly.
Nani Jaan kept telling everyone how well Uncle Jim had looked after Lalla and me.
“I don’t see why that gives him license to tell them tall stories,” my father said.
“Mo!” protested my mother.
“His father was a great hunter,” my father rocked on his heels, his hands in his pockets, “I doubt if Jim has shot anything but a partridge.”
“That’s not true!” Lalla and I chorused.
I didn’t want to go to England with my parents, I wanted to stay in Amarkot. I said as much the next day.
“Jim Bhai has really spoiled these girls,” my mother said to my grandmother that afternoon. I was half-dozing beside Lalla on an old-fashioned divan with silver legs. My mother was reclining against a bolster. We were in the wide passage that divided Nani Jaan’s portion of the house from the half she had decided to rent. At the far end, a matting of tall, sweet-smelling reeds, khas ki tatti, blocked the large window. Outside, a man sprinkled water to keep it wet. A large electric fan fitted in the center blew in the cooled air. “He loves children,” Nani Jaan said. “His own don’t respond to him as yours do. Shahla encourages them to scorn his English ways in the name of nationalism.” I could hear the click and chop of her silver cutter as she dexterously cut betel nuts into tiny pieces.
“I don’t know why you chose Shahla for him,” my mother burst out.
“He said he wanted a girl with a pale skin, beautiful feet, and a mole on her chin. We were lucky we found anyone.”
“He said it as a joke! He was shattered when Frances died, he didn’t want to marry again.”
“What difference does that make?” Nani Jaan said. “He never had any consideration for anyone’s feelings. No one in our family has married an Englishwoman—and that was bad enough, but to bring all the scandal and shame upon us! No one would receive him in England. No English official would receive him in India. He ruined his chances of joining the Indian Civil Service, which was his father’s dearest wish. Can you imagine what his poor parents went through? His education, honor, everything—thrown to the winds.”
“Civilized English people met him,” my mother answered, “as did enlightened Indians. We all knew that if there had been any justice, he should have been allowed to marry Frances in the first place. Instead, they encouraged her to marry that awful man with his titles, horses, dogs (and an American mother’s fortune), who beat her black and blue and wanted heirs, even when childbearing became a grave risk for her.”
“Poor Frances,” my grandmother sighed. “She was too good for this world, so kind and gentle. But if his mother wanted to find him a suitable Indian bride from our own family in Old Delhi and with the same background as us, who can blame her?”
“He was speechless when he heard you had proposed to Shahla on his behalf and her family had accepted,” my mother said. “He felt honor-bound to go through with it.”
“He had his eye on you.”
“Of course he didn’t! I was 14 or 15, just a naïve little girl to him, barely out of parda. He was comfortable with me, that’s all, because I had been close to Frances and used to play badminton and tennis with her. Anyway, I had been betrothed to Mo since childhood.”
“That would hardly have been an impediment. He had no regard for any Indian custom.”
“Oh, Mother!!”
The conversation died. The afternoon wore on. My head grew heavy with the heat. I sipped cool water. Suddenly, a breathless servant charged in. “Begum Sahib, Begum Sahib, a terrible thing! A woman has been killed and eaten by a tiger near Jim Sahib’s house!”
I sat up.
“Nonsense,” said my mother. “There isn’t a tiger within miles.”
“My brother saw it,” the servant took in a great gulp of air. “He heard its roar and he heard her screams. In the cane fields—that belonged to Jim Sahib once. There’s a secluded stream that people visit.”
“Visit?”
“They use it as a latrine,” Nani Jaan explained.
My mother rang Uncle Jim. He said the tiger had escaped from a reserve thirty miles away and somehow found his way, crosscountry, to Amarkot. Oh no, Uncle Jim said, the animal was nowhere near his house, he wasn’t in any danger. But his best advice was for everyone to stay put. There was utter confusion outside. People, mostly young men, had come out with sticks and stones to combat the animal. One look at the mangled woman and the sound of another roar, and they had fled. Within a few minutes the story had spread. Everyone wanted to see the tiger, they were converging on the cane fields.
“Dear God,” my mother said. “What do they think it is? A fun fair? Where are the authorities? The police?”
She called my father from his room. Lalla, too, woke up. The servant wheeled in the tea trolley but no one looked at it. My father donned a sola topi and walked up to Nani Jaan’s gate with us. Two jeeps appeared with the Chief of Police and the local MP, accompanied by HH in safari dress. HH had been at Aitcheson College in Lahore with my father. He said, “Hello, Mo, old chap. Want to join us?” My father hopped into the jeep despite my mother’s protests. The jeep’s loudspeaker blared: “There is a tiger in Jim Sahib’s old cane fields. Do not go near. Keep away. Keep away! We have everything under control.”
This had quite the opposite effect. Soon, the avenue was crammed with people heading toward the fields. Vendors of sweet drinks, cigarette, and paan jostled along with the curious mob, advertising their wares with loud singsong chants. There was a distant rumble and screams. A movement of people, pushing, shoving, running. A passerby told us that the frenzied animal had leaped at the crowd and killed one more woman.
My mother returned to the house with Lalla and me. Rivulets of sweat ran down her flushed face and ours. We retreated into the dark, cool passage and gulped down iced water. Nani Jaan tried to ring Uncle Jim but the line was busy. Some of her servants slipped away to join the melee; others supplied us with bulletins. No one quite knew what was going on. We huddled next to my mother.
Someone reported that the mob had reassembled. The police had moved in with jeeps, rifles, and megaphones, asking people to clear the area. No one had budged. Instead, one-time hunters, political workers, and everyone who possessed, or could aim, a gun had turned up. Suddenly, Shahla Momani ran in, screeching, “Hai! Hai, Allah! Do something. Jim has disappeared with his rifle.”
“God preserve us!” my grandmother began to pray. My mother sat there with her hands wrapped around her head saying, “Where is Mo? Where is Mo? I wish he was here.”
What happened next was pieced together by conversations between grown-ups and eyewitness accounts. Uncle Jim was seen striding through the field with his gun. He pushed his way to the front of the crowd that had encircled the tall, unkept cane where the tiger had retreated. He came across some boys laying bets on whether the Chief of Police or HH would kill the animal. Apparently Uncle Jim said, “I will kill it.” The boys gawked. An old family retainer crept toward him and tried to wrest the gun away. A shot rang out. The tiger sprang from its hiding place at its attacker—Uncle Jim. In that split second Uncle Jim aimed and fired. The animal sank to the ground. Half a dozen other bullets went off from all directions. The brief silence that followed was shattered by another loud bang.
Uncle Jim had shot himself in the head.
6. 1956
In our London house there was a photograph of Uncle Jim. He was standing under a tree with Frances outside their elegant summer home in the wooded hills of Nainital. He was looking directly at the camera with a wide, confident smile. A center parting divided his hair into two bouncy waves. The open collar of a white sports shirt clung to his neck and its tip rested casually against his cleanshaven chin. A tennis racquet dangled from his hand, almost as if it were an extension of his long, sinewy arm. Frances had an air of such fragility that it almost seemed as if, but for the small, pale hand anchored in the crook of his arm, she would have wafted away. The impression was reinforced by the gentle billow of her skirt against her knees, the fine strands of translucent, sunlit hair that had escaped from her perm and the tautness with which she held her long neck high, at a slight angle, her eyes fixed firmly on him.
I still wonder how or why it was possible that my mother, who seemed to know everything imaginable about Uncle Jim and Frances, should not have known or recognized the name, Raynard’s Wood.
Of course we didn’t talk much about Uncle Jim any more, but my mother was always going on about Rajas and Nawabs, Lord This or Lady That, or her ambassadorial brothers, one Indian and one Pakistani.
“What are we?” I asked her.
“We are British,” she said. But whenever I said this to people, the British looked blank and Indians and Pakistanis laughed—one or two pinched my cheeks and said, “How shweet.”
By this time my father’s business in real estate had prospered. Our new house in Richmond was filled with light, gleaming parquet floors, and subdued colors. One day my mother declared that she could send us to “a proper school” at last. School prospectuses flooded in, but on further inquiry no school had a vacancy. One day, Lady This-That, an ex-colonial friend, suggested Raynard’s Wood School and wrote a letter of recommendation. Despite this august introduction, the principal, Mrs. Fotheringay, wanted to meet us to ascertain our “standard of English” and our “ability to adapt to English ways.” My mother exclaimed, “Oh really, how absurd!”
She dressed carefully and stylishly in gray, beige, and blue that icy spring morning, and we drove to Raynard’s Wood. We turned into the wrought-iron gates, down a drive lined with cedars. There, before us, rose a white edifice topped with faux battlements and a central tower. My mother clasped her hands together and gasped, “Isn’t it beautiful, Mo?”
A thin woman let us into a wood-paneled hall. A huge animal skull sat on a wooden chest. Hunting trophies, including antler heads, looked down at us from a great height. A tiger head was mounted and spotlit against false jungle foliage in a glass box by the marble stairs. Lalla blanched. I felt nausea rising. My father placed a soothing hand on my shoulder and took Lalla’s hand. Mrs. Fotheringay, a large regal woman, sailed down the stairs toward us.
My mother seemed transfixed by a row of oil paintings, dominated by one of a slim, handsome man in the khaki uniform of the First World War. “They are rather fine portraits, aren’t they?” said Mrs. Fotheringay. “That’s the previous owner, Sir Roger Allis. And those are his three children, Godfrey, Hugh, and Frances, with Lady Caroline, their mother. Sir Roger sold the house to a South African businessman during the Great Depression. No one has lived here since. We found the pictures in the garage.”
“How sad!” my mother said. “How sad!”
My father steered her firmly by the elbow into Mrs. Fotheringay’s study. There he put on his plummiest English accent (which was too round and too pronounced to be really English) and trotted out the usual, “During the war when I served in the Royal Indian Navy,” or “When I was at Dartmouth,” which always seemed to break the ice with the English. My father and Mrs. Fotheringay discussed The Two Wars for some time. She showed us the Great Hall with the Allis coat of arms emblazoned above the fireplace. We saw dormitories, classrooms, common rooms. My mother kept exclaiming, “Oh, how beautiful! How beautiful!” at every vista of evergreens, bare trees, or terraced lawns as we wandered across to the tennis courts, the hockey pitch, and the swimming pool.
Mrs. Fotheringay duly indicated that there would be a vacancy for us in the autumn. My mother squeezed Lalla’s hands and mine in the car and said, “Well done. You behaved impeccably.” She was in a curious mood, a mixture of elation and silence. “Can you imagine, Mo, what it must have been like in the old days,” she said, “when Jim Bhai was here?”
“At a girl’s school?” I asked. “Uncle Jim?”
I could talk about him now without tears. “Of course not! Jim Bhai was at Sherborne. This was the family home of Aunty Frances.”
7.
That evening my mother pulled out entire folios of Uncle Jim’s watercolors and drawings from a steel trunk. My father was amazed. He had no idea that she had carted all that paper all the way from India, but even I could tell the work was really good: It was signed with Uncle Jim’s real name: Zulfikar Ali. There was Frances as a young girl, wispy and blue-eyed; Frances’s mother “among the first women in England who learned to fly” in goggles and baggy trousers, her elbow resting possessively on the wing of her aeroplane; Frances’s gaunt father, “wounded in the First World War,” propped up on crutches, not at all the proud and stately man with the shining leather boots in the portrait we had seen at Raynard’s Wood. He had been “a bitter critic of the war,” but “had served his country with honor and lost a leg.” My mother told us that Uncle Jim had lived in England throughout “the terrible days” of the First World War. He used to spend his school holidays next door, at The Vicarage, with a family known to his in India. She showed us a watercolor of Raynard’s Wood (I knew I had seen it somewhere before, she said) with that familiar building against a backdrop of blazing autumn trees. My mother said a part of it had been turned into a convalescent home. Uncle Jim and Frances, childhood friends, had helped out with first aid there. Sir Roger and Uncle Jim used to go out sketching together, with Uncle Jim pushing his wheelchair. They drew war-wounded patients too, but some were rather frightening pictures and my mother wasn’t going to show us any of those. “Can’t see any point in paintings like that,” said my father.
My mother told us that Uncle Jim wanted to be an artist, but his father forbade it. He had done a wonderful picture of Frances with her two little girls. I looked at my blond aunt with short, shingled hair, a pearl necklace, and her two blond children. I thought that almost made me blond too, not dark, curly haired, and big-nosed.
“Oh,” I said. “Does that mean I have English cousins?”
“Don’t be silly, Jo!” my mother cried. “Don’t be so stupid!”
“She’s only a child, Sitara,” my father said.
I didn’t know what I had said that was so wrong.
My mother shut the folios. She said, “He gave them to me long, long ago. He said they belonged to his Old Life. He didn’t want them any more.”
My father ruminated: “There are still a good many people in England who remember Frances and Jim.”
“Yes,” my mother said. “Yes, I know what you mean.” She twitched a fine, plucked eyebrow. Lalla and I knew this meant that something had to be said, or not said, to us.
“The point is,” my father continued, “if you girls go around saying your aunt lived in that huge mansion, people will just think you’re showing off. We don’t want that, do we?” Lalla and I shook our heads.
“Good,” he said. “So there’s no need to mention Jim or Frances again.”
My father didn’t know about the need that every English boarding school has to have a ghost, or the power of stories and images of a man with a wooden leg going thump, thump, thump along drafty corridors, crying “Fanny! Fanny!” They would be enmeshed in my nightmares and my being, along with white faux battlements and a tower, the face of a snarling tiger, a mangled woman, gunshots, the bier of Uncle Jim covered with a white cloth amid the wailing of Shahla Momani, my mother and Nani Jaan, crying and crying, and Lalla bawling, “But if he killed the Man-eater, why did he die?” and the silence of his ashen boys, my father, the Chief of Police, the MP—and even HH who, by tradition, had not shouldered any bier except his father’s—as they carried him away from us, from me, from Lalla, forever, amid whispers that truly Jim Sahib had saved the town from a ferocious Man-eater and died a hero.
Those are the imploding dreams I try to exorcise through my paintings. As for my three dominant colors, why do people ask? Isn’t it obvious? Red for blood, white for blindness, blue for sorrow.