MOTHER’S JOURNAL (1910–1920)

‘I can’t take the land with me but I can sell it.’ That was father at his sharpest. I had never heard him speak to mother in any but the kindest of tones, sometimes as if a loving elder was talking to a child. The rebuff was in answer to mother saying this is all you’ve got, this piece of black soil. (She didn’t know the word ‘alluvial’, or she would have used it here.) You can’t take it to Canada. This had come at the end of a long drawn argument to which I, about ten years old fiddling nervously with my plaits, was a mute witness. Mother had started it saying nobody abandons land. Land is life, home, blood, country! Blood is spilled on borders, tell me why? Because it is the country’s land. You are abandoning your own! She couldn’t believe it.

Even when father’s decision fell like a slap on her face, mother wasn’t going to give in without a fight. ‘Take it from me, you can’t abandon a language also. You mean to say she (and she pointed furiously towards me) will speak in git-pit? Suppose she forgets Hindustani?’ ‘She won’t,’ father interrupted her patiently, but mother was furious. ‘How will I speak with her, tell me, how will I? Step-mothers, sauteli moms, find it difficult to speak to their daughters. When these vilayat-returned shameless men bring a mem as a second wife, they can’t speak to the husband’s daughter. But I will not be able to speak to my own!’

Father didn’t lose patience, didn’t slap his head or roll his eyes (no one did in those days) just stood there silently allowing the storm to blow over. Which it did. Years later when I recalled the scene, it struck me that could mother have been nursing the fear that one dark day he would bring a Canadian dame home.

Mother was worried about kala pani, caste, excommunication. She never mentioned all this but we could sense it, father and I. Once when she casually let it drop father just said, ‘We are not Brahmins.’ You never could keep mother quiet.

‘We are Thakurs, and are blessed that we can feed the bhooka Brahmin.’

‘They are not as hungry as you think they are.’

Father couldn’t be bothered about all this—touch and taboo. He had heard how Canadians gobble beef and ham, and was not averse to try both once he left our shores. There was no caste to lose in Canada, he thought, and if you did lose the damned thing, you couldn’t make enquiries in Lost and Found. (All this he told me with his usual sarcasm decades later, during his year-long sickness, a precursor to his death.)

A good thing was we weren’t Muslims—we didn’t have any ancestors buried here, with a forlorn flame teetering over a stone slab, till the night wind snuffs it out. How can Muslims leave their lands and the bones of their dead? The wrench must be much greater. They think of exile as Hijr, smearing the dislocation with a shade of the sacral, Muhammad moving to Medina. I remember the rice—no one called it paddy those days, and a lily pond built lovingly by father. In a way he had sculpted the land, the boundary fringed with bramble and camel thorn. There were more than forty acres of rice, and he also grew corn and gram near a grove of shisham trees. He had his scarecrows there. Even I would help in setting up a scarecrow, putting a small earthen pot over his head and painting it—the moustache bigger than the face.

We had more than rice, of course. In our holding we had an old broken wall holding up the ruins of a Naubat Khana where sometime or other shehnais must have wailed in welcome to a wedding or a birth, the players, their cheeks ballooning, swaying to the whine of the ungainly looking instrument. Much of the plaster had peeled off and the thin old brick of previous years was visible. Two rickety pillars stood giving it tentative support, and a wall in the rear. It was anyone’s guess if the Naubat Khana was holding up the wall or the other way around. The two of them could be likened to a pair of drunks holding on to each other so that they didn’t fall.

No one taught us about hierarchies, we just picked all that up—I mean I did. It was as smooth and natural as the eye telling you that the earth is brown and leaves are green and sunsets are lined with gold. The Baheliyas, the hunters, were never to be allowed indoors and the kills which they brought—a leg of a buck, or a nilgai, or sand grouse were to be left outside. Meat incidentally was never cooked in the kitchen. It was cooked out in the open on a wood fire in a special vessel which was never allowed into the kitchen and was cleaned and scrubbed with wood ash outside the house. Mother and I never touched any meat. Only father did, and with considerable relish. It was lower caste women who touched meat. Mother said they would be born even lower on the caste scale next time they were unfortunate enough to be born, and if the world was unfortunate enough to receive them once again.

The Kachis who grew vegetables could come to the house and squat on the veranda with their turnip and cabbage and aubergine—the Kachis were as dark as the brinjal. They were given an annual sack of rice. So were the two Baheliyas. Rice straw was free—people carried it away as they liked, a straw pile became their bed. Father wasn’t bothered about touch, especially when he went for shikar with Baheliyas and bird catchers. And he kept telling mother not to drill her ideas into my head. To be fair to mother, she laughed and chatted with the women who came to thresh rice and later pound it in those thick cylindrical iron vessels. Once when he was looking the other way I asked father, ‘Who are these rice pounders?’ What caste they were, was left unsaid. The way he moved his head and fixed me with a cold stare reminded me of a bison turning its head to eye a hunter. ‘Women,’ he barked. A minute later he pointed at the Kachis watering the fields and added, ‘And these are men, just like us. Understand?’

There were omens—there always are for those who want to believe in them. There was a falcon’s nest in one of our trees and the male would sit on a fork and never bother about us. One evening the baaz, as we called him, flew away at our approach, shooting up vertically into the sky. Next morning we set out for Mathura to celebrate Janm Ashtami, the birth of Krishna. I didn’t like the look of a string of women in white, their heads shaved, most of them begging. When mother refused to answer my questions, I told her I knew. They were widows. Mother clamped her hand over my mouth. Mother felt thirsty and drank the water and it tasted brackish. She spat it out. I gulped it down. On return I fell ill, the whites of my eyes turning yellow. A Muslim Fakir was called and he prayed over me, put his palms over my eyes and left a bowl of water under the bed. Next morning the water had turned yellow and my fever abated. Mother said first the water turns salty, then yellow. Now all we need is for the water to turn black—kala pani, crossing the ocean, is what she meant.

Mother’s real complaint was that father was too educated. You don’t need college if you want to farm. You can’t grow rice or wheat if your mind is busy cramming up. Education meant English and notes about this mountain range and that valley—a sierra here and the Andes there, and all of it learnt by rote. What had the Andes to do with transplanting rice? She didn’t mind his maths and his hard-nosed bargaining at the grain mart—mandi—as he sold the crop. A train of bullock carts would carry the rice, while the straw would be carried away by the villagers. This was UP, The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1910. We, of course, called it Avadh, our Avadh, the British called it Oudh.

There were other hurdles to be crossed before you could sell the land. But father mollified her. The land has to go to the daughter—that means to the in-law’s family. It will never be in the Brajbir Singh name. Mother didn’t have an answer to that. She hadn’t had a son in ten years of marriage.

Father had left for Canada a year earlier, may have been more than a year. He had gone to explore. His English was okay, so there was no problem. It is full of Punjabis, he said when he returned. They were helpful, but they were not his people, men from the doab. It was only when he fell ill during his old age that he confided in me what he was up to. He found just Sikhs there. They were good to him; he didn’t have to spend on food for the first month. The Sikhs didn’t expect the cold insolence with which they were initially treated in Canada. People looked askance at these long haired immigrants who didn’t know a word of English. Why did they expect any better, asked the old man, just because they had been declared a martial race by the British? The British treated everyone like that, including their own lower classes— the char woman and the chimney sweeper. They would use the term ‘martial races’ when it came to war. He was certain war was coming. How can anyone live with the snobbish English? Surely the Germans wouldn’t. He also laughed at Teja Singh in Vancouver who was very worried about the mowna lehar, the wave of hair cutting and shaving among Sikh immigrants. Why couldn’t they just trim their beards and be done? They looked handsome in their turbans. But the Khalsa Diwan was scared about the hat epidemic—the Bhai Bhag Singh and Bulwant Singh Granthi types. Six hundred Sikhs in Vancouver had started wearing hats! Disaster—barbadi—was round the corner! Father told me he empathized with both, the topiwalahs and the granthies.

Once we got there—wife and daughter, bed roll and steel trunk—mother never uttered a word of complaint, no matter how miserable she was. You can’t keep a husband on the defensive all the time. Father had forbidden her from carrying any idols, including the one of Durga that she loved. But she had secretly smuggled that in, as also a six inch Ganesh, elephant head, large ears and all, in silver if you please. And she picked up words, the way you pick up an allergy these days. There was no such thing as an allergy in 1910. On being questioned by a kindly gori lady, I heard her answer looking the questioner square in the eye:‘Me doesn’t English.’ I was sent to a school, English was nothing new to me for I had studied in a decent school in Lucknow, but the accents were new, this English sounded like a completely alien tongue to me initially. Slowly, without being conscious of it, I started mimicking them, my ‘t’s and ‘d’s got sharper, and once I was immersed in this river of clipped consonants, it was bliss, I shed some of my self-consciousness. Accents and self-consciousness have a lot to do with each other, more so if you are brown and your schoolmates white.

There was no recrimination from mother even in our first winter when her skin cracked and the land was blanketed with snow. At night, if the wind was right, it carried the howl of the pack to your ears. The first time we heard it, she quickly put the razai over my face to snuff out the sound, and I had to fight her off. ‘Am old enough to hear wolves,’ I snapped at her in English, my eyes blazing. Her smile was beatific, an acknowledgement of my having grown up. Mother’s belly had started bulging unaccountably. I noticed she was eating less. Then I caught on. Father would look anxiously as she walked, ready to spring to her assistance, in case she wobbled. He would hold her hand as she walked down from the house to the road. I remember the day my brother was born. The sky had started rumbling with discontent since early morning, hours before dawn. A storm was in the offing as we set out for the hospital. She wanted a midwife but father insisted she had to move to a hospital and hired a horse carriage. We plied her with shawls and blankets. Snow and wind blew into the horse’s face. At times an exceptionally fierce gust would shake the carriage. The nurses at the hospital were kind and warm. One of the sisters said, ‘What a day to be born! Am certain a blizzard will be upon us shortly.’ They made her change and put on hospital clothes and said none of these shawls and blankets would be permitted inside. They thought they carried germs and they threw them in a tub of boiling water, soap suds bouncing all over and circling the brim. Father kept absolutely quiet. The place was a revelation, the floor so clean with a glassy shine on it that reflected my face as I looked down. I had never seen anything like it. Men folk who knew us cursorily, all Sikhs, came to the hospital to be with us. They seemed more bothered about the outcome, whether it would be a boy or girl. Father’s face remained impassive, he seemed more worried about mother.

It was a boy—he made us wait till midnight. Father said he is blizzard-born. I will name him with two B’s, and he lit upon the name Balbir, but mother would have none of it. ‘It is not a Hindu name,’ she said. But Balbir it was and he remained Balbir for the rest of his life.

The boys in school looked at me as if I was a strange animal. No one made an attempt to talk. I thanked God for that. Three months later the headmaster called me, a grizzled hulk, a bit unkempt, tie hanging loose around his unbuttoned collar, pince-nez fitted precariously around his eyes, veiling the kindness dripping from those two windows.

‘Do you find any of this of interest, kid?’He was pointing to my books.

‘Any of what?’

‘The subjects we teach.’

‘Yes, but I want to learn is languages.’

‘Languages!’His eyebrows shot up half an inch.

‘Spanish.’

‘Spanish? Where did you hear the word, not in India I am sure.’

I nodded my head.

‘Better learn English first.’

‘Learnt it, can talk to you.’ (I must have sounded arrogant, chit of a girl with her plaits bound in a bun talking like that!)

‘There’s more to English than talking to an old wolf like me.’

‘Kind wolf.’ He laughed for a minute and said, ‘Thank you. What’s your name?’

‘Shail.’

‘Do you like it here?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Not sure if you like it?’No answer from me. ‘What did your people do at home, in India?’

‘Rice.’

‘Rice!’

We grew rice, I said shamefacedly, carrying my palm to my lips.

‘Nothing to be ashamed of. Be it rice, millet or wheat, anyone growing food is doing good to the planet.’

I liked the sound of Spanish, softer, a sibilance slipping into another almost surreptitiously like a lover’s arm around your waist. A Mexican taught Spanish to a handful of us. I loved it, also because I wasn’t the laggard anymore. We were all beginners. I looked forward to this one period a day.

Father, with the money from the land he had sold, had opened a grocery and was doing well. But he hated it. To be a shop owner was the last thing Thakur Brajbir Singh ever wanted. Mother had picked up enough English to work in the shop, though her consonants were thick, the ‘t’s and ‘d’s sounding like an axe under a grinder. Life wasn’t easy by any means. The Canadians, large sized all—even their strays were big—looked down upon us. There was nothing much to look up to us either, to be frank. Father would slap his forehead when he saw some of the immigrants walking on the street, unkempt and in dhotis. The Punjabi jutti, the slipper with an upturn, like the moustache of a zamindar villain in an Indian movie these days, was also a constant. Turban and beard did not endear them to the whites. And the kirpan belts were a veritable red rag. The Canadians didn’t mind a hood packing a pistol in a holster, that could be called civilized (Al Capone would shortly be on the scene in Chicago) but a dagger dangling near the hip! Ex-service men alone wore shirt and pant, but they got lost in the jutti-and-dhoti crowd. Father would rather be dead than stir out in pyjamas, and I remember he kept his belt buckle shining. Mother never veered from her sari or salwar kameez.

Once I recall we saw a coffin being taken in a horse carriage, a black coffin, coachman and two others also dressed in black. Mother sensed what it was but still asked, what is it that they are taking in that long box. Father explained it was a coffin. She was appalled. ‘Don’t they carry their dead on their shoulders?’Father explained to her the graveyard was more than a mile off, and it was winter and the coffin was made of pine wood and heavy.

Father had made a few friends among the Sikhs—there were hardly any Hindus there—the crowd consisted of people from Punjab fleeing plague and famine. I would eavesdrop on the muttered conversation between Father and Harnam Singh Makkar and one Gobind Bihari. Gobind worked at Port Moody but would come in on weekends. I hadn’t heard of plague earlier. However, many decades later, I came across the death figures in a journal. The lieutenant governor of Punjab reported to the governor general that plague was taking away 60, 000 a week during some years preceding our coming to Vancouver. They did not refer to it as Ton, as we did in Avadh. For the Punjabis it was mahamari, the great pestilence, the great killer. Harnam Singh said the stricken would be left out of the house like cattle and within hours they would be dead and the Kanjars would take the bodies away. How the Kanjars managed to escape disease and death remained a matter of wonder for him. When Bihari and Harnam Singh got emotional (which was always) they blamed the Englishmen even for the plague. All that digging to put through canals in Punjab, made all the ratty diseases come out in the open, they said. The Angrez can never leave well alone. There was always anti-Angrez talk.

After a year, father opened a saw mill and would smell of larch and pine even after a bath. We moved into another dingy apartment, the entire building looking like a rundown warehouse, but it had a chimney, though it was black as hell. It was a part of an indeterminate neighbourhood which was neither Canadian nor wholly ours. We started burning pine logs now instead of the cones which we used to gather for our first winter. I would gaze, enraptured, at some of the Canadian houses of the rich, the front vine-covered, garden immaculate, manicured. Wouldn’t it be heaven to live in one of these?

Even in the new apartment we could hear the muttered goings on between father and Harnam Singh and at least one or two others. Once the news came in about the assassination attempt on the Viceroy, the excitement was electric. A lot of people came to our door. I was amused to see them looking over their shoulder as if they were a part of the bomb conspiracy. News came in dribs and drabs. The Viceroy was attacked as he returned from the great Durbar in December 1912, where King George V and his queen Mary took the salutes of the native princes. The English royalty was seated high on a balcony while the native royalty, one by one was called upon to give their ‘farshi salaams’, the spine slightly bent and the right arm moving from floor to chin. The princes in their brocades and turbans which sported scintillating solitaires, then had to back pedal half a dozen steps—it wouldn’t do to show their arses to the Angrez royalty. There was much laughter in the house on that one. ‘Was this George Panjum homosexual?’chortled Harnam Singh. I laughed and mother slapped me on the shoulder and asked me to go to another room where I wouldn’t be able to hear what was going on.

There was much talk of rising up against both the Indian princes and the Angrez. The bomb attack on the viceroy, Lord Charles Hardinge, in Chandni Chowk was welcomed and the men drank a bottle of whisky for once instead of the fiery rum. ‘Uthao jam, Qatil ke naam,’ they shouted as they raised their glasses. Lift up your glass for the assassin. The bomb was hurled at the haudah, killing the mahaut—the elephant driver—but only injuring the viceroy. Lady Hardinge escaped unhurt. Harnam Singh was happy about that—nothing should happen to the zenani. The best part was that the bomb-throwers vanished without a trace. But he bemoaned the fact that we didn’t have good bombs. The Viceroy should have been thrown off the elephant with the blast, he said. It was rumoured that one of the assailants was a woman, and for days I would be day dreaming of chucking a bomb (had never seen one though) at a beetroot red British official. Rebellion was in the air. We lived with it as one lives with the aroma of home-made bread.

Once mother made bold to ask as to why we were getting entangled in this Punjabi war? Father said forcefully, ‘India’s war’. And he stared at her for a good minute. He could be short with others too. Once Harnam Singh talked of Majbi Sikhs derisively and father shut him up.

Nothing lasts. War clouds were closing in. Before war, rumours, before the rumours, omens, columns in newspapers, martial music and patriotic songs—that is the sequence. Forgot one thing—lots of gaalis, swear words against the enemy, what monsters they are. I would hear the word ‘Ghadar’ in the confabulations between father and Harnam Singh and Gobind Bihari. The community in Vancouver kept getting more hostile to the British as the Canadians started baying, if not for our blood, certainly for our exit; and certainly for the doors to be shut to any bearded rustics wearing sarongs instead of pants. As it is they were fed up with the Chinese and the Japanese immigrants and this sudden influx of Sikhs with a sprinkling of other Indian communities, was the last straw for Canadian white labour. The Asians were depressing the wages. Throw them out they said. And then came Komagata Maru, Japanese ship commandeered by the Sikhs, with a paymaster called Gurdit Singh Sandhu. The radio was silent about the long voyage, but the grapevine substituted admirably: three hundred and seventy-six people aboard, ship sailing from Hong Kong, Shanghai, some Japanese port on to Vancouver. It was 23rd May, 1915. It was illegal they said. What is illegal about it? Asked the small Indian community. It has picked up passengers en route, which it was not supposed to, said the authorities, and it has been met by Ghadarites—Bhagwan Singh Gyani and Barkatullah. Indians answered that Bhagwan Singh is our high priest in Vancouver, though we knew that he was involved with the Ghadar—the new US-Canadian party wanting freedom for India. The language was more sonorous those days, the Ghadarites wanted to ‘cast off the shackles of imperialism’. (And no one spoke of the sea as sea, it was always ‘the azure mane’.) Ghadar incidentally was also the name given by the British to the 1857 uprising.

The ship was to dock at the Burrod inlet, what was actually the Coal Harbour, barely two hundred meters off the CPR Pier A. We were trying to get there to give them a tumultuous welcome. Our hearts sank when the news came that the Immigration officers led by Fred ‘Cyclone’ Taylor had gone on ship to meet the Japanese Captain. ‘Cyclone’ was bad news, tough fellow—tough types mould themselves in their image, rather the image of themselves they want to see in the mirror. Cyclone told the Japanese captain to vamoose. The Canadians thought of the ship passengers as a sort of epidemic that was to disembark and invade their land. The Mounted Police was brandishing their truncheons to keep us and the welcoming Sikhs away from the dock. A doctor and his family were allowed to disembark because they had gone back to India for a holiday. The doctor told us the others would be sent back. All the way back, some of us cried in horror? He nodded. Father tried to get across the gangplank but was threatened by an uplifted arm with a truncheon at the end of it. The horses were getting fidgety—they had probably never encountered something like this, for now we started shouting slogans of ‘Inqalab zindabad! Nadir Shahi nahin chalegi! Tana Shahi nahi chalegi!’ (I still have to find out who Tana Shah was.) Regrettably horse and mount did not understand our lingo; they had never been close to sloganeering Hindustani. The ship would be turned back into the maw of the ocean, some of us were convinced. Horse and truncheon meanwhile managed to turn us back from the Coal Harbour.

As we went home that evening, father said we will also be pushed out. He didn’t eat his evening meal. Mother unaccountably vented her spleen on father for taking me along to the welcoming party. Father would sometimes remain quiet at mother’s unreasonable recriminations. I had to tell her, who knew they would almost beat us back? The goras will never allow it, said mother, feeding off a vein of pessimism innate in all mothers. The ship lay at anchor for two months. There was a time when the Canadians would not allow any water or food to reach the ship. A Shore Committee was formed by Hassan Rahim and Sohan Lal Pathak. Father, Harnam Singh and Gobind Bihari all pitched in with money which the committee asked off the community and over 20, 000 dollars were collected. Canadian MPs came and they too addressed public meetings shouting that no Indian would be allowed. There were confabulations in the house. The ire of the people was directed against Hopkinson of the Police or immigration—the community hardly knew the administrative set up here. Most Indians had hardly been in Canada for more than six or eight years, most had come in 1906. There were mutterings that he had some Punjabi sources and was feeding the government of Columbia with the information that the boat people had many rebels who would create chaos in Canada. The High Court endorsed the government and one day the Harbour tugboat was asked to push the ship out to sea, but not before the frustrated passengers had vented their ire against the police by showering them with bricks and coal. The Vancouver Sun reported against ‘Howling Hindus’ who hurled their coal missiles in such a torrent that it looked as if the police had been under ‘a coal chute’.

We will shortly be shoved out of here, said father, one day and we started packing for America. We got a visit from the police. They wanted us out. Harnam Singh said he would never leave, even though he had a brother in California who was doing well. Yet, how people change. He came over shame-faced one evening. ‘I have changed my mind,’ he said. ‘What about?’ asked father. He was longing for his family in the village and so was his wife, missed the morning Japji in the gurdwara, longed for the rope mesh of the manji of all things. He justified his decision to go back with a Punjabi saw—Punjabi is good both with expletives and saws.

Jai sukh Chajju de chubare

Na Balkh na Bukhare

The bliss at Chajju’s rundown shack (chubara)/

cannot be matched by Balkh or Bukhara.

Can shadows be displaced? We were. Shifts are not easy, especially moving across countries. Each shift has an underlying narrative that may or may not open itself to language. Does one call it a plurality of exiles or crossing borders or a ride through a continent? Memory is an outcrop of ancient weed and I have to cut through it. Our four years, or was it five, were over. I had picked up my English and didn’t have to affect an accent anymore. I was almost speaking like the Canadians. Mother was happy at that but often put on a sour face as she asked father how on earth she was going to understand her child! I had picked up Spanish and the Mexican teacher placed me on top of the class. Balbir was four when we left Vancouver and couldn’t understand why I was crying. Mother scolded me as always. ‘This is not our land. You should have cried when we left Avadh, but you were laughing! Ungrateful girl. This is not our land. This belongs to the goras and their mems.’

All our Sikh friends had relatives in California. But it was no fun. The shadow of war was hovering over half the world, and father said God knows what the British intelligence men have told the flatfoot American police. They stalked us, even me, as I finished my graduation. The British Police had sent a CID man to corner the ‘rebels’ and ‘terrorists’ as they termed the Indian revolutionaries. Most of the so-called revolution was talk, talk and more talk. Father again made friends with the kind of people who had that uneasy over-the-shoulder look when they were out in the streets. If you opened the door as they rang the bell, they weren’t happy standing in the open and answering your queries. If mother was at the door she would ask for names and why they had come. They fidgeted and wanted to be indoors, roof and roof-shadow over their heads, no longer in the line of sight of supposed stalkers. Mother didn’t care for them—she knew we were thrown out of Canada because of these baagis (rebels). Father corrected her and called them inqalabis (revolutionaries). She even asked father once whether we were ever going to have a settled home—quite willing to go back to our forty acres of rice and the crumble that was the Naubat Khana, only all that was no longer ours.

Of father’s visitors and companions, what can I say? They had, of course, different names and faces and yet they were no different from the Gobind Biharis and the Harnam Singh Makkars of Vancouver—emotions always on the boil. How they cursed when news came in about that lethal firing. Near Calcutta, as the Komagata Maru completed its journey round the world, nineteen passengers were shot down at a place called Budge Budge by the Indian police. (The blame fell on the Indian sepoys who fired. ‘For what yaar, for the measly ten rupees that they get as their salary!’‘They get fifteen!’ ‘Chad paray, forget it, the Indian soldier will fight the Germans for eleven rupees a month. Just you watch.’ ‘Thukdi gal hai—it is all about prestige.’‘What prestige, killing your own people? All this is nonsense, bakwas. Look at Russia—socialism, anarchism, syndism…’ ‘Syndicalism, you mean.’ ‘O, kuch vi keh lo, call it what you like, they are engineers of new systems. We only have lohars, bloody blacksmiths. To throw a bad bomb at an elephant is all we can do.’‘I say first kill landlords—the ones who got lands for fighting for the British in 1857.’ ‘What nonsense, zamindars! First kill the Viceroy. Start from top.’ ‘Very difficult killing goras. Start with the desi boot-lickers first.’) At its worst, that was the kind of stuff I heard across the walls, especially when people were in their cups. Father just listened. I was old enough to sometimes join the crowd now.

News filtering in from Vancouver raised our spirits up a bit. Whatever may have happened at Budge Budge, in Vancouver the Sikhs were not going to forget or forgive. Two of the informants were gunned down. Hopkinson must have known that he had it coming. Of course, a big cheer went up when news came that Hopkinson had been shot in the courthouse.

I thought it was amazing that the inqalabis could know about the CID Englishman who had come from India, and detect his footprints in the actions of the American police. Rumours about a revolutionary from India also floated around. His exploits were talked about in whispers, a bomb here, a pistol shot there, and even a shipload of guns trawling around the Indian Ocean littoral, all attributed to his name. Who could he be? No one mentioned his name, the way some tribes won’t take the name of a sacred totem.

Father took me to New York and the Columbia University campus to hear Lala Lajpat Rai, all the while telling me what a great leader he was. How he railed against the British! How graphic was his description of Indian poverty. He used the word ‘exploitation’ about ten times in his talk. I was sorry that there were just about a hundred people to listen to him. After the meeting a gentleman I had seen with father once took us to meet the leader, who seemed fatigued after his one hour lecture. He was embittered. He had gone on ship to India but had been turned back from England, he told us. As the ship docked in England, policemen came aboard and accosted him. According to him the conversation went something like this:

British Police: ‘I am Inspector Jeremy Hogan, Mr Rai. Would you make yourself available to answer a question or two?’

Lala Lajpat Rai:‘I don’t think I have a choice.’
Inspector Hogan:‘May I know where you are heading to, Sir?’
Lala Lajpat Rai:‘You haven’t asked any of the other passengers this.’
Police:‘We are specifically asking you Mr Rai, and if I may say so, for your own good.’
Lajpat Rai:‘Oh really? Since when has our good been of any interest to the British Police?’
Inspector Hogan:‘Am I to understand Sir, that this questioning is not to your liking?’
Lajpat Rai:‘It is not, Sir.’
Inspector Hogan:‘Oh, it isn’t? To cut the Gordian knot, if you know what I mean by that Mr Rai, it would not be a good idea to head to India, if that’s your objective. You may not be very welcome there.’
Lajpat Rai:‘Why not? My meetings are attended by thousands in India. Only some days before boarding this ship I got a news-cutting from an Indian newspaper, calling me “The Lion of Punjab”!’

Hogan:‘Caged lion, Sir.’

Lajpat Rai:‘Is that a warning from HMG?’

Hogan:‘HMG does not concern itself with people like you Mr Rai. It is the job of the British police to deal with troublemakers conspiring against the Empire, an Empire which has done so much for poor Indians, if I may be bold enough to say so! Good day Mr Rai.’

‘I took the hint and returned to America,’ said the Leader.

In a matter of days war fell on us like a bomb—a Duke was killed somewhere (I had no idea then what an Archduke was) and the police started filling the jails with Indian ‘revolutionaries’ in America. Would our inqalabi visitors still talk of assassinating viceroys? I dared not ask the question, as father bundled us to the Mexican border in desperate haste to escape the American police.

Mexico! Thank God I knew Spanish. And, thank God, we didn’t have to look over the shoulder. We settled into an apartment after father had changed his dollars to the Mexican Peso. I quote from my diary about the goings on during our first Sunday.

Father said ‘I am tired. You go around, but find your way back!’ I wander through the streets, gawk at the churches. The service is on and I hear the choir, hesitate on the steps, mother had not let me enter a church in Vancouver. A young man watching me is rather amused and shouts in English, go in Lady, don’t worry, its kosher, and follows me into the church. I don’t know what kosher means. I am enthralled by the singing. When I come out he accosts me. ‘Are you Catholic?’ I shake my head. ‘I am relieved,’ he says, ‘thought you may be hesitating because it may not be what it seems, a church to Virgin Mary. Have seen some of your nuns, pretty die hard. Aztec and Maya deities were worshipped along with Virgin Mary in this church once. Now of course we are unadulterated Christian, not that it is something to be extra proud of. Some like me would be quite happy with the earlier mix.’ I am not taken aback, much to his disappointment.

He gives his name—Ramos; asks me if I would have coffee with him and we walk into an eatery. I find out he is a journalist; at the moment is concentrating on learning German. Why German, I ask, a bit intrigued. ‘Must know both sides,’ he says, ‘and nothing like a language to tell you what a people are. Language is confession, of a culture, civilization without shirt and vest and, pardon me, underwear.’

He gets friendly, and mentions I must meet the Indian revolutionary, then clams up. I want more from him and feigning innocence, ask, ‘Oh, the dangerous one?’ He falls for the bait, shakes his head. ‘What is so dangerous about revolutionaries? Only blood-suckers have to fear them, not you and I.’ I nod, and repeat after him, ‘You and I.’ He goes on, ‘First they rob the harvest, then the land, then they snatch the bead necklace from the peasant woman, she has nothing more classy than beads, though once their necks were loaded with gold. And then, as their ambitions rise, they think, why not the bloody nation itself? Why must I leave it for others to rob? The nation is just a bank without guards, don’t you see?’ I see, but still laugh. He shakes his head in disapproval. No laughing matter this. But he knew the revolutionary and he took me there, of course with father’s permission. I had asked Ramos why he wanted me to meet the great man. He needs a secretary, he said. We met him. He was tall and stern-looking, I think the expression was put on.

Best to be frank right from the start. ‘It’s my father who is a communist. We, mother and I, are not into that sort of thing.’

‘What sort do you mean? Revolutions, lady, change not just life but the world.’

I kept wondering at that moment which meant more to me, life or the world. Instead, all I said was, ‘Revolutions fizzle out.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but they leave a mark. Look at 1812.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about.

He had a forbidding presence and he was curt, couldn’t tell if it was put on, never know with great men. They’re never far from thinking about the impression they create on crowds, followers et al, so why not aspiring secretaries? Ramos introduced me. He kept looking at his papers and momentarily deigned to fix me in fitful stares. It is a bit unnerving when a man is looking down and then, without raising his head, lifts up eyelid and brow to stare at you, expressionless. Ramos plonked himself on a chair and I followed.

‘What has Ramos told you?’

‘About what.’

‘The kind of work you’ll be involved in here.’

‘Secretarial.’

‘And what does that mean?’

I wasn’t happy with the drift. ‘I’d like to be frank, Sir. We both know what this sort of work is, paper, typing (I don’t know shorthand), phone calls provided there’s a phone (I looked around and saw one) and helping you in your work, whatever it is.’

He smiled for the first time. Ramos laughed. ‘And what do you think my work is?’

‘You tell me.’ This time I laughed.

‘You’re pretty confident for a girl your age. And bold.’

‘We are Thakurs. Father left a store and a sawmill in Vancouver after the Komagata Maru affair.’

He nodded. ‘You fancy yourself a fighter for freedom, is it, inqalab zindabad type?’

‘Not me. My father. Lots of talk in the house about shooting this Britisher and that Britisher.’ And then I put my knife in. ‘Wannabe revolutionaries are good with words.’ Ramos gasped and the great man looked hard at me trying to gauge what exactly I was leading up to. I added, ‘Father even took me to a meeting of Lala Lajpat Rai at the Columbia University ground, you know.’

‘Meeting with Lojpot Roy?’

‘No Sir, he was addressing an audience. We were a part of the audience, though later a Sikh gentleman took us in and we heard him again in private.’

‘Very good people, the Sikhs. Do you speak Bengali?’ I shook my head and told him we were from UP. ‘How were you concerned with the ship?’

It was at that moment that a lady walked in from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘With whom are you yacking away? Oh, hello Ramos,’ and she smiled at him. Oh, so this was his wife.

‘Evelyn, see whom Ramos has brought. Wants to work as our secretary.’

I bowed just a wee bit and she smiled at me warmly. ‘Sorry my hands are wet, can’t shake yours.’

MN repeated his question, ‘What did you all have to do with the ship?’

‘We went to the docks to welcome it. The police was ready to beat us up. The Canadians didn’t want any Indians coming in.’

‘People don’t like poor immigrants. The rich would be welcome. Wealth has an entry pass most places.’ It was his wife Evelyn who said that, nodding her head. I found myself getting bolder. ‘The Canadian workers thought we would depress the wages further. As it is the Chinese workers had brought down the wages.’

‘What were you up to in the States?’

‘I graduated,’ I said.

He looked at her and at Ramos, then after a pause he asked, ‘When can you start?’

‘Start what?’ I shot back.

‘Work, damn it.’

‘Tomorrow. My father wants me home before dark.’

‘All fathers do and Indian mothers wouldn’t let you stir out of the house if they had their way. We’ll see about that.’

I got up. As a parting shot I told him, ‘And I am good at Spanish, so please don’t worry on that score.’

‘Hmm, you think well of yourself, don’t you?’

‘I do,’ and we all laughed, as Ramos and I walked off. In the street I told Ramos, ‘He never said a word about payment.’

‘Don’t worry. He is flush with money, I don’t know how. But he has enough.’

‘Better a well-to-do revolutionary than a starving one,’ I said with a laugh, as we parted and he went his way.

That’s how I began work with MN.

He didn’t seem to have the money. The plumbing was suddenly giving trouble, but he told me not to call the plumber, with Evelyn looking on disapprovingly. They never argued in my presence. I’ll first need to go to the bank, he added. He did not ask me to connect him on phone, but phoned the German embassy himself, and I could notice the disappointment on his face when he couldn’t speak to the person he was after. Evelyn walked out with a shopping bag for the groceries. He made another call, and must have got the man he was after for he bounded out of the office, directing me not to look out of the window. His apartment faced one of the broadest streets of Colonia Roma as the colony was named. It was an after-dusk moment and I switched off the lights and looked through the window so that no one could notice me. I gasped as I saw a car trailing him, a car that came alongside him, threw open a door and he jumped in—I was thinking in terms of a kidnap. When he returned an hour later he locked himself in his room with his wife. Next morning, he gave me my salary in advance.

A week later he said I have a meeting this evening, so you’ll have to stay back. The visitor knows no English. He could have told me that last evening, I thought, but kept quiet. At home there would be disquiet of course. In the afternoon he told me the man’s name was Alfonzo Suarez. ‘Munitions man.’ Very helpful. When would he start talking to me and abandon those staccato sentences he threw around like a cop shooting away because of a nervous trigger finger. By the afternoon he was tinkering with wine glasses, cleaning them and laying the wine bottles. I saw Evelyn walk out and asked her, ‘Madam, won’t you be here?’ She told me not to Madam her ever. ‘And what use will I be? You heard him, he speaks only Spanish, the person coming to meet MN.’

Must be a big guy, this Alfonzo. ‘They are very formal, these Mexicans,’ said MN, ‘take an hour just introducing themselves. But please take notes.’ A little later, ‘You never respond to what I say.’ I told him I had nothing to say and so kept quiet.

The man came on time, well-groomed and smelling of aftershave. He greeted Roy a bit pompously detailing some obscure organization he was heading—the ‘Organization for the People’s Right to Egalitarianism’—something as bombastic and meaningless as that. He also made it a point to say he came from a long line of Spanish nobility, and didn’t forget emphasizing that he spoke only Spanish and knew no English. He declined a drink and I giggled since MN had spent an hour laying out his wines. He asked for coffee and I went to the kitchen and got both of them a cup. After some pleasantries MN, who was Senoring him all the while, thought it best to introduce himself, starting with a stab of a tirade against imperialism, and then explaining that he had turned a socialist. ‘I thought the good of mankind, which means the proletariat, is a better cause than the good only of Indians.’ Alfonzo nodded. Then MN hared off, praising Mexico and the revolution. He started with 1812, and I still had to brush up my history and didn’t understand what he was getting at. When he came to 1910, Alfonzo interrupted him politely by putting his hand up.

‘1910 was a bit of a fluke senor, I as a Mexican should know. You have obviously heard of Madero—now the revolution itself takes its name from him. He suffered from slight hallucinations, if I may put it that way.’

‘Hallucinations?’

‘He heard occult voices, Senor Roy, or voices that came from occult sources. If he hadn’t heard these voices, he wouldn’t have formed the first political opposition in the country. Begging your pardon, I am always a bit suspicious of things occult. In the business that I am in, munitions, we have very little place for such things.’ He smiled sardonically as he said this. ‘And don’t forget he came from a wealthy family. That’s why Porfirio Diaz, the previous president, didn’t care to crush him immediately.’ He paused a bit and added, ‘The one who really fouled things up was, of course, the American ambassador.’

‘Has to be him, can’t be anyone else,’ my boss agreed. ‘Next only to a British aristocrat, an American diplomat is the most obnoxious you can find anywhere.’

MN had to change the subject, I knew. He did. ‘And where would you slot yourself, Senor?’asked MN gently. ‘I ask only because we are so many of us on the same side today—communists, syndicalists, anarchists, socialists—that it becomes a bit of a problem to know where each of us stands.’

‘I wouldn’t want to pigeonhole myself, Senor Roy. If, for an instant, I were to distance myself from my life, the way one leaves a game of chess and looks back at all the moves and counter moves, I’d say I am half socialist with a touch of the anarchist in me. Anarchism lies dormant in my dreams.’

‘And what exactly are your dreams about, if I may ask?’

(A bit impertinent, wasn’t he? This kind of conversation should build up slowly, I thought. )

‘Powder and match, bombs and guns.’

‘But we have little use for all these here, don’t you think?’ It wasn’t a question, he made it sound as if it was a statement of fact. The guest nodded, sat back and smiled. ‘You never know, Senor Roy. Things are fine here, and will remain fine, Dios willing, but you never know. The past has a habit of digging its way up like a rodent sometimes. The old gods are dead but not entombed. Their funeral service has not been held, the Aztec blood still crying out, though we may not hear the cry.’

‘I thought the people were quite unified.’

‘Suffering over the ages unites people and modernism has bestowed order on the chaos of Latin America in general, it’s hidden reality.’

‘Aren’t we unnecessarily apprehensive? Hidden realities, away from the world’s eyes, could turn into unrealities.’

(Were these people playing games? Why?)

‘To bring back the discussion to our realities, we were talking about what gives muscle to a revolution, weren’t we? Probably both. Senor, the game you are playing, or would be playing, you would need them sometime or the other. Philosophy can take you only that far. Revolutions deal more with guns and grenades. Words are just fluff, fake match to fake emotion.’

MN looked hard at Alfonzo. I knew when he became tense he would start tapping his foot, which he was doing at the moment. ‘Philosophy is not just words or about words. It is the heart of the struggle, the unseen fire within.’

‘Unseen fire remains unseen; what counts, Senor Roy, is the flame that spouts from the barrel at night.’

There was a pause and I got up to serve snacks, and asked him if he would care for wine now. Alfonzo agreed. MN was delighted. He took a childlike delight in showing off his bottles, asking the visitor’s preference and then unscrewing the cork.

As he took a sip of the wine, Alfonzo resumed the discussion. ‘A big social change as you people desire, means an upheaval, also means bloodletting and sacrifice—sacrificing others as well as yourself—though sacrificing others is always a better option. All is fair on the altar of revolution.’

‘Revolutions need to come swiftly, Senor Alfonzo, not on the back of a mule train.’

‘I can see in your eyes that you are ambitious.’ (He looked at me and said don’t translate that.)I translated nonetheless and found MN nodding. ‘Exploiters need to be eradicated,’ he said, almost without context, ‘that’s something the revolution does, among other things.’

‘Some workers also, isn’t it, I refer to eradication?’

‘Workers will fight for the revolution, some may die. It is an honour to die for it.’

‘Russians would be saying that, wouldn’t they, the Lenins and the Trotskys?’He paused for a while and then said, ‘Some will die Senor, fighting the upheaval, others resisting it. But the revolution will also kill those fighting for it.’ It was Alfonzo nodding away this time.

‘A revolution is like a machete in a sugarcane field. It won’t be caught discriminating. But you are not specific about your ideology, Senor Alfonzo?’

‘Ideology is too big a word for the likes of me. My ideas are an offshoot of my indolence—and family bullying—all the while being told that I was a bum—couldn’t manage the workers at the hacienda, labour at the factory. “He will take to drugs one day, ” said my father to his younger brother in my hearing one day. I was very fond of this uncle, and he of me. I still hold this against my father. So nothing pleased me more than to stay away from my own kind, the rich, if I may use that dirty word, and I am into munitions, and ashamedly rich.’

As he got up to go, he bowed and said, ‘Senor Roy, if you ever need arms, for your activities abroad, let me know. I will give them without charge. I will do it for the sake of my scorecard, the card that will be read on the Day of Judgement.’ He bowed and left.

Next day, after I had typed out my notes for him to see, MN asked me what I thought of the discussion. I told him at times I thought both of you were playing games. I don’t know why he is taken up with you or the revolution, being so rich himself. Guilt, said MN, guilt always has a role to play. And he hates his kind, as he said, I ventured. He shook his head. ‘We need to be careful. Did you notice he talked of social change “which you people desire”. Significant slip. Hope the Americans didn’t send him to me, or the English.’

I didn’t dare to contradict him but still managed to say in a half strangled voice—‘I thought he was muddled.’

‘Affluence, munitions and socialism can’t be a happy team. He is muddled all right, as you said, but more so because of his circumstances, they too are muddled. Still we have to be careful.’

Sundays were my own. Ramos would every now and then meet me ‘accidentally’. I was reading up on Mexico and would ask questions off Ramos whenever he fell in with me. I remembered about the American ambassador Alfonzo had mentioned. ‘Where did you get hold of that?’ he asked. I gave an evasive answer.

‘It was February 1913, mind you and the former President Diaz was released from prison by traitors. A right royal battle began between Madero’s army and the reactionaries. In a previous election Diaz had got a million votes while Madero, first man to contest an election against him, got 196! Now it was he who was president. Madero blundered choosing General Huerta to lead his troops. For ten tragic days known in Mexico as La Decena Tragica, the two sides bombarded each other to pulp. General Huerta had fallen out with Madero, who was a vegetarian and a teetotaller—never drank tequila. Unforgiveable. You can’t control Mexico if you live on grass and water, can you? The general was won over by the other side and betrayed Madero. Though I must say there were also those who thought that the General just grew tired of trying to deal with Madero and went over to the other side. The American Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson was more fool than bastard. Of course, like all Americans, he thought he owned Latin America, arranged a meeting between warring generals, appointed Huerta as president—nothing an American ambassador can’t do—made the two sides sign such a document in the American embassy. Madero was to be given a safe passage but was shot, along with the vice president, while being transported.’

I let that sink in—always takes time, the enormity of history and revolutions, to turn to sediment within you. He added, ‘You know he, Madero, once said, better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees. And in two years he did a lot for the poor.’

Mexico and its eternal revolution were a bit of a puzzle. The country seemed a cauldron with revolutionaries going around as bandits, and bandits going around as revolutionaries. (I used to call them revolutionists, till MN gave me a rap on the knuckles.)One didn’t know who was who or which was which. Once you move outside the law, the lines between the two get blurred. The haloes around bandits and revolutionaries were interchangeable, I thought. (When I was silly enough to say this to MN, he shouted at me.) Zapatistas intrigued me. Emiliano Zapata Salazar and PanchoVila had opposed Porfirio Diaz, the previous president, and Zapata had established and headed the ‘Liberation Army of the South’, as it was called. After the 1910 revolution, Vila had more or less descended into banditry. But Zapata was a revolutionary at heart, influenced by the anarchist Oaxaca Ricardo Flores Megon. Spaniards have long names. I kept talking of Zapata to Ramos. ‘Doesn’t he have a base at San Angel?’ I asked one Sunday. ‘He doesn’t,’ was the answer.

‘There’s a monastery there.’

‘Yes, but it’s not worth your while and it is twenty miles over bad roads or no roads. And Zapata won’t be there.’

Zapatistas will, I shot back, insisting on the trip, surely his motorbike could get us there. ‘There’ll just be ghosts there and nothing else.’When we got there the place looked abandoned, the grass brown and scruffy, and almost no one around. Then we spotted a few peasants who seemed frightened at first, but seeing just two of us, seemed to gather courage and clustered near us, all the while gawking. ‘Don’t go there,’ they said pointing to a rather run-down building, ‘there’s no one there.’There was. A dozen guys were swinging away, hanged by the Zapatistas I don’t know how many days ago; nor would anyone know why. Ropes tied to linter and beam, and the other end knotted around broken necks. The place had a vicious odour. They were peasants swinging there, in rough, threadbare clothes, not hacienda owners. I came out and threw up, and all the way back I had to listen to Ramos reprimanding me for an hour, or so it seemed. I was never going to link Zapata with romance again in my life. The image stored in my mind was of peasants swinging away and the slightly worn out beam holding.

Don’t go home just yet, he said to me seeing me depressed, not that he was ebullient either. We went out for a pizza. Sitting over lunch, I just got brave and asked him ‘How much of you is Spanish and how much Indian?’ Nothing could have been more stupid, but I did ask him. The question had been intriguing me for a while. I was too confused with my own rashness to note his reaction.

‘Bold question,’he said, ‘but have you any idea what this country, rather, what its people have gone through?’ I shook my innocent head.

‘I am mixed, though most people can’t make out because of the pigment, a factor to be reckoned with both in painting and genetics. A pigment stamps its racial ancestry on you. My mix-up, if I may call it that, started when a Hacienda owner fell in love with an Indian girl and married her, instead of abducting and bedding her. Proper church wedding it was, with many friends of Spanish descent staying away. That was my grandmother, her grandparents, incidentally, who had been properly Christianized.’

‘Did your family, or your grandmother’s, ever face the Inquisition?’

‘Inquisition left us alone, we stood exempted. Both the Franciscan and the Dominican order agreed tacitly to the merging of a Maya or Aztec deity with a Catholic saint; makes life easier for all, isn’t it? Please remember though that royal tributes were collected from Indian communities for the expense incurred by Spanish friars to Christianize us—the encomienda system as it was called.’

Before we left he said, I want you to remember one thing more. In the sixteenth century, the Indian population with which I identify myself, diminished from thirteen million to two million. Livestock increased, though, he added ironically.

Even stories about him in America were circulated surreptitiously. Here in Mexico, not many people knew about him. Yet his past was consigned to whispers. Where did that arms ship which trawled after him, its hold stuffed with bombs, originate? Java? Sumatra? And the jaws would drop when people heard about his contacts—Rash Bihari, Lala Lajpat Rai! The unfortunates who died for that elephant bomb on the Durbar day, their names had been read out from loudspeakers. Not so our hero. Newspapers couldn’t spell his name, AIR had never heard of him it would seem. Talking about him was flashing a mirror message when the sun is overhead.

If actions reveal the man, they did nothing of the sort with him. He wasn’t self-conscious, no diffidence about the man who, as rumour went, had never been to college, had taken to bombs and things like water fowl to a lake. His stock had risen with an invitation from the War Minister! There was no change in MN after the meeting, no visible ebullience. The world, or rather, the Mexicans started looking at him in another way. A lesser man may have thrown his chest out a bit, drunk an extra glass of wine, patted friends on the back a bit patronizingly. Not him. It seemed nothing could ruffle him. He was tall and not exceptionally good looking, but he had a presence. You could sense that his thoughts were on the move all the time and in a particular direction. And he was unafraid. When I said this to father he said ‘revolutionaries cannot be afraid. Fear gives them a miss.’ He, I mean MN had started thawing—you need someone from your country to talk to. He clammed up when I had spoken of people itching to take on the British, father, Harnam Singh, Gobind Bihari, such types. I thought he would lap it up. Instead he looked at me icily and I thought of a double barrelled gun staring at me. For some days I didn’t mention the colonial yoke again.

It was not fair on him to have a teenager as secretary. He was considerate, almost compassionate, with me. He was picking up Spanish fast, I noticed a bit fearfully. I can recall some of the things he said. Religion wore a robe of love and carried a sword hidden under the robe, he once said. One was not sure if the robe was initially designed to hide the sword. Original intent and later practice often differed, he added. He was not sure about Russia, where this new state built on Marxism would go, which track it would follow. The planet hadn’t seen anything like it, this equality in men; an equality which the state had to force down your throat. How could everyone be equal to everyone?I wondered. But what a good idea!

Once I told him I don’t understand what is happening. In fact, many don’t. An archduke gets shot and a World War erupts, and then this revolution occurs in Russia. The world is too large, he answered. ‘You wake up with an ache in the morning and a stomach bug. You don’t know what’s happened. Or you get a bad dream—instead of the koh-i-noor you dream of Nadir Shah. You don’t know where it came from, the dream. It’s the same with reality. One doesn’t know which steam pipe will turn cold and which will of a sudden start fizzing, or worse, burst. But let’s make the best of what we can comprehend. The feudal armies of Europe are killing each other off, and the feudal structures of Europe are dying, though most of Europe can’t see it that way. In Russia the brave Lenin and Trotsky are leading a revolution of workers and peasants. It is a fight against injustice of thousands of years.’ I interrupted him. ‘You mean a few hundred years, don’t you? Since industry came on the scene, coal and cotton.’

‘Coal and steam and mining and iron. Don’t forget the peasants who have toiled for thousands of years and have to be content with straw and chaff while the grain went to the kulak, landlord, or knight. Well, Lenin and the proletariat are winning; they have to win, if you have any faith in the future. It is the only slab of time which has a flicker of light in it. If you want my views, I would consign the past to hell, or at best to limbo. The present is no better, hence your confusion, but it has a kernel of hope, a seed which may turn into a tree. It’s in the future that our promise of paradise lies, the equality which the Jacobins and the guillotine talked of in 1789—Robespierre and Danton, heard of them?’ (I nodded.) Reality is too big for any human being to comprehend in its entirety.

I thought to myself that moment that if reality was opaque, unreality was worse, cloaked in a summer dust storm, but I didn’t dare open my mouth. Did money have anything to do with this sudden gust of optimism? He had got hold of a hoard of gold coins just after he shifted his residence to the outskirts. He had got hold of an Alsatian dog which he really cared for and loved. He had also bought a rifle and three mouser pistols. Right house in the wrong place with maize fields all around. And what of the Zapatistas and the bandits?

Another day, he was sitting with Evelyn and the two seemed locked in a serious discussion. They paid no heed to me. It was four in the afternoon and I asked him if I could leave because I saw no work coming my way. I was surprised at his answer. ‘I wanted to dictate my article for the El Heraldo de Mexico.’ He had begun writing for this journal as well as for Pueblo regularly. Usually he wrote his articles in uneven Spanish, and I smoothened the thing, typed it again and sent it off. I hoped he would be at the job soon, the discussion with Evelyn seemed never ending. I walked over to the balcony but he called me back in. They still seemed to be conferring seriously when I heard him raise his voice ever so slightly and say, ‘How long can one move on two tracks, how long? You answer me Evelyn.’ Saying this he got up and started dictating to me in English. He always dictated fast, for his brain worked at express speed.

His thoughts tumbling over each other like boulders in an avalanche. As he was nearing the end, I butted in and asked out of the blue, putting my pencil down and laughing, ‘What about the two tracks?’

‘Oh, you heard that one, did you?You may not understand this just as yet. This is philosophy,’ he added jocularly. I plucked up courage. ‘A horse has to stick to one track, but you are not a horse. Philosophy need not cramp itself with such restrictions. Evelyn laughed and said, ‘What do you think philosophy is?’

‘Philosophy is a wild ass. It can cut across tracks, even turn round and do an about turn.’ I noticed that the two were stunned.

Superintendent of Police Special Branch of the CID Calcutta, Jeffrey Hughes Denham, had a very successful career dealing with revolutionaries and pseudo revolutionaries. His method had three stages. The first had nothing to do with third degree, he told his colleague Charles Spiegelman, who headed the Crime Branch of the Criminal Investigation Department or the CID, as it was better known. The first stage meant just reasoning with the rebel—don’t do it son, you’ll regret it. You’ll get your freedom when the time is ripe and you Indians know how to handle it. The fellow was even given a chair to sit on, a glass of tea in the lock up, blanket, rice and dal and small steel katori of vegetables. You also dangled that unfailing carrot, money. Turn informer son and you can sleep at home and smoke ganja with your revolutionary cousins. Shout slogans for all you’re worth. If that sermon didn’t work, the next day when he stood before Denham, the consequences of his actions would be spelled out in no unclear terms—jail and the gallows, and for good measure a rope with the knot in place, would be dangled invitingly in front of him. The third stage was a long one starting with taking off his dhoti, forcing him to lie prone, splashing water on his buttocks and then making one of the burly sepoys take off his rubber shoes and go on a spanking spree. Charles would shake his head in disapproval—he knew of much sweeter methods that went under the pseudonym ‘sustained interrogation’. Denham wouldn’t budge. ‘Charlie, it is the humiliation that does it. They can’t stand the shame, especially if the constable comes from the cobbler or the sweeper caste. The sheer indignity of it!’

Charlie wasn’t easy to convince, his gospel was bastinado, a few blows on the sole of the feet and back of the knee and a starvation diet to go with it. He laughed, ‘Don’t give them rice man, and they’ll succumb.’

Well, now this unfailing Jeffrey Hughes Denham had been sent to the Americas, first to the States and then to Mexico, to try his hand at getting MN. Blighter finds things different here. You can’t put the guy in the cooler, you can’t take off his dhoti—not sure if he even wears one, no constables of the tanner or cobbler castes at hand with big-sized tennis shoes! What is the world coming to, Charlie? Relate all this to the boss. And I think we need to be discreet, we’re not dealing with Bengali babus here. Every bugger carries a pistol, wears a sombrero and sports a moustache. We want to catch a revolutionary. The Mexicans claim their own revolution is in bloody progress!

The boss was the DIG CID, tough beetroot-red, pipe-smoking hombre from Dorset, which he loved to pronounce as Darzeet. After he had had his three shots of whiskey he would sing,

‘There’s not a land like Darzeet

Though you’ll never come accraaz it

Even if you search through and through

From New Yark to Timbuctoo.’

The boss was not pleased, bosses seldom are. Tell him, he bawled at Charles Spiegelman, ‘We are at war damn it and not interested in discretion. Valour is the word. The fellow we have sent him to get is a Bengali babu! He hasn’t come from the bloody Andes. What’s the bugger talking about! Entire fucking America is behind us and him, so what’s his worry? Cold fucking feet, that’s what he has got and goosebumps on his damned arse! And he shouldn’t call me, I don’t wanna talk to him! Understood!’

Charlie understood and relayed the message.

Denham moves in to Hotel Geneva of all places, swarming with Teutons. He goes to the bar, orders a bourbon, and almost spits it out. Never drunk anything so wretched! He chases it with two measures of scotch, just to get the taste out of his mouth. A lady comes in and sits on the bar-stool next to him. The bartender bows and introduces her as the Princess of Bavaria and then discreetly withdraws. Denham of Calcutta CID, true-born Yorkshire man stands up and kisses her hand which he notices smells of cheap perfume.

‘And what brings you to Mexico, Herr-Ritter, if I may ask.’

‘Business and pleasure, Madame.’

‘And what beezness can flawreesh in these time of war Herr…?’

‘Denham, I mean…well yes…Denham,’ he stammers.

‘As I was saying Herr Denham, the awnly beezness that war encourages ees munitions, buy and sell bomb, bullet, torpedo nicht wahr?’

‘Not much scope for that, I agree Madame, but I have also come for pleasure, to fish for instance.’

‘Feeshing een Mexico city, and not the coast?Very original, and very eenteresting. And if you are meexing beezness with pleasure, may I order a glass of wine for you?’

‘No no Madame, it is my privilege to do the honours. Abdar, I mean, bartender, a glass of wine for the Memsab, I mean Princess… Fraulein…?’

‘Angelique.’ And he says almost audibly to himself, ‘Princess! She looks more like a whore.’

‘Denken,’ she says as the wine glass is placed before her. ‘You look a leetle lost, Herr Denham. What are you doing in the evening today?’

‘Nothing much, Lady. I will just retire to bed.’

‘Bed ees there for better theengs than retiring, Herr Denham, I mean, a good sleep and happy dreams. May I suggest you order dinner in your room. Bartender, dinner for Herr Denham in his room. On my account.’

Barman bows to the Princess of Bavaria, but addresses Denham.

‘Sir, shall it be dinner for two?’

‘Capital Madame, I mean barman. And obviously on my account.’

‘Denken’ says the Princess, as she goes into his room when the dinner is served and asks, ‘I don’t see your feeshing tackle, fly, rod.’ I could leave them there but I won’t. After some more whiskies and wine and jousting in bed, she keeps up with her affected French accent and asks, ‘ if you haven’t come feeshing for fish, what have you come feeshing for, liebling?’

He laughs and finds he can’t control his laughter, has had too much to drink. ‘You are asking a very loaded question, luv.’

‘Loaded did you say liebling? I have a good friend who deals in munitions. I must introduce him to you tomorrow. Good Mexican can be of great help to you. He will find the feesh you want to fry!’

‘I just want to fry a Bengali.’ Denham almost chokes with laughter, and she gives him water to drink and slaps him on the back.

It all unravels later, a bit through the efforts of Ramos, a bit through the Germans who almost beat up the ‘Bavarian princess’. The damage had been done. She was also drunk and forgot in the morning what she had prized out of Denham at night! Even if the great Kaiser Wilhelm was on the back foot now, and war was getting over with soldiers on both sides leaving the trenches to the rats, you couldn’t have a Teutonic version, however poor of Mata Hari bringing such a bad name to both those noble professions, spying and whoring. Unforgiveable! Yet Angelique remembered the word he had used—loading, and Alfonzo during his tryst with Angelique got scent of it and made a beeline for Denham. It was the bartender who came to our rescue—it was him that Ramos contacted. The fellow listened in, and his version went as follows:

Denham immediately sensed that the munitions man was after a sucker and who better that an English sucker from Calcutta? He played along. For the first half hour there was hardly any talk between the two—Alfonzo didn’t speak English. He phoned up his office to send an English speaking person. So, initially, the barman was functioning as interpreter and translator. The negotiations started the moment the English speaking girl from Alfonzo’s office arrived.

‘Senor, if we need munitions, it would be for the European theatre where we are already winning. There’s, of course, Turkey you know, Gallipoli and all that shit. Surely we wouldn’t need supplies from Mexico for a war raging on the Bosporus, don’t you think?’

‘Then why did Senor come all the way to Mexico? A shepherd seeks pastures close to his sheep.’ I fancied that this little speech was capped by a sardonic smile.

‘In war, you grab things from wherever even the moon is not too far, ha ha.’

‘My ordnance is nowhere near the moon senor. It is at your service.’

They get into a huddle, and the bartender loses the thread.

Head a-split with a hangover, Denham nevertheless knows what he has to do. He shambles into the American Embassy and asks to meet the consular officer. He is made to sit in a quiet room. After a few minutes an American officer comes in and asks politely, ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Jeffrey Hughes Denham, we’ve been expecting you.’

He is surprised they know his full name, because his card just read J. H. Denham. They shake hands and the American asks, ‘What can we do for you?’

He rambles about terrorism, bombs, Calcutta-Cologne and Bengali-German conspiracies not just against the empire but targeting Anglo-American friendship. The American listens gravely and then eventually asks, ‘What exactly do you have in mind?’

‘There are two avenues, if I may venture to suggest. The first choice would be to take him back and thus prize out details of other conspirators, bomb makers etc. , you understand?’

‘Through force?’

‘Yes, of course, old man, you can’t get by in this game without some force, isn’t it, a tickle in the ribs here and a prod in the arse there?’

‘Kidnapping happens to be a criminal offence all over the world, Mr Denham. And what is the other option you were thinking of exploring?’

‘Well, there’s a word called “elimination”, isn’t there?’

‘With respect, Mr Denham, considering our very delicate relations with Mexico at this instant, I am afraid both avenues you suggested are closed.’

Denham gets the impression that he is being treated like a WOG just because he is tanned after twenty years in the wretched sun of Hindustan. So, the buggers are not prepared to bend rules, is it? They didn’t even offer me a cup of coffee! Would have helped me with this headache. I’ll show them! He proceeds to the French Embassy. Pour quoi they say, why come to us? Still struggling with his hangover and the effects of the de riguer jousts with Angelique, he tells them about this terrible terrorist from India. They produce an officer who was previously with the French Foreign Legion, blue patrols and handlebar moustaches. Man after my own heart, cries Denham, when he sees him. ‘Monsieur, I have sabred many a bastard in the black lands, I mean bad lands of Africa. I am the man you are looking for and you are the man I am looking for. There’s no adventure in this place unless you are a Pancho Villa or Zapata.’

The next morning MN’s dog, which he loved, dies. Ramos thinks he has been poisoned, it’s now time to tell MN about the plot against him. The Germans are phoning up regularly as it is and keeping Ramos informed.

It’s the first MN hears of CID Superintendent Denham. He doesn’t seem to be worried. Business as usual, but he does take a round and surveys the surrounding maize fields and beyond it the wild growth of cactus and shrub. In the evening, a ramshackle truck comes up. Four or five locals with spade and shovel lean out. It halts near the house. What on earth for?

They get down and start scything the wild growth around the house. ‘Rather late in the day,’ says MN. ‘They should have been here in the morning, isn’t it?’ Ramos thinks nothing of it and sits on his motor cycle and buzzes off home, but I stop him and insist he leaves his pistol with me, never know what may happen in the night, if the Germans are to be believed. Then a car rolls down and we see a tall man, dressed in blue patrols, his head shaven, his eyes piercing blue, get down. He looks like a general, in fact, a field marshal. A tanned fellow is sitting with him. Immediately, the ones who were cutting down the wild plants leap up and rush with spade and crowbar into the house. I hear gunshots, seem to be coming from the same weapon, I can make out the spatter of lead against the wall. I want to run to MN’s defense but my legs refuse to move. I now check if the pistol is loaded, look at the sky and let go, thank God there’s no plane overflying MN’s house at that moment. The local toughs are stopped in their tracks, but one huge guy manages to penetrate to MN’s bedroom where he is calmly sipping scotch with his left hand and holding a pistol in his right. The fellow retreats in haste and encounters me, but all the six bullets from my, or rather Ramos’ Smith and Wesson, are already in the Mexican sky. I still point my pistol at him but he calls my bluff, lifts me and runs to the car. It is then I hear the man in Blue Patrols sneering at the tanned guy sitting with him. ‘Did you bring me for this monsieur to kidnap a beautiful lady! I have honour on my side, I am from the French Foreign Legion!’And he points the pistol towards Denham and shoots him, before he shoots the hulk who was almost making off with me.

A journal is a recollection, and recollections have their own problems especially when events seem to be scrimmaging with each other. Writing now in the first person of a time when I had just stepped out of my teens, confronting a new culture in a new country, slightly suspicious of the only ‘friend’ I seemed to have, suspicious of his intentions, hoping Ramos wouldn’t fall in love with me, knowing that such a suspicion was most presumptuous; managing a difficult boss with a wife who was cordial but aloof, a boss who was miles above me in intellect and experience, and was aware of it, and at times made me aware of it—it is all a bit tough putting it down coherently in a journal. Events…did I mention events? Well, they were gathering like flies around sweets in India. Success was slowly coming his way, like-minded people from the left quietly clustering around him, getting pally with left-leaning Americans who had skipped over to Mexico to escape going to war in Europe. Mexico must have been paradise compared to the trenches. Must look up details of the war. Were the Yankees ever in Somme—I know it was the Aussies in Gallipoli. But I was talking of MN and his ascendant star. The culmination of it all was a meeting with the president, General Don Venustiano Carranza himself.

There were also the Indian ‘revolutionaries’ and most came for money. How is it we Indians of whatever ilk can smell money across sea and savannah and then manage to swoop like buzzards on a kill? Which of the senses plays a part here? Some of them, the desi revolutionaries, after taking money from him, asked me where MN got the coins from, they were gold coins, mind you, though he had exchanged some of the money for American dollar bills. They knew the money came from Germany, but still they asked, where’s the harm in a question? Their audacity was unbelievable. When I told him about some of the things these revolutionaries said, he just laughed it off. ‘Don’t let it worry your little head,’ he said, ruffling my hair gently. He was generous—would part with a thousand or more dollars without any problem. How long would his treasure trove last? Having lost the war, the Germans had started leaving Mexico.

We had no such trouble with Mexicans or the disenchanted Americanos, whose disenchantment was with the trenches— which they had never been to—that was a different matter. One couldn’t help overhearing conversations. How people attacked the state! In the eyes of some of the Mexicans, the villain was the state and its main role was to defend private property, and the dirtiest word in their vocabulary was a ‘status quo-ist’. MN was fond of grouping such people as Anarcho-Syndicalists. Since there was not enough work for me in the office, now that he had picked up Spanish—I started studying Marx and whatever communist literature I could lay my hands on. I noticed it impressed MN, though the wife was impervious to my efforts at learning. He had, of course, no time for me. Firstly it was a full house—Evelyn, Maria, the cook (I thought she was even more good-looking than the wife), and the visitors. The houses, both at Colonia Roma and the one he had shifted to, were the tramping grounds for Mexican socialism; in and out they went, faces radiant with expectation (of what?), thumping of chests and hail Bolshevism—whatever that may mean—written all over their faces. And then the Bolshevik came home!

For MN and his socialist cronies it was as if Jesus had dropped from the cross (on furlough from Calvary) and walked across to drop his calling card on us. ‘I am Jesus from Nazareth (it’s in Palestine, friend), sorry am a bit sozzled, I mean I am a Lenin crony from Mouscova actually. Pleased to meet ya, revolutionary comrade. You’re the one who started the first communist party in the world outside Russia, aren’t you? Hope you’re well stocked with dough.’ I am being both facetious and spiteful—must admit I resented him initially, the space around MN was getting crowded. He had many names, I was to discover, Brantwein, Borodin—his real name, and a name for America! He even had a family under a false name, the wife never knowing his real identity. He was suave, his bearing aristocratic, from the little I knew of the Russians, I felt he was more a Czarist than a Bolshevik. Needless to say, he was more gracious with Maria than with me—after all she managed the household and cooked fabulously. The palate often determines which way a friendship lies. She was Mexican and I was Indian; that also counts. Actually, no one in the house had time for me except when I was needed on the Olivetti or when something really important had to be drafted in Spanish. MN told me once how he had been complimented on his Spanish because of something I had drafted. Possibly I may have simply improved his draft, who cares? ‘Did you tell whoever about me?’ I asked a little self-consciously and a little stupidly. He just smiled and didn’t answer.

I saw him typing one morning and asked if I could help; he waved me away, didn’t want me near him or look at what he was typing. I kept away, not a very difficult thing to do, and yet difficult. Why was he keeping something from me? What was so important that he had to keep it to himself? I was a nobody. How would my knowing something affect anything or anybody? Evelyn came and overlooked the typing which made me more jealous. What had I to do with it? He even had a carbon paper on and as he finished, Evelyn asked why the hell do you need a copy? She crumpled it along with the dark blue thoroughly indented carbon paper and threw it in the bin. That evening I did a sneaky thing, a bit, only a bit, ashamed of it. I picked the crumpled copy up, went home and read it carefully.

Yes, he had no time for me but there were days when he was alone, this was before the Russian made his entry. Evelyn had gone out to a library. Father had been talking to me of the Irish rebellion at Easter. Thakur Brajbir Singh had kept his ears close to the ground and had talked also of an anti-British agitation at a place called Champaran in Bihar. MN was alone that day in the house and I asked him what he thought of all this. I remember his answer, words coming out with difficulty through pursed lips. ‘These are puffs of smoke on the horizon. The real fire on the skyline is the Bolshevik Revolution. Who told you about Champaran?’

‘Father.’

‘Hmm, India gets into the bone with us Indians…as it should,’ he added hastily.

‘Has it got into your bones?’ I marvel at my audacity now. ‘You are very bold,’ he said, not too happily. He got busy with his books, and then came back to my table to ask, ‘What have you noticed that you asked me that question?’

‘You don’t speak much about India…it is all Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.’ He nodded, ‘Not enough, I agree.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there are bigger things to worry about, a revolution that can change the way humanity has lived till now. It will end the exploitation of the poor, worker and peasant.’

‘But they are being exploited in India as well.’

‘You don’t understand. Firstly, there are hardly any workers in India, we are not industrialized. I am referring to the planet. Lenin is talking of humankind.’

When you are locked out of conversations, you learn to listen. I found conversations were veering a bit away from Lenin and Trotsky to Marx and someone called Hegel. I knew of Marx and was reading up on him, but Hegel remained distant. I soaked in words like ‘petit- bourgeois-reformist’ and the like and soon noticed that ‘anti-imperialist’ was no longer in much use. A lone word can always tell you as much as a story.

Autumn 1919, the leaves on the trees turned crinkled amber rather than gold. The voices in the house became muted when I was around, there was more whispering. I kept away, who was I to pry and for what good reason? The scene had changed and suddenly become more surreptitious. When things are moving into a shadow you can never tell when they will emerge into light? Does darkness provide the right ambience for conjectures? What happens to people when a fuse blows and the lights go out? What happens when a woman is suddenly woken up by a rumble in the attic or a scurry of rat legs under the floorboards? She dare not even leave the bed, all the while praying that the sounds stop and the night returns to its silence. I am dramatizing. When you don’t know what’s happening, the best you can do is to turn to drama. Well, suddenly conversations turned to whispers—phus-phus was the word in India. I came one wintry Monday to find the house locked. Where had everyone gone? And without saying a word to me? A short holiday perhaps, but they would have told me. How could this happen? That week I haunted the house, waiting and often walking through the reeds on the periphery. Word must have gotten out on my prowling for one morning I saw a socialist whom I used to see with MN, was waiting for me. He was very polite, as Mexicans are, and took me to a restaurant for coffee, and there handed me an envelope which bore my name in his handwriting. He cautioned me not to open it right there. When I left he said, don’t talk about him and don’t make enquiries. A disappearance such as this has its own rules around it.

I kept feeling the thick envelope from time to time as I walked back, and each time I did this my heart sank. I went home and mother was fortunately in the kitchen for I wanted to be alone. I already knew its contents by touch, but hoped there was a letter for me. There wasn’t. All it contained was dollar bills—three months’ salary. Not a word or a line, not even an au revoir. I cried putting a pillow over my head so that mother wouldn’t hear me sobbing.