Those ashtrays populated my childhood like unusable toys.
Of course, we knew this life, refracted
through cut glass, reflected on brass, was, in part,
make-believe — even I, as a child, knew it — that
the furniture, the flat, weren’t ours. Yet that view,
morning and evening, of the Arabian Sea
and the Queen’s Necklace, and the dome of the Taj,
was all mine. At that time, I was more
interested in prying into windows of the buildings
not too far away — I had a pair of binoculars
given me by a friend of my father’s from England
that took me near those rooms, and, looked into from
the wrong lenses, gave me the strange satisfaction
of feeling farther away than I really was.
I knew our country was poor, but mainly as a
sombre abstraction. Having said that, our wealth
was make-believe — perquisites (perks) made up
for the ceiling on high income under Indira Gandhi.
My father had no savings — he’d lost everything
with partition; the take-home pay, after tax,
was small. The only way to get rich was not to pay
taxes, almost impossible to do when you had
one of the best jobs available in a British-owned company.
But the perquisites gave us the trappings of affluence
if not affluence itself. A chauffeur-driven car,
first an Ambassador, then a “foreign” car,
a poor relation of the Managing Director’s Pontiac—
an Austin that tried to keep us happy, and often
stopped for no reason on Marine Drive. It was
often pushed into motion by passersby. Domiciled
in India, its habits had become Indian. Still,
it was a foreign car (the word “foreign” had,
for the urban upper middle class,
as much a shameless magic as it might have had
a malign resonance to a nationalist or to
a Little Englander); commensurate with my father’s
position. Years later, a Mercedes-Benz,
regal in those years of austerity, took us
everywhere. Wherever we went in it, we were
saluted. These cars — our cars — of varying
degrees of majesty, were not our own. (When my father
retired, he bought a secondhand Ambassador
at a concession from the company. The new
Managing Director’s son had practised on it
and perfected his driving skills, permanently
affecting its engine. The chauffeur who’d driven
the Mercedes-Benz, a fair, round-faced, moustached,
uxurious Hindi-speaking man, forever dropping
his wife’s name in his conversations, wept when he bid us
farewell. An age had ended for him.
He had a new employer now. A better job—
and yet these illogical tears.) That Austin
used to be parked outside the old building on
Cumballa Hill, near the Parsi General
Hospital. It was from here I went to school,
going down the road past the Allah Beli café
where drivers ate biryani for lunch — always plotting
how not to go to school, because I hated it,
hated the hymns in the morning, the P.E. classes,
physics and mathematics; plotting, feigning fever
and malingering in order to stay at home.
The fifteen or so minutes I had in the car
before I reached school near Mahatma Gandhi Road,
going past, every morning, Marine Drive, before turning
either into the road that ran past Parsi
Dairy Farm, and the Fire Temple, then right
again towards Metro Cinema, or farther on,
turning left at Churchgate, moving towards
the traffic lights before Flora Fountain — those fifteen
minutes I spent in apprehension and prayer.
It was Christ I prayed to, to save me from
the imminent danger of P.E. classes.
His power and efficacy had been impressed on me
by a series of Roman Catholic drivers,
one of whom took me to the church on Wodehouse
Road when I was seven or eight. I kept
the card-sized picture he’d given me, in which
Christ looked like a blond sixties flower child,
his face and blue eyes tilted slightly towards heaven.
It was this image I prayed to, going down Marine Lines,
or stuck in a traffic jam in Kemp’s Corner. I found
a good excuse not to do P.E. — the murmur
that the stethoscope had discovered when I was three years old.
My parents took me from doctor to doctor; at first
diagnosed as a hole in the heart, then an obstruction
to a valve. My blood whispered loudly
with my heartbeat. I watched as the others touched their toes,
or executed a somersault on the “horse”;
or hung, primate-like, from the Roman rings,
and thanked the Almighty I had the means to convince
my mother to write a note: “Please excuse my son
from P.E. today.” School, then, was a place
of lonely observances, where a role was already
created, of watching from the sidelines; meanwhile,
we’d moved to the apartment on Malabar Hill.
The solitary quest for the other had started
long ago; the first desire was for
myself. As a child, I’d often stare
at my body in the mirror, in the silence, appraising,
weighing, sometimes touch the mirror, feeling the pleasure
was mine, but that I was being pleasured as well;
that private feeling of separateness
and connection. Later, I began to compose the secret
object of my search from odds and ends, nipples
and navels; sometimes a woman in a bikini, alone
in an advertisement; sometimes, without knowing it, the gods
and goddesses in my father’s Outline of Art;
gods more than goddesses — as if I was still searching
for myself — the mirror, in this case,
was the picture of the gods. I flicked the pages. For a long
time the mirror stage lasted, and those Roman bodies
were touched by the hue of my skin, by my sweat,
by sameness and its odd allure. I saw a print
of a painting of Saint Sebastian, his arched torso
pierced by arrows. I couldn’t distinguish
between the sacred and the profane, the spiritual passion
from the carnal. These gods were among
the earliest pornographic pictures I beheld.
The hardbound books in my father’s library; besides
those on industrial growth, and development,
and fiscal policy, and the World Bank,
were the Grolier Classics — relics of his love
of prosody and line — the Divine Comedy,
and Paradise Lost, long unopened, but whose titles
spoke worlds. I thought Paradise Lost a tropical island;
the Divine Comedy a farce. Among the books
was a consumptively thin and freckled copy
of T. S. Eliot’s Selected Poems, bought
for a shilling and sixpence in London, and shipped
more than a decade ago with other Pelican books to India.
Looking into it when I was twelve or thirteen,
I remember the bemusement and distaste
I felt, more than if I’d come upon an obscenity,
on reading the lines “I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…”
and experiencing a great, if temporary, disillusionment,
as if some taboo had been breached. Thus, my childhood.