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‘Stop talking shit and come and have a shafti at this stall,’ Wally called. Mention of any god annoyed him; he was a fervent atheist. Wally came from Dagenham, where he was a car-worker like his father, and we gathered that if God ever had the cheek to enter the factory, every manjack would have downed tools at once and walked out on strike.
‘Why don’t you pack in ordering us about, Wally?’ I asked, but Geordie was already on the move, in his submissive way.
Geordie and I made our way over a plank bridge spanning an open sewer to see what Wally was up to. He was standing in front of a wooden stall decked with magazines and pictures, mostly sugary ones of Indian film stars. Behind the little counter sat the owner, dressed in white and nodding and smiling at us, indicating his stock with a graciously inclined hand.
‘Hello, young masters, come to see what you are liking just now to buy very much! Yevery thing all at very cheapest prices, young masters, for suit the pocket. If you are looking pretty magazines with photographs of young ladies in the Yinglish language, I have very plenty what is to your likings.’
Ignoring him, Wally pointed to some pictures hanging from the beams of the stall. Each picture portrayed one fantastic personage. Their bright colours suggested that they were posters.
‘What a bunch of fucking savages!’ Wally said. ‘You were talking about their gods – well, there they are, and a right old bunch they look! You notice this cove don’t have no pictures of Winston Churchill here!’
‘You like the pictures, sahib? I hold light for you to make the close observation. Yeach and yevery one a Hindu god and lady-god!’
As we stared, Wally pointed with particular venom at one of the posters. ‘Look at this bastard here! What do you make of him, pulling his own guts out by the fucking yard! Wyhyrr, makes you want to spew up!’
He was stabbing his finger at a splendid and terrifying green figure with the face of a monkey. The monkey wore a crown and the elaborate and stiff golden garments of a prince. The garments were undone. The monkey was ripping his body apart from throat to pelvis, revealing a generalized mass of pink and red entrails. His face was distorted by something between pain and ecstasy.
‘Christ-on-fucking-crutches!’ exclaimed Geordie. ‘Them blaspheming bastards! I mean to say, anyroad, it’s bloody cruel, like, even in a fucking picture.’
‘Yes, yes, very terrible scene,’ agreed the stall-keeper, smiling from one to the other of us. ‘This is a depiction of Hanuman, young gentlemen, who fought for Rama and also Rama’s beautiful wife, the lady Siva. He is also called the Monkey God.’
‘He’s marvellous in a revolting way,’ I said. ‘What did he do?’
‘Sahib, Hanuman is fighting for the lady Siva when she is keeping by Ravana.’ He performed a little sword-play with his hands.
‘Who’s Ravana when he’s at home?’
‘Ravana is the King of the Rakshasas.’ His smile suggested he did not mind stating the obvious for us.
Geordie burst into laughter. ‘Ask a daft question, Stubby, get a daft bloody answer!’
But I was fascinated by the monkey god. I knew how he felt. Wally was furious that I was taking the matter seriously.
‘What do you fucking care what this monster did? The bloke who painted that ought to be put away for keeps!’ He thumped an adjacent picture, which showed an impossibly pink and rounded young lady with curly nostrils, busily balancing on one foot on a green leaf in a bright blue pool. ‘Who’s the pusher, Johnny?’
‘Yes, yes, this lady is Lakshmi, sahib, the lady-god of fortune and also the pleasure of the god Vishnu, according to our religion of Hinduism, sahib. If you like buy one or two picture very cheap?’
‘I don’t want to buy the bloody things, do I? I’ve got no time for all that rubbish. It’s a load of fucking junk, if you ask me.’
‘The pictures demonstrate items in our religion, sahib.’
‘Well then, that’s your look-out, mate, ain’t it? Just don’t try to convert me to the bloody nonsense, that’s all!’
Ganesh, the elephant god, hung there too, with diamonds in his trunk. Wally knocked him and sent him swinging, to show what he felt about Hinduism.
‘Come on, Wally, like – I don’t think you ought to take the piss out of the poor sad!’ Geordie said. ‘He’s got his living to earn.’
‘How much? Kitna pice ek picture?’ I asked the stall-keeper.
‘Gods and lady-gods all one low price, sahib, only five rupee yevery painting. Very lovely things to look upon, in the day or even night-time. Five rupee. No, sir, you young gentlemen now from the barracks, I know – four rupee! For you, four rupee!’
Wilkinson was trying to move Page on, arguing in his vague way. He now tried to move me on as well – not that I had any intention of paying four or five rupees. Seeing us about to move away, across the plank over his well-flavoured ditch, the stall-holder called that he would accept three rupees.
‘Tell him to fuck off,’ Page said. ‘All that sort of thing gives me a pain in the arse. It’s downright sinful! Let’s go and get something to drink!’
‘Yes, let’s go and get something to drink,’ Geordie said.
‘I’ll have a drink when I feel like it, and not before. You two piss off if you’re so bloody thirsty! Give you one rupee for the monkey god, Johnny!’
The stall-holder came to the plank and bowed his head, regarding me at the same time under his brows. ‘You very hard man, sahib, me very poor man with wife to keep and many many chikos to give food, and mother also very sick, all about her body. This is real good Indian painting, sir, for to take home to your lady in England.’
‘I’m not going home. I’m here to stay. I’ll give you one rupee.’
‘Come on, Stubbs, fuck it – you can buy three beers for one rupee!’
‘Aye, tell him to stuff it up his jumper!’
I gave up and yielded to my friends’ gentle advice. As I moved across the plank, the stall-keeper followed, one hand out.
‘All right, sahib, I take one rupee. Come, come, you give!’
Page clouted himself on the head several times. ‘You don’t want that fucking thing, Stubbs! You cunt, come and have a drink! I ain’t buying you a beer if you waste your money on that load of old rubbish!’
But I went back across the ditch and waited patiently while Hanuman was rolled up inside a sheet of frail pink paper.
As I came away with it, Wally and Geordie made pantomimes of staggering about in disgust, clutching their throats and vomiting into the ditch.
‘Don’t bring that horrible thing near me, Stubbs!’ Wally said. ‘You must have more bollocks than brains! We haven’t been out here five minutes and you’re going fucking native already. Isn’t he, Geordie?’
‘Besides, if he’d hung on, he could have got the thing for half a rupee,’ Geordie said. ‘It’s really a terrible country – you have to say it!’
‘Git your loin cloth on, Stubbs, you jungley wallah!’
‘I’ll fling you into the fucking ditch, Page, along with the other turds, if you don’t shut your arse! Let’s go and get a bloody beer!’
After a bloody beer, we went to the cinema. Being a garrison town, Kanchapur boasted three cinemas. One, which showed only native films, was Out of Bounds. The other two, the Vaudette and the Luxor, were in bounds and changed their programme every Sunday, Tuesday, and Friday. Wally, Geordie, and I went to the Luxor, sitting among the peanut shells in the front row but one, to wallow in The Girl He Left Behind in which – have I remembered aright after all these years? – Alice Faye sang A Journey to a Star and No Love, No Nothin’.
Later, back in the aimless main street, night hung like Technicolor in the trees. The promptings of lust were on every side. Kanchapur’s street lights, infrequent and yellow, were besieged by a confetti of insects. Every shop was open. Soldiers apart, there were not so many people about, yet the impression was of bustle. A man in a dhoti spat a great gob of betel-juice at our feet as we passed.
‘Dirty bastards!’ Wally said automatically.
We made our way to a restaurant and sat out on the verandah bellowing for a waiter with plenty of fine deep-throated ‘Jhaldi jaos’. We ordered five eggs-and-chips and beer three times. It felt good to be sitting there, chatting idly about the film as we ate, occasionally waving to a friend in the street, and slapping the odd mosquito that settled on our fists.
Geordie set his knife and fork down and leaned back in the wicker chair.
‘Aye, well, that was almost as good as getting stuck up Alice Faye.’
‘I’d rather have Ida Lupino.’
‘Ida Lu-fucking-pino? Balls, she’s got no figure – Alice Faye’s lovely, built like a brick shithouse!’
‘She’s just an old cow. Even you can see that, Geordie!’
While this debate on female standards of beauty was in progress, Wally leant forward and grabbed my rolled-up picture of Hanuman, which was lying on the table.
‘Let go of that, you bastard!’ I seized him by his curly yellow wrist. He laughed, pulled back, and crunched the cylinder. I hit him in the chest with my left fist.
The next moment, we were on our feet and confronting each other. I was so angry, I hardly took any notice of Geordie, who was shouting feebly at us both to sit down.
‘Come outside, you lousy thieving bastard, and I’ll teach you to maul other people’s property about!’
‘You couldn’t teach a pig to piss, you ill-tempered bastard! I only wanted to look at the fucking thing!’
‘What did you screw it up for then, you interfering cunt?’
Wally went all quiet and crouchy, as if he was about to jump on me.
‘Don’t you call me a cunt, you Midland prick, you, or I’ll sort you out!’
‘You and who else?’ I waved a fist in his face.
Waiters were running up, fluttering their hands about us and cooing with alarm. People at other tables were jumping up, and Geordie was trying to get us away. ‘For Christ sake, you couple of dumb ’erbs, do you want the fucking Redcaps on us? Pipe down! Pay your bloody money and let’s get out of here!’
He picked the battered roll of picture off the floor where Wally had thrown it and, with much ushering and swearing, managed to get me out of the restaurant. Wally had marched out ahead of us. I pushed past him, knocked down Geordie’s detaining hand, and hurried away from them into the bazaar. God knows, I was prepared to swallow the old working-class ethic whole if I could, but there were times when it stood revealed in all its shoddy triviality! I could be as stupid as the next bloke, but Wally’s stupidity was an invasion of privacy!
Clutching my maligned picture, I walked on, although I could hear Geordie calling to me. My regret was that I had not given Wally a bunch of fives in the mush while I had the chance.
My temper was troubling me, as it had ever since my early school days. The tendency to get involved in fights had already upset my army career. I was sixteen when I left home and went down to London to seek out Virginia Traven, my great love. Without her, I floundered in the war-dazed city. What pavements I trod were nothing to me. All the streets under the sky of 1939 held only frustration and anger.
My pride had not allowed me to return meekly home from London. Had my father ever come down to find me, to collect me, to take me back – yes, then I would gladly have returned, and felt no defeat. But he never came. When I realized that he never was coming, I marched into the Army Recruiting Centre in Leicester Square, lied about my age, and signed on for what was then the traditional ‘seven-and-five’ – which is to say, seven years’ service on the Active List and five on the Reserves.
I was posted to the 2nd Royal Mendips, then in training near Wells and busily covering most of Somerset on foot, stomach, or whatever parts of the body best suited official inclination. When the regiment was shipped over to France in the New Year of 1940, I went with them. There we proceeded to acquaint the countryside round Arras with the stomachs, feet and other organs which had proved so popular in Somerset. To break this routine, I volunteered to go on a radio-operator’s course which, I understood, would take me to Paris. Paris! Gay Paree! The very name evoked a knowing leer on any soldier’s face.
When the fate-deciding list came through, I was not dispatched to Paris. I found myself instead in a North-facing Nissen hut in Prestatyn, on the North Wales coast. The power-that-be had discovered that no man could become proficient in the mysteries of 19 set unless he had been exposed to the ice-filled gales that blew in off the grey waters of Liverpool Bay. While I was undergoing this mixture of technology and meteorology, my mates in the BEF were suddenly plunged into heavy defensive fighting in Belgium, as Hitler’s then invincible divisions rolled through the Low Countries towards France and Paris.
The Mendips were involved in the fighting around Louvain, as a thousand heavy tanks rolled down on them. Many of the friends I knew were killed or taken prisoner by the Germans, while the mangled units retreated to Dunkirk and the coastal ports as best they could. The bad news seeped back to Prestatyn. Guilt and betrayal seemed to be my lot. I got drunk whenever I could afford it, and was always involved in fights.
At the same time, the death of my friends made me a sort of hero. I used to claim – the feeblest and worst of jokes – that France would never have fallen if I had been there to sort things out. Only movement comforted my confusion and, in those terrible young summer days when France was collapsing, movement was everywhere in Britain. The steam trains pulled in and out of stations; evacuees went towards unknown foster-parents; hands waved; women fluttered damp handkerchiefs, and were at once forgotten at unknown destinations. The next day, in another place, you went on parade with a hangover and a bloody eye.
Having completed my operator’s course, I eventually rejoined the unit, then being reformed after Dunkirk. They were short of trained men, and I was given my first stripe. We moved up to the wilds of Yorkshire. Desperately hard up for equipment, we exercised over hills and dales, or endured an endless series of assault courses. The war laboured on, and for some unfathomable reason the seasons took turn and turn-about just as in peacetime, and the invasion of Britain never came.
After a year, I got my second stripe – only to be busted back to signaller a month later for fighting with a private, a great stupid Green Howard I came up against in Richmond. More postings, more trains pulling out of dim platforms, more khaki uniforms in country places. I went back up to corporal, was busted again, and for the same reason – I was drunk and got involved in some prickish quarrel. It did not seem to matter. It was then that one of my mates turned my old joke against me – ‘You’re dead right, Stubby – if you’d been over in Belgium fighting the Jerries, the French would never have given in!’
I couldn’t bear having the piss taken out of me. Remote and evil things happened all over the globe; the blackness in Europe spread eastwards and down into the Balkans. People died and cities burned. In England, there was no Gestapo, only broken sleep and patched underclothing, and lorries rolling throughout the barricaded night. I didn’t care! War is strange: it throws people all together and yet it isolates them from each other. Behind a uniform you can be very impersonal. Even a knee-trembler is generally a solitary gesture against loneliness.
Now I was sick with loneliness again in Kanchapur. How long, oh Lord, how long to the next knee-trembler?
With the taste of the beer and the quarrel with Wally Page still on my tongue, I walked towards the far end of the town, past a row of drivers, each sitting almost motionless in his frail carriage behind a withered horse. Every carriage burned a dim light, every driver called out to me – lazily, coaxingly, seductively – offering to take me where I wanted to go. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. Behind the last tonga, half-hidden by tree-shadow, stood a quiet young man. He now stepped forward quickly to my side, grasping my arm with his warm brown hand. His face was heavily pockmarked and he wore a white shirt hanging over blue shorts. A serious-looking young man. With an air of spiritual inquiry, he asked, ‘Why you are walking, sir? You like nice lady for fornication?’
I looked round. Only the tonga-wallahs were within earshot, and they had surely heard it all before.
‘Where is this lady?’
‘Woh, sir, she right close by! Two street only, very near, very nice place! She lie for you now, sir, very pretty. You can come with me look see, sir – just come look see!’ He spread his fingers wide before him, as if to show how open and above-board everything was, her legs included.
‘What’s she like?’ Were we talking about a flesh-and-blood woman?
He could have looked no more serious had he been describing the CO’s daughter. ‘She very lovely girl, sir, pretty face and hands, and body of fine shape and light colour, very very sweet to see.’
‘I bet! What age is she?’
He held my wrist again. ‘You come – I take, and if you no like, no bother, doesn’t matter one litter bit. I t’ink you will like, sir, you see – very nice girl, same many years as you and entirely no ageing in the parts of the body!’
In this broken language of courtship and the fragrance of the evening was something irresistible. Morally pure, my arse! With my heart hammering as if I were already on the job, I said, ‘Okay, just a dekko.’
Of course she would be an old bag …
‘Once you see, sir, you like! Making you much excitement.’
So I delivered myself up for the first time into the hands of the treacherous Indian. Once he saw that I was his, he wasted no more words, moving back among the trees with a gesture that I was to follow him. As soon as he stopped speaking his mottled English, he seemed much more alien, and I went in constant expectation of a cosh on the head.
I had to pursue him down a side lane between two shops, where it was doubly dark and stinking. Narrow though the lane was, people stood there in the blackness. A man called softly to my man, and was answered. A hand slyly felt me as I passed. Even then, on that negligible venture, I was taken by an impulse to dive deeper into this morass of living, to sink into the warrens of India, to disappear for ever from view of all those who had claims on me.
The side lane curved and led into a back street – a street very different in atmosphere from the main one. The main street had a sort of artificial cantonment order to it. This one was narrower, busier, more foetid, less easy to comprehend. This was the real thing, clamorous. We moved into its streams of people, women gliding, porters proceeding at a slow trot, animals going at their own pace. Nobody took any more notice of me, following my man as in a dream, than they did of the sacred cow ambling among the little stalls or the men on ricketty balconies above us, gobbing betel-juice down into the gutters below. The acrid odours, that whining music, reinforced the lustful images in my head. Surely people like this must be at it all the time!
My young man spoke to a boy. The boy said something quickly and went darting away ahead, through the miscellaneous crowd, running as if a tiger was at his heels. My sense of adventure grew; I imagined knives being sharpened for me.
‘Where is this place you’re taking me?’
‘Very soon we come, sir, very near.’
At a corner, a huge deodar was growing. It was difficult to make out in the night and confusion and conflict of shadows. We dived down a side road and from that into a dark, sweet-smelling court. I paused in its black mouth until poor yellow lights gleaming in upper windows allowed me to get my bearings. There was an old tree here, immensely twisted, fainting in the arms of twisted old houses. Silent men were sitting huddled under the tree, smoking – at first I took them for goats, until I made out their cigarette-ends, which glowed intermittently with their breathing.
My young man tenderly clasped my wrist again, perhaps as much feeling my pulse as detaining me.
‘Lovely girl, sir, waiting for you here with sundry embraces, just now, sir, in this room close by.’
Again a whispered word with a half-seen stranger, as we stepped between pillars supporting a balcony or a roof, pushed past a stable containing an animal of some kind (I could hear it moving restlessly), and came to a door. In the wall beside the door, a tiny candle burned in a candle-sized alcove. A faded blossom lay beside the candle, while night insects hovered round the flame. The door was slightly open.
‘Come in, sir, come in!’
The young man pushed the door wider. I could not make out the interior at all, so dimly was it lit. Hesitating on the threshold, and still being able to hear the movements of the animal we had passed, I imagined at first that I was looking into a stable, with a high wooden partition barring most of the space. There seemed to be no furniture. Two or three people – including a boy who might have been the boy who ran on ahead – were standing waiting in the dimness. One of them called out huskily in an Indian tongue.
As my eyes grew used to the light, I made out a face near the ceiling of the interior, staring down at me through ironwork at the top of the partition. At that moment, one of the people in the shadows lifted up an oil-light, so that the watching face took on detail.
How could I describe it? Even next day, it was like a face in a dream. Its dark liquid eyes and its mouth, the black hair neatly gathered back, were common property of millions of Hindu girls. Yet the excitement and imagined danger of the circumstances were so intense that I felt at once I knew her character: pitiful, pliable, timid, passionate. Her face was naked to me in the light.
While the light was still brushing shadows of bars across her face, she became an individual for me – my first foreign woman! Was this the girl they had brought me to? Then I loved her. Sex I wanted, but far more than that I wanted love!
