Those were hot months, mingling too many tears in the sweat of the coastal summer. Bobby watched from the sidelines, ready to run away into the street and ripen his Malayalam in the sun. The house weighed less heavily on him, except that he was the only boy. He must inherit the town’s most eminent trading concern, to manage in his turn. Sons turn into their fathers, Bobby knew, but an end so inevitable could only be treated as impossible: same as death. The picture playing on the screen in Bobby’s head was different. Its action would not be caught in the stifling funnel of the southern coasts, between that seaward gate of the Calicut customs office and the cargo bay of the Madras docks. His story would take him further, though he could not yet imagine how far.
He went hunting with the Heerjee boys and daydreamed down his barrel. Out on the estuary were the only decent summer game – fat, mean muggers lying still and inconspicuous by the water’s edge, looking like sunbaked cowpats unless one had its jaws open. As long as they were sunbathing, the advantage was yours. Once the crocodiles entered the water, it was theirs. You had to get a mugger at the base of its neck, where the scales weren’t armour-hard. If you missed, they were in the water in an instant. They could overturn a boat and slide a child down their throats as if it were a prawn. Or so he’d been told, when he was a child. In the bellies of the oldest muggers there was royal treasure, silver nose-rings and anklets, intact long after the princesses who wore them had been digested.
The moss-mirror surface of the Beypore gave him no foreboding of what lay ahead; bridges on the Ganga, pontoons on the Euphrates or the ferry across the boiling waters of the Manipur. The decade already hastened towards war, but it was someone else’s war, very far away. Bobby never imagined, any more than the egg boy, how the war would rise up around India, or how it would divide the country, divide the army that enlisted him, and even divide Bobby against himself. Or that he, his sisters and new-found brothers, his countrymen and men from all over the Empire, would be drawn out onto roads that led very far from home, and did not all lead back.
If he had known, he might not have been in such a hurry to leave. But nothing was changing yet in Calicut. Every year on his birthday, his family bathed him in milk and rose petals. Every year he protested, letting only his mother Tehmina do it, and every year his sisters would break in, shrieking, to fling the petals at him before he even had his pants on. In his teens, his long face revealed a strong jawline, to balance the effect of the sweet mouth and eyes. As soon as he could, he wore the sharp moustache that was in fashion, like Errol Flynn’s – two sabres crossed on his lip. He was seventeen. It was time to get moving.
2
Madras, 1939–40
Time to get moving.
Bobby’s eyes opened and passed over the area. No room for error now – this was where it got dangerous. He surveyed obstacles and alternative escapes, in the event that the exit was blocked. To his left, the elderly owner of the Irani café dozed at his desk, his head drooping forward and jerking back. His son, the manager, thick-armed but mild, hid behind a rustling headline: ‘KEEP THE ENEMY AWAY FROM INDIA: Contribute again to the Governor’s War Fund’. A Tamil bus boy moved between tables, clattering thick china plates and steel forks into a tub.
Bobby pinched the last saffron streaks from the plate, licked his fingers, and moved into action. He stretched out wide, wincing with satisfaction. As his left arm reached into the air, his right hand danced the plate across the table, ringing out the signal he was finished. Smooth as a top, the bus boy turned toward him, and Bobby rose and strolled to the desk.
‘What you had, beta?’
‘Two plates dhansak, uncle,’ he answered, beaming. ‘But I don’t have any money to pay.’
‘Suu? What?’ The drooping spectacles marched up the length of nose.
Bobby pursed his lips, contrite. The idea was to keep the volume down.
‘Bloody bugger!’ the old man shouted, rising to his feet. So much for the volume. ‘Who the hell are you that I should feed you for nothing? Heh?’
‘Uncle, what can I say. I’m a Parsi.’
‘What Parsi! Who’s a Parsi! I never saw a Parsi giving … to not pay for his food! What behaviour? You rascal, you don’t … You are not a Parsi!’
Bobby stumbled backward into a chair, aghast. A soda fell over and fizzed in somebody’s rice. His expression wobbled from the wound, and he turned his palms out to the wrathful Irani. ‘Me, not a Parsi? Uncle, say anything, but don’t question my ancestry …’
‘You are never a Parsi!’
Bobby swung his head in fierce reproach. The son was now trotting across the shop, wagging his index fingers to call for peace, but Bobby had changed gear. His fingers flew down the buttons of his shirt, and pulled it open. Clutching his white undershirt like a loose cotton skin of his heart, he said, ‘Sadra!’ Without lifting his eyes from the Irani’s refracted glare, he reached back for a chair, and clambered onto it to stand above the room.
All eyes were pinned on him.
‘Daddy, for God’s sake what –’ said the son.
Bobby chanted:
Yatha ahuvariyo
Atha ratush ashat chit hacha,
Vangheush dazda manangho –
(‘As the Lord is chosen,
So is judgement chosen
In accordance with truth –’)
‘Get out!’ the old Irani screamed. ‘You – just get out right now!’
Bobby dropped off the chair and was out the door. As he ran down the street, he squeezed his trouser pocket, checking for the change he would need to get back to Guindy, the suburb down the shore from Madras. His leather soles clapped against the asphalt, applauding his daring and his escape.
Madras was a city that, if not on the boil, was at least kept simmering. Its skyline bubbled with domes, each bunch marking a grand institution beneath: a court, a college, a church of any faith. The older domes were Gothic fruit, and the newer domes raised in this century were called Saracenic: white hemispheres with brims like sola topis, sly effigies of the White men who built them. They had some opposition from the baroque gopurams of the city temples, and the rustling ficus trees. But Madras was the founding British city in India, the first to be lit up by the bulbs of modernity, and it was the domes that drew young men and women from a hundred peninsular towns, especially at the start of an academic year.
To say that Bobby arrived here, in 1936, to go to college would be misleading. He did attend the Loyola College, a new Jesuit institute at the edge of the city, and did matriculate in two years. But he was enrolled more seriously in a programme of unlearning than of learning; specifically, unlearning the habits of his upbringing. One new friend, Sankaran Nair, had the pleasure of walking into Bobby’s room and finding him on his bed stark naked, knees splayed out, trimming his toenails with his teeth. The joke became that Bobby, ‘while at his pedicure’, had gone wide and ‘made himself a Muslim’. If anyone asked, he said, sure, he could prove it.
He had a good length of leash in his head, and sometimes he would just run to its end, to see how far he went. He stood outside his chemistry lecture hall once, poised until he had thrown a brick through the window – just to see if his arm had the nerves to do it, to let fly – and then he appeared in the doorway, while the curses and the clear solutions were still rolling off the table tops, and the lecturer’s eyes fell on him as though Bobby had sacked a temple, and Bobby said, ‘Spot