Indian Takeaway (31 page)

I
should tell you about my grandfather’s house. In its day it was quite palatial, but its day has long since past. The house sits in the middle of a bazaar, a straight row of shops on street level with residential accommodation on the floors above. We have three storeys. Our ground-floor room is accessed by a large sky-blue, double-arched doorway; in the old days we had a water pump in that room and we would have the most excellent baths imaginable. The room has now been rented out to some shopkeeper or other. By the left-hand side of the arched doorway is a small sky-blue doorway, leading up some narrow high stairs. These unremarkable steps lead you to the first floor of 22 Moti Bazaar. This is the main living level. Two public rooms, three bedrooms, a small kitchen and a couple of bathrooms are peripheral to a central uncovered courtyard. This courtyard used to be the focal point of the house. The men would drink their whisky and eat their kebabs here, the washing would be put out to dry here, kids would play here, ladies would gossip here. It all happened here, under the canopy of an ever-changing sky. It was where we would sit and gather in the summer evenings to eat, drink and be merry. The next level up is what we call the
cotee
, the terrace. Back in the day, before the introduction of the western-style ‘flush’ toilet, it was on this level the
tattia
, the latrines, could be found. No matter
how Indian we might feel in our hearts, no matter how much love we felt for the country and how much we enjoyed being here, the single factor that separated us British-born Indians from our Indian-born family was our inability to utilise their different and challenging toilet system. I have never been able to enjoy a squat toilet. My leg joints have never achieved that extreme position of stretching; I have never been clear as to how best gather my garments lest they become involved in my ablutions; and my balance has never been honed to accommodate a passive body position whilst simultaneously evacuating my bowels. Even if I had mastered these complex ways of the east I am most definitely a toilet paper kind of a guy. No matter how compelling an argument is made for the added cleanliness and advanced hygiene of a manually washed arse I still prefer some sort of paper-based barrier between my hand and my faeces. I’m sorry, I just do.

To say the
tattia
were medieval would be doing a disservice to medieval plumbing. There was only one thing worse than having to take a dump in these communal latrines and that was to watch the girl who came in to clean them out every morning. The heaven and hell paradox of the terrace upstairs was that alongside the latrines was this fantastic open area with views over the entire city. We would fly kites, we would play football, we would generally lark around; but whatever we were doing, we were having fun only very irregularly interrupted by someone or other needing to take a dump.

I remember with vivid clarity as if it were yesterday, sprinting up to the terrace one morning, only to be confronted by a goat tied to the balustrade. It seemed a little strange to me that the day before there had been no goat, but I thought it best not to question its sudden appearance. To me, this wasn’t a goat, this was a friend. My imagination being what it was, I decided to
name my new friend Goaty after some hours of deliberation, and for the next few days, still chewing the last mouthful of breakfast, I would race upstairs to play with Goaty. Perhaps I was at an impressionable age or perhaps Goaty and I had known each other in a past life but I felt some deep almost cosmic connection with Goaty; I think it’s the closest I’ve ever come to loving an animal.

Again, it’s with vivid clarity I remember that morning, tucking into a delicious breakfast of pickled meats and parathas. I forced the last mouthful in as I turned the corner onto the terrace looking for my soulmate but Goaty was nowhere to be seen. My emotions were mixed, part of me upset that my companion was gone, another part of me thinking that perhaps in escaping during the night Goaty had at last achieved his freedom. I felt it only right and proper to inform the grown-ups of Goaty’s disappearance. Strangely they didn’t seem shocked. Their lack of shock soon became apparent when they told me that far from not being present that morning, Goaty had very much been there. On the breakfast plate. The pickled meat I’d so enjoyed for breakfast that morning had in fact been Goaty, my dear, dear friend. Given that I was only ten years old it seems a terrible irony that whilst enjoying Goaty for breakfast, I had been looking forward to enjoying Goaty after breakfast. And so it is clear what I am going to cook when I get to my grandfather’s house. It has to be goat. Curried goat. What else? It was what Goaty would have wanted …

To say my father has wanderlust would perhaps not fully convey his love for travel, his need to explore. He was born in 1934 and brought up in the city of Ferozepure. If I am anything with
regard to India then I am a Punjabi. Regardless of religion and caste my family were Punjabis and I have always felt that that means more than anything else. Then they created Pakistan.

My father was twelve years old when India was torn asunder. The Punjab was slashed into two and Pakistan was ripped away from the wider subcontinent. Borders were hurriedly drawn and redrawn and then drawn again. A man-made line cut through the Punjab and separated people that had lived together, identified with each other for hundreds of years.

The creation of this new nation, the separation of Pakistan from India, defined my very existence. Ferozepure sits but a few kilometres from the border. Given its strategic importance, it was the centre of horse-trading when it came to deciding which side was to be given the city. It is incredible that people, places, histories and families can become the subject of third-party intervention. That third party was of course the British, the Raj, working in concert with self-interested Indian politicians and their apparatchiks. Someone had to draw a line somewhere. That’s how man-made borders are created: by men. It’s not about rivers and mountains; it’s all about politics. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was that someone. A young lawyer with little knowledge or interest in India, he was brought over by Mountbatten in order to effect the impossible: to create a clean line of demarcation that would keep all parties happy and disappoint none. Impossible. The theory was simple: Muslim majority towns and villages were to be given to Pakistan, the land of the Pure, and the rest would remain Indian. Impossibly simple.

At first Ferozepure, with its marginal majority Muslim population, was to be in Pakistan. Then, a few days before the 14 August 1947, the Radcliffe Line was re-sketched, Sir Cyril’s pencil heading to the north of Ferozepure, enclosing
my father’s birthplace and returning it to India. Therein lay my grandfather’s fate, my father’s fate and mine. Ferozepure became a city defined by its proximity to the border with the newly created Pakistan of 1947, a microcosm for all the chaos of Partition. More than half the city left, their lives on their backs and headed across the still wet ink that marked this new, artificial border. Muslims headed north, and Sikhs leaving the new Pakistan headed south.

Although my family did not physically move, there was a journey to be undertaken for the city around them and for the nation of India. It feels as though my father’s whole life was defined by this philosophical journey, albeit one politically motivated; a journey for which the travellers themselves had absolutely no choice. In Ferozepure families were broken; generations of friendships were dissolved. Lives were utterly, completely and irreconcilably changed. The street where my grandfather lived, Moti Bazaar, was predominantly Muslim prior to Partition. One can only imagine the scenes as they left India, left their lives behind.

So picture if you will, Cyril Radcliffe, a green young barrister, fresh from the Home Counties; in front of him a table laid for lunch, a map of India and one freshly sharpened pencil. In amongst all that rests my fate; in amongst that defines my meaning of home. I’m here today, an overweight Glaswegian Sikh because a young English barrister redrew a line on a map. Life’s funny, isn’t it?

I learned all about this in the late 1990s. It took a few years for me to appreciate this information, and the extent of its impact on my life. At first it was just a good story; then it became my story. There is a part of me that feels that I should never have been born, I should not exist. Millions were brutally murdered during Partition; no one knows for sure how many.
What would have happened to my grandparents, my thirteenyear-old father and his siblings had Ferozepure remained in Pakistan? Would they have made it into Indian Punjab? Would they have avoided the slaughtering hordes? Would they have become those slaughtering hordes? Men became devils, as one old uncle of mine puts it. He looks off into the distance and one wonders what sights scarred and marked his young mind in 1947.

Even if they had survived where so many had perished, surely my father’s life would have taken a different path. Momentous events change us momentously. Part of the reason he left Ferozepure twelve years later was because as a border town half its horizon had been slashed. It could no longer look north and thrive as a commercial centre. It had become militarily important rather than culturally or civically important. Ferozepure had stagnated as the army moved in, the city becoming the front line of the newly hewn India. For a man with aspirations as vibrant as my dad, Ferozepure was never going to contain him. And I can’t help feeling that his destiny, and consequently mine, rest in the events of Partition. I can’t help feeling that on some level I am not meant to be here.

Maybe he would have settled in a small town outside Jalandhar, the then capital of the Punjab. Maybe he would have had his marriage arranged to a woman who was five foot eight instead of five foot two. Maybe that other woman wouldn’t have been such an amazing cook and such a loving mother. Maybe he would never have dreamt of leaving India and seeing the world. Maybe he would have become a civil servant and filed paperwork about companies he had never heard of, involved in deals he didn’t care about. Maybe I would have never been born. Maybe.

It’s a bright morning and early enough still to be described as tranquil. I am leaving
Merry Dawn
for ever. And the Kashmiri dawn seems merry enough. The
shikara
takes me the fifteen or so minutes across the lake, followed by a half-hour cab ride to the airport. The stillness, the calmness of the lake and the valley couldn’t be more antithetical to the overbearing security at the airport. As a boy I travelled through a trouble-torn Belfast, but even that experience pales into insignificance when compared to the heightened security at Srinagar airport. I am body checked four times between entering the terminal building and boarding the flight. The entire cab is checked, engine and all. My paperwork is stamped and checked seven times and no hand baggage is allowed on the fl ight.

As I wait in the departure lounge I witness a microcosm of the Kashmir issue in the context of Indian nationalism. It just so happens that the third one-day cricket international is taking place between India and Pakistan. Cricket is a religion here. All the gentlemen in the lounge are facing the plasma screen, watching intently. The numerous members of the Indian Armed Forces are similarly glued to the screen, their sub-machine guns nonchalantly slung over their all too narrow shoulders. The entire room is transfixed. Although we are on Indian soil the majority of the Kashmiri travellers are supporting Pakistan, the soldiers obviously supporting the flag of the country they had sworn to give their lives for: an uneasy stand-off I think you’ll agree. India loses an early wicket. Rather than celebrate euphorically, there is a discernible lack of any sort of reaction from the Kashmiri onlookers. Never before has silence spoken
such volumes. I board the plane, feeling as though I am leaving an occupied country.