Stranger to History (2 page)
My mother thought that as I had no brothers and sisters it was better for me to be with other children rather than inactive grandparents. But I dreaded the house and if the decision had been left to me, I would not have gone at all. To come from my small uneventful house to the bigger house full of children was to come with nothing to share. Unlike my cousins, I rarely had any opportunity to devise games, especially not for the numbers that came. So on the occasions I was sent, I seemed always to arrive late, or mid-game, with no hope of catching up.
One morning I arrived to find that the cousins, and the cousins’ cousins, had all been given notebooks and pens by their fathers and put to the task of recording the licence-plate numbers of passing cars. A special prize awaited whoever at the end of the day had jotted down the most. The game was already underway when I arrived. Main roads surrounded the five-acre property and the cousins were scattered to perches on its periphery from where they could see passing cars. I couldn’t find anyone to ask for a notebook, but was quite happy not to play and relieved that my absence would not be felt. I was settling into a planter chair under the portico of the house when my aunt, who had just finished doing the household accounts, found me.
She was furious to discover her only nephew, son of the sister she loved, excluded from the game. I tried to explain that it wasn’t anyone’s fault, that I had arrived late, but here, she thought she recognised her own family’s good manners and it angered her further. She called two servants and sent them to round up all the cousins from the different corners of the property. I withered at hearing these orders and pleaded again to be allowed to join the game on my own terms, but the servants had gone and my aunt, too, in search of a notebook for me.
In a short time, nearly a dozen coloured turbans had assembled at the front veranda, looking at me for an explanation. I muttered something and tried, turbanless, to blend into the crowd by engaging my immediate cousins, but they were irritated by the mid-morning interruption and could speak only of the game.
Minutes later my aunt returned with a notebook, which she handed to me. She explained that she hadn’t been able to find one like my cousins had been given, but that this would do just as well. It was much longer and narrower than theirs, and when I opened it, I saw it was the accounts book from which she had torn out the used pages.
She called aside her children, my first cousins, and within earshot of everyone, yelled at them for leaving me out. Then she came up to the other cousins and said that since I had arrived late I couldn’t be expected to catch up. In the interests of bridging the gap, I would be given a handicap: they were all to give me twenty licence-plate numbers from their lists before they resumed the game. Muffled groans and cries of ‘Unfair!’ rose, as they submitted to the slow, arduous process of selecting twenty unique licence-plate numbers to give me. Like an unwilling tax collector, I sat on the shallow steps as my cousins, all older, taller and turbaned, came up to me. My mortification must have appeared as ingratitude, which further annoyed them. When nearly three of my book’s long, narrow pages were filled, my cousins vanished. Careful not to be caught alone by my aunt again, I ran after them to find a spot from which to watch the road.
And it was like this that I, who from an early age possessed a horror of competitive games, passed the longest day of my life. Fiats and Ambassadors ambled down the wide boulevards, and wobbly heat strands rising off the tar, nearly concealed their black-and-white number plates. From the roof of the house, it was possible to see the palms around the Imperial Hotel’s swimming-pool. The hint of moisture accentuated the dryness of the land. Fumes, dust and temperature came together to form a parched feeling of nausea. The day grew into an impossible fever, rich with boredom and hallucination. If any of my cousins registered the game’s monotony, they didn’t let on. They ran from perch to perch, sometimes shrieking with excitement at spotting a blue-and-white diplomatic plate, which, like the newly introduced Suzukis, were higher in points.
The game broke for lunch, but its inferences dominated the conversation. Diplomatic cars were easier to spot than Suzukis, but harder than white VIP number plates. Of course an ambassador’s car was the hardest to spot and so should be awarded higher points. One cousin claimed to have spotted 15 CD 1, the British High Commissioner’s car, but was suspected of lying. Overhearing the conversation, I could tell that the handicap had been unfairly given. I was well ahead, despite being the slowest at spotting cars. The others seemed to register this and left me out of the conversation.
When they returned to their posts, I was determined to spot even fewer cars. I knew the day’s humiliations would only increase if I were to end up winning the prize. As the afternoon wore on, I added barely a single entry. The cousins, despite the scorching white heat, remained fanatical. In the worst hours, I had none of the excitement of the competition, just fear of victory. It wasn’t till evening when traffic filled the streets, like rising water behind a lock that I could tell I was no longer ahead. With the falling temperature, the sky regained its colour, and birds and insects, also paralysed by the heat, returned to their movements. The vast white torment of the day sank to a compact stratum just above the earth, drawing pinks and blues out of the areas that it surrendered.
At close to six, nearly the time when my mother was meant to pick me up, the nannies came running to call everyone in for milk. Drinking milk was viewed in my aunt’s house as the secret to growing tall. Committed to this goal, my cousins drank great quantities of it at competitive speeds. Everyone’s nanny brought their child’s special milk mug to the house as if it were a piece of professional sporting equipment.
I didn’t mind drinking milk, but I wasn’t used to the amount drunk at my aunt’s house. I hadn’t brought a mug, and hoped that if I delayed the process I might be able to slip away with my mother before the points from the licence-plate game were counted. So, as the others ran back to the house, I clambered over a small mound and went to the boundary wall. I unzipped my trousers and started to pee. I was concentrating on the small frothy puddle forming before me when I looked up and saw my first cousin similarly relieving himself. He saw me too, and after staring intently in my direction, his face turned to horror. I looked round to see what had alarmed him and began to say something, but he turned his head away, muttering to himself. Then, squeezing out a few last drops, he pulled up his zip and fled. He ran up the mound and down into the garden, screaming, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’
He had chosen his words well. I felt their embarrassment even before I understood their meaning. ‘
Nanga
’ meant naked; it was a nanny’s word used to instil in children the shame of running around with no clothes on. It was used in little ditties to make the point clearer and its resonance was deep.
Susu
was a little boy’s penis. And though I knew each word my cousin had spoken, I couldn’t piece together the meaning of the sentence. Why had he said that my penis was naked?
I zipped up my trousers and ran down the hill after him in the hope of figuring out what he meant before the others did. I reached the lawn as the news was being broken to the rest of the cousins, who collapsed, coughing and spluttering, when they heard. They were not quite sure what it meant, but the nannies screeched with laughter.
The commotion was so great that the adults were drawn out on to the veranda. Again, my cousin yelled, ‘Aatish ka susu nanga hai!’ This time, seeing all the adults, including my aunt, laughing, I laughed too, louder than anyone else. The cousins, who earlier had been perturbed rather than amused, were now also laughing. The time for explanations had passed and I decided to ask my mother in private about what the nannies had dubbed my hatless willie. Fortunately, amid the disruption the licence-plate game had also been forgotten and when my mother turned up, she found me agitating to leave before the others remembered.
In the car, as my mother drove from roundabout to roundabout, like in a game of joining the dots, I agonised over the day’s discovery. I could now tell the difference between my
susu
and my cousin’s, but its implication was impossible to guess.
The truth turned out to be more implausible than anything I could have invented. If there was a link between the missing foreskin and my missing father, it was too difficult to grasp. My mother had always explained my father’s absence by saying that he was in jail for fighting General Zia’s military dictatorship in Pakistan, but she had never mentioned the missing foreskin until now. My idea of my father was too small and the trauma of the day too great to take in the information that he came from a country where everyone had skin missing from their penises.
It was a loose, but not disturbing, addition to my life. I felt oddly in on the joke and laughed again. The sun slipping behind Safdarjung’s tomb, the little car climbing up the dividing flyover with my mother at the wheel; it was too familiar a view of the world to change over a
susu
without a hat.
I grew up with a sense of being Muslim, but it was a very small sense: no more than an early awareness that I had a Muslim-sounding name, of not being Hindu or Sikh and of the circumcision. In Delhi, my mother had many Muslim friends; we saw them often, and especially for the important Muslim festivals. On these occasions – in them teaching me the Muslim customs and greetings for instance – I felt somehow that they saw me as one of their own. But in Delhi, steeped in Muslim culture, it was hard to pry apart this sense, here related to food, there to poetry, from the shared sensibilities of so many in the city, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
On the sub-continent religion is patrilineal so it was inevitable that my awareness of religious identity and my father’s absence would arise together. At times, over the years, when the twin birth of that day surfaced again, it was always as a Siamese tangle rather than as distinct questions. My mother didn’t raise me with religion, but my grandmother, though Sikh herself, told me stories from the different faiths that had taken root in India. As a child I made my way through all the sub-continent’s major religions. When I was five or six, I was a devout Hindu, lighting incense, chanting prayers and offering marigolds to the gods; Shiva remained the focus of my devotion until I discovered He-Man. Then, aged seven or eight, I threatened to grow my hair and become a Sikh, but was dissuaded by my mother and my cousins, who had fought their parents for the right to cut their hair. Through all this, I retained my small sense, gained on that hot day, of being Muslim.
When I was ten a Kuwaiti family, escaping the Gulf War, moved into our building and their three sons became my best friends. One night, sitting on their father’s bed, the subject of religion came up. Either from some buried conviction or just the wish to be included, I told them I was Muslim. Their father seemed surprised and asked whether I had been circumcised, making a whistling sound and a snip of his fingers that reduced us to cackles. And just as it began, the question of the circumcision, and the patrilineal connection to Islam that it stood for, was obscured in confusion and laughter.
It was only few years later, when Hindu–Muslim riots erupted across India and Hindu nationalist groups drove through Delhi pulling down men’s trousers to see if they were circumcised, that my early memory of the link between my circumcision and my father’s religion acquired an adult aspect. But by then, my desire to know whose son I was had consumed any interest I might have had in knowing which religion I belonged to. I was also on my way to a Christian boarding-school in south India, adding the final coat of paint to a happy confusion that was as much India’s as my own. And it wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties, far away from my childhood world in India, that religion surfaced again.
T
he colourful Virgin train that took me north on a low, grey morning in 2005 was heading for Leeds. I was twenty-four and had been living in London for a year. A few days before, a group of British Pakistanis had bombed London buses and trains; most had been from Beeston, a small Leeds suburb.
Beeston that morning, with its rows of dark brick, semidetached houses, could hardly cope with the attention that had come to it. The world’s press filled its quiet residential streets with TV cameras and outside-broadcast vans. The police were also there in large numbers and the residents, caught between camera flashes, yellow tape and controlled explosions, either hid in their houses or developed a taste for talking to the press. The majority were Punjabis, Muslims and Sikhs, Pakistanis and Indians, re-creating pre-Partition mixtures – especially evocative for me – of an undivided India that no longer existed.
Walking around Beeston, interviewing its residents, I became aware of a generational divide among its Muslims that I hadn’t noticed in previous trips round England. The older generation could have come straight from a bazaar in Lahore. They wore the long-tailed
kameez
and baggy
salwar
of Punjab, their best language was Punjabi, and although they were opposed to Britain’s involvement in the Iraq war and hated America, they were too balanced to be extremists, too aware of their hard-earned economic migration from Pakistan.