How do you write about a place whose literature you are intimately
familiar with, yet have had little physical presence in, mostly just transiting
thru its airport? How do you write
about a place whose history you cannot but be in awe of, realizing it had
systems of governance in place 300 years ago that are relevant even today, that
it created a phalanx of officers who believed it was their preordained right to
rule the world, and armed with just this sense of entitlement, had the
confidence to walk into distant lands, into tribal villages, with wife and baby
in tow, and expect to, and then rule, simply armed with the cloak of their
confidence? How do your write
about a place that bears the street names of Landsdowne Court, and Little
Russell Street and Greater Russell Street: names that have rolled off your
tongue and passed under your slippers in the Calcutta of the 70s and 80s? How do you write about London, a place
you should have visited much more than you have, a London that is far from the
Bilayat of your parents and grandparents, far from the London of glossy photographs
of guards at Buckingham, of empty biscuit tins with alluring images of a tidy
society, but a London more multicultural than New York, a London of abayas, of
lungis, of flaming hennaed beards, of East European hotel accents, of tweed jackets and herringbone fabrics,
and merry evening men wearing blazing orange sports coats and lime green pants?
No Indian of a certain generation can
write about England without a chip on his shoulder, without either
over-reaching admiration, or slight ridicule, or an enforced sense of familiarity.
The afternoon we reached London, I took a walk to Hyde Park,
a 10 minutes walk away from our hotel on Edgeware, a street full of middle
eastern shops. Once there, I
looked for Speakers’ corner, the iconic symbol for free speech, where thru
history, cranks, minorities, the oppressed and the antagonized could stand up on
a public podium and rail away with no repercussions. My father had spent time in London in the 1950s, he used to
visit the British Museum every day, walk thru Hyde Park often. I had first heard about Speakers Corner
from him. I asked a vendor at the
corner, she vaguely pointed me to the place. There was no speaker. Just folks
with smart-phones.
Along the road by the Northern bank of the Thames, a taxi
driver almost ran over and killed a bicyclist. Only through a maneuver resembling the Japanese judo trick
employed by Holmes to escape the clutches of Moriarty and re-emerge to public
demand, did the cyclist escape.
Following this incident each party uttered a single foul word at each
other, beginning with the letter f.
They then wheeled along and went their way. It was the most civic display of the usage of the word f----
that I have ever seen. The British
have a way with softening curse words.
“Barnshoot” is an example.
At night we went to Southall for dinner. The is the bastion of Punjabi life in
Britain, the biggest Punjab outside of Punjab. I had first heard of this place in Khushwant Singh’s writings. He had met a
sweeper at Heathrow in the 70s from Southall who wept and beseeched Mr. Singh
to take her back home. You can
skip the English language entirely, and for a lifetime, if you are in Southall. The place looks like a slightly
prosperous North Indian city.
The day we return we travelled to the Tate Modern
gallery. It is a beautiful,
civilized thing to have museums with free entrance. Tate Modern can sometimes be confusing, since the art can
overflow into the visitor’s space.
“A” hesitated to sit at a beautiful oak bench with dark tight grain, and
lines with a slight, deliberate curve in the fashion that Japanese furniture
can sometimes have. He thought it
was perhaps also a museum piece.
There was a sparse Italian room with works of wood and stone slabs. I suspected that the visitors walking
into the rooms themselves were part of the artist’s design, a dynamic brush
that the artist had trusted us with.
There was a room full of photographs of public executions sites in
Syria, simple straightforward places where Honda Accords were parked on the curb.
We walked back to Edgeware Street one night from the river,
walking through Trafalgar Square, Piccaddilly and Oxford Street. Somewhere south of Trafalgar we came to
a road called Whitehall, by the side of which were statues of British generals with
moustaches, looking sinister in the harsh floodlit night. Field Marshall Viscount William Slim,
the WWII General who retreated from Burma to India pursued by the Japanese, only
to turn around and beat them back in the plains of Imphal, stood on a stone
pedestal in his army boots, with perspicacity in his eyes and binoculars on the
ready, should the London fog lift some day. Inscribed on the pedestal below him were the names of the
Indian and Burmese towns where he had seen action: Kohima, Imphal, and Arakan. A
South European couple came over to look at the statue and the lady puckered her
eyes as her lips tried to mouth the unfamiliar names of the towns. And yet how delicious those names sounded
to me—my grandfather had settled as a headmaster in Imphal, my father and my
uncles had grown up there. V.S. Naipaul,
on visiting Pathankot in India found it strange to see the very technical
British engineering word “railhead” amidst, what was in his mind, a very chaotic
India: “How strange again and again to
hear this solitary English word, to me so technical, industrial and dramatic,
in a whole sentence of Hindustani—the railhead for Kashmir.” My feelings
are similar, though in inversion to the course of this sentiment: these remote
places whose names roll off so easily off my tongue sit etched in stone like
strangers: geo-ported anomalies from a time long back, in this smooth, thoroughly
occidental suburb.
On our last evening we spent some time at a pub. Many years back, when some of us were
working very hard to develop a new material for silicon processor chips, we
would head off to an Irish bar in Mohegan Lake in NY late at night to blow off steam
after our the kids had gone to bed (most of our kids at that time were of that
age when putting the kids to bed was an important part of the family fabric). The Irish bartender, who had become a
good friend, had told me that Guinness, even in draught form, tasted better the
closer you got to Ireland—London would be better than New York, and Dublin
would be the best. Now, Guinness
is brewed in many different countries so I was always skeptical about his
claims. My friend is now long retired
to Florida, but I decided to test his theory. And indeed the Guinness tasted better, fresher in the heart
of London than in New York. Or
perhaps it was just that beer is served a little warmer in Europe than in New
York, allowing a better feel for its taste. Barnshoot!
