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A JOURNEY HOME -RETURN OF THE NATIVE
1994By:T.R.K
In 1947 July, a young English school boy stepped off a Simla to Delhi train at the Old Delhi Railway station and was to witness a most macabre scene. He was expecting to be met by his father's factotum-servant-driver; perhaps accompanied by his Ayah, who he hoped would gift him surreptitiously with his favourite mango halva. Delhi however was in flames.Ian Grant the young boy had travelled a day and a half, changing on the way from a narrow gauge toy train, descending through the forested riverbanks infested with malaria; into the humid plains of India;into Delhi numbed by the sudden dawning of Independence. The anarchic volcano of religious dissensions had erupted into riots of unimaginable cruelty and dimension.Ian now recalls how untouched he felt; excusably only having experienced kindness from all the Indians he had met; unable perhaps to comprehend the tides socio-political events which led to the partition of India. He recalls vividly however, as if seen in a shadow puppet play, Sikhs brandishing kirpans; Hindus with rock and blade mounted on axe handles; moslems uniquely identifiable in their checkered lungi and beards; women and children streaming in a torrent into the old Delhi station, with a life time of possessions in bulging metal trunks and gunnybag sacks; some piled high onto anything on wheels; dead bodies draping the street-ends: a Bertolucci freeze-frame of history on the march; an apocalyptic J.G. Ballard vision of hell.
No one paid any attention to the young English boy with his trunk and his school boy satchel strapped round his shoulders, waiting impatiently for the servant to arrive and whisper that every thing was Ok.
Years later at the age of 18 Ian having spent a great part of his adolescence in Conoor in South India where his father was an accountant, set sail to London, English to his fingertips in appearance; but Indian at heart.
Today at 60,eccentrically dressed in pinstripes, a dressy shirt with a vivid bow tie, a flower patterned silk waistcoat; a seasonal hat(from a jaunty boater to a bowler) gleamingly polished shoes, and a military bearing enhanced by a rosewood walking stick, topped in silver (Ian joined the Grenadier Guards soon after his arrival in England and stayed with them for years, working for a time on duty at Windsor Castle, being worried by Her Majesty's corgis), has packed his bags,sold his house where he he has lived for over 18 years, and is setting sail again to India,on a way one way ticket, declaring that he will never return.
Ian made an exploratory first trip back to India 2 years ago; 40 years after he left India. He was suffering at the time from bouts of ME. He says that the effect of arriving in Madras, with the impact of heat; the street scenes hardly different from the way he remembered them, the smell of spice and dung; and the new industrial smell of machine oil pervading the senses was simply galvanizing. His stumbling fatigue vanished overnight. Friendships were swiftly revived. local Madras Club, a much seedier version of the British Clubs in St James' visited with satisfaction; hot peppers and Tamil curries acting as a restorative shot in the arm.Ian recalls restful Indian afternoons; and the pleasure of many new friendships made at family dinner parties.
Ian has shot the lights out of his English home,metaphorically; sold all his furniture and acquisitions, save what he brought with him , his parents heirloom.
As an insurance broker for the last 30 years of his life, Ian has been a friend of hundreds of Indian families, where he is received with affection as a member of the family, business relationships maturing into life long friendships. Most of them would agree that Ian is doing the right thing in going home to India. His English friends however who would miss him equally, see him significantly differently. Ian, they say, lives in a time-warp: a Tardis of his own values and romantic vision of India which is no longer there; Ian his taste for Pink Gin in some serious quantities are inseparable. His friends worry that India provides the perfect black hole into which even novice lovers of alcohol would surely sink. The Indian middle class friends that Ian feels close to, are now ruled by new-world ambitions and by a system of etiquette which cannot accommodate the faux pas of an out of date romantic. Once the novelty of Ian's value as a "society showpiece" has worn, he would be marginalised and left alone.
I remember seeing with absolute delight a TV documentary about an expatriate Englishman in Kenya, by the androgynous name of Hilary Hook. At the very end of his career he is forced to leave the country he loved and considered his own; expelled from his rented house of a life time.There are 2 scenes of inevitable fade outs. Hilary Hook gets mournfully, aggressively drunk and gets out his hunter's rifle and shoots out all the lights in the house. A scene later shows him captive in a mean flat in English suburbia; talking to himself, perhaps to the camera, his Blighty Trevor Howard vowels rounding fulsomely on choice swear words expressing distaste; then you see him staggering into the local supermarket, bewildered by the packaged bounty on the shelves; staggering out again with a shopping basket loaded only with bottles of gin and vodka.
It is easy to compare Ian ungenerously, and unfavourably with this archetype. The idea of staying on In India underpins the anxiety of Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson portrayal of folks left to cope with being lonely in a crowded culture.
I see Ian differently; I see him shedding a good deal of his hothouse values acquired in his English Tardis turning native in the nicest sense of the word; re-acquiring a true sense of what this crowd and chaos is all about; seeing the gentleness of the individual and the shyness of friendships: perhaps the real dynamic of life and liberation.
I trust he will take to sending frequent gifts of letters from India to his friends he has left behind. Without the benefit of an editors's quill, they should be eminently readable.