In theory the Mrs Naicker’s routine was this: Stan, Dick and Eugene entered with just enough cash for one trip to paradise while Ross sat in Ho Fun’s and kept their wallets and passbooks safe–both from Mrs Naicker’s light-fingered ladies and from Stan, Dick and Eugene’s weak wills, which, unchecked, would continue shelling out until they were drunk, broke, miserable and raw of phallus. That was the theory. In practice, Stan, Dick and Eugene kept coming out for more money (furnace-blast of heat and light between brothel porch and restaurant was God, to be agonizingly withstood by post-coital Catholic boys), then going back in, until they were drunk, broke, miserable and raw of phallus, and on each return to the restaurant tried to persuade him to join them. Eugene, who was never long about his business and was known to the girls at Mrs Naicker’s as Quickprick or Sprintfinish, had already been over once.
‘Why don’t you give it a try, men?’ he’d asked Ross.
‘No fear.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not for me.’
‘Come on.’
‘Not with them.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them.’
‘Look here, you want to go, you go. But don’t say I didn’t warn you when your bleddy lund turns green and drops off, okay?’
Eugene had plucked a leaf of mint off the side of Ross’s plate and popped it into his mouth, Ross speculating where hand and mouth had been. ‘Just give me another twenty,’ Eugene said, chewing, hands back in pockets. He had pale hazel eyes and an olive-skinned chimpish face, sandy hair severely centre-parted. Added to which, shirt wrongly buttoned and carmine lipstick smudge on his left cheek. Give Eugene a lottery win or a cleanup on the Cotton Figures, Ross thought, and he’d quickly, quietly and with that same chimpish look of contented resignation, whore himself into the grave. ‘One more and that’s it, absolutely,’ Eugene said. Then, in a guttural whisper, ‘Seriously, there’s one girl in there will do whatall I don’t know.’
That had been ten minutes ago. Stan would be out next, hot-faced, eyes pickled, dragging on a Craven A, conscious as the oldest of having a dissolute image to keep up. In expectation of this Ross took the last mouthful of dessert and raised his head to look out.
Just as my mother went past. Unignorable fusion, girl and taste. Lovely bare neck and arms, flare of light off dress-hip, chilled egg custard, fresh mint, cinnamon, nutmeg, then an intense whiff of sizzling ginger from the kitchen. Her shadow crossed the restaurant’s concrete floor and sleeping Persian cat. Sunlit womanly shoulder and the heavy swing of curled-under dark hair. Anglo. Got colour, Ross thought. Young. Walking fast. Calf muscles. Nervous. One backward glance as if she might be being tailed. Nasty-looking scratch on her cheek. Why here? Dress print was what? Poppies?
Anglo. You knew straight off. As did the Britishers. Tommies eyed-up Anglo-Indian girls with the look of disgusted entitlement. Chutney Mary. Teen pau pussy. Toilet graffiti and overhearings. Told her it would lighten her skin and she was on her back before you could say Churchill. ‘She thinks she’s the bleddy cat’s whiskers as it is,’ his mother used to say of Mrs Lorrimer, her arch-rival in the matter of Sunday hats. ‘God only knows what she’d be like if she had colour.’ Having colour was being fair-skinned, a semantic inversion. There was thinking to be done about this, he knew, but the knowledge irritated him. He was eighteen. His circuits of desire were live and reliable: knock about, drink, box, play football, get clean girls, make the Olympics when the war was over. Those were the pulses that took him through the hours and days. Thinking would get in the way. Politics was a disturbance on his peripheral vision.
‘Nah one?’ the waiter quacked.
‘What?’ Ross said. He’d leaned back on his chair to track my mother through the window.
‘Nah egg cussah?’ the waiter said, pointing to the empty plate.
She’d disappeared into a clutter of rickshaws, leaving the street vivified: one coral-pink wall; a conical pile of yellow sand; a splat of betel in the bone-white dust as if someone had been gunned down and whisked away. For a moment he could hear time passing, a quiet hiss of evaporation: your life, now. Something rattlecrashed beyond the serving hatch, followed by a jangling diatribe in Chinese. He shivered, a little current of pleasure. Fear of syphilis notwithstanding, he opened to life when it knocked; fierce forces ambushed or seduced and he went under aflame or dreaming. Technically, he reminded himself, he was still on the run from the bleddy law.
He snatched up the wallets, dropped four annas on the table, got woozily to his feet.
‘Tell my friends to wait here,’ he said, then hurried out into the blinding light.
The street was a stripe of sunlight with a margin of shadow a yard wide. His eyes stung. Pickled. They’d passed a half-pint of country liquor back and forth in the truck on the way to Ho Fun’s. He’d drunk water in the restaurant but the grog in his blood had made short work of it. Now his mouth was thick and dry again. Neat country liquor with lime cordial. Jesus Mary and Joseph never again. The heat was an incessant scream. Excremental odours came and went. Nausea for a moment–a quiver of egg custard–then control. He felt better. He looked down the street. Red poppies on a white dress. Who scratched her face like that? She’d disappeared into the gaggle of rickshaws.
Stuffing wallets and passbooks into his jacket pockets (Eugene’s and Dick’s still had their two standard-issue condoms tucked into the back flap–madmen!), he set off at a run.
His shins hurt. Bits of the street flashed past. A paan shop, a trio of dhoti’d Hindus, one with a homemade purple eye-patch. A squatting black-toenailed sadhu messily fingering up rice from begging bowl to bearded mouth. A boy in filthy half-mast pyjamas staring at the ground next to his white-nosed and long-eyelashed donkey. A bullockless bullock cart tipped forward on its shafts. A post office, burned out, boarded up after the riots, Jai Hind! daubed in yellow on its façade. Outside it two men in Gandhi caps followed him with their eyes. Anglo in uniform. Indian Air Force. Khaki drill and buttons that weren’t brass. They won’t want you here when we clear out. A lone Tommy (Royal Air Force, double the pay, buttons that were brass) came over to the IAF canteen now and again to talk politics with Stan, who took a cynical interest in what was going on. ‘They hate you just as much as they hate us. More, actually. At least we can go home. Where the fuck are you lot going to go?’ In the riots protestors had had Gandhi caps whipped off and set fire to by the police. ‘And who are the bloody police?’ Stan’s friend had asked, rhetorically. ‘That’s you lot, isn’t it? The bloody Auxiliary Force, the bloody ’arf-castes.’
Ross ran on. The pain in his shins receded. Sunlight was sheer, all blades and planes. Jai Hind! Free India. Let them get on with it, then. That wasn’t life. Life was something else, the feeling of significance you got at odd moments, the whore tigerishly grinning from the balcony, or that evening swimming alone in the Taptee, looked down on by a wafer-thin blue-etched moon; once a little lift of consciousness in the middle of a crowded street, with horns beeping and people shouting, as if for an instant you were given a glimpse of…he didn’t know what. Inclusion in God’s generous cunning. The pattern. Destiny. ‘Sooner or later the niggers’ll kick you out,’ Stan’s RAF friend insisted. So what? He, Ross, would go somewhere else. Wherever he went there would be the strength of his own two hands and cold water to drink and the dawn sunlight unfolding the trees’ delicate shadows and the piercing conviction under God’s somewhat scornful eye of his own significance. Wherever he went he could, for Christ’s sake, box.
Still, sooner or later niggled. ‘Storm’s comin,’ Stan’s friend liked to say, with ghoulish relish, legs crossed, cup and saucer held just under his chin. He was a Mancunian (Mancunians, Liverpudlians, they sounded like creatures out of Gulliver’s Travels), cadaverous, with watery blue eyes and tarnished horsy teeth. ‘We pull out, you buggers are going to be up shit creek wi’out a paddle. Then what?’
This was the thinking to be done. Ross hated the obligation. The very words Legislati
ve Assembly made him drowsy. People forming leagues, committees, parties, movements. He wanted to be left alone. Life was in the moments. You saw a girl and got up and followed her while God watched how you handled it. Which meant that how you handled it mattered. ‘Don’t see any fun in it,’ Stan’s friend had said of Catholicism. ‘God spyin on you while you’re avin a shite.’ They’d laughed, Stan and Dick with guilty flashbacks to the hours at Mrs Naicker’s, but Ross with a sudden intimation of how cold and meaningless he would feel without God’s eye on him from time to time. Imagine that: the world, the universe, everything barrelling along unwatched, no one keeping score, the whole thing a giant accident. He’d laughed with the others, but the thought had led him to an abyss into which he’d looked down, vertiginously, then recoiled. This was the core of his faith, such as it was, that God was there, that things happened for a reason, though there was no guarantee of happiness in this world or the next, only the guarantee of some kind of story, your own.
A ripple went through the sunlit drivers who in the brash light seemed all teeth and eye-whites and fingertips. Rickshaw, sahib? Tonga-taxi? Rickshaw? It was as if he’d disturbed a flock of geese. You sat on your arse and they burned their bodies’ energy getting you from A to B, the translation of what your legs wouldn’t do into what theirs would, did, had to. If he called to one of the drivers, the man’s response would be commercial delight, no sign of dread at what it would cost him, the horrible inroad it would make into his body’s fuel. Ross thought of the fuel, a couple of parathas or chapattis, a handful of dhal, the disproportion between this and the exertions into which it must be transformed. It was impossible, and they did it, millions of them, day in, day out, while you sat on your arse and didn’t give it a thought because all there was was the moment of slightly disgusting commercial delight then the man receded into his inhuman function. Jai Hind! An image formed of a crowd of rickshaw drivers taking their ease in a golden field, drinking tea, smoking, some of them wearing bits and pieces of left-behind British gear: a solar topee; riding boots; a lady’s veiled hat. Suddenly a whole country abandoned, the curious quiet glee of kids left with the run of a house. Would it be like that for them? Was that what they were waiting for?
He had these thoughts from time to time but they didn’t stick. They slid from him, oiled by the will to pleasure. Waving the drivers away, he rounded the corner at the end of the street. The girl was twenty yards ahead, hurrying. Towards Roshnai Gate, he assumed. What was she doing out here? She looked back over her shoulder, didn’t see him. Too young. Sixteen? But the body had arrived, unequivocally, breasts and hips, those dancer’s calves. No make-up. He slowed, followed more cautiously. This was the excitement a murderer would feel. Sex was God-shadowed, garlanded with warnings. His childhood image of Adam and Eve was printed for life, the pathetic bare bottoms and downturned mouths, the after, never the during. He imagined a smudge of Edenic mud on Eve’s white (naturally, white) buttock, the earth dutifully telling its tale. Adam’s face would have been tender with shame.
She ducked behind a newsstand and disappeared. He followed.
‘Sahib?’
From a doorstep to his left. He looked down. His pursuit had brought him into a street that disappeared into a maze of covered market stalls.
‘Sahib, is that yours?’
The man asking was young and tatty, sitting hunched forward, knees up, smoking a bidi with one hand, shading his eyes with the other. Crumpled kurta pyjamas and a light coat of dust on the blue-black waves of his hair. His mouth remained unnecessarily open, revealing betel-stained teeth too widely spaced. Ross imagined him lying on a bare bunk fantasizing about making a bundle and cracking the whip. A pinstripe suit, a gun, a lipsticked and sulky moll.
‘What?’
‘There, sahib, by your foot.’
Ross looked down. Next to his left foot was a dirty khaki handkerchief, scrunched up and tied with a bit of leather thong.
‘No, that’s not mine.’
The poppy-dressed girl reappeared from behind a fruit stall, briefly entered a shaft of sun, paused, aura’d in brilliant motes, then turned right and headed up the market’s main aisle. Not so anxious now, Ross thought. Got her bearings. Holds her shoulders differently. Swimmer’s legs, maybe. He saw her underwater, scissor-kicking for the bottom, eyes squinting, hard thighs slicing the water’s buttery bulk.
‘Sorry, sahib, I thought you must have dropped it.’
Ross was already moving away. He glanced back to see the man on the doorstep grin and sketchily salute him. The liquor had worn off. Drunk, he would have read the salute as sarcasm. Drunk, all those ‘sahib’s would have added up to the insolence of deliberate overuse. They won’t want you here when we’re gone. Drunk, he would have slipped with relief into outrage, felt its deep calm hardening in his head and fists. That was the other purity. When you fought, God didn’t watch, He came into you.
No. That was a lie. Drunk, it was the Devil who took possession, the two of you in lip-licking collusion. God was for the ring. Transcendence there was sober, a clean flowing out into the infinite; you looked down with angelic innocence at the knocked-out man on the canvas and found you had to struggle back into time, causation, the physics and maths of how you’d done it. Feinted, drew his right, and caught the bugger with a solid counter, straight on the point. You could make a post hoc story out of it but it always felt false. It was a miracle, you wanted to say. God took me for a moment, that’s all.
He was dehydrated. The market was busy and loud. A gorgeous cacophonous stall of caged bulbuls, mynahs and parakeets to his left, a tiny wrinkled matron to his right, shrilly haggling with a young fruit seller whose cheekbones shone like polished mahogany. A foxy dog the colour of wheat lay on its side in the shade of a striped awning, eyes slits, wet muzzle up as if in ecstasy. Dogs were everywhere, wet-nosed, lovely-eyed, with that tender, arresting way they had of sniffing each other’s anuses. In his father’s Anglo-Indian Quarterly years ago it had said, ‘We may as well face it: to both the British and the Indians we Anglos are a pariah race.’ He’d been a boy when he’d read that. Pariah dogs were mongrels. He hadn’t understood.
Smells changed every few paces: dry-roasting mustard seeds; scalded coffee; frangipani incense; cow dung. A fat green-sari’d woman thickly musk-perfumed went past him. Glimpse of her midriff rolls and blood-red toenails. The city was sexy, Lahore, the whore sound in it. At St Aloysius’ history had been history of the British Empire–the Spinning Jenny, American independence, the East India Company–the notion of India’s history before the Raj barely occurred to the boys, but Danglers let the odd thing drop, that Lahore, for example was a much-looted city, Aryans, Mughals. Which must have given it this rich, tired feel of experience, like a woman long since used to every stripe of fornication.
Fornication. Woman. Just the words and your scrotum tingled. Burping, he tasted liquor and lime, shuddered. The morning’s drunkenness sheet-lightninged from a distance. The girl had stopped a few yards ahead at a stall selling used books and magazines, Conan Doyles and Photoplays. Mental rehearsal so far hadn’t got him past Excuse me…
An overweight perspiring Sikh in a sand-coloured suit, who, on the edge of Ross’s awareness, had been creating a flap in a small crowd, spun out of it and bumped into him.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ They looked at each other. The Sikh grabbed Ross plump-fingeredly by the elbow. ‘I’ve lost something,’ he said. No ‘sahib’ this time. Ross was taken by the eyes, as large and black-lashed as a showgirl’s. The beard was a fat pelt, oiled and silver-streaked. ‘It’s a matter of…’ Suddenly the Sikh’s face contorted, a grimace, almost tears, then righted itself. He squeezed his jaws together, an effort against psychic collapse that made his face shudder. Ross, embarrassed, looked past him. The girl had turned a corner and disappeared. ‘My friend,’ the Sikh said, opening his eyes. ‘I’ve dropped, somewhere in this market, a little…frankly, a handkerchief, tied round something. Have you seen it?’
‘Yes,
back there on the pavement—’
The Sikh’s head jerked away as if he’d been swung at, though the boneless fingers remained locked on Ross’s elbow. ‘What! Where exactly?’
‘Just back there next to the pawnshop. Fellow sitting on the doorstep asked me if I’d dropped it.’
For a second it was as if they’d fallen in love. Then the Sikh without a word tore himself away and ran.
So now instead of Excuse me he would say, I’ve just made a complete stranger very happy. The confidence to dispense with preliminaries would get her attention. He pictured Stan, Dick and Eugene back at Ho Fun’s, stewing in their own guilt and calling piteously for chai or lassi–on tick, since he was holding the cash. No more Mrs Naicker’s for them today. They had fucked their last. In mysterious ways you did God’s work. He went on.
But at the next junction, aisles going left, right and straight on, there was no sign of her. The market floor was peppered with trodden scraps of food. Each person shopped intently, as if he or she were the only customer there, breaking reverie only to ask or argue a price. Hard to believe the din broke down to these utterances.