I Am a Stranger Here Myself: An Unreliable Memoir

PROLOGUE

Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD LIKED HIS tipple and perhaps after a drink or two famously remarked that there are no second acts in our lives. You are only given one chance for success. That may be true for some. I am now past eighty and well into my third act, having given a few side performances along the way. These days my body aches, my walk is slow and my mind sometimes plays tricks on me. Should I piss or have I already pissed? There are other handicaps best not mentioned here. But, touch wood, I am happy as a lark, surrounded by friends, healthy as one can be at my age. I am an agnostic but I do believe someone up there is looking after me.

I am of the Patidar clan that has several divisions and subdivisions. The word ‘Patel’ does not have caste or religious connotations. A Patel can be Muslim or a Dalit. He doesn’t even have to be a Gujarati. I have met Pakistanis and people from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh with Patel surname. The vast majority, however, are middle-ranking Gujarati Hindus, owners of agricultural land or descendants of families that once were farmers but now own motels in America and pharmacies in Britain. Our roots are in villages, and, sometimes, wearing a suit and a tie, we often continue to carry the village mentality. We do not have a past beyond a few generations when our family trees disappear into the soil that we once tilled. Most people of my father’s generation would not know the exact date of their birth.

As a child, growing up in Fiji, I was probably the most unlikely to succeed in my class. I was tall for my age, under-weight and gaunt, a figure of fun for my classmates and a victim of cruel missionary teachers. University life in Delhi and later in Bombay improved me somewhat but nice-looking girlfriends still eluded me. I did better in London and it was as a practising barrister in Bombay High Court that I finally found my stride. Success with women came to me late in life by prevailing standards but I was grateful it came at all.

I was no great shakes in front of a judge but I was young, a bachelor just past thirty and there was no shortage of women in search of husbands. I had a glamorous job as a stringer for a leftist London weekly and my columns in Indian newspapers were getting attention, sometimes more than I would have liked. The only drawback was that I had little money in my pocket and lived in a one-room paying guest accommodation on Malabar Hill with the kind landlady next door sending me a cup of tea for breakfast with a slice of buttered toast. But I couldn’t have been happier.

That was my first act. My second act as an international civil servant with the United Nations was glorious. I spent most of my career in New York, the most vibrant city in the world, with the best of theatre, cinema and restaurants at my disposal. The schools for my children on the Upper Eastside were top rate and one child ended up in Harvard and the other in Cornell.

Now I am on my final act. I live in Delhi, the only city in the world where you can wake up in the morning and listen to birds coughing in your garden. Since retirement I have written columns for newspapers and magazines as well as five books, including a best-selling novel. I am now on the last sprint before the curtain comes down. Some of my prayers went unanswered over the years and I thank the Lord for that. Otherwise I would have ended up in a newspaper office or as an executive in a major airline’s headquarters at Nariman Point.

I have not lived in Fiji any length of time since I left as a teenager but I still carry a Fijian passport proudly. The saddest thing about living a nomadic life is that the tyranny of distance prevents you from being around at the time when sudden tragedies strike your loved ones. I heard of my father’s death when I lived in Bombay, my mother passed away while I was in Delhi. I was not there when a brother and a sister died. But I did make it in time for some of the funerals.

My children and grandchildren now live thousands of miles away from me. I will probably need the help of four friends to carry me to the cremation ground and one of them to light the fire. Over the years my friends have become part of my family. Those dearest to me I can count on the fingertips of one hand.

Madeleine Blaise, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, pondered on the difference between autobiographies and memoirs. Autobiographies, according to her, tend to encompass the full span of life and are usually written by people who occupy some kind of public space: ex-presidents and movie stars, for instance. ‘Memoirs are written by less obviously eminent sorts. Generals write autobiographies, foot soldiers write memoirs.’ Without question, this is a memoir not an autobiography. Make what you wish of what follows but keep some salt handy. ‘The older one gets the more vivid the recollection of things that have not happened.’ That’s a Mark Twain quote!

Ernest Hemingway wrote that in his early years in Paris he trapped pigeons in Luxembourg Gardens for dinner. No one believes that for a moment. Surely Jesus did not do magic tricks like walking on water or turning water into wine. Such stories were inventions of his disciples who wrote the New Testament. Jesus had better things to do: deliver that remarkable sermon on the mountain, for instance. I am a closet follower of his teachings though for all practical purposes—birth, marriage and death—I am a Hindu who doesn’t like the company he keeps these days.

Writers when they write about themselves tell tall tales just as fisherman add inches and kilos to the size of their catch. They are not always forthcoming when it comes to their uglier side.

What follows is a mixture of fact and fiction.

PART I

I

Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry. The milk will be delivered on the door-step tomorrow morning and the New Statesman will come out on Friday.

—George Orwell

THE FIRST TIME I HAD sex I was petrified. It was late at night, it was dark and I was alone. My sex life did not improve for several years after that and like most boys of my age I learnt to get a firm grip on myself. Sixty years ago, we were just as keen on getting laid as boys of today. It was not easy. Delhi University was Punjabi-conservative, very salwar kameez. During my three years, I cannot recall seeing a female student in jeans. In my college, Shri Ram, there were over 800 boys and a solitary girl, a brave Maharashtrian from Poona (now Pune).

Dating, such as it was, was confined to the cafes on the campus. Any boy seen sitting with a girl sipping coffee was the envy of his classmates. Holding hands was unacceptable. Miranda House and Indraprastha girls had to be back behind the college gates by six. Volga restaurant in Connaught Place was out of bounds for students from Lady Irwin College. The place didn’t even serve beer but the principal didn’t like the band playing there at teatime.

There really was no place to hanky-panky. Female visitors were not allowed into our hostel rooms though sometimes we managed to sneak them in. If we were lucky we got a kiss out of them. In any case, parents expected daughters to remain virgins until they married. Perhaps they still do but in our time the girls were more strictly policed. If one excluded the surreptitious visits to brothels on G.B. Road, the overwhelming majority of the boys too were virgins.

Things changed for me, dramatically, when I landed in London to do a postgraduate degree at the London School of Economics—officially the London School of Economics and Political Science—and study law at Inner Temple. This was the swinging sixties; the pendulum years, as Bernard Levin described them. The name Christine Keeler will ring a bell for those of a certain age. Everyone seemed to be into kinky sex, whips, handcuffs, vaseline. Someone once asked Woody Allen if sex was dirty? ‘It is if it is done properly,’ he replied.

The girls* at LSE were working class, unkempt and dishevelled. They came from the Midlands and beyond, took baths once a week. As for Inner Temple, you did not have to be very bright to be admitted. As a result, it had girls from the upper classes, with peaches-and-cream complexions, who did not make the cut at Oxford or Cambridge. They wore dresses from Harrods. Fortunately for us, their boyfriends were wimps from public schools, not fully weaned away from male buttocks to female ones. At Inner Temple, I was like a child given the run of the candy store!

Britain was still racist and the mummies of these girls would not have approved of them marrying dark-skinned boys from the former colonies, but they did not object to flings as long as the daughter did not get pregnant or fall in love with one of us. We were even invited home at Christmas!

We always carried condoms in our wallets, never knowing when we might get lucky. Some girls insisted that we wear two, afraid that one might break. This had the added advantage of slowing down ejaculation. Buying condoms was the trickiest part. It required a great deal of courage to go up to the woman behind the counter in Boots and ask for a packet. And they were not cheap for those on student budgets.

The Indian and Pakistani girls studying with us would not touch us though, for some reason, we desired them more. They preferred white boys and their sex lives were more discreet. Almost all of them returned home to marry the likes of us.

Some of the English girls still lived with their parents and took trains to the home counties after classes. I lived in Putney about an hour away on the tube, a bit far for an afternoon bout of sex. What to do? I found a disused broom closet in the basement of the Inner Temple library. As long as you were standing up, kept the lights off and did not make a noise, it was a great place for a quickie! On reflection, this was perhaps the craziest thing I have ever done. If we had been caught, we would have been rusticated and I would be polishing diamonds today in Surat. I was not thinking with my brain.

I have no reason to envy the youth of today. Fifty years ago, before some of their parents were even born, I was having a ball.

I flew into Heathrow on BOAC, full name British Overseas Airways Corporation. It was some years later that the management had the good sense to shorten it to British Airways. Since I was from one of their colonies, a British Council representative met me at the Victoria Coach Station where buses from the airport terminated. He put me up at the students’ residence in Paddington for my first three days. After that I was to be on my own.

It was the autumn of 1961 and the city was experiencing the first chills of winter. My first business was to invest in an overcoat that did me good service for the next five years. My immediate concern was money since the British pound notes in my pocket, bought in the black market behind Handloom House in Bombay, would take me only thus far. My father had sent a bank draft of a hundred pounds from Fiji to be picked up from someone with digs in Brixton. I had no idea where that was but I was told at Queensway tube station to change trains from Central Line at Tottenham Court Road and take the Northern Line to Stockwell. I panicked when I got off to change trains. I had never seen or got on an escalator before. I waited a few minutes to see how others did it before I took the risk. Once I had the bank draft in my hands I was relieved—a hundred pounds would see me through the first couple of months.

Then came the ordeal of finding accommodation and it was not easy for a black or brown person. Perhaps our yellow friends from Hong Kong had it easier but I wouldn’t know about that. You would see a sign in the window saying ‘vacancy’, you rang the bell and the landlady would take one look and tell you it had already been let. Racist? Of course. But African students studying in India have suffered far worse. It was difficult to find jobs during vacation unless you were prepared to pick hops on farms in Essex and Kent. The Australian and white South African students had no problem at all. Intolerance was rampant and out in the open. Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express carried cartoons by Cummings depicting African leaders as monkeys, tails included.

Fortunately, I found a bedsitter off Bayswater Road at five pounds a week. It was not the posh part of the city—there were hookers on the street—but it was central London. The shared bathroom down the hall was freezing and putting your bum on that ice-cold toilet seat took courage. The room itself was not large enough to swing a cat. The only utensil was an electric kettle. The gas meter took six one-penny coins and gave heat for about thirty minutes. It barely managed to heat the room and my allowance being what it was I used it frugally. I invested in a hot-water bottle and woolly long johns that one wore under the pants.

Back in Bombay I showered daily, sometimes twice on hot sweaty days. I don’t think I saw a shower in any home in London in my five years and a daily bath in the tub that one shared with other tenants was out of the question. Again, you needed to insert pennies to get the hot water running and six coins would give you three or four inches of lukewarm water in the tub. You splashed it on your body as best you could. One did not sweat in such a climate and I soon learnt to follow the example of the locals and limited my baths to once, sometimes twice a week until I found a place where hot running water was free. I never did figure out why the bathrooms and loos were always the coldest place in English homes. Central heating in residences was just catching on and more popular with affluent immigrants than the local population.

A week after I settled down I went to the north to visit a cousin in Ashton-under-Lyme, a bus ride away from Manchester, and I discovered how miserable the lives of immigrants from India were in their new homeland. Most of those I met were newly arrived and lived as bachelors; even married ones had caught the plane or ship alone hoping to bring their wives and children once they could afford a home of their own. Until 1962 Indians didn’t need visas to travel and settle in Britain. These men, mostly from Gujarat’s villages, worked in the town’s mills and slept two or three to a room. There was no indoor toilet. You had to tread through snow to get to the outhouse at the back. It had not occurred to the original owners to build a bathroom. If there was a bathtub it would often be used to store coal. Every Saturday, the day off, my cousin and others would go to a municipal bath to wash off the week’s grime. On Sundays they cooked and watched wrestling matches on black-and-white television.

I was not happy in the tiny room that was home. A student friend from Zanzibar recommended staying with a landlady with two meals, breakfast and dinner provided. I found one such place in East Finchley but I did not last more than two weeks. One afternoon the landlady walked into the room and switched off the light while I was reading. She said I was wasting electricity. Luckily a room opened up at the place where the British Council person had dropped me when I had first arrived in London. It was perfectly situated being within easy walking distance to four tube stations, Bayswater, Paddington, Queensway and Lancaster Gate. The last two were the closest and equidistant from the place on Queens Gardens. The Central Line dropped me at Chancery Lane and I would walk down to Inner Temple between Fleet Street and the Thames Embankment. The room was quite spacious and the best thing about it was that it had central heating!

Breakfast was served till 8.30 a.m. and I timed my wake-up in a way that it gave me time to brush my teeth, change and go down before the kitchen closed. All things considered, especially the fact that two meals and room cost five pounds a week, the food was not bad. I had my first taste of rabbit meat. I guess it was a delicacy since it was served only on Sundays at lunch. If you must know, it tasted like chicken. Americans consider it poor man’s food.

I had my first taste of alcohol in the bar of East Africa House near Marble Arch. It was gin, and not knowing anything about mixing, I drank it neat. It tasted great and smelt wonderful. Some things stick in your memory forever. Though we drank frugally as students, maybe a beer or two a week and occasionally something stronger, I have never looked back when it comes to enjoying drinks in the evenings. Though the amount of consumption has inevitably increased over the years I cannot remember ever throwing up after excessive drinking.

There are four Inns of Courts in London and the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple is one of them. The other three are Middle Temple just across a narrow lane, Lincoln’s Inn behind the Royal Courts of Justice and Gray’s Inn a mile or two away in the north, so far that I don’t think I have ever visited its grounds or met a student studying there. To be called to the Bar and practise as a barrister in England and Wales, one had to belong to one of these Inns. Once you are admitted you are a member for life unless you get disbarred for misconduct.

Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru are among the many distinguished alumni of Inner Temple. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was in Middle Temple and Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was in Lincoln’s Inn. India’s independence and partition owe a debt to these institutions, if you can call it debt.

The senior and distinguished barristers and judges are on its governing council. They are called Masters of the Bench, led by the Treasurer, who is elected for a one-year unpaid term. I still make it a point to lunch there at least once during my visits to London. The dining hall, where I was called to the bar so many years ago, has a superb spread, a roast always included. Ever so traditional, they always serve fish on Fridays. At the end of the meal you prepare your own bill—honour system—from the menu on the table that has the prices. During my time, we were not allowed to take guests of the opposite sex, and wearing a tie and jacket was obligatory even for students. Mercifully, the rules are much more relaxed these days. The Brits too have lightened up.

There is no longer table service; you help yourself to food laid out on a long buffet table. The chef will carve the roast for you, a generous portion, if that is your selection. Instead of long wooden benches we hated, nowadays you sit on comfortable chairs. Fifty years ago, the waiters were all male, all white. It was rumoured that they were former convicts being rehabilitated. The only female was Betty, the cashier. A pretty blonde, a bit past her prime, she would have sex with her favoured students as long as the student was willing to listen to her talk till four in the morning in her flat south of the river. Which part was more exhausting is not for me to say.

Much of the Inner Temple was destroyed during the blitz of the Second World War when Germany targeted London. The rebuilding was completed in 1959. There is a lovely garden towards the embankment where we went for walks in summer after lunch. Besides the exams, it was mandatory for the students to dine in the Inner Temple hall six times a term. The idea was to rub shoulders with practising barristers which, in reality, we never did. The tradition continues but the number of dinners has been reduced to three each term. The food was the usual English stodge, a watery soup followed by something roasted—lamb, beef or chicken—with potatoes and boiled cabbages or Brussels sprouts. There would also be a pudding and, if we were unlucky, it would be that most disgusting dessert in the world, something only the British relish: junket.

I had my first sip of wine, red, in that hall. I had imagined it to be something sweet and was surprised that it wasn’t. A bottle came with the meal and it was to be shared by four students. After a time, I learnt to sit with two Indian or Pakistani women students together with another male friend. The women would not touch the wine and if they did they drank sparingly. That left my friend and me to share the bottle between the two of us. At the end of the meal you got also a small bottle of port, again to be shared. The port came to us through a