Friends and relations rallied round. There were theatre visits, lunches, and teas. I was posted off for weekend visits, clutching my railway ticket, correctly gloved, with my umbrella strapped to my suitcase. I must have been a dismaying guest – incongruously tall, like a bolted lettuce, socially inept, crippled by homesickness.
I no longer know which of these family friends it was who hit on the idea of taking me to see the heart of the city, the bomb-flattened area around Saint Paul’s. He was someone who had developed an intense interest in the topographical history of the area and had discovered the way in which the bombs had stripped away the layers of time. He had taken to going down there, map in hand, to trace what was revealed. He suggested I come with him on one of these weekend excursions.
The place was deserted. Saint Paul’s rose from a wasteland of rubble, cropped walls, and sunken lakes of pink willow herb. The effect was one not of destruction but of tranquil decay, like some ruined site of antiquity. Street signs tacked to surviving shreds of wall plotted the layout of the place: Cheapside, Bread Street, Watling Street. We wandered around, peering down into the willow herb lakes (DANGER! KEEP OUT!), inspecting the untidy little cliffs of walling, matching what we saw against my companion’s street plan of the pre-war City. He also had a plan of the medieval boundary wall. He showed me how this was reflected in the street pattern. He gave me a genial history lesson, most of which I could not follow because what I knew of English history was confined to the patriotic rantings of Our Island Story, but I paid attention. I became distinctly interested. I floated free of the prison of my own discontents and enjoyed the fresh air of an abstract interest. I caught a glimpse of what it is like to have adult concerns. Look, said my companion, here is a stretch of the actual medieval wall, which must have been embedded within and beneath this blitzed building – look at the flint and ragstone. And then he led me to his pièce de résistance. Here, he said with triumph, here is a Roman bastion. This was one of the corners of the oldest wall of all, the original Roman wall.
Roman? Roman, had he said? But what did this mean? We had Romans down in Egypt. Had had Romans, time was. I knew about Romans. They came from Rome and Italy and surged all over Egypt and Palestine, building forts and temples and things which had fallen down but bits of which you could still see. They dropped their money everywhere: most of it was in the Alexandria museum. They built the Alexandria catacombs. They were responsible for Pontius Pilate. So how then could there be Romans right up here, in England?
I pondered this, staring at that unexceptional bit of wall. Evidently Our Island Story, in its potted hagiography of Boadicea, had not made it clear who it was she had been up against. Perhaps I asked my companion to explain matters. If so, I don’t remember. What I do remember, with a clarity that is still exhilarating, is the sudden sense of relevances and connections which were mysterious and intriguing and could perhaps be exposed. That word ‘Roman’ chimed a note that was personal but was also, I realized, quite detached. Romans were to do with me because I had heard of them, but they were also to do with the significant and hitherto impenetrable mystique of grown-up preoccupations. It was as though the exposure of that chunk of wall had also shown up concealed possibilities. I sniffed the liberations of maturity and grew up a little more, there amid the wreckage of London and the seething spires of willow herb.
Anita Desai
[1937-]
Anita Desai was born Anita Mazumdar in Mussoorie, India. Her father was Bengali and her mother German, and Desai grew up speaking English, German and Hindi. English was, however, the first language in which she learned to write. In 1957 Desai received a BA in English literature from Miranda House, an élite college of Delhi University. After graduating, she spent a year working in Calcutta and then in 1958 she married Ashvin Desai, with whom she has four children.
Desai’s first published work was a short story that appeared in an American children’s magazine. Her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), was praised by critics as lyrical and poetic. Desai’s employment of stream-of-consciousness and the way she uses physical landscapes to reflect the psychic landscape of a tortured mind, invited comparisons with Virginia Woolf. In this novel, as in later works, Desai explores the psyche of an ‘outsider’ – someone who is ensnared by a society in which he or she does not belong. Desai’s characters, both male and female, are often victims of their cultural environment, as in Voices in the City (1965), Where Shall We Go This Summer? (1975) and In Custody (1984). Both In Custody and Clear Light of Day (1980) were short-listed for the Booker Prize.
The themes of alienation and ‘foreignness’ figure strongly in Bye-Bye, Blackbird (1971), which tells of two Indian immigrants living in Britain. By creating one character who decides to remain in Britain and one who decides to return to India, Desai captures the ambiguity of being caught between two cultures. Indeed, Desai herself maintains a certain distance from India in her writing: ‘I feel about India as an Indian,’ she says, ‘but I suppose I think about it as an outsider.’ In 1988 she published Baumgartner’s Bombay, which is written from the point of view of a German in India. He, like the majority of Desai’s protagonists, suffers from a sense of alienation, and in this novel, as in her other works, Desai’s prose skilfully maintains the tension of his unhappy and ultimately violent life.
In 1986 Desai was a visiting fellow at Girton College, Cambridge. Since then she has remained active in the academic world, dividing her time between Massachusetts, England and India. From 1987 to 1989 she taught at Smith College, and she later became a Purington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. She is currently teaching in the creative writing programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desai has published numerous essays, reviews and articles, and her latest novel is Journey to Ithaca (1995). She is the author of three children’s books, one of which won the Guardian Award for children’s fiction in 1982, and she has also published a short story collection, Games at Twilight (1978).
In the following section from Desai’s novel Bye-Bye, Blackbird we witness the two protagonists undergoing their comic and slightly surreal encounter with a hitherto imagined London. Desai explores the persistent and undeniably powerful mythology that a colonial centre imposes upon its ‘peripheral’ subjects.
From Bye-Bye, Blackbird
Riding on the top of the 139, right up in front with only a sheet of glass to separate them from the blue-grey waves of London, they rode, they swam, like porpoises, through the city between banks of clay-red brick walls. Adit, assuming familiarity with it all, assuming the disinterest of a native of the city, lowered his head into the Country Properties column of The Times, but Dev, his head aggressively uptilted, stared ahead, turned this way and that and confronted the Battersea power station with the eyes of a conquering soldier marching into Egypt. He had determined to be blasé, even contemptuous, for he had early found cynicism to be the easiest and safest of postures, but there were things in London – and the Battersea power station was the first of them- that threw him off his guard, shook him out of his normal attitude of cynical coolness and now, like an idolator catching sight of a renowned shrine, he raised his arms in an unconscious frenzy of excitement at the vision of the four great pillars, one at each corner of the massive grey temple of power, pouring vast billows of dark smoke into an empty, breathless sky.
Battersea, Battersea, Battersea power station! Words of worship roared inside his throat and when he opened his mouth a strangled sound came out to make Adit look up in amazement.
‘What’s the matter with you, yar?’ he whispered, fiercely annoyed at such unsophisticated, such outrageous behaviour which so brazenly marked them as strangers, visitors, bumpkins even.
‘What’s the matter with me? Look there, yar, look at that – that building.’
‘That’s the Battersea power station,’ Adit hissed.
‘Ah, it must be the most magnificent sight in London! God, I’m sure the pyramids have nothing on it. Look at its bulk, look at the way it squats, square and weighty and unremovable on the ground. Look at those vast blank walls – like those of a secret vault of mighty emperors. Look at those towering chimney-stacks sending out the smoke of sacrificial fires. Can’t you see the puja being conducted in its locked chambers, by priests in saffron robes and vestal maidens in white? Can’t you see the great bonfire they’ve built inside and the herbs, the spices and magic potions they hurl into it? Can’t you hear the clanging of great gongs and the blowing of long horns and singing of sweet hymns? I believe the electricity of London is generated by that sacrificial bonfire, right in the innermost heart of that temple. We ought to stand up and bow, Adit. We ought to kneel down and pray. We ought to sing out a hymn – the Vedic hymn to fire –’ and, to Adit’s agony, Dev began to intone, shrilly, in Sanskrit:
‘Produce thy streams of flames like a broad onslaught,
Go forth impetuous like a king with his elephant.
Thou art an archer.
Shoot thy sorcerers with thy hottest arrows, O Agni, send forth thy heat, thy winged flames …’
‘Chelsea Bridge!’ sang out the conductor. ‘Chelsea Bridge!’
Rain on Sunday. Damp raincoats swinging from the gallows in the corner, wet umbrellas bleeding into a bucket. Electric heaters glaring red like inflamed eyes. Sunday papers littering the floor. Sarah expressionlessly following the thundering vacuum cleaner about. Adit sitting immobile in front of the television screen. Smell of rain, fish, mildew and mud.
‘You must be masochists to live in this climate,’ declares Dev, for his eyes are burning, his head exploding after an endless morning of reading close print on thin paper and seeing the shadows flicker across the shivering screen. ‘Masochists. What a climate, what a stinking climate.’
Adit suddenly jerked into life, joyfully suggests, ‘Make a bonfire to the great god Agni. Go on, go to Battersea power station and offer up your flannel underwear, your knitted socks. Ask Agni to send us heat.’
Laurel Lane. To begin with this is Dev’s London – the small side lane banked with its brick-walled houses, partly obscured by privet hedges, by lines of washing and, now and then, a creeper of crimson roses or a bush of azaleas as delicate, as fine and airy as a host of pink and white butterflies hovering over a garden gate. In the small pebbly gardens and on narrow pavements, an occasional abandoned toy wagon or garden rake, but rarely an owner of these objects, rarely any human attachment. Lives lived in Laurel Lane are indoor lives. Occasionally a door opens, a stout and chinless matron in a flowered dress and an old cardigan appears with a tub of washing under one arm and clothes pegs stuck in her mouth like outsize teeth, or a younger woman comes out to wheel a sleeping child in its pram. There is a certain hour every afternoon – so Dev has noticed on his indoor days – when Mr Yogi’s ice-cream van drives up, playing a gay little tune to summon the children of Laurel Lane. Then, even in wet and freezing weather, an astonishing number of junior citizens explode into the lane, clutching their pennies, to buy ices of great variety in colour. Rough children they look, with patched clothes and dirty boots, but with what fresh faces, what achingly red cheeks and bright, alive eyes – National Health Service children, brought up on free orange juice and good milk, and with money to spare for Mr Yogi’s ices.
But Dev is rarely there to watch the appearance and disappearance of this Pied Piper of ices and Laurel Lane remains, to him, a place of shut doors and curtained windows. Spidery aerials perched on rooftops like ritual totem poles are evidence of television sets by the dozen, but never a sound does he hear from them. He does not hear his neighbours – their radios, their quarrels, their children are all kept behind closed doors.
‘Now if this were India,’ he explodes one dull day, standing at the window, ‘I would by now know all my neighbours – even if I had never spoken to them. I’d know their taste in music by the sound of their radios. I’d know the age of their child by the sound of its howling. I’d know if the older children were studying for exams by the sound of lessons being recited. I’d know what food they ate by the smells of their cooking. I’d know which men quarrelled with their wives, which mothers-in-law beat their daughters-in-law – everything. If I lived on a road like this in Calcutta, I would be aware – as aware as can be – of everyone around me. But not here. Here everyone is a stranger and lives in hiding. They live silently and invisibly. It would happen nowhere in India.’
‘That must be nice,’ said Sarah wistfully, strangely for she had never struck Adit or Dev as being a neighbourly or even curious person. But somehow the picture Dev has coloured for her – bright, verbal crayons sweeping across the black-and-white of the well-known page – appeals to her.
‘It isn’t,’ growled Adit. ‘It’s bloody noisy and dirty and smelly.’
‘But alive,’ Sarah protests.
‘And this isn’t. Or it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the pets. There are always the pets,’ Dev muses at the window.
The canary in the brightest window, its brass cage sparkling with the freshest polish. Even the most nondescript dog has the brisk air of confidence which is born of the certainty of a good dinner at home, and almost always there is a concerned and affectionate human being at the other end of the leash, sometimes even making human noises at it. But the ones that really captivate Dev – although he will not admit it – are the cats, larger than any he has seen before, fluffed out in billows of fine hair, stalking sedately, royally down the garden paths to settle in a patch of sun on the walls, and serenely – with only the faintest expression of curiosity, subtly dissembled – watch the world go by. They are Bustopher Jones, Deuteronomy and Jennyanydots in person. They do not dart away at his approach, as he is used to having cats do, nor do they glare discouragingly down their noses at his overtures, but look up inquisitively, almost inviting a pat and a bit of conversation about the fine weather, unalarmed and comfortable in the eiderdown furriness. Nothing lean or scarred mars this golden landscape and so captivated is Dev that he cannot bear to speak of it – at least no more than to admit grudgingly, ‘Of course they do keep pets. I know which houses keep what pets.’
Dev ventures into the city. He descends, deeper and deeper, into the white-tiled bowels of Clapham tube station. Down into the stark caverns artificially lit, by way of long, ringing staircases where draughts sweep icily up and down and yet leave the underground airless, suffocating. The menacing slither of escalators strikes panic into a speechless Dev as he is swept down with an awful sensation of being taken where he does not want to go. Down, down and farther down – like Alice falling, falling down the rabbit hole, like a Kafka stranger wandering through the dark labyrinth of a prison. On the platform, with blank lights glaring at the cold white tiles all around he stands fearfully with his fellow travellers and darts horrified glances at the strange look these people, who had seemed natural enough in the sunlight of High Street, have acquired in these subterranean depths. Here in the underground their faces have become withdrawn, preoccupied, and are tinged with an unearthly, martian green, their movements are grown furtive and their voices – on the few occasions when they do speak out – chill him with their hollow, clanging harshness. In a panic he throws himself into the tube that has come slipping in like a long worm, and is carried off by it, hurtling through black tunnels in which the air is choked with soot and cinders and the very air is black as in a tomb. Dev is swamped inkily, with a great dread of being caught, stuck in the underground by some accident, some collapse, and being slowly suffocated to a worm’s death, never to emerge into freshness and light.
He does emerge, to his amazement, into the most natural freshness and light of Leicester Square – its littlē park ringed with tulips and green benches on which old men sit, under early summer foliage, reading their papers and scattering crumbs to fat, overfed pigeons. Exhilarated as a man snatched back from the tomb, he walks off, staring at the posters over the theatre doors, advertising plays he has so far only read of but now can actually walk in and see – a miracle that quite unsettles him.
But twice that day he is to relive the experience of delving into the tunnels of London’s grim earth and of emerging into the radiance of natural light. In the galleries of the Tate he stumbles upon his own horror of the underground in Sutherland’s crazed, dark, bloodstained visions. In considerable agitation, he tries to keep his voice down as he falters, ‘Look. Look, Sen, that is what I mean, that is what I was talking about.’
Adit, fearing another pagan outburst as he had suffered on the bus, tells him sternly, ‘Those were drawn in wartime, don’t you know, when the tubes were used as bomb shelters.’
Stammering with the effort of maintaining his dignity, Dev insists, ‘They are no different now,’ and he is able to breathe only when Adit leads him into a gallery illuminated with the rosy, noontime visions of the Impressionists.
