Inderjit Badhwar: The Chamber of Perfumes

If you get the idea that there was rootlessness in our family, a sense of anomie, a nagging feeling that we were hung between a world of tradition and a world of rapidly changing technologies, then I've given you the wrong impression. True we were Midnight's Children. True we learned and spoke English better than the King himself. True we were the inheritors of educational, bureaucratic, cultural legacies of the Raj. We inherited snobbery, elitism. We realized we all lived in India in tribes of cultures. We were born in an India of 400 million people, one fifth of mankind, a population that was to double within 40 years. Poverty, mostly poverty of a kind, of urban ghettos, of rural privation, never witnessed in Europe or America or Tolstoy's Russia. But there was no guilt. We did not dangle between reason and revolution. We were not agonized by existential dilemmas like the Jews of the pre-World War II diaspora - whether to migrate to the Holy Land under the Palestine Mandate and take up Hebrew, whether to join the Bolsheviks in Russia to create the permanent revolution, whether to remain cloistered in Yiddish speaking pockets in New York, or whether to assimilate with the Gentiles. No, we were not afflicted by the dilemma of the Fabians either, whether to sit in libraries and continue to make the Revolution an esoteric exercise and indulge in theories of Sovereignty from Hobbes to Bentham and Laski, or to cut the bullshit and get on the right sides of the barricades with the masses. Nor did we torment ourselves like European intellectuals about which side to join during the Spanish Civil War.

I mean, social historians may legitimately ask, weren't you torn between two cultures, several languages, the need to emulate Gandhian renunciation and bourgeois acquisitiveness and conspicuous consumption, to become the vanguard for the workers and peasants to reorder the political structure that was a British hand-me-down of constitutional legalisms? There was no dilemma either invented or promulgated by the dictators of social conscience anywhere in the world that did not stare us in the face and threaten to drive us crazy. We were Veblen's Leisure Class. We the Marxist-Leninist historical garbage that belongs in history's dustbins. We were the Indian Lefť's lickspittle of neocolonialism and neo-imperialism. To India's populists and ultra nationalists we were the exponents of a corrupt Urban Culture who scoffed at their own roots.

We stood guilty as charged. At least Papa did. Frankly, he didn't give a damned rat's ass. He had read Spinoza when young. He had armed himself with Churchill's volumes on the Second Great War. Travelyan's Social History lay dog-eared on his bookshelf from the very first page on the analysis of Chaucer's age and the influence of the French on Anglo Saxon culture.

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The feast of green coriander, bitter gourds and moong dal - north India's staple lentil that looks like a hellish yellow porridge but tastes like heaven when cooked with love - and mustard greens with dollops of white home-churned butter served at the table over which he presided in formal coat and tie would at his command the next day turn into a banquet of partridge cooked in sherry, garlic and Worcestershire sauce. Cauliflower with white gravy, fricasseed chicken served with roasted potatoes and carrots topped with parsley, French onion soup, steak and onions, baked fish, deviled eggs, Russian salad with home- made mayonnaise, caramel custard, fudge brownies. These table habits have become part of family memory, along with Papa's letters of admonishment and advice to his family -stand straight, develop character, tolerate others, learn not to hate, be compassionate, respect precision in language, be charitable, do what is just, respect knowledge, adore books, respect eclecticism, believe in the rule of law, get married and bolster your husband's career, learn how to wield a rifle and shotgun. Don't shoot at a sitting duck or partridge. If you cannot allow yourself not to believe in, then at least doubt God.

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Godless Papa did not inherit his atheism from Marxist literature. He considered Communists boorish. He lumped them with soothsayers, mendicants, fortune tellers, wandering sadhus, fake holy men and assorted conmen and mahatmas who promised redemption, religious nirvana, a better tomorrow in the name of Hinduism, fooled women into accepting gurus. His concerns were more erudite. In those rare moments when he would care to explain himself he would tell his friends that he admired those aristocratic Gentiles in Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy who had the courage to surrender themselves to the Nazis in order to protect Jews. We were later to learn that during India's post-partition riots in which Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other in their hundreds of thousands over the creation of the separate countries of India and Pakistan, Papa who detested religious states and Jinnah's vision of Pakistan as much as he distrusted Hindu rituals, for more than a month hid a Muslim friend, a Razakar (Muslims involved in planting bombs and blowing up trains in India for the Pakistani cause) in his private bathroom. Later, when people asked Papa repeatedly why he had taken the risk, he replied: "He was a friend." The friend ultimately chose to remain in India with 50 million other Muslims who,50 years later, doubled in size making India a country with the second largest Muslim population in the world.

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Damnit. We mixed everything. Metaphors, philosophies, music, nursery rhymes, Victor Sylvester and his ballroom orchestra (Papa loved to fox- trot and tango and often dragged a petrified Mama onto the dance floor, once with a rose stem clenched in his teeth), Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Benny Goodman Stompin' at the Savoy, Sachmo and Ella, Bhim Sen Joshi and Bismillah Khan.

Nothing was incongruous.