Never having had any connection with IndiaI didn’t know what an expatriate was until in September 1959, havinghitchhiked overland from England, I was ushered into the presence of a seniorone in a shipping office in Calcutta. His name had been given to me by a nurse Imet by the Sea of Galilee and since all three of us were Scots, the clan networkwas invoked. In those days, being good Calvinists, Scotsmen abroad cultivatedmasochism by wearing ties and jackets in Calcutta’s sweltering heat.Preferring to wear shorts and shirtsleeves I was viewed from day one as a failedScot. The expat gave me 200 rupees and said, "Buy a jacket." I did—butonly 20 years later when I revisited the UK (in winter.) I bought a blazer fromWinky’s in Mussoorie in 1972 and last wore it at the launch of ArundhatiRoy’s God of Small Things held in the Delhi Oberoi against the backdropof a lotus pond. (Wot! no hyacinth?)
The expat bastion in Calcutta was the Swimming Club where preserving the cultureof Albion appeared to rest largely on the conspicuous consumption of fish andchips. An exceedingly plump missionary lady in a swimming costume that stretchedthe bounds of feasibility, complained that labourers swarming over the bambooscaffolding on the adjacent High Court building were peering down at her amplebulk. With the scorched pink of her roasting thighs, perhaps they were checkingout whether she was a buoy marking the deep end?
Disappearing for the next two decades into a Himalayan hair shirt, the onlyexpats I encountered were as odd and outlandish as myself. Ronald Bougham was aBuddhist with shares in a butcher’s firm. Michael Maskew was a defrockedYorkshire monk of a French order located deep in the Sahara. Sorensen (SunyataBaba) had a dog that spoke to him in silence. Yogi George (with an anti-Papalfixation) would offer monkeys raiding his garden a radish in the hope thatbetter manners would prevail next time. The scholarly ex-Austrian LamaGovinda’s better half was a fire-eating Parsi lady whose voice was a cure forconstipation. And all these could be found on Cranks Ridge, at just one end ofAlmora.
Every hill station has its assortment of oddball characters and moving toMussoorie I found in Ruskin Bond’s Maplewood Lodge a summer visitor in SirEdmund Gibson who, like Jack Gibson, was eccentric by expat standards forfeeling fully at home in India.
Expats like Sir Mark Tully, Gillian Wright and Toby Sinclair I find to be moreIndian than British-born P.I.O.’s with Cockney twang or Clydeside glottalstop. The only occasion I had dealings with the British High Commission waswhen, on becoming a naturalised Indian citizen, I was required to renounce myBritish citizenship. The UK response, (impressive in an age of shrinking gunboatfleets), was the equivalent of "Sorry chum, you can’t." Anyone born inBritain of British parents stays British irrespective of his personal choices orBaroness Thatcher’s shrill opinions. Which only goes to show that suitless andbootless, you can still enjoy the best of both worlds.
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This article originally appeared in Delhi City Limits, November 30,2005
