At the Pictures

 

My grandfather owned possessions in the South of India, close to the French enclave at Pondicherry, which later became famous for Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram. At the time Sri had still a long way to go before becoming the renowned sage and philosopher of “Integral Yoga” from the fifties. Instead he was attending the convention of Indian nationalists and the authorities considered him a dangerous radical. My grandfather’s first wife had passed away after a miscarriage and the widower approached a dating agency. Missives and pictures went to and fro – it took weeks for a letter to cross the Indian Ocean – and finally he went to Hamburg to see for himself. Granny, as well, had to travel some distance before they could meet; she came from Baden Baden, a spa in the South of Germany.

He looked at her, she looked at him; they seemed to like what they were seeing. In January 1911, they boarded a steamer to India. Not yet married, they shared the same cabin. I still hear Granny’s voice saying “and he refused to switch off the light” eliciting a chuckle with her audience. (I like it, too – with the lights on I mean.) After weeks at sea they disembarked in Bombay and the registrar of His Majesty, King George V, legalized the liaison at his office in the Old Custom House.

The couple boarded the train for another trip of several days. The last fifteen miles to my Grandfather’s mansion, they drove in an open two-seater; from the pictures I would guess a Talbot Model M4. The car came to a halt on crunching gravel. The photographs show a house with round arches and palm trees leading to the pillared porch. For the memsahib it was Paradise. Her childhood had been a time of austerity; she was raised in an orphanage. Granny never talked of it without mentioning a “count from Austria,” which allegedly had knocked up her mother while taking the waters in Baden. And now she found herself surrounded by domestics attending to every wish and whim. My grandfather even took her out to the movies.

Now, we all know of course that a motion picture in those days was a silent affair of grimacing people in black and white jerking about on tablecloths hung up as makeshift film-screens. It wasn’t a very dignified affair. But this here, my grandfather promised, was going to be different. After an hour on sun-baked roads, the perspiring couple parked the car and entered the chill of a pillared town hall with drapes between the columns, all in scarlet, the golden tassels touching the floor.

The seating was a mixed assembly of chairs, carried in from the storage room and put up in a semicircle towards a table covered under a green cloth. Behind the table steps were leading up to an elevated dais. A lonely piano‘s demure presence was barely noticed. Attired in shining silk, the tall impresario faced his incoming audience, asking everybody to be seated. He had an impressive coal-black beard and wore an even more impressive turban from which the hovering eye of a peacock feather kept flashing and nodding. He walked up to his audience and one by one, with a little squeeze to their shoulders, shook the gents by their hands and lifted the lady’s fingertips to his lips. My grandmother felt strangely fatigued and yet overtly alert. The dim space on the dais lit up and figures in blue burnouses wrenched themselves loose from the quavering mirage, riding their camels straight towards the audience. A wave of muted alarm passed through the rank but abated when the Bedouins made their animals kneel and dismounted.

My grandmother swore she could hear the hissing of the drifting sand. The sudden cluttering of the fronds in the palm trees startled her. It all seemed very real.

One of the unburdened pack animals hustled towards a tree with low hanging branches. My grandmother wondered why nobody in the audience seemed surprised to see in this African setting a hairy Mongolian camel with two humps. But then did anybody else actually see what my grandmother was seeing? Fingers were pointing, but no two people pointed at the same thing. My grandmother couldn’t take her eyes off the camel. It had a spring in every step of the padded feet and the animal’s joy in finding such a tasty tree remained with her as a picture of happiness for the rest of her life. It made her smile, but this smile was soon to be followed by a frown. Nobody in the picture unveiled the face and instead of eyes she saw only a pair of black hollows with two needle sharp lights suddenly flashing out. She felt a shiver running down her back. There was a smell of perspiration and bitter herbs in the air.

The impresario now positioned himself right in front of her.

From his turban, he pulled out the infernal peacock feather and swiped it over her brow; my grandmother winced and labored to breathe. The impresario’s figure began to disintegrate into purplish bundles of pulsing rods, probing the air like the thin tentacles of a strange, octopus-like creature. With a heavy sigh my grandmother passed out. When she came around she found herself bedded on the floor with her husband holding up her head and look at her with a worried expression. The ladies left and right fanned the air with newspapers and straw-hats.

“I told you not to wear a corset,” said my grandfather, “the season is too hot for this.” He unbuttoned the top of her blouse. She didn’t wear a corset. She was pregnant.

© – 3/10/2009 – by michael sympson, 1,000 words, all rights reserved