At the Pictures
|
The wizard had not forgotten
his magic and dissembled as a raging fire, then turned into a tiger and
then the shape of a running creek. Yet no deception would spirit him
away and conquered he submitted in his own appearance and spoke at last
in human tones.
|
Virgil
|
to
Dawn
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
