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
|
My
grandfather owned possessions in the South of India, close to the
French
enclave at Pondicherry, later to become famous for Sri Aurobindo’s
Ashram. At
the time Sri was not yet the sage and philosopher of “Integral Yoga”
from the
fifties. Instead he attended conventions of Indian nationalists and the
authorities considered him a dangerous radical. My grandfather had
other things on his mind. His first wife had passed away after a
miscarriage. The widower
approached a
dating agency, letters and pictures went to and fro – it took weeks for
a
letter to cross the Indian ocean – and finally he came to Hamburg to
see for himself. Granny, too, traveled some distance before they could
met; she came from Baden, a spa in the South of Germany.
He looked at her, she looked at him, they
liked what they were seeing. In January, 1911, they took passage 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!” We both chuckled. I like it too with the
lights on. 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,” who 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 a certain
tension, almost anxiety. Gradually the dim space on the dais began
lighting up. Figures in blue burnouses wrenched themselves loose from
the wavering mirage and rode 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. Veiled women
began pitching camp.
My grandmother swore she could hear the
running water and the hissing of the drifting sand in the wind. The
sudden cluttering of the fronds in the palm trees startled her. It all
seemed so very real.
One of the unburdened pack animals hustled
towards a tree with low hanging branches. 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 every time she told the
story. The smile was followed by a frown. Nobody in the picture
unveiled the face and instead of eyes be she saw only a pair of black
hollows with two needle sharp lights suddenly flashing out. It made her
shiver. There was a smell of perspiration and bitter herbs.
The
impresario now stepped up and 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, 1,001 words, all rights
reserved
