and marrying girls from India. “They don’t like Indian boys,” she says categorically of such girls. “They think they are too orthodox. They marry the others—white boys. And Indian boys like to marry girls from India only.”
“I would like one family member to be abroad,” says her husband, to whom another man has just revealed a modern miracle: a pocket electronic diary.
Later, another home, this one waiting to say goodbye to its daughter, recently married, on her way in a few hours to join her husband in Toronto.
The men sit in the front living room. The scene is a little reminiscent of a wake. They look sombre, dejected, martyred, but liven up when we arrive with my jolly host. The father of the girl: sitting with a shawl around him, morose, making one-line statements that one doesn’t quite know how to respond to, indulging the many younger children with tender reminders to go to sleep, finally taking a boy under his shawl. He’s almost a child himself, with a daughter going away: and daughters are often called “mother” by their fathers.
In the other room the women are more relaxed and jovial. The bride appears in the front room once, can’t be more than twenty-two; she wears a red shalwar-kameez and is very beautiful. B.A., M.Sc., Krishan Chander tells me. He borrows ten Canadian dollars from me to give her as a present. She is his niece.
My last impressions of India, in New Delhi in the wedding season, are fleeting. I have seen so much in the last four weeks, I feel numbed. I visit the Gandhi memorial and the tombs of the great Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple, the poet and musician Amir Khusrau. I walk through Old Delhi and realize that here is another world I have not seen. But I know I am going to return, India has taken me back.
At a reception given by the British Council, finally I meet that institution of a man, the writer Khushwant Singh, who had written glowingly and generously of my first novel when it appeared in India. He gives me a warm embrace. Here I also meet the writerand journalist M. J. Akbar, who has written of these recent and previous occurrences of ethnic violence. He compares it to Bosnia. It is now that Krishan Chander becomes aware of the extent of what has been going on in Surat and Bombay. So busy has he been organizing Canadian-studies affairs, he has not had time to look at the papers. I didn’t know, he says. He tells me of an incident he witnessed on his street after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when the Sikhs of Delhi were victimized. He saw a corner store belonging to a Sikh being torched. And it turns out, he himself is a refugee from some part of current Pakistan.
Krishan Chander and his wife drive me to the airport in their white Maruti. He tells me that he now awaits a relation of his who is coming from England on the express purpose of going to his village and having a twenty-year-old curse lifted from his daughter, also in England. Indians are tribal, says Krishan Chander’s wife, a school principal; all except the educated ones, she adds.
Ahead of us, a commercial vehicle. On its back a decorated sign: “Horn please!”
Delhi: The Burden of History
Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
T. S. ELIOT , “Gerontion”
Enigmas to Uncover
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
EDWARD FITZGERALD , The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
B ECAUSE D ELHI WAS THE FIRST CITY where I landed, I have always returned to it; from here I have departed for various
“I would like one family member to be abroad,” says her husband, to whom another man has just revealed a modern miracle: a pocket electronic diary.
Later, another home, this one waiting to say goodbye to its daughter, recently married, on her way in a few hours to join her husband in Toronto.
The men sit in the front living room. The scene is a little reminiscent of a wake. They look sombre, dejected, martyred, but liven up when we arrive with my jolly host. The father of the girl: sitting with a shawl around him, morose, making one-line statements that one doesn’t quite know how to respond to, indulging the many younger children with tender reminders to go to sleep, finally taking a boy under his shawl. He’s almost a child himself, with a daughter going away: and daughters are often called “mother” by their fathers.
In the other room the women are more relaxed and jovial. The bride appears in the front room once, can’t be more than twenty-two; she wears a red shalwar-kameez and is very beautiful. B.A., M.Sc., Krishan Chander tells me. He borrows ten Canadian dollars from me to give her as a present. She is his niece.
My last impressions of India, in New Delhi in the wedding season, are fleeting. I have seen so much in the last four weeks, I feel numbed. I visit the Gandhi memorial and the tombs of the great Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple, the poet and musician Amir Khusrau. I walk through Old Delhi and realize that here is another world I have not seen. But I know I am going to return, India has taken me back.
At a reception given by the British Council, finally I meet that institution of a man, the writer Khushwant Singh, who had written glowingly and generously of my first novel when it appeared in India. He gives me a warm embrace. Here I also meet the writerand journalist M. J. Akbar, who has written of these recent and previous occurrences of ethnic violence. He compares it to Bosnia. It is now that Krishan Chander becomes aware of the extent of what has been going on in Surat and Bombay. So busy has he been organizing Canadian-studies affairs, he has not had time to look at the papers. I didn’t know, he says. He tells me of an incident he witnessed on his street after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when the Sikhs of Delhi were victimized. He saw a corner store belonging to a Sikh being torched. And it turns out, he himself is a refugee from some part of current Pakistan.
Krishan Chander and his wife drive me to the airport in their white Maruti. He tells me that he now awaits a relation of his who is coming from England on the express purpose of going to his village and having a twenty-year-old curse lifted from his daughter, also in England. Indians are tribal, says Krishan Chander’s wife, a school principal; all except the educated ones, she adds.
Ahead of us, a commercial vehicle. On its back a decorated sign: “Horn please!”
Delhi: The Burden of History
Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion.
T. S. ELIOT , “Gerontion”
Enigmas to Uncover
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.
EDWARD FITZGERALD , The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
B ECAUSE D ELHI WAS THE FIRST CITY where I landed, I have always returned to it; from here I have departed for various
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