Mahatma Gandhi’s Pen
by Vishwas R. Gaitonde
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The sculptor was merging with his creation, his every chip made with quiet confidence. The audience, whose hundred eyes followed his deft hands as he chiseled away rapidly, did not exist for him, not even when a collective gasp of appreciation or an audible sucking in of the breath swept through the crowd like a wave as they perceived something beautiful, intricate, delicate, take shape under what had seemed a flurry of careless strokes.
I was astonished that the sculptor’s imposing craft could be displayed at all, that the gigantic block of ice continued to stay solid as he chipped away. The London sky pullulated an uncertain grey light on this wintry day. The people around me stood bundled up in their coats, scarves and mittens, but I didn’t think it cold enough for a block of ice to resist melting. Yet the sculpture that the artist had completed — two intertwined dolphins, each looking the other straight in the eye while their lips puckered into Madhubala smiles — stood proud, with not as much as a puddle of water on the slate flagstones beneath. The pure blue light that exuded from within the sculptures put to pale everything around them.
Now the artist worked on his second piece, a castle complete with battlements and turrets. I had dropped into to Covent Garden to check out the fruit market for produce, as I sometimes do, and was drawn to the sculptor in the piazza who was keeping the crowd so entranced, the people at the back on tiptoe leaning over those in front.
“Such a bloomin’ waste of time and effort. So much heart pouring into something that will only last for a few hours.” A half-familiar, rasping voice zinged that sentence into my ear while a hand crushed my left shoulder.
I half-turned, and gazed into the sardonic face of Jimmy D’Mello. An unpleasant surprise, but I hid it. D’Mello frequently made visits to London — here today, gone tomorrow — but the Covent Garden market was an unlikely place to run into him.
“Silly people, lost in their own admiration,” D’Mello went on, unperturbed, not bothering to lower his voice, heedless to whoever might hear. “The man’s an artist but also a fool, using the wrong medium to display his craft. Ice melts. Now, a diamond is forever. You know that, don’t you, friend? Come, let’s move on, surely there are better things to do.”
He pulled me out of the crowd as he talked. “We’ve always met in situations where a proper conversation was impossible. I’m staying at the Waldorf, around the corner. Come, let’s have a talk over coffee — for once, you can enjoy the coffee without having to serve it.”
I ignored the taunt and we walked down the street to Aldwych. I wondered why he’d even want to have coffee with me and how I might shake him off as soon as possible. But without giving offense; a pauper would be a numbskull to offend a millionaire.
* * *
Had my wife not started a catering service in London, I might never have met D’Mello. Our families had lived in bungalows in Uganda. We came to England penniless. Our fall was precipitous, shocking. The Ugandans had always resented us Indians because we were a prosperous community. Their animosity was uncalled for, because we had got nothing on a bejeweled platter, not one scrap.
The British transported our ancestors from India to East Africa as labor. People transplanted into new soil could be more easily controlled than the locals. The colonists said the locals were indolent and lazy, that Africans shied from hard work; no sweat soiled their squeaky-clean brows. But the Africans watched with envy as the hard-working Indians inched their way up from poverty to prosperity.
And then it all fell apart. We knew we were resented, even hated, by the Ugandans, but we Indians kept the country running and therein lay our security. Or so we thought, but Idi Amin Dada had plans we knew nothing about until he trumpeted them. He expelled Indians from the country: leave within ninety days or forfeit your life. We stayed until the last minute — surely the pig-headed idiot would see sense and reverse his decree? We called his bluff, only it wasn’t a bluff, and we, beaten animals, frantically scrambled out into uncharted waters with whatever we could carry, losing even portions of that to soldiers who had no qualms about stealing from us as we boarded the buses.
Newspapers gave the impression that Britain welcomed us but the truth is that it took us under duress, grudgingly. My distress over the shabby treatment was quelled by the thought that I, at this very moment, might be stretched out on a torture rack in one of Big Daddy Amin’s dungeons. I learnt how to be a refugee, though I felt degraded, belittled.
Even the people who came forward to help us did not appreciate our full situation. To them, we were the wretched of the earth from some African tenement hellhole, illiterate, ignorant and lazy. Could we be anything else? The assumptions that were near-impossible to uproot. I was well educated, had successfully run a business in Kampala, and could have run rings, circles and ovals around all the smug Englishmen strutting around in pin-striped suits in their cozy corporate world in the City. But I would never be able to enter their world. I saved money for months before I could buy an ill-fitting second-hand suit. I had no papers to prove my schooling or my track record, and I bore the taint of “refugee.”
Tainted now, but not forever. I had no doubt we’d make it big in England some day. A Bangladeshi friend and I started a small furniture business that came along nicely in Plaistow in London’s East End. My wife ran an Indian eatery nearby, on Barking Road. It was a small establishment but situated on a busy thoroughfare. Customers who dropped in to sample our food always returned.
Then a customer talked my wife into providing the food for a tea party, and that was the start of the catering service. As my partner easily managed the furniture business, I handled the catering requisitions from important clients. I harbored hopes of establishing a classy restaurant in London’s West End; an idle daydream right now, but one that was not unachievable.
Jimmy D’Mello was a guest at a party where we catered. He was doing a rotten job of masking his boredom and finally wandered to the far corner of the hall where I stood. He complimented me on the food and conversed genially. I was in thrall that a guest at such a lavish event would notice, let alone chat, with the caterer.
I had no idea he was half-Indian. With his pastel pink skin, strapping height, and shock of blue-black hair, I took him to be an Irishman. But his speech belied his looks; his accent was anything but Irish. It was not Cornish, it was not Scottish, it was not Yorkshire, and I was irked because it had such a familiar ring. The more he spoke, the more annoyed I became at my inability to nail his accent. The host of the party, the man who had engaged our services, seemed annoyed as well but for another reason. Caterers came on time, did their thing and left; they did not rub shoulders with the guests. I hoped to God the host understood that D’Mello, not I, kept the banter going.
After two parties, D’Mello pretty much extracted my life history with his questions while he crammed my samosas into his mouth and dabbed at the chutney dripping on his chin with a napkin. Naturally, I could not probe into his life. But the party hosts, curious about why D’Mello spoke to me at such length, chatted me up to discover what we had talked about. In the process, I learnt a few things about D’Mello.
He was from South Africa. That explained the familiar accent. A business magnate, he had his fingers in many pies — textiles, processed food, precious metals — and he divided his year between London, Amsterdam, Antwerp, and New York. He had gone to school in India.
What the party hosts neglected to tell me I unearthed from other sources. D’Mello’s mother was an Indian-South African from Durban. His father was white but his identity remained unknown, as did his ancestry: Afrikaner or British. Little Jimmy, born on the wrong side of the blanket, was packed off to India as a young boy and brought up by the D’Mellos, an Anglo-Indian couple.
The official line was that the boy had been sent to India to be raised by his grandparents after his parents in South Africa died in a car accident. The D’Mellos were an elderly couple who kept to themselves, and their neighbors vaguely knew that their children lived abroad. So the sudden appearance of a grandson did not cause much of a commotion beyond a raised eyebrow, not even when the D’Mellos, an ordinary middle-class family, found the money to give Jimmy a handsome schooling in a private boarding school.
The grown-up Jimmy eventually made his way back to South Africa and established himself in the business world. Evidently his father — whoever he was — took excellent care of his son, short of publicly acknowledging him.
D’Mello must have taken to me in some way, because he repeatedly hired me to cater the parties he threw on his London visits. He owned a large Edwardian manor in Harefield on the outskirts of the city. Southall, so close to Harefield, was chock-a-block with Punjabi eateries. D’Mello could have engaged one of them rather than somebody like us from way across town. He paid us extra to cover transportation and he tipped magnificently, though he did not call it a tip but an “appreciation.” My wife and I felt honored and did our best to provide the tastiest Indian food that anybody could get in London. Moreover, we had at least this in common — both of us had been treated ingloriously in the country of our birth, he because of his dubious ancestry and I, on the diktat of a tyrant.
D’Mello had a nickname in South Africa: Arse Full. I wanted to shake the hand of whoever coined it. D’Mello’s monologues were often affected and pompous, and he really seemed “full of it.” Then I discovered it wasn’t “Arse Full” after all, but an Afrikaans word with a similar pronunciation: Aasvöel, ‘vulture’. The nickname was a misfit. D’Mellow was heavily built, a six-footer, and very hairy. The black hair curled up on his forearms. His chest hair seemed hell bent on butting its way out through the spaces between his shirt buttons and from above his collar. Hairy Ape or Gorilla was a better sobriquet than Vulture.
Whatever he was, vulture or ape, just about everybody regarded D’Mello to be a shady character. They only differed on how dark the shade was. Some said he made sure he stayed within the boundaries of the law although he had questionable ethics. Others were blunt: he was a crook who had never been caught.
This thought stayed with me. I had once asked him how he traded with South Africa at the time he had lived in India, a period when apartheid was king in South Africa and India’s robust anti-apartheid policies forbade Indians even to visit South Africa; the prohibition was printed in Indian passports.
D’Mello made a rude spitting noise. “You can get around any rule, friend. All an Indian passport holder needed was a South African citizen to vouch for him. The immigration officer at the airport issued an entry permit, a separate document to be surrendered at the time the visitor departed the country. The passport remained clean, no entries, no stamps. Oh yes, all the nations imposed sanctions on South Africa but, believe me, they all broke their own laws; the countries that condemned South Africa the loudest traded with it the most.”
D’Mello’s shifty reputation certainly did not deter the high and the mighty from attending his parties. The worldliness showed in the texture of their clothes, their wristwatches, rings and necklaces, and in the hum of their voices and their false laughter. At one party, I noticed several industrialists of Indian lineage in the room, some of the wealthiest men in Britain. A mixed crowd milled around on other occasions but all its members came from the elite.
Some of these events also boasted of a medley of cuisines. Besides our catering service there were others: Italian, German, Lebanese, Brazilian. The guests gorged on the variety on offer but undercurrents of tension ran between the caterers: whose food was the most sought after, who ended up with the largest amount of leftovers to cart away or dump?
I did my best to ignore the other caterers and watch the guests, who were as diverse as the food. The Faisals, Rasheeds and bin Abdullahs genially exchanged overdone smiles while rubbing elbows with the Epsteins and the Horowitzes as they sipped Scotch and champagne and dug into delicacies that were neither kosher nor halal. They spoke about the most banal things with an unnatural bonhomie, as though following a script that only the privileged were privy to. I wondered about each one’s hidden agenda; it was not affinity for Jimmy D’Mello that brought them to his parties.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Vishwas R. Gaitonde
