Although
The Remains of the Day
won the Booker Prize and became a huge commercial hit worldwide, Ishiguro himself, always alert with his magnifying glass, referred to the novel as a “wind-up toy”; and as if in response to a book that could be read in only one way, he followed it up with an allegory of estrangement,
The Unconsoled,
so abstract as to be indecipherable even upon rereading. In
When We Were Orphans,
there is a feeling of his having broken through his self-consciousness to activate a passion that was previously submerged; and even as Banks’s attempts to keep up appearances—like his wilful blindness— nicely reflect those of the society around him, the book records unsparingly how the larger world’s machinations put all his innocence to shame.
The venturing onto foreign terrain leads to occasional melodrama here (“ ‘What you just saw in Chapei,’ ” a Japanese colonel says, with unlikely fluency, “ ‘it is but a small speck of dust compared to what the world must soon witness!’ ”); and the tendency to be overpunctilious is not entirely transcended: in the middle of the book, Banks suddenly adopts a ten-year-old Canadian girl, who is so peripheral to what follows that she feels like a narrative device—another orphan, another foreigner, a symbol of the responsibilities Banks neglects and a way of tying pieces of the plot together. Yet this very unevenness can sometimes feel refreshing—and even mark an advance—after the occasionally overworked perfection of books like
The Remains of the Day.
More important, Ishiguro uses the precedent of the International Settlement as a way of highlighting—and questioning— the very mingling of races that represents the main challenge (and possibility) of our universal Otherness. Salman Rushdie, in his celebrations of the new deracination, looks back to Moorish Spain to show how different cultures can live together in relative harmony; Michael Ondaatje, in his
English Patient,
imagines a desert in which individuals spin around one another like separate planets, no national divisions visible in the sand. Ishiguro, however, on this theme as on most is notably less sanguine than his contemporaries (his father, it’s interesting to note, grew up in the International Settlement). National identity is the language and the currency we use, he suggests, and even his Akira and Banks, at the age of six, refer all their triumphs at games to being Japanese or being English (even as they vie to say “old chap” more accurately than one another). In one of the most reverberant moments in the book—as well as the strangest and most typical—the small Banks asks a friend of his parents’, “ ‘Uncle Philip, I was just wondering. How do you suppose one might become more English?’ ” The older man, sounding like many people around us today, replies that “mongrels” like Banks, growing up amidst many cultures, may be lucky enough to exist outside traditional affiliations, and may even bring an end to war. Then, stopping, he corrects himself. “ ‘People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it’ll just collapse. And everything scatter, as you put it.’ ”
When We Were Orphans
traces the collapse of a civilization, and the scattering of just about everything, revealing how the very wish to belong is complicit in that unraveling (and watching the only home Banks has turn into a broken maze of refugees). And in its sadness, as in its willingness to stretch and experiment with realism, it reminds us that Ishiguro is as much a European as an English writer, alien in the deepest way. In many respects, in fact, the novelist he most resembles is that other disciple of Kafka’s, living in England for thirty years without ever becoming English, W. G. Sebald. Other than in The Unconsoled (the perfect title for all of Sebald’s work), Ishiguro has always been concerned with how war affects those not directly involved in it—the theme that Sebald has made his obsession—and how we try to get around all the things we do not want to say (or know). It is a curious coincidence, perhaps, that both writers have been conducting their enquiries into the end of Empire in an England where anti-Japanese and anti-German sentiment run high sixty years after the last war.
When Banks finally comes upon his much-missed family home in Shanghai, it is to find it made over by its new Chinese owners. When Sebald’s narrator, in the recently translated
Vertigo,
returns to his hometown in Germany, he can revisit his family’s old living room only by checking into a local inn. For both these writers, thrown into motion by the turns of history, foreignness in the modern floating world can only begin at home.
2000
A FAR-OFF AFFAIR
“But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead.”
—Barabas, in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta
The assault began, really, as soon as I set foot in my parents’ India last year. IF AGGRIEVED, said the sign in the Bombay customs hall, PLEASE CONSULT ASSTT. COMMISSIONER CUSTOMS. I wasn’t sure that Asstt. Commissioner Customs was very keen to see me, and, besides, I was mostly aggrieved by that extra “t” in “Asstt.,” but still I proceeded, head held high, into the merry mayhem. On one side of me was a sign offering a “Liquor Permit,” on the other, whatever a “Car Hailer” might be when he’s at home. On the far end of the hall, where I went to change my dollars, a sign informed me gravely, PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR DRAWERS ARE LOCKED PROPERLY. Looking down to make sure that all was as it should be with my underwear, I stepped out into the gloom, and found myself inside a wheezing knockoff of an ancient Morris Oxford. A “Free Left Turn” was to the right of us, and a “Passenger Alighting Point” to the left. On every other side, the ceaseless Indian anarchy was in full and vocal swing: buses saying SILENCE PLEASE on their sides, the mudguards of trucks responding HORN OK PLEASE, and my own little car making its own small contribution to democracy with a sticker on the back window: “Blow Your Horn/Pay a Fine.”
India is the most chattery country in the world, it often seems, and it comes at you in almost two hundred languages, one thousand six hundred and fifty-two dialects, and a million signs that scream from every hoarding, car hailer, and passing shop. But the strangest effect of all, for many a visitor from abroad, is that the signs are just familiar enough to seem completely strange. We passed a “Textorium” as we jangled into town, and a Toilet Complex. We passed the Clip Joint Beauty Clinic, the Tinker Bell Primary School, and Nota Bene “Cleaners of Distinction.” One apartment block advised all passersby, NO PARKING FOR OUT SIDERS. IF FOUND GUILTY, ALL TYRES WILL BE DEFLATED WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE.
Feeling more than a little prejudiced myself, I looked around in search of more useful guidance. YOGIC LAUGHTER IS MULTI-DIMENSIONAL, a sign in front of a decaying Dickensian manse announced. Beside it, between some pictures of chunky Technicolor movie stars, a board advised, DARK GLASSES MAKE YOU ATTRACTIVE TO THE POLICE. I could only imagine that they, like most of the notices around me, had been fashioned by some proud graduate of the course I had seen advertised in the national paper, flying in: “We make you big boss in English conversation. Hypnotize people by your highly impressive talks. Exclusive courses for exporters, business tycoons.”
In any other country in the world, duly hypnotized and impressed, I would have stopped there: taking note of English misplaced in translation, or imperfectly learned, is not a very useful exercise, especially if you cannot speak any of the almost two hundred local languages yourself. My Hindi, nonexistent, would have provoked more than multi-dimensional yogic laughter. Yet all the miscegenated signs in India speak for something more than just linguistic mangling, and something more poignant: they clutch at you a little with the plaintiveness of a child of a secret union that neither of its parents will acknowledge. A little, in fact, like that sad-eyed man who comes up to you outside your hotel in once British-Indian Aden, and asks you if you’d like to see the English cemetery.
I am entirely Indian myself, by blood, though born in England, and yet I never saw the incongruous merging of those cultures in their prime, or even the protracted divorce that followed upon their falling apart. But even for me, and even fifty years after what is known as “Independence,” a large part of the romance of India lies in the culverts and civil list houses, the cantonments and canteens that still dot the hill stations and tropical valleys of the subcontinent. In their day they stood for occupation, even oppression. But now, soothed by history’s progress, and standing for a liaison that neither party sought, they speak for something more wistful, to do with the colonizer colonized. And language—the words that startle and bewilder on every side—hints at something that official historians and politicians overlook. As you walk past an “Officers’ Mess,” across from a sign for the “Bombay Colour Sergeants,” you feel yourself in somewhere unique, not quite past and not quite present—the realm of Indlish, or Englian, or whatever you wish to call a curious marriage of inconvenience. (Zee TV in India actually broadcasts its news in what is called “Hindlish.”) On my trip across the subcontinent last year I was able, with some effort, to work out what “Free Foot Service” might be (in a temple, no less), and even to deduce what “fingers” stood for, on a menu (a shortened form of “finger chips,” or those kind of potatoes the British are always loath to call “French fries”); more than once I found out, the hard way, what it is to have a meeting “preponed” on you. But always I felt that I was speaking a language quite different from the English being spoken all around me (more Indians, of course, speak English than Englishmen), and came to feel that the one companion who’d been with me all my life, the English language, had stolen away into a corner and come back in a turban, a finger to its lips.
The hybrid forms of this unlikely tongue first came into being, it seems, when the merchants and adventurers of the East India Company arrived in India in the seventeenth century, bringing with them their words, their enclaves, and their aversion to all messes not of the officers’ kind. Very soon Shakespeare and the Bible were being recited around India. And yet—such is the logic of empires everywhere—the more the seeming invaders held on to India, the more India, somehow, held on to them. By the middle of the nineteenth century, fully twenty-six thousand words had traveled in the opposite direction, from the subcontinent back to England, and many of them referred to goods as indispensable as your
pyjamas
or your
punch.
Deeper than mere words, of course, were all that the words conveyed, as Mother England stocked up on
cashmeres
and
mangoes
and
loot.
To talk about Empire today is to break very quickly into a contention of “us” against “them.” But in its heyday it could never have been the black-and-white affair that polemicists recall (brown, more likely, and shifting, and full of unexpected greys). And today words are how we see the evidence of cultures flirting with one another and mingling and stealing into one another’s chambers; the signs of India—CAUSEWAY AND CROWDED LOCALITY AHEAD or POULTRY CARE CLINIC—are how we see how each was haunted by the other, and how the very sense of rich and poor got challenged and upended. Any Briton who reclined in a sense of superiority over the natives had, in Emily Eden’s apt words, the assumption “jungled out” of him, so that soon he was no longer sure whether he was in the light or in the shadows.
As I stepped into an ill-lit office in New Delhi last year, I found myself greeted by a mildewed copy of
Hobson-Jobson,
the great old cobwebbed lexicon of British India that began life as a series of letters and took its name, improbably, from an Englished version of “the wailings of the Mohammedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of Moharram—‘Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!’ ” And as soon as I opened it up, I was in another realm (more human and more mongrel than in the history books), learning that “ducks” referred to “gentlemen belonging to the Bombay service” and a “Lady Kenny” was a “black ball-shaped syrupy confection.” A “James and Mary,” I read on, was the name of “a famous sand-bank in the Hoogly River behind Calcutta.” The aged book inflected every last sense of “pish-pash” and offered the precise implication of “pootlynautch.” But more than that, it showed how foreignness and its opposite danced so close together that soon it became hard to tell one from the other. “ ‘Home,’ ” it says, in one of its more poignant definitions, “in Anglo-Indian and colonial speech . . . means England.”
For many Britons abroad, no doubt, home came quickly to mean something else, in-between, or nowhere at all: when the Englishman Fowler, in Graham Greene’s
Quiet American,
tells a Frenchman that he’s going back, the Frenchman says, “Home?” and Fowler says, quickly, “No. England.” And in Britain these days the home that many new writers commemorate is somewhere on the backstreets of Bombay.
Hobson-Jobson
can tell you the exact social standing designated by a “burra-beebee,” it can offer a good definition of “ticky-tock,” but it cannot begin to clear up more complex ideas of belonging.
And so simplicities begin to fly out the window, as opium became the largest export of British India and the opium of the masses began flowing in the other direction. These days, I suspect, every Englishman worth his salt—every
tycoon
or
pundit
or
thug
(all the words come, of course, from India)—knows what a
guru
and a
mantra
is, and what
yoga
connotes, and has very possibly partaken of them himself. India began by sending its
verandahs
to England, its
bungalows
and
juggernauts,
and very soon was following up with its
avatars,
its notions of
karma
and
nirvana.
“They gave us the language,” says a character in Hanif Kureishi’s
The Black Album,
“but it is only we who know how to use it.” And though that has the somewhat strident sound of agit-prop, it does remind us of one way in which the conqueror got taken over. Jane Austen has been embangled and set down in the drawing rooms of Calcutta in the work of Vikram Seth, and Dickens has been given a spin and relocated to a dusty Bombay apartment block in the novels of Rohinton Mistry. The Empire never left, it’s tempting to conclude; it just settled down in a backstreet in Madras, and started to tell its story from the other side.
To travel through India today, therefore, especially if you are following it through its English-language signs, is to see at every turn one culture getting under another’s skin, and into its heart and mouth and dreams. And the effect is intensified because the cultures of South Asia seem never to throw anything away, but simply take it all in and stir it up into the mix. You may occasionally be able to make out what is being said to you—DO NOT CROSS VERGE or WATCH FOR SHOOTING STONES—but any resemblance to the language you know is largely coincidental. As I went up into the Himalaya last year, past mouldering Anglican churches whose plaques recalled gallant soldiers killed by a bear (IN THE MIDST OF LIFE WE ARE IN DEATH), I was given instructions at every turn: IF MARRIED DIVORCE TO SPEED or DO NOT NAG WHILE I AM DRIVING. The value of the injunctions was only faintly undone by the fact that I still don’t know what many of them mean (NO DUMPING ON BERMS or WATCH FOR OCTEROI).
And even when, by some miracle, you can follow the words, they seem to bite their own tails by being placed in sentences that do everything they can to undermine their own solemnity. Indian English, when it is not overly formal, comes at you with the fatal tinkle of an advertising man who’s got his hands on the Ten Commandments: there’s always a trace of sententiousness in it, and yet the lofty sentiments are placed inside the jingly singsong of a children’s ditty. A decade before, traveling across my stepmotherland, I’d been struck by the signs that said LANE DRIVING IS SANE DRIVING or NO HURRY, NO WORRY, but now they had been joined by half a hundred others, trilling, RECKLESS DRIVERS KILL AND DIE, LEAVING ALL BEHIND TO CRY (or, a little more potently, RISK-TAKER IS ACCIDENT-MAKER). As I drove out of little settlements crammed with such instructions, the signs offered brightly, THANKS FOR INCONVENIENCE. And the majesty of such slogans is only slightly diminished by the fact that five hundred million Indians cannot read a word of any language, let alone the Jinglish commemorated on its roads, and show no signs of being swayed by LET US SOLICIT THE SERENITY OF SILENCE (BLOW HORN IF YOU MUST).
It can seem as if a whole new language had been dreamed up by a clergyman in cahoots with a mischievous schoolboy. They’ve drawn their inspiration from Lewis Carroll and pledged themselves to turn V. S. Naipaul on his head. Never use one word when thirty will suffice, they seem to say. Never use a simple locution if a complicated one will serve. Honor your “felicitations” as if you were an “affectee.” If you don’t blow your horn, after all, who will?
“The ceremonies should be quite pompous,” a friend declared, with sweet innocence, as I stepped into a marriage hall in Bombay, and I recalled that one memsahib who had never sailed back to England was Mrs. Malaprop. And when I opened
The
Times of India
(“Invitation price: 2 rupees,” it declares, inscrutably, on the cover), I found a whole section devoted to “matrimonial notices,” in which prospective brides were glowingly described as “homely” and “artful” and “wheat-coloured” (which, in the crazed logic of Indian English, means domestically minded, culturally inclined, and fair-skinned). Even at Hare Krishna Land, the center of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, the sign at the entrance extolled its guru’s “large propaganda program” and, inside, in the center’s school, a smaller board offered tips on “Blooming Manners.”
You do not have to be much of a polemicist to see, in this cheerful mingling of proportions, how a country of the poor can somehow make the playthings of the rich its own, and in that very act contrive to give the things a gravity and an innocence they would never have at home. India, of course, is the home of Sanskrit and of complex philosophies that little in Britain has ever matched; but what struck me, as I went through some of the least privileged parts of Bombay, was how the most ramshackle huts called themselves “Marriage Palaces” and old buses, if they did not style themselves “Stage Carriages,” had “Semi-Deluxe” written on their sides, or “Naughty” on their fronts. Even the most broken establishments (especially those, perhaps) call themselves “Honesty” or “Reliable” or “Dreamer’s Delight,” as if words still had a sympathetic magic here, and just to invoke a quality was to bring its blessing down among us.