The other motherland

Though I’m culturally indebted to London, I haven’t visited there in decades because my daughter, who was a student there last year, says it’s frighteningly expensive. It is hard to believe that in 1964, months after I was born, my father, not long graduated from Darbhanga Medical College, reached Heathrow airport with only three pounds in his pocket. He left the airport and walked down a road, carrying his suitcase, when a Sikh gentleman stopped him and asked him where he was going. To the Indian YMCA in central London, my father answered. (It’s at Fitzroy Square, under the shadow of the Post Office Tower, down the road from Henry Perowne, the hero of Ian McEwan’s Saturday.) You’re walking in the opposite direction, the gentleman said. The sardar, a worker at Heathrow, took pity on my father and took him home to his family for a hot meal and a warm bed. I can’t imagine what would happen if today, with only three pounds in my pocket (or whatever it might be once adjusted for inflation) I were to land up in London, a city now associated with dubious bankers, corrupt Russians, playboy sheikhs, and spoilt Bollywood stars.

My previous visits to London were as a child, when our family lived in England till 1971; I actually lived there during my MA, staying for a couple of weeks at the Indian YMCA, 22 years after my father did; and I visited London during a 2004 visit to Wilton Park for a India-Pakistan track II conference. I wanted to visit in 2009, when Blur had a reunion concert at Hyde Park, but the ranking British diplomat in Chennai (where I worked and lived) could not swing a ticket (they sold out online within an hour or so). And whenever I amuse myself with fantasies of travelling abroad, it seems that with London so expensive, one might as well visit New York, which long ago displaced London as the Centre of Humanity.

Watching the Olympics these days will tell you nothing about London except that it has been raining, given the way athletes have been splashing around in the track and field meets. In any case, the only events where India seemed to have a medal chance are the ones held indoors. The opening ceremony was too late for me, though I hear it was wonderfully eccentric. I consoled myself by reading Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party and by watch ing several short films of Wallace and Gromit, including the insanely hilarious A Matter of Loaf and Death.

Of course England is always accessible to us and for me, it is on hand in the books interspersed in the current stack on my bedside table: Anthony Beevor’s The Second World War, David Kynaston’s Austerity Britain, Kinglsey Amis’s The King’s English, and Piers Brenden’s The Fall and Decline of the British Empire, 1781-1997. It’s also there in my music collection, which, incidentally, began with a now-lost vinyl record that my mother bought in London back in the late 1960s. It was a compilation of The Beatles’ hits, though when I hit 12 or 13, I realised it was not actually by The Beatles themselves, but by unknown bands doing “covers” (my mother must have been misled by the large title on the cover which said something like Greatest Hits of The Beatles, missing the finer “as performed by others”). I never had the heart to tell her; she was initially puzzled when I started playing the real versions, but I guess she eventually caught on.

My mother is what pretty much what defines the memory of my life in England between 1965 and 1971, since my father was always busy with work and left to my mother the job of raising me and my brother, younger by two years and born in Cardiff, Wales. She took up painting and for some years, my grandfather’s house in Muzaffarpur had several portraits of my brother and of me, subjects with expressions of infant bafflement, until time conspired to make those paintings vanish in thin air. She took us out to the park. She indulged us our devotion to Bobby Charlton of Manchester United (and the 1966 World Cup champions). She let me collect comics, which I long lost to dust. Also, she introduced me to reading, first through Enid Blyton (how much more English could we have been?) and then through Agatha Christie, whose genius I now realise was not in the plotting but in the setting of her novels. Like PG Wodehouse, Christie evokes upper-class England of nearly a century ago, and it is as real and tangible as the seedy underclass of inner London, at the other end of the 20th century, that Martin Amis evokes in London Fields.

So when I catch a glance of the Olympics these days, I don’t think of the LIBOR scandal or of Europe’s bottomless decline or of the incredible feats of Chinese swimmers or even of how exasperating Indian sport can make you. I don’t think of visiting. What I think of is my mother; and to her I say, get well soon.