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Though we Indians agitated for years for the ouster of the British from India, most of us barely knew any Englishman or European and plenty of had not even seen one, not to mention spoken to 1. In all of my 20-odd years in Bombay, I had come throughout solely 4 or 5 ‘white’ males. One was a police sergeant or commissioner who had saved me from near-death in a highway accident and the opposite was a Justice of the Peace who later grew to become director of instruction within the state and wound up with a knighthood.
The British and the Indians led separate lives, each geographically and socially. They lived in bungalows, we in chawls. They ate on the Taj and went for morning walks at Malabar Hill. They hardly ever attended our colleges, for, in the event that they had been youngsters of civil servants and plenty of had been, they went to public colleges again house. For us going to England was out of the query; for them, England was house. And, after all, they had been the rulers and poor us, we had been the dominated.
The primary Englishman I got here to know was a policeman. In truth, he was a Welshman known as Jones who was high-up within the Bombay police. He occurred to be at a highway junction close to our faculty, when a tram practically ran over me, a school-going boy of ten. The person put me in his automotive and took me to a hospital, the place even the nurses had been ‘white’. It should have been an ‘English solely’ hospital however for some cause, I used to be not handled in another way. And once I was discharged, I used to be given a giant cake and requested to keep away from trams!
The story of the second Englishman is a bit of sophisticated. He had a double-barrelled title, the sort viceroys used to have and I usually thought he was descended from royalty, which he could properly have been. I met him thrice, as soon as as an official of the schooling division, then as a district Justice of the Peace who practically despatched me to jail throughout the ‘Give up India’ motion after which once more, as a overseas service official in London, with a knighthood earlier than he retired.
My first encounter with him as a director of schooling in Bombay is extra memorable. He had visited our faculty in reference to a operate and there was some type of a debate wherein I used to be a speaker. He was apparently fairly impressed and took me to his workplace in his automotive and introduced me with a number of thick books, together with ‘Oliver Twist’ by Charles Dickens, my very first English novel, in actual fact, my first English guide.
A couple of years later, by which period he had turn out to be a decide, we met in a courtroom in Pune, he within the decide’s high-backed seat and me earlier than him, together with many different college-going boys, as some type of a detenu. Some 20 or 30 of us had been stepping into a procession in August 1942 after we had been arrested and put up earlier than him.
I have no idea whether or not he recognised me, however he smiled and requested what I had been as much as, throwing stones at a police station on a wet afternoon. Truly, we weren’t throwing stones and had been distant from a police station. After a fast trial, we had been let off with a warning, although we had been by no means informed what the warning was. 5 years later, I used to be in London, and so apparently was my English pal, striding down the strand, like a person possessed. He had returned house, together with a number of others, after we grew to become free and was working in Whitehall. The imperial look had disappeared and he seemed extra like a barely dishevelled Alec Guinness as much as his normal methods in Notting Hill pubs. I, alternatively, had gone up on this planet and was not solely working for Krishna Menon in India Home however attending glittering champagne events in Mayfair, ogling girl this and girl that and having a ball.
I obtained a sense that my pal was in some type of intelligence job after years in India as a member of the ICS however after all, he mentioned nothing. Englishmen, I had learnt, by no means say something until you drive them to and even then, it’s by no means the entire fact. That’s solely why they make such fantastic spies. I by no means obtained to know his actual title. Nevertheless it was actually not James Bond!
This text was first revealed on December 12, 2009.
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