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Delhi, motor cars, rich people, English women with loud voices – “fancy! the Kingdom of Heaven filled with people like …” like my ayah and my friend Dhunia the sweeper? I hoped so, but in fact I knew it would not be low caste, untouchables, like that, but ‘untouchables’ like that beautiful, laughing English Lady. Now I know that they were unspeakables too, but that I learned too late to be much help. Not even Miss Whybrow and Mrs Thompson could teach me that; I had another twelve years to go before I would even have a chance to learn.
But Delhi: New Delhi! Isn't it splendid? If only I hadn't got to go to school. …
The train worked steadily, sometimes painfully over the stiffer gradients of the Western Ghats till it drew in to the terminus at Bombay. The railway station, like other architectural monuments of the British Raj, was a mixture of tawdry provincialism and Imperial domesticity which even in retrospect can evoke in me nostalgic feelings of great poignancy. I came in time to believe that these feelings were the substitute for what others called ‘homesickness’. But I had no home for which I could feel sick – only people and things. Thus, when I found myself alone in the playground of the Preparatory School in England where I kissed my mother a dry-eyed goodbye, I could see, above the hedge which separated me from her and the road which was the boundary of the wide world itself, her hat go bobbing up and down like some curiously wrought millinery cake carried on the wave of green hedge. And then it was gone.
Numbed, stupefied, I found myself staring into a bright, alert face.
“Which are you – A or B?' it said. Other faces had gathered.