Today's Reading
Shiv watched Joe with a group of young men who resembled him, men whose strong, confident jodhpur-clad thighs pressed into the flanks of horses as they played polo back in India. Shiv considered Joe's smoothness, an assured quality that came from a natural assumption of one's place in the world. What was it called, that? He recalled the prized falcons of Hyderabad Sind and the balletic precision with which they landed on their prey from on high. To be so highly trained that your responses were ingrained, bred in the bone, was to assume a privileged place in the world. He had not been trained to hunt, to discern weakness in others, to conquer. He felt incapacitated. His thin frame felt weak and puny to him. He didn't have it, what these men had.
But with a glass of champagne in one hand, which he had disliked at first sip, and a smoked salmon canapé in the other, he laughed at everything they said, and tried to suppress the intense loneliness that gripped him as he looked around the room. These were his country's oppressors and here he was, one of the chosen, sent to live among them, become like them. His father's parting words came to him now, the bewildered look on his face, as if he was reconsidering his decision to pack his son off to the land of their oppressors: "It's too late to wonder if this is the right thing. There's no avoiding it. You will come back an Englishman, for that is the only way to succeed in their world."
A wave of sound rose and fell around Shiv. He heard the polite laughs and ironical accents of the men and women around him now—the women, their jewelry tinkling as they reached for their glasses, a little tipsy and gay; the men, so well trained in social mores that even when their voices, emboldened by drink, grew louder, their laughs broader, they were still, always, within timbre, within the wave. Nothing cracked the air around them—a smooth social atmosphere hid all tensions, blanketed all desires.
He glanced around as the crowd became merrier. They soon lost interest, the novelty of a brown-skinned man who had landed so unexpectedly among them beginning to wear off. As the observer now rather than the observed, he viewed them as members of a tribe at war with his own, and himself as an interloper in their midst. The steamy damp from the cuffs of his trousers travelled up his legs like a tropical breeze. Never, he told himself, as he took in the flushed faces of the guests and heard their champagne-fuelled laughter. I will never become an Englishman.
Glasgow, 1941
On 31 May, 1941, The Empress of Scotland slips out of Glasgow harbour like the moon out of a cloud. Its gleaming hull cuts through midnight black waters as it sails up the Clyde estuary heading towards the Firth of Clyde. A young woman, just turned twenty-three, pins her eyes on the scene by the quay even as it slides out of sight. Though it was a foggy night, the top of the tower of St. Mungo's Cathedral could be seen, and once she's placed it, she knows exactly where her mother would be—there by the docks, still peering at the vanishing ship. She imagines her standing there, elderly before her time, a bent figure in her old tweed skirt and faded mackintosh, worn green wellies, grey hair sticking out from a scarf tied tightly around her head, and recalls her parting shot. "You take that ship right back, Mairi, my girl. India's no place for a young Scottish lass. Yer home's Glasgow, and don't yer ever forget it."
She takes a long, lingering look at the shoreline. The ship would sail past the Mull of Kintyre, then begin its long voyage through the Atlantic Ocean and across five seas—the Norwegian Sea, the North Atlantic Ocean, the South Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea. Her head spins just thinking of it. Water would be her element for the next two months. She follows the crew members indoors.
Mairi watches them wheel the gurney down a long, carpeted hallway. One of them stops by a door, turns the key in the lock. He opens it and stands back, "This is the room, miss." She examines it critically. Larger than her room at home, it has a bed against one wall; a desk and a chair; an armchair; a floor lamp for reading. The lamp has a red-fringed shade with glass beads hanging off the fringes, a decadent touch in an otherwise plain room. She turns the handle on the bathroom door. A tub, a sink, a toilet. Functional, spare, and adequate.
"We were told there would be a nurse tending to the patient. We removed the second bed so there would be more space for you to move around," he says. She nods, turns to look at her patient. He is unaware, still in a coma. Eyes closed, face impassive, body still and swathed in sheets, he looks incongruous—a young man who has seen the face of death and is still in shock from the encounter. The anxious pucker around his lips has gone. Maybe he's sensed that he's away from danger now, he's in safe hands. She reaches for his pulse. It beats as steadily as a metronome.
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