35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘THERE’S BLOODLETTING AS WE SPEAK’
Sinhas as if they were gods. And, like most wealthy Indians, Lord
Sinha treated menials like menials. Everyone knew where he stood,
though, and every system needs order, according to its rulers.
When the sleepy fellow who carried over our tray of gin fizzes
managed to spill one, Sinha snapped angrily at him in Bengali, as if
the man had deliberately spilled the drink. Then he turned to me,
shaking his head and sighing.
‘These blacks!’ he said. ‘They’ll never learn.’
Blacks? I recall thinking, noticing as if for the first time that Lord
Sinha was no darker than I – and that the bearers were black. Caste,
of course, means colour. South or North, the high-caste Indians were
all big-boned and pale-skinned; and hard labour was the province
of small black folk.
Huge clouds the colour of bruises hung over the Ganges delta as I
landed in Calcutta on July 17, 1992, spilling rain in torrents so
heavy you were drenched in half a second. This brooding darkness
in the sky at noon made the city feel doomed, saturated in its sin.
‘This country needs a dictator to sort its problems out,’ a
businessman from Delhi had informed me on the plane.
‘What, like Stalin?’ I’d replied.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Like Hitler.’
I thought of his words now as I passed through the city’s streets.
Lady Sinha was right: Calcutta did look worse. There were now
many grades of slum, sprawling for miles in every direction on the
outskirts, and occupying any and every available patch of land in
the city itself. Some homes were fortified tents; others were buckled
and sagging structures improvised from scrap corrugated tin,
flattened-out gasoline cans, oil drums, palm fronds, bamboo, and
various wooden containers still bearing stencilled names. Entire
families camped around damp, smouldering fires under old burlap
awnings tied to trees on muddy patches of open ground – sometimes
those in the middle of major roads. A river of people holding
umbrellas like a funereal black Chinese dragon miles long flowed
down every pavement. People were soaked, spattered with patterns
of dripping mud from passing cars. Washing hung out hopelessly
on the railings of balconies in crumbling low-rise buildings made
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