Digby steps outside. It’s the twenty-second of May, a quarter of the way into the century, a decade after a war wrought terrible slaughter. One more death hardly matters, but it does for him. His feet carry him away. He wants to find people, lights, laughter. Soon he’s in a pub, thick with revelers. He has to shout at the barmaid for his two pints. “For the granda and his mate,” he says, nodding to the back room. The taste is vile. He thinks of Archie Kilgour. Are you drinking tonight, you jakey? Yer a widower, did you know? As for his mother, he has no tears, only angry words. Did you think of me, Ma? Do you think you’re off to a better place?
He gets thrown out of the pub; he’s not sure why. Next, he’s in a small, dark, beery room where the drinking is serious and silent. He shoves in next to a group of lads who give him the evil eye. “Two pints for the granda,” he says again, but doesn’t bother to move to a table, drains his first glass at the bar. He notices the blue-and-white bunting on the wall facing him, then sees those colors echoed on the scarves of morose men. Fuck me, I’m in a Rangers’ pub! He’s trying not to laugh, but he can’t help it. “Fucking Rangers!” He shakes his head. Did he say that out loud?
A man tells Digby to come outside. Digby has a better idea: he’ll drink the second pint right where he is.
A fist hits him on his ear. A bottle is smashed, and something sharp flicks at the corner of his mouth. The publican comes around the beer-puddled counter and heaves him out on the pavement. “Bugger off before they finish yer smile, and you with it!” Digby stumbles round the corner, sobered by the recognition that these silent men might find killing him more diverting than drinking.
At the newsstand on the corner, a hundred identical handsome faces jeer at him, triumphant. LINDBERGH’S CROWNING HOUR, the banner headline reads. THE HERO OF AMERICA. The wetness trickling into his mouth tastes faintly sweet, faintly metallic. His sleeve is red. His eyes don’t want to focus. Could a man really have flown across the Atlantic? Yes! Says so in big letters. In a plane called the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh landed, his mother aloft. He feels no pain at all.
CHAPTER 11
Caste
1933, Madras
“Travel broadens the mind and loosens the bowels.” A street vendor’s lamb kebab in Port Said drops Digby to his knees, confining him to his cabin for two days, enough time to appreciate Professor Alan Elder’s parting words in Glasgow. By the time he recovers, they’re out of the Suez Canal and passing through the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Gate of Tears. This narrow strait, barely eighteen miles across, connects the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Off one bow, he sees Djibouti; off the other, Yemen. Save for a three-month posting in London, he has spent his twenty-five years on earth in Glasgow and might have spent the rest of his life there, never seen this confluence of waters, never discovered for himself that the English Channel, the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean, despite their individual personalities, are one. All water is connected and only land and people are discontinuous. And his land is a place where he can no longer stay.
Under his feet, the ship is alive, making groans and sighs. He paces the deck in a broad-brimmed hat, though it can’t keep the sunlight from bouncing off the water and tanning his face, highlighting the pale, jagged scar that creases his left cheek from the corner of his mouth to his left ear. The shifting moods and colors of the Arabian Sea—azure, blue, and black—mirror the ebb and flow of his thoughts. The horizon rises and then dips; the salt spray is cool on his face; he has the sensation of standing still while plunging toward his future.
He peeks into a first-class stateroom, ashamed of his curiosity yet awed by the sofas and plush chairs, the thick brocade curtains and the pocket doors that allow valets and maids to attend to their employers. A maharajah is on board; he and his retinue have booked all of First Class. Digby is one class below, with his own tiny cabin. There are two classes below his, the segregation so complete that he hears rather than sees them.
A rough sea brings on what is either seasickness or a relapse of the ailment from the lamb kebab. Being a doctor means he has no objectivity about his symptoms. When he’s absent from the dining room for two seatings, Banerjee, who has a seat at the same table, comes to check on him.
Alarmed to see that Digby is barely able to lift his head, Banerjee returns with broth and paregoric. The tincture’s camphor-and-anise odor settles in the cabin and quietens his stomach. Banerjee—or Banny, as he asks Digby to call him—is in his late twenties, baby-faced, with the complexion of a boy raised on milk and cream, with meat never having touched his palate; his light-brown skin, which he assiduously protects from the sun, is fairer than the tanned Digby’s. Banny seems too young to be the barrister he is, called to the bar after four years of study in London. The path he has taken is much like Gandhi’s at the tail of the previous century, an observation Banerjee makes quietly but with pride.
When Digby rejoins the dinner table, Mrs. Ann Simmonds, the wife of a district collector in the Madras Presidency, says, “Duck tonight,” as if unaware of Digby’s previous absence. Her wide face has no edges, no angles; she reminds Digby of a bulldog, and has the moist, sagging eyes to match. From their first day she took command of their table, acting like a stateroom passenger choosing to dine with the masses out of her largesse. Listening to her hold forth, as he has every night, Digby is reminded of his three-month posting at Saint Bart’s Hospital in London—the prize for a medal exam he topped in Glasgow in his third year of medical school. Until he got onto the Bart’s wards, he wasn’t aware that he had an accent, or that it made others assume that he was provincial and stupid. It was a rude awakening. He couldn’t shed the accent entirely but one could soften it; he had worked hard to stay clear of those words or phrases or pronunciations that typecast him. Not that such efforts have fooled Mrs. Simmonds, who largely ignores him. Now he overhears her say to the diner across from her, “We English know what’s best for India. When you get there, you’ll see.”
Later that night, Digby strolls the deck with Banny. Despite the bond they’ve formed, they haven’t discussed politics. Digby confesses his ignorance of the world outside of Glasgow, or even outside of the hospital. “I lived in the infirmary these last few years. I had no cause to read a newspaper unless it appeared under a wound dressing, or in a belly I was opening.” He’s been making up for it by studying the papers in the ship’s library. The headlines are about Germany’s intention to rearm despite the Treaty of Versailles. A belligerent new chancellor promises to lead the country out of its economic devastation. But there’s little news of India.
“You could ask Mrs. Simmonds.”
“No, thank you,” Digby says.
Banny smiles, polishing his lenses and squinting at Digby. “Why go to India, Digby?”
Digby sees clouds in the distance, arranged as though along a plumb line. He imagines land beyond. They’re alongside the west coast of India, passing Calicut or Cochin. “A long story, Banny, I’m afraid. I fell in love with surgery. I was a good student, then a good houseman in surgery. Eager. Dedicated. When I wasn’t on duty, I loitered in Casualty, hoping to scrub in on accident cases. But when it came time to be selected for a surgical postgraduate post in Glasgow, turns out I wasn’t in the right pew. Outside of Glasgow there wasn’t a chance. So I joined the Indian Medical Service, hoping to develop as a surgeon.”
“Being a Catholic, was that it? How did they know?” Banerjee asks. “Your name?”
“No. Mine could be Protestant or Catholic. Now, Patrick or Timothy or David would be a giveaway. But I’d gone on scholarship to St Aloysius’ College. A Jesuit institution. I could hardly hide that. But even without that, it’s as if I’m giving out secret signals.” Digby looks at his companion uncertainly. “I’m sure it’s hard to understand.”
Banerjee laughs. “Not at all. It’s quite familiar.”