Digby is embarrassed. It’s a stupid thing to say to a man who has lived under the yoke of British rule from birth. But Banny can sound and seem more British than Digby. “I’m sorry—”
“Why be sorry, Digby? You’re the victim of a caste system. We’ve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable rights of the Brahmins. And the absence of any rights for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.”
The ship rounds the southern tip of India and heads up the Coromandel Coast. At midnight, Digby stands alone on deck. The black waves turn a fluorescent green and blue, as if a fire rages deep in the ocean. He’s the only witness to an utterly beautiful yet mysterious spectacle. (Only the next day does he learn from the steward that it was phosphorescent plankton, a rare sight.) It seems to underline for Digby that he has in the course of this voyage peeled off his past like a soiled glove. More so than ever, he has shed a Glasgow shattered by the Great Slump, shed its patter, shed his last living relative, shed everything but the festering wound it left on him. The only industry that thrived in Glasgow was violence. It bubbled out of the Gorbals behind the infirmary and from elsewhere in the city; it showed up in the casualty ward every night. As a houseman, Digby sewed faces that had been expertly sliced by the warring razor gangs, the Billy Boys or Norman Conks, always a symmetrical pair of slashes hooking up from the corners of the mouth to the ears, marking the victim for life with a “Glasgow smile.” Digby feels fortunate that his own scar is just one-sided; the smashed bottle was duller than a razor and left him with a jagged dimple next to his natural one. It is a pale stigma of a life he wants to forget. He could have forgiven Glasgow his scar, his disappointments, his mother’s suicide. That was hardly reason to leave; even misery, when familiar, has its own comfort. What he couldn’t forgive was that after all his slaving, after his singular and almost maniacal devotion to surgery, he’d come to the manned door and was denied the password. His mentor, Professor Elder, a man beyond caste, albeit from upper-caste Edinburgh, did his best to help, suggesting a way out. “I know a place where you’ll get tremendous experience, and with luck find great mentors in surgery. Have you considered the Indian Medical Service?” What’s fur ye won’t go by ye, Digby thinks. It was a phrase his mother would use: whatever is in his destiny will come to him, regardless.
When he disembarks in Madras, he feels he’s arrived on a new planet. The city has a population of six hundred thousand, and most of them are at the quay, or so it appears to Digby from the cacophony, the confusion, and the heat. He breathes in the odors of cured leather, cotton, dried fish, incense, and salt water, the top notes of the antique scent of this ancient civilization.
Stevedores pour from the ship’s hold like a column of ants, bent forward from the weight of gunnysacks held over a shoulder with a grappling hook, sweat glossing their black skins. Women clustering outside customs make a bouquet of bright green, orange, and red saris with bold patterns. He’s entranced by the punctuation of a glittering stone in the nose, a red dot on a gleaming forehead, gold dangling from the ears and echoing the heavy borders of the fabrics. The rickshaws and carriages lined up outside are painted in every color of the rainbow. The vibrant, uninhibited palette of Madras is a revelation. Something clenched within him unwinds.
In the customs shed, he watches Mrs. Ann Simmonds greet a small but stocky man, presumably her husband, the district collector: little joy is evinced by either party at this reunion. She marches off to a small car, her chin in the air, her stubby nose pointed in the direction of Westminster, and with a royal’s expression on her face.
“Oi! I said no! You insolent babu! Do you want a thrashing?”
Digby swivels around to see a red-faced Englishman rise from behind a customs desk to loom over Banerjee. The tableau sends a chill through him, a wrenching recognition that he is, by virtue of arrival, one of the occupiers; his is the inalienable right to be first off the gangway, receive a quick stamp of his papers, and not be talked to in this manner.
In the humid customs shed the hands of the clock have paused, waiting to see what’s next. Digby’s breath quickens in the hothouse air, and reflexively he takes two steps to intervene.
Just then, another customs official intercedes. All Banerjee seeks is to disembark for the twelve hours that the ship is berthed, so he can visit a friend in Madras before continuing north to Calcutta. The senior official gives his subordinate an impatient look, stamps Banerjee’s papers, and lets him leave. Banny’s gaze falls on Digby. His hooded eyes have turned hard as stone, expressing the dogged resentment and the unwavering resolve of a subjugated nation that bides its time. Then the look vanishes. He bestows a stoic smile on Digby and heads for the separate exit for non-whites. He doesn’t wave farewell.
CHAPTER 12
Two Big Ones
1933, Madras
The clerk from the hospital who meets him at the port is shocked that Digby has no trunk, just a shabby suitcase. They travel in a rickshaw pulled not by a beast of burden but by a man. The heat and a touch of mal de débarquement leave Digby disoriented, taking in the cow loitering in the middle of the broad avenue, the blur of dark faces on either side, the cobbler at work on the dusty pavement, the low-slung whitewashed buildings with hand-painted signboards, and the cluster of huts on the edge of a stagnant pond of water. They pull up at a bungalow not far from the harbor and close to Longmere Hospital, his new place of employment.
A short man in a white shirt, white trousers, and bare feet slips a jasmine garland over Digby’s head, then bows, his palms held together at chin level. Muthusamy is to be Digby’s cook and housekeeper. For someone who is used to calling a tin of sardines his breakfast, lunch, and dinner, Digby can’t fathom the notion of his own cook, let alone one who garlands him. Muthu’s white teeth are a beacon in his coal-dark face; his forehead has three horizontal streaks of ash—a vibuthi, as Digby learns later, a sacred Hindu marking that Digby will soon observe him apply each morning after lighting camphor and praying before the small icon of a god tucked in a kitchen shelf. Muthu’s salt-and-pepper hair is parted in the middle and oiled back; he radiates kindness. Digby bathes and then sits down to the meal Muthu has prepared: rice with what Muthu says is “chicken korma”—chicken in an orange-colored gravy. Digby is famished and the korma mixed in with the rice is delicious, a riot of completely new flavors on his palate. He finishes most of it before he belatedly notices that his mouth burns and his forehead blossoms with sweat. After dousing the flames with ice water he lays down on his bed under a sluggish ceiling fan. His last waking thought is that he must ask Muthu to tone down the combustible ingredients in his dishes until he is more used to them. He sleeps for eleven straight hours.