Category:

PROLOGUE

London, January 1931

It was raining, English rain, that first night when he came to England. Thin, fine icicles that fell at a slant and made incisions. Standing outside Victoria Station, waiting for a cab, he felt its needle pricks pierce his skin like markings. This is how England claimed you—through its rain. His hands and face burned and tingled. He felt alive, his senses acutely picking up every impression, from the stone in his shoe to the gaslights rippling through puddles, their slight hiss. Exhausted yet exhilarated at having finally arrived at his destination, he noted how unsuitable for this alien cold and damp his thin tropical trousers and shoes were. The rain had already seeped through them, and the woolen coat he was wearing, which would have weathered a cool wave in the hill stations of India, was as useless as a rag here. Ah, how it reached for his bones, the chill damp. A low, whistling wind funneled through his clothes and up his neck; warmed by body heat, it seeped out of him like smoke coming out of the chimneys of London's homes. He scanned the traffic on Victoria Street for a cab. When one drew up, the cabbie rolled down his window and said, "If it's East London you're wanting to get to, I can't take you."

"No," he replied, his teeth chattering, his lips swollen with cold. "It's 24 Gloucester Square."

"Hop in, then."

 

Shiv lugged his suitcases into the cab and sank back into the seat. Fatigue held him now in a vise. From Karachi to Bombay, a two-day train journey; from Bombay to Marseille by ship—seventeen days that covered nearly seven thousand miles on the SS Rajputana. Then waiting to board the ferry at Marseille for Dover, and finally, the train from Dover to London. He sighed, drawing cold air into his lungs. Everything he touched was freezing. He hugged himself for warmth. The dampness of his clothes and the lack of heat in the cab made him certain he would catch some terrible disease.

"Raining nonstop since last night. Hardly anyone out this evening. Reckon they've all taken the tram or the underground home." Chatty and jocular, occasionally whistling during silent pauses, the driver was beginning to get on Shiv's nerves. He finally screeched to a halt outside a house on a quiet street. "Here you go, mate," he said, doffing his cap and smiling broadly at Shiv when he received an overly generous tip. The cab suddenly seemed like a place of warmth to Shiv, though his teeth had been chattering from the cold all the way and his nerves were at knife-edge. Even before the tip, the cabbie seemed not to know that Shiv was one of the colonized, the people his people lorded it over every day back home in India. Shiv had been treated with deference and courtesy in a normal world where everyone who got into his cab was an equal. "Cheerio, sir," the man said as he left the cab.

Standing outside the door of the house, with his suitcases on either side of him, Shiv felt his heart beating. He felt fear and impatience both. As he had walked out of his father's home with the family to board the ship for England, sobs threatened to break his cool exterior, a façade both he and his family needed so they could do the unthinkable—bid goodbye to one another. Now that he was here, the other side of parting—desolation and uncontrollable anxiety—bared its teeth. Had he felt this back home, he wouldn't have come, he told himself. He badly needed a pee and thought about his hosts, an English family who had offered to take him into their home, with growing nervousness. His father had met Mr. Polak on a trip to South Africa to see Mr. Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was then living in Johannesburg. The two men had become close friends, and when Mr. Polak visited them in Karachi, years later, Shiv had been a nine-year-old boy. "I want to be a lawyer like you so I can save the world," he told a bemused Mr. Polak. His moment had come. He stood outside the Polaks' door shivering uncontrollably. His teeth chattered. More than likely, his host wouldn't recognize him.

There was no going back now.

As his finger went to the doorbell, the door opened. A young couple, arm in arm, stopped at the door and looked him over, their smiles fading. "Yes, can we help you?" the woman asked in a formal tone of voice.

"I'm looking for Mr. Polak. I'm Shiv Advani and I believe he's expecting me?" He hadn't meant it to sound like a question. His voice sounded weak, unsure.

The young man by the woman's side gave her a quizzical look. She frowned at Shiv. But then, just as quickly, recognition seemed to run through her. "Oh my goodness," she said, clutching her companion's arm. "Of course, it's the Indian who will be staying with them while he's at the Inns of Court." She turned to him. "They were talking about you earlier. You're a day early," she said. Shiv stood in the doorway, his mind calculating the distance he had come, to be told he was too early. "I'm sorry," he said, deeply uncomfortable. "I'm sure the telegram..." She glanced at his luggage, noting, no doubt, the wet edges of his thin trousers, the skimpy orange silk scarf around his neck. "You'd better come in," she said. "No use standing there, getting wetter than you already are."