By: Ganesh Saili
‘Oye! Kala-angrez aa gaya!’ Austin’s catcall sliced through the morning air. There was no ignoring it.
My fault was that I was twenty-three years old and teaching English at the college, and perhaps I, too, must have been a little cocky.
Rescue came when my colleague, Professor Sudhakar Misra, mentioned that Austin’s name, as entered in his attendance register, was, believe it or not, ‘Austin William Benjamin Makepeace McGregor’ – quite a mouthful, that!
The tables had turned. Now the boot fits the other foot!
‘How did you get such a long-winded name? Which tombstones in the cemetery did your parents steal these names from?’
Crushed, the catcalls ceased. We became good friends, and life moved on.
Rewind time, and I see a young girl, still in her teens, accompanying my father to Mussoorie. This was her first time leaving her village; the only language she knew was Garhwali. Of course, she did pick up a smattering of Hindi over the years. Fortunately, she spoke to me in Garhwali (a language that now comes easily to me).
When I was five years old, I was sent to a school run by the Garlahs – three of them – Edith, Doris, and their brother Cecil, who looked after twenty pupils. It is to them that I owe a debt of gratitude for opening the doors of Anglo-India to me. English soon became my second language.
The eldest, Doris Garlah, was an accomplished math teacher who taught at the Railway School of Oak Grove in Jharipani. She is remembered for giving the girls ‘the treat of treats’ in 1960 by permitting them to tune into the radio broadcast to hear Princess Margaret say ‘I do’ as she wed the Earl of Snowdon, Antony Armstrong-Jones.
‘Saili Sa’ab, your son’s quite a chatter-box!’ I overheard Edith Garlah talking to my father, adding: ‘He talks nineteen to the dozen!’
While my father tried deciphering the idiomatic phrase, a monkey raided the doli outside the kitchen door.
‘That blessed latch’s not working! They’ve filched my jharans!’ wailed Doris. Her tea towels had been purloined again.
Soon after, I too began to shorten words: ‘remember’ was pared down to ‘member’; ‘brother to ‘bro’ and later, I picked up priceless expressions like ‘she looks like a dying duck in a thunderstorm.’
Paunchy Cecil Garlah would send me to the wood godown, saying: ‘Go! Give Arthur that old boozard a jhaanp!’
Pic courtesy: Roli Books
Arthur Fisher was a down-and-out hobo who lived out his life sleeping on sacks of wood charcoal.
One day I found him counting his pennies (annas). He was stacking them into neat piles muttering: ‘Eightsies! Charjees! Dohjees!’ Winking at me, he slipped the coins into his pocket, saying: ‘A swig a day keeps the doctor away!’
‘Don’t you have a family?’ I asked with the singular tactlessness of a child.
‘After the war, I returned home to find they had gone to England. Harmony Cottage had been sold.’
‘Did they ever get in touch with you later?’ I persisted, twisting the proverbial knife.
‘Of course not!’ he spat back.
As he got older and I grew up, I saw him become an assistant to Mr Lord, the cemetery’s undertaker. It was a role that saw him see many to their graves. That is until the day he also came to rest and was buried in the pauper’s section of the Camel’s Back Cemetery.
Edith, the youngest of the Garlah family, shared the medlars from the medlar tree in her garden with all of us. I still remember Simon, the parrot in a cage, who cheerfully greeted us as we came through the school gate with a loud: ’Good morning!’
When she crossed the Golden Bridge in 2006, she was just a few days short of her hundredth birthday. I was there when they lowered her coffin into her uncle’s old grave, where she had wanted to be buried under the deodars, facing the eternal snow.
With her going, it felt like an age had passed, leaving a kala angrez adrift again.
Ganesh Saili, born and homegrown in the hills, is among the select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found recognition worldwide.
