The Chauvinist

He was a lower-middle class Indian of the old-fashioned kind. A Bengali Hindu who owned a stationary shop in Calcutta, his edges were blurred by the diet of mild prosperity, and he had a thick moustache. He spoke fluent Indian English without the modern transatlantic twists of the call-centre workers. He talked in that wonderful 1940s syntax, and laced his sentences with anachronistic words. He used the continuous aspect continuously, and he said “actually” a lot. He was charming.

The bus had stopped on the road back to Dalhousie, and the copper light of the afternoon was cutting through the dark forest and flaming the distant ridge of snow. There were a couple of stalls at the edge of a broad clearing, and the other passengers had wandered off to piss in the pine trees.
“Looks like England, yes?” he nodded to the hills and the pines.
I squinted, “Not really. More like Switzerland I think.”
“Ah yes, Switzerland.”
He told me he was “on tour” with his family, visiting a string of crumbling hill stations before returning to Delhi to take a long distance train back across the full girth of the country to Bengal. His wife, walking a few yards away, smiled at me. She had taken the second of the two routes Indian ladies can take as they approach middle age, and she was thin with blue shadow around her eyes rather that plump and waddling. But she had a kind face behind her glasses. His two children, with pudding basin haircuts and woollen jumpers for the alpine climate of Himachal Pradesh, were scampering over the grass and giggling. He was very kind, and he gave me a carton of sticky mango juice from the plastic bag his wife carried.
“You are coming from which part of England?” he asked.
“Cornwall.”
“Cornwall?” he frowned, “near London?”
“Not really. It’s in the southwest, by the sea.”
“Ah. Actually I am visiting England next year. My Uncle, he is living in Birmingham. We will be touring England, and also Spain. My Uncle is having caravan in ‘Spain’.” He had that odd Indian habit of putting random words into verbal quotation marks, so that “Spain” had unwarranted emphasis, as if it was a cliché, or a dubious theory.
He asked me if I liked India, and I told him that I did, very much.
“But you are having some difficulties with our ‘transportation’ system, no? It is much better in England, I am thinking.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I took the Shatabdi express to Chandigargh last week, we don’t have anything as good as that in Britain.”
This delighted and him. And of course the real reason I liked India was not its rail network, but the warmth and friendliness of people like him. They were everywhere; on every bus, on every train, at every guesthouse. It was a kind country.

The bus was still standing at the roadside, and the driver had pushed a large stone under each wheel, not trusting the brakes to keep it from rolling back down the slope. The children had moved further away, chasing each other in circles, and his wife had followed them. The colour was deepening on the far mountains
“I was reading that you were having some trouble in England recently, in Glasgow,” he said.
“Glasgow?”
“Yes, Glasgow, with the Muslims.”
“Oh,” I nodded, “Bradford you mean?”
“Yes, yes, Bradford.” He shook his head and looked at the ground. “Everywhere, all over the world it is these Muslims who are the problem.”
I made a pained noise, “Well, you know, it wasn’t really that simple in Bradford. The problem really was the BNP. They went there and stirred things up. The Muslims there are very poor… You know the BNP?”
“Yes, yes,” he said abruptly, “British National Party.” But he shook his head and turned slowly back towards the bus, scuffing at the gravel as he walked. “Everywhere, Muslims are number one problem, really, I am telling you. India, Afghanistan, Israel, America, England, all problems are coming from Muslims.” He looked up and frowned at the sunset. “I am telling you, it is in their minds, they are not really human beings.”
I blinked and did not know what to say.
He ran his thumb and forefinger over his moustache. “You are lucky in England, you are not having too many Muslims, but the problem will be coming. Here in India?” He made a noise of disgust, “We are having too many Muslims, too, too many, and always they are taking advantage.”

Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I liked him. The driver had clambered back into the bus and started the engine with a clattering roar. He sounded the horn, and people began to move back over the grass in the last of the sunlight. We were standing beside the steps.
“Actually,” he said, “sometimes I am thinking this Hitler was having some good ideas.”
“Hitler?”
He frowned at me, wondering perhaps if I was stupid, “Yes, yes, Hitler, Germany, 1945, Nazis.”
I stared at him, this kind man with his smiling children, who had given me a carton of mango juice. “What on earth do you mean?”
“I am telling you, in Germany Hitler was having problem with minority, and he was dealing with problem, he was having Final Solution.” And there was one phrase that certainly deserved verbal quotation marks, but he gave it none. The driver sounded the horn again, and he swung himself onto the battered aluminium steps. I stared up at him from the dust, not wanting to sit too near to him now. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “Actually, what we are needing in this India is Final Solution for the Muslims.”

© Tim Hannigan 2008