Bombay Swastika Read online

  As Chief Product Officer of a global telecommunications company, BRAHAM SINGH writes extensively on IT and telecommunications. Shifting gears, he now gives us Bombay Swastika , his first novel. He also wrote the screenplay for Emperor , a political thriller set in Malaysia and based around their May 1969 race riots. Emperor , the novel, is near completion. He recently began research on his third novel, The Little Eunuch, set in China.

  He divides his time between Virginia and Hong Kong.

  Dedicated to Dr. Jyotsna Singh. Because which

  Indian father wouldn’t want the world to know his daughter is an MD?

  To those who think right is on their side, listen up, it means bugger-all. And those fighting injustice should remember, you will lose.

  First published in 2018 by

  Om Books International

  Corporate & Editorial Office

  A-12, Sector 64, Noida 201 301

  Uttar Pradesh, India

  Phone: +91 120 477 4100

  Email: [email protected]

  Website: www.ombooksinternational.com

  Text copyright © Braham Singh, 2018

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing by the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-93-84625-57-3

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Preface: The Sardar’s Run

  1. Fertilisers

  2. The Howling Dachshund

  3. The Tamilian

  4. The Cold Pilger

  5. The Second Floor Balcony

  6. Cowboy and Indians

  7. The Porcelain Doll

  8. Lenin

  9. Brothers-in-arms

  10. The Great Divide

  11. The Gorilla

  12. Chai for Two

  13. Salim Ali versus the Rest of Us

  14. Radioactive Showers

  15. Sindhi Refugee Camp

  16. Mauripur Road

  17. ICE

  18. Friends & Family

  19. Darkies

  20. Sethji’s Gift

  21. Schwester Ingri d

  22. Das Jüdische Krankenhaus

  23. Doctor Waller

  24. The Last Straw

  25. The Men’s Room

  26. The Toilet Stall

  27. The Marxist Passion Play

  28. Ground Fighting

  29. Rusalka, Song to the Moon

  30. So Many Zeroes

  31. Rubbing Knees

  32. Atomic India

  33. Dress Code

  34. The Haunted Whorehouse

  35. When Wishes Become Horses

  36. The Golog

  37. Girl on Fire

  38. Bhairavi’s Engaged

  39. The Marxist Buddha

  40. Swastikas & Synagogues

  41. Salim Ali’s Happy

  42. The Mule

  43. Directing Traffic

  44. The Sassoon Protection Home for Whores

  45. A Transvestite at Karim Court

  46. The Sickle

  47. Atomic Ganesh

  48. The Pimp

  49. Memento Mori

  50. Krishna’s Muslim Hordes

  The Historical Context

  Bibliography

  Websites

  Acknowledgements

  Fleshing out Bombay Swastika brings so much verifiable history to the fore that one is tempted to forgo disclaimers, deem it all true, and get on with it. Except that for starters, there are relatives from Ernst’s dead, German wife’s side—still alive but unreachable. No self-respecting member of the Virginia Bar would allow me to go write a purported true story without this other family’s concurrence. It’s not the only reason though, to run with fiction instead. It’s also because Bombay Swastika has this Indian slant, and that gets tricky.

  India has become a prickly nation. Denominational as well as a general sort of animus worn on shoulders like epaulettes. A narrative such as this may not escape lumpen rancor altogether (they may not read, their masters do). Some years ago, a Bollywood movie named Billu Barber was threatened into removing Barber from its title. The very real threats of violence came from a group—let’s call them hairstylists —who find the term barber derogatory. This suggests even the fig leaf of fiction isn’t much of a prophylactic, but one is entitled to minimise risk.

  Besides Ernst’s Indian family and friends who therefore may best be thanked anonymously, there are Indian curators, senior police officers, IAS officers, friends in government circles, friends in criminal circles and those thriving in both, who helped me research this novel. Also, Jesuits, schoolteachers, hotel managers, High Court advocates, doormen, and steadfast members of India’s two major communities that remain in a permanent stand off against each other. All of whom I also thank, while taking care not to name anyone. You know who you are.

  Most of the events around which the story is built, are real. The people, barring some mentioned here, are not.

  Ernst’s parents Siegfried and Betty, were real. The staff at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC located their histories for me. The Holocaust Museum, I can publicly thank. These days, rampaging hairstylists or Hindu fundamentalists are the least of their worries.

  At the Museum, a kid in jeans and yamakeh heard me out and asked I come back after lunch. In that one hour he fleshed out Siegfried and his wife Betty from amongst the millions who died at Nazi hands. Ernst’s father, Siegfried, never did enjoy that glorious death I accorded him in Bombay Swastika . And while I had Ernst’s mother die of cancer to fit my story, in actual fact she and Siegfried, both Berliners, were picked up in Frankfurt, put in a cattle cart, taken to Riga via Berlin, and shot. We have a chilling type-written message from Nazi authorites to the local jurisdiction where the parents resided, informing them they can go ahead sequester Siegfried’s property as the party in question is now deceased. The German fetish for documentation is one of the biggest hurdles Holocaust deniers face.

  The Purandhar Fort Parole Interment Camp did exist and the German internees were amazing record keepers, especially the Lutheran priests. To them—Nazi sympathisers to a man—I convey my posthumous gratitude for helping build a Jewish hero. They kept diaries, wrote books and memorialised day-to-day events with Teutonic diligence. It was an extraordinary moment, every time a narration from their records matched one of the Ernst’s tidbits.

  Purandhar was unique in that German Jews and Nazis bunked next to each other in the same barracks, interned as equals. This delicious irony deserves a book unto itself about the actual people who entered and left Purandhar, and those who remain buried behind its frothy Deccan trap, stone walls.

  Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s last days make for fascinating drama and are extensively documented by various sources. I used Stanley Wolpert’s biography as much as I could as well as his recommended bibliography to crosscheck Sindhi memories on 1948 Karachi. Taking a hint from his list of primary sources, I spent time in the India Office Library in London desperately trying to find an angle that may have eluded Wolpert.

  The remarkable Jinnah was wasted on both India and Pakistan. It’s a shame we meet him here so briefly and that too only after time’s run out. Chabildas’s escape from Karachi to Bombay was terrifyingly real. Its depiction in this book is fictionalised. His Sindhi Camp is still there in Chembur, changed and yet unchanged.

  Ernst’s refugee girl, the love of his life, is still alive and the Indian side of his family flourishing in Bombay, now Mumbai. They had two children, and now have grandchildren and great grandchildren, all blessed with rock sta
r goodlooks—Sindhi and German DNA coursing through their veins. I thank the clan for all the love and affection showered on me even as I dissected them for this story.

  As with Purandhar Fort, the war time goings-on at the Krankenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde , Berlin’s Jewish Hospital at No.2 Iranische Strasse, is a tale in itself. Unlike the stories from Purandhar Fort, this one does get told—and brilliantly so—by Daniel B. Silver in his Refuge in Hell: How Berlin’s Jewish Hospital Outlasted the Nazis , Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2003, p. 352. It’s from here I pilfered the collaborator, Doktor, Doktor Walter Lustig’s inimitable character. Silver’s Refuge in Hell was key to drawing up the plot around Schwester Ingrid. When it came to the detailed layout of the hospital compound during the war (the exact location of the Sammellager staging area to ship Jews, where the SS were stationed, the police wards, etc.) the book was extraordinarily helpful. This is the hospital complex Bombay Ingrid entered, and from where Schwester Ingrid never came out.

  A suit with no literary background walks into a publishing house, wielding a manuscript. What could be the beginnings of a joke went on to become Bombay Swastika , thanks to Ajay Mago and his editor extraordinaire—Ipshita Mitra. If not for Ipshita, Dr. Homi Bhabha—India’s nuclear mascot—would simply have snuck in and out of the story. Thanks to her persistence, he now lingers on while the game’s afoot. The easiest thing one can do with fissionable material is to blow it up. Sixty years later, that’s just about all the indomitable Dr. Bhabha’s atomic energy program has got to show for itself. On the other hand, it does lend itself to a great story .

  Still, how does a suit with no formal education in literature attempt a novel? By first learning to write movie scripts. Juliane Block, a die-hard Berliner, is an up and coming movie director who takes no prisoners. She taught me to manage a story arch across never more than 110 pages of a movie script. If Bombay Swastika stays on point, it’s due to her. My other teachers though, were people I never met in person.

  The Mahabharata tells us Ekalavya became the world’s greatest archer by observing his teacher from afar. Ekalavya put up a mud statue of Dronacharya and would practise before it. Mine then, is a composite Dronacharya with Paul Theroux in the clay, along with V.S. Naipaul and Martin Cruz Smith and Khushwant Singh and Adam Johnson and Junot Diaz. One would also need to throw in Shobhaa De, Tarun Tejpal, Kiran Nagarkar and Chetan Bhagat. There are so many other influences, but these are my teachers. I would read everything they wrote and steal from them to write, write, re-write and write again, until one day I croaked in my own voice. There’s no cutting off a thumb for my teachers the way Ekalavya did for Dronacharya; but I do thank each of them for being there for me.

  The best part of any journey is when help pours in from unexpected quarters. Without Renaud Palliere, Om Books International wouldn’t have known I exist. He championed Bombay Swastika like a boss. Then there’s my dental clinic. Dr. Manisha Soni proved to be as much a stickler over grammar as she is about correct root canal procedure—finding punctuation errors where I could’ve sworn none existed. Then there were those who helped motivate, including a writers’ group in Reston that got so offended by Bombay Swastika , I knew I was on to something. For positive reinforcement, nothing beats my daughter’s work ethic as she ploughed away through her residency, doing eighteen hours a day to inspire and shame her father into staying up late. Then there’s her mother, Harini—my rock. But for you, I’d probably be living it up, doing lines on some beach.

  Preface

  The Sardar’s Run

  The Sikh was big. Sikhs are big. This Sikh was bigger. A naphtha flare lit his face with a whoosh and he ran. For a moment, one would think it was Jesus running like crazy, his bearded face all lit up like that. A Jesus in a saffron turban. To celebrate this second coming Indian-style, the night broke into a dhrupad rhythm going, dhin tananana, dhin-dhin tananana.

  The Sikh slowed for a bit, allowing security to catch up. Then he feinted, then dodged once more at the last moment to sprint off towards the naphtha towers. And because he knew his Chinee was rooting for him from the shadows over there, he started to show off.

  ‘Oye, phuddus!’ he called out without losing stride. ‘Where did you learn to run?’

  The security-wallahs abused him back—‘phuddu yourself!’—although clearly in awe, hence somewhat demoralised; also straggling, out of shape and already tired. Even otherwise, they were dogs chasing a car. What if the car stopped? They say Sikhs can’t multitask, but this one could sing and run while hefting a loaded gunny bag in one hand, holding his lungi up with the other. Dhin tananana, dhin-dhin tananana, he went, keeping up with the beat streaming across from the jhopadpatti slums.

  There was never a time before jhopadpatti slums and they were everywhere. If you’d think of building something; anything, anywhere—the jhopadpatti would know what you were thinking and sneak up, just like that. Like what happened when they built the Fertiliser Complex, close to where Bombay steps out into the Arabian Sea. Using dwellings put together with tarp and Fertilisers gunny bags to encircle the factory perimeter, at first the jhopadpatti slum kept it low-key: we’re just this one hovel here, one there, the starving poor, ignore us. See, we shit in the open, nothing to fear. Exactly how they laid siege on Sindhi Refugee Camp some years ago, then crawled their way into Trombay Proper to steal across Sion-Trombay Road into Sion and become the Dharavi sprawl—world-renowned for a stink that had aeroplanes brake in the air and turn around instead of landing properly at Santa Cruz Airport. Western reporters studied the phenomenon, inhaled, then wrote about it and filmed people squatting with brown bums on full display. The Sikh was a truck driver, but he knew this gora propaganda for what it was. He would discuss it with his Chinee lover and they would debate Lenin and Mao.

  Coming in early morning with the Chinee on his mind, he drove through the jhopadpatti’s cow dung smoke to where American consultants were still giving the finishing touches to Socialist India’s A-1, first-class, second-hand Fertiliser Complex—transferred here lock, stock and barrel from Texas. During working hours, the Americans camped inside a solid piece of red, white and blue, bang in the middle of the complex—Indians not allowed.

  ‘Fuck that’, his Chinee had said. He wanted something from in there very badly and as far as the Sikh was concerned, that was that. He would get it for him. He would do anything for him. So, once it was dark, he scaled the chain-link fence to climb down into the American enclosure. The door to the air-conditioned, concrete block was left unlocked. It was like saying Indians didn’t have the balls.

  Once inside, it blew his mind, especially the Coca Cola machine, in spite of the stocked bar and pool table. It was night-time, no one present, and the air conditioner on. He couldn’t believe one could shiver like this in Bombay. America had its shit together. On that, there could be no debate. He started looking for what his Chinee wanted and it was exactly where the Chinee said it would be. Phoren looking, with wires connecting to a stack of 12-volt car batteries, even though it was plugged into the wall through a transformer. Another wire crawled up the wall and went outside through a hole on one side. The Sikh took out a screwdriver from his salwaar and went to work.

  A good half an hour later, he left clutching a Fertilisers gunny bag containing whatever this was he had unscrewed for his Chinee; wires sticking out from everywhere. When he looked through the chain-link fence, the security-wallahs were waiting for him on the other side.

  ‘Sat Sri Akal, Sardarji,’ they greeted. Big smiles. Caught red-handed, he had grinned right back through the chain-link fence—how a Sikh does in the face of adversity.

  ‘Sat Sri Akal, bhenchodon,’ he said, and proceeded to climb over to their side as if nothing to it. The security guards clearly hadn’t thought this through because once he stood in their midst, they didn’t know what to do with so much Sikh. He waited, they waited, and he waited. When they waited some more, he simply walked away; then yelled, ‘Bole So Nihal!’ before sprinting off, holding up his
lungi with one hand, the heavy gunny bag swinging weightlessly from the other. Fertilisers’ green swastika logo danced with the gunny bag whenever it caught the light. A naphtha flare went whoosh, painting a halo behind his bearded face to create that Jesus effect. All that was missing was a big, fat Sacred Heart to go with the picture.

  ‘Oye!’ the security yelled, and rushed en bloc after the lunatic. They were tired but fuck that; he had entered America without a visa.

  ∼

  Zigging while the security zagged, he turned a corner to ease into the shadows reaching out from the urea towers. Hidden from view now and with pipes scurrying around to provide additional cover, he searched for his Chinee. And there he was, a little porcelain doll looking lost. The Sikh put down the gunny bag and folded his lover gently into his arms. He could have that American thing he wanted so badly, the Sikh offered, in exchange for some mouth-to-mouth. They looked into each other’s eyes and the Chinee used both his hands to readjust the Sikh’s unravelling turban, pushing wayward, jet-black strands back in place .

  ‘Actually when you’re gone,’ he whispered, ‘I miss your chest hair the most.’

  Oh yes, they were in love. The nonplussed security outside the urea complex sounded close, and the last thing the Sikh needed was for them to find out. So, they kissed Western-style and placing his porcelain doll back to the ground next to the heavy gunny bag, he stepped out from the shadows with the biggest hard-on known to man. Seeing his lungi tent like that, the guards couldn’t believe their eyes.

  ‘Oye, bhenchodon!’ he said. ‘What you looking at?’

  And anyway, why the surprise? Sardar, after all. So they powered up again, to come after him in a half-heartedly dogged manner that is so Indian, it should be trademarked.

  ∼

  More Sikh laughter, lots of swearing and running like Milkha Singh, then boredom began setting in. The bhenchods weren’t going to give up, or catch up. It dawned: this was bullshit. The urea plant released ammonia that tore into his eyes, his new leather Multanis were covered in dust, and his turban was all over the place. He on the other hand, was going nowhere. He decided to stop, turn around, raise his empty hands and say, guys, what the fuck, let’s call it a day, and no harm done.