Out of India Read Free Page B

was nothing else to do.
    Men had ranged themselves along the wooden benches, two or three to each oar, depending on their age and strength. The lifeboat was heavy and clumsy with high sides, deliberately overbuilt to stand the punishment of the ocean, and it was not easy to row. The hands on the oars were willing but soft, inexperienced. The oars were long, heavy, with rough wooden handles. They struck the water at an awkward angle, and the knack of getting them in and out smoothly with a steady rhythm was hard to learn. After a while no one spoke. A bearded man vested in the authority of a navy-blue jacket with brass buttons took the tiller. Women and children were scattered on the benches towards the inside of the boat, fitting in wherever there was a space. The rowers had begun briskly but soon grew weary. Shoulders slumped, breath came thickly from open mouths, a dew of sweat dampened foreheads even in thenight chill. Sore hands began to blister. The breeze was freshening, dragging frayed strips of cloud over the flying moon. When the moon was hidden, the oar-strokes no longer glittered in a spray of white foam but went in and out amid surly dark swirls.
    Our little family group sat facing forward, cramped for space but glad to huddle together for warmth and security. My brother’s back came within the ambit of one of the oarsmen’s swing. Every so often, on a hard pull, the end of the oar jerked into my brother’s body. A creak of the oarlock and then the blow – a painful time-keeping. It was not easy to shift position without disrupting the work of the boat, and my brother did not complain. He was older than I and felt his standing, particularly in the absence of our father. He would not acknowledge his bruises, and this was no time for the indulgence of tears. At first, I sat on my mother’s lap, hugged against the rough stuff of her coat. In front of me I watched the prow circle against the starry sky. The long swell under the rising breeze was causing the lifeboat to yaw and pitch a little, a mild but unsteady motion.
    The fusty smell of my mother’s coat was in my nose. I felt constricted. I was gulping, I couldn’t get enough air, a rising warmth pushed against a plug of soft matter in my throat. My eyes were out of kilter, the horizon was upending itself, faces shifted alarmingly. I needed more room. Seeing my condition my mother led me down the boat, stumbling over the ribs, to the clear space in the stern around the helmsman. On each side of him a little bench curved around the contour of the boat just below the gunwale. We sat on one of these benches, close to the helmsman, but I could not prevent the welling up of my young life inside me. Fright, cold, puzzlement, misery, ignorance, the loneliness of a small mite on the vast unfeeling breast of the sea, they all gripped me. I began to gasp. Now I knew where I was, raw and almost unlicked,and for the first time I sensed my human incapacity. My eyes were misted, my stomach churned and heaved.
    Suddenly I leant forward and vomited accurately into the lap of the helmsman. He hardly flinched but kept tired eyes straining into the night.
    *
    Biological life is one thing. We date our being from conception or birth. But except in dreams or drugs what do we know of our infant days, our weaning, our first stumbles onto two legs, our shouts of naked emotion turning by degrees into speech? Full life – full self-awareness – starts with the first memory. I know that moment exactly. I confirmed it at the City of London Library at the Guildhall, searching through the shipping registers of Lloyd’s of London. I read there what I already knew, that when reality caught me and opened my eyes to perception I was hand-in-hand with catastrophe and sudden violence:
    Departed from the Clyde, on 19 September 1940, SS City of Simla , with 3000 tons of general cargo, 183 crew and 167 passengers. On 21 September, at 55′59″ North &