The Book of Everlasting Things, page 24
On the cover of the July 16, 1916, edition, no. 138, of the newspaper Le Miroir was a photograph of four men—three British officers and one Hindustani with a trailing turban, preparing for an offensive during the First World War. The turbaned man, “lieutenant-général hindou Sir Pertab Singh,” was obviously important enough to be featured on the front page of a French newspaper. Curiosity piqued, Samir began searching the stall for other editions, hoping to learn something about his uncle’s history. He didn’t know anything about the war, except that his family had always referred to it as jung in a tone grave and onimious. He found an edition from July 29, 1917, which showed the English king, George V, visiting his troops on the Western Front, but not much else.
Samir asked the bespectacled bookseller if he had any more newspapers from the time. He didn’t think so, but rummaged through the boxes in the back and emerged with something equally as old. “Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Uh, oui, yes, I do,” Samir affirmed.
“Voilà, then I have this. The War Illustrated, a British magazine, also from wartime.” The bookseller presented the thick magazine to Samir, a compilation of several issues printed over the course of the war.
Samir thanked him and placed the heavy bound volume on the wooden surface. With a thud, he opened it to the back and then made his way to the front, idly flipping through photographs of European soldiers until familiar features from a lifetime ago caught his attention. Rows of men with dark skin marching in the streets, setting up camps, working guns and other arms, posing with French children, and squatting around a fire. He looked around the bouquiniste to find the bookseller tending to another customer, a young woman studying a scrapbook of stamps, and an old man tapping the keys of a typewriter as if it were a piano.
HERE AND THERE WITH OUR GALLANT INDIANS IN FRANCE, a headline read on May 8, 1915. It showed three Indians sepoys washing their laundry in a village fountain, turbans on their heads, puttees wrapped tightly around their legs. Grainy photographs of lonely turbaned sentries, a sepoy quenching his thirst from a water fountain, and a pair of Indian cooks were arranged on the page with captions. There was an image of a sepoy holding a French baby, both of them laughing joyously. Samir caressed the sepoy’s face.
He then flipped to the very front of the book, to when the first divisions of sepoys had arrived in France. The headline from October 10, 1914, read, INDIAN CONTINGENT REACHES THE SEAT OF WAR, accompanied by several images. Placing his forefinger on the first caption, Samir read it out softly: “Lithe, keen, and fit, these Indian troops, who are seen here in the transport that carried them to Marseilles, disembarked eager for the smell of powder and were not long before they were bearing their part in the hard fighting in Northern France.” Above the text was a photograph of sepoys standing on the deck of a ship, clutching the rails. At first glance, they looked indistinguishable, but on closer inspection, Samir found that their turbans were all tied differently; some bore large insignia and badges, and others sported full beards. These were his people. And then someone caught his eye.
Samir stared at the photograph. A thousand thoughts were suspended in his brain, but he couldn’t grasp at a single coherent thread. Abruptly, he slammed the thick volume shut, paid for it, and carried it back home, barely paying attention to the road.
Léa had been standing by the tulsi plant they were growing in the kitchen, smelling its leaves as she rocked Sophie in her arms. But upon seeing her husband, she immediately put the child down to rest in the crib and went to him. Samir was mumbling to himself, protectively clutching a large leather-bound book against his chest. She pried it from his grasp, and the only words he managed to utter were “Page 173.” Flipping through the book, she arrived at a photograph of Indian sepoys. With a trembling finger, Samir pointed to a man in the center of the image, his head titled to the right in order to be fully seen by the camera. There, captured in grainy film, was his uncle, Vivek Nath Vij, having embarked on the adventure of a lifetime.
In their bedroom, Léa compared the image in the book to the 1937 photograph, and though there were physical differences, it was very much the same person. Behind her, Samir was rustling inside the wardrobe, and took out, for the first time in front of his wife, the leather apothecary case. Within seconds, the apartment was filled with a bouquet of sublime smells, and Léa found it difficult not to succumb to their splendor. Many times, she had wondered how her husband could bury this part of himself. Perhaps only the deepest pain could eradicate the deepest love.
She watched as he began removing vials of perfume one by one, searching every inch of the case. “What are you looking for, mon amour?” she asked.
“I–I don’t know. Something, anything,” he said helplessly, before discovering a compartment at the bottom that held a stack of journals. Placing his palm over them, he hesitated for a minute, remembering how precious they were to his uncle and how secretive he had remained about them.
“He kept these under lock and key, you know,” he told Léa, “always claiming that they were irreplaceable, more important than any perfume.”
Samir brought the journals up to his nose, and inhaled their surface, deeply and desperately. In the pile was a small brown journal different from all the others. It was barely a few inches in height and width, and its cover was embossed with the words VIJ & SONS, ESTD 1830, LAHORE. The very same words were printed on the ledger that Som Nath’s dried rose had lived in. Samir picked it up, assuming that this was where it all began, but he found the first few pages to be filled only with measurements and purchase orders. Of course, this was a document from the original family business.
But as he leafed through the journal, he froze. “Vilayat, 1914,” an otherwise empty page read. Samir stared at his uncle’s Urdu script, rendered pale by years and weather.
“Vilayat,” he repeated, feeling the warmth of a familiar language on his lips.
“What does that mean?” Léa asked.
“The foreign land,” Samir replied, and began reading out loud, translating for Léa.
August 26, 1914
We have been sailing for two days now, and Hindustan has long been left behind. I have not a fear of water, but last night, I felt as though I would not survive to tell the tale. Large waves crashed against our ship, some taller in height than Vij Bhawan. Men swayed as if intoxicated, unable to remain steady. Thunder and rain struck the wooden decks, strong winds swept us up, and we held our breaths in fear until the ship fell back down again. What will a man who is so afraid of the ocean do on a battlefield, I wonder. No one in my family has ever ventured farther than Punjab, let alone across a liquid body so grand. I am the first. Of so many things, I am the first.
Samir shut the notebook and held it against his body. This was no ledger of textile orders, nor was it a record of perfumistic secrets. This was a private journal of an even more private man, on his way to war. For a moment, Samir was overcome with guilt for having glimpsed into a past he had no business entering. And then reality hit him. There was no one left to tell him about these expeditions: no grandfather, no parents, and certainly no uncle to give voice to the long-silenced years that eventually led the family to perfumery. And yet here in his hands lay the truth, ready to be unraveled. He looked at Léa and she looked at him, but neither knew what to say. After a few minutes, Samir took a deep breath and opened the journal again. He sat on one edge of the bed, and she sat on the other, and between them emerged the story of Vivek Nath Vij.
32
With the Indians in France
In August 1914, twenty-year-old Vivek bid farewell to his family in Lahore and caught a train to Karachi, from where he and other sepoys were to board a ship westward, where they would fight in a war alongside British soldiers. Many of Vivek’s comrades who had served in battles before shared tales of their gallantry. But none knew anything about the expedition ahead, why this war had begun, and who was fighting in it. Vivek had left Vij Bhawan armed with his family’s prayers and the journal Samir now held in his hands. In Karachi, he waited four days before the ships were ready, and then the ports came alive with sepoys and officers of various regiments, and additional servicemen like cooks, mule drivers, porters, doctors, stretcher bearers, even tailors and water carriers. For many of these men, hailing from villages and hamlets enclosed by dry fields and mountain passes, the boundless blue water was a sight to behold. In summer khaki they had strolled along the harbor with the carefree disposition of men not at the onset of battle but on the cusp of adventure.
“He was never like this, my uncle.” Samir looked up from the page at Léa. He was struck by the incredible detail Vivek had committed to writing. “For as long as I knew him, nothing was so easily divulged, things needed to be pried out. Words were scarce, and memories even more so. Yet here he is, chronicling every breath.”
“Did he never tell you these stories?” she asked, surprised.
Samir sighed. “He never told me, nor anyone else in the family. All I knew was that he had been to war, but as a child, I used to wonder what perfumers did in battle. And these … I always assumed these were journals full of formulas. He was so particular about keeping a record of every composition.”
“Well, what else does he write?”
Samir returned to the pages. “That he is one of two educated men in his regiment, and when news of his literacy reaches the British officers, he is appointed official scribe, with extra allowance for the post.”
Léa crawled closer to Samir, peering at the pages she could not understand.
* * *
Through the night, the couple escaped into Vivek’s journal. The SS Teesta carried three brigades of the Lahore Division westward from Karachi, stopping at Aden and Suez, where the Sirhind Brigade was left to guard the canal. The Lahore and Jullundur Brigades were then herded back onto the ship, but no one knew how much farther their destination was, or even which country constituted “vilayat.” Samir was impressed with how faithfully his uncle chronicled the hours. His language became a discourse of wind and sea, stories of fellow sepoys and of starlight casting its net across the sky. He wrote about how one of the machine-gun mules had succumbed to the heat, and about daily drills, parades, and exercises. Some men played cards, others read holy texts, and Vivek became better acquainted with his regiment, which included companies of Sikhs, Dogras, Punjabi Muslims, and Pathans.
On September 11, he wrote his first letter for Lance-Naik Balwant Singh, who hailed from the mighty Rajputana region and addressed Vivek as kaatib, the formal word for scribe. Having grown up in a sandy desert, he was eager to describe in his letter to his parents the small fish he had seen leaping and flying above the water’s surface.
On September 16, as the sepoys disembarked briefly in Egypt, Vivek turned twenty-one years old.
On September 26, they had been afloat for twenty-seven days. “Twenty-seven dawns and dusks, twenty-seven sunrises and sunsets, and twenty-seven twilights. The men have lost count, but I persist. Each day is a shadow of the next, yet each day holds the promise of something unaccustomed.” Samir looked over at Léa, who had fallen asleep.
Sleep evaded him, and so he returned to the journal, carefully inspecting it. It was pocket-sized and fragile, subjected to oceans and battlefields. At times, his finger traced a word, a phrase, a scribble, a note that he could imagine his uncle making, and he would smile sadly. His hungry nose smelled the pages—muddy, salty, fetid, metallic, unfamiliar. His nails grazed the old binding, as if wanting to slip into history. Part of him was grateful for this discovery. Yet the more he read, the smaller he felt for never having asked about the past.
September 26, 1914
In the morning hours, we stood on the deck and caught first sight of the majestic vilayat.
As he read these words aloud to Léa the next morning, Samir wondered whether Vivek could have known that this foreign land would alter not just his own life, but also the lives of generations of his family. With his index finger, Samir traced a tiny drawing of ships lined up at the port of Marseilles.
We disembarked to disorder on the port. Men, animals, cargo, and rations were being off-loaded into carts and lorries. Welcomed by soldiers and seamen in baggy red trousers and blue coats, we assembled into our companies, inadequately clothed for the cool weather. The Baluchi soldiers were the first to march out into the streets, and we followed suit with rifles resting upon our left shoulder, held upright toward the sky.
“Mar-say,” Samir read out from the page, tracing an invisible word from right to left, connecting the alphabets like a poem—mim to alif to re to sin to baree ye. Mar-say. The strangeness of reading a mother tongue so far away from the motherland was not lost on him.
As Léa poured coffee and milk into two cups, she said, “My father was a teenager at the time, present in the crowd waiting to greet the Indians. It is a story that all of us who grow up in Marseilles are told—a landmark event. My grandmother would often recall how valiant they looked as they marched down the wide avenues to the beat of drums and pipes.”
Placing the journal facedown, Samir smiled at his wife. “What else did she tell you?”
“Oh, the scene was apparently delirious. The crowds went wild, they clapped and screamed, Vivent les Hindous! and Vivent les Indiens!—waving flags and dropping embroidered handkerchiefs on the cobbled streets.” She laughed. “She told me that children swung from their necks and women pinned roses on their lapels. The French people were grateful the Indians had arrived in their time of need.”
At work, Samir spent every spare second thinking about his uncle’s first impressions of France and comparing them to his own. On his way back from the hospital, he purchased a map, and later unrolled it out on the kitchen table with the intention of tracking his uncle’s movement as the war progressed.
* * *
The next day, he read Vivek’s descriptions of the different companies of soldiers, based on their unique uniforms. The 15th Sikhs bore an iron ring on their turbans and shoulder clasps. The Gurkhas carried the fish-shaped kukri knives. Vivek’s khaki turban had a dark blue cloth on the left side with a fringe. The Brahmins and Jats wore tall turbans, the lancers sported a long tail, the Pathans placed a kullah between theirs, and only the Gurkhas and Garhwalis wore no turbans. It was evident that despite the rejection of his father’s profession, the habits of a cloth merchant’s son were ingrained.
He had also noted that the Indian camp at Parc Borély was separate from the British one. Within it, there were sections for bathing and cooking, and an enclosure for horses, mules, goats, and sheep. There was a kitchen for Hindus and Sikhs and another for Muslims, clearly demarcated. The locals, whom Vivek referred to as Francisi, watched on as the evening meals were prepared by campfire and the smells of chapati and dal wafted through the air, mixing with meats, spices, cigarettes, and hookah coals.
September 27, 1914
The air is cold and dry, and unable to sleep, I write by the light of an oil lamp. Sucha Singh, who has left his new bride, Gul, in the village of Moga, is strumming on his tumbi a few tents away. The wind carries his voice across the open park as he croons a Punjabi song about forlorn lovers. His lament warms my heart and I find myself praying that he may return to Gul, unaffected by this war.
September 28, 1914
When we meet the Francisi people, they shake our hands or invite us into cafés. They are fair-skinned like the sahibs, but the men sport long twirling mustaches, which makes them distinct. None have witnessed people with our coloring. Some women, upon seeing the Sikhs, offered to shave their long beards, thinking they had been on the ship for far too long on the voyage across.
From the kitchen, hands covered in tomato and fennel, Léa said that her grandmother always mentioned how handsome the soldiers were, and how women offered them everything from fruits to flowers, and sometimes even asked for their uniform buttons as mementos. Unable to tell if she was teasing him, Samir chuckled, but he reflected that if his uncle had never traveled to France, then Samir never would have found his way here either. Holding on to that thought, he walked to the crib and sat down beside Sophie. Then, reading as much to her as to his wife, he continued.
We do not understand the Francisis, or they us, but we try to communicate. In shops, we point to a souvenir to know the price. At the post office, the stamps are labeled. So far, we are adjusting well without a common tongue. This evening, the Faithful were called to prayer, and I sat in the far corner watching a Sikh sipahi from Lahore, a teenager no older than Mohan, offer a cup of milk to a cat, as Francisi children looked on, enthralled. There is something tender and rare about this meeting of East and West, unbound or dictated by any sarkar, except the compassion we share as children of the same earth.
Inspired by all this talk of her hometown, Léa had used her grandmother’s recipe to make bouillabaisse soup for dinner. The spicy fish stew was a delicacy from Marseilles, having originated as a poor sailor’s meal made with vegetables and leftover fish scraps likely too bony to sell. The couple had invited Madame Blanchet, who arrived carrying a freshly baked lemon yogurt cake for dessert. All through dinner, dipping crusty bread into the soup, Samir inhaled the familiar aromas of saffron and garlic, and smiled to himself. Then, after Sophie was asleep, the couple curled into bed, and Samir took out the journal and the map.
