The cat-lover who walked by himself
Francis King
BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY by Anita Desai
Heinemann, f10.95, pp. 240
1111111■Nr
Having survived six years (surely it would not have been so many?) of intern- ment as an enemy alien in India, the German Jewish protagonist of this novel, the Baumgartner of its title, emerges to find that, now that his war is over, the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent are fighting a war of their own, both with their British rulers and with each other. 'War within war within war,' he muses. 'Every- one, engaged in a separate war, and each war opposed to another war.' But although war within war within war is certainly one of Anita Desai's themes, it is not the main one. This is exile within exile within exile.
Cunningly multi-layered, the book tells the story of a whole life in exile. As a boy, cherished son of a furniture-dealer, in a Germany increasingly hostile to people of his race, Baumgartner already has a feeling of not belonging. A despised and mocked alien at a Gentile school, he moves on to another, Jewish school, where, ignorant of Hebrew, he feels hardly more at home and where he is also despised and mocked (`Baumgartner, Baum,' chant his fellow pupils in the playground, 'hat ein Nase wie ein Daum!'). After his father has gassed himself in despair at what is happening, a family friend persuades his doting mother that the by then teenage youth should emigrate to India. This Baumgartner does. But being Jewish, he is not accepted by the German community in Calcutta; and being German, he is not accepted by either the British or . the Indian communities. Later, when he has been locked away, he never seems to achieve total acceptance even by his fellow Jewish internees. Always he remains the odd man out. It is this inability ever to achieve total acceptance even by his own kind that makes of him such a pitiable figure. But it also irritates the reader. Throughout his story, Baumgartner remains supine, unre- sponsive and gormless, passively accepting each fresh blow as though it were no more than what he deserved. Always he remains so close to the edge of existence that one is surprised that it is only in his old age that he eventually falls off it into extinction. Nothing ever arouses him to excitement, passion, hatred, indignation, joy. In his youth he has a vague, sentimental attach- ment to his mother; in his later years, a no less vague but less sentimental one to another German exile, a former nightclub singer who has consented to a mock marriage to an already married Hindu, in order to avoid a wartime internment simi- lar to Baumgartner's. He is indifferent to the history, the art, the architecture and the music of the country in which he is doomed to pass a lifetime of increasing deprivation. Eventually his only interest in life is the care of a tribe of often vicious cats, who make his dilapidated Bombay apartment reek with a stench so potent that no one ever visits him.
Baumgartner surveys the life of the Indians among whom, because of his poverty, he is fated to eke out his life, like some visitor to a primitive fever-hospital. The fact that he does not belong in it lends him an immunity. Around him, the people beg, steal, starve. They fight the British and then, with even more murderous ferocity, they fight each other. A gang of Hindus butcher the Muslim Marxist who lives in a cubby-hole above Baumgartner's little flat. Outside, in the street, the life of a homeless family constantly erupts into violence. All these horrors Desai brings home to the reader with remarkable vivid- ness. But they never seem wholly to come home to Baumgartner himself.
The tragic climax of the novel springs out of Baumgartner's chance encounter, in a café to which he goes to scrounge left-overs for his cats, with a young hippy compatriot. At first, sprawled stoned across a table, after he has devoured a meal for which he has been unable to pay, the young man seems no more than a harmless nuisance. But after Baumgartner has reluctantly taken him back to his flat, at the urging of the café-owner, and after the young man has disappeared into Baum- gartner's squalid bathroom for a fix, things grow dangerous and sinister. In the finest section of the book, the young man re- counts all the terrible events of his life in India. How much is hallucination, how much reality in this catalogue of horrors grappling with a yeti in Himalayan snows, self-laceration in a procession at Mohur- rum, living with lepers on a Calcutta refuse tip, cannibalism as a dom in the burning ghat of Benares? We do not know, Baum- gartner does not know, even the boy does what we do know, even though Baumgartner and the boy do not yet know it, is that the doom evaded by flight from Nazi Germany has now, so many years later, caught up with Baum- gartner. The drug-demented 'Aryan' will kill the pathetic old Jew.
Some of the logistics of the story do not seem quite right. As a businessman in prewar Bombay, even someone as feeble as Baumgartner must have made some non-German friends, and surely these friends would have kept in touch and even have attempted to help him during his years of internment? Again, if his father's business was ruined by the Nazis and his mother perished in a concentration camp, it is odd that Baumgartner has never received any kind of compensation from the German government.
But these niggling doubts do little to detract from one's pleasure at being in the hands of a novelist so sure of precisely what she is setting out to do and so skilful at doing it. The India which she creates is, in its teeming poverty, its violence and its ignorance, like some anteroom to hell. No book by this highly talented author has been more sombre and unsparing.
Previous page
