Highlights In The Shadows: 17 - Swimming In Moonlight
Owen Clement recalls outings to swim in the river on moonlit Indian nights.
When a Friday dance at the Institute fell on a night with a full moon, the crowd would dash home, change into casual clothes and pick up their swimming costumes. The women would prepare picnic hampers, while the men organized lorries for transport.
They would then set off along the palm lined trunk road north through the moonlit dappled paddy fields and villages to a wide stretch of white sand, where the river Kasai had been diverted, near the village of Mohanpur. The old wooden breakwater made a perfect diving platform for those of us who enjoyed splashing around on these balmy nights.
We sometimes saw dead animals or bloated partly burned corpses floating next to us while we were swimming. The reason for the latter was that firewood was expensive and some of the poorer folk could not afford a funeral pyre. They merely put a live coal in the lightly shrouded body's mouth and dropped it into the river, counting on nature’s carrion, the vultures and turtles, to dispose of the corpse. These unpleasant incidents occurred rarely and did not mar those magical nights.
Those times come alive for me now when I hear the sounds of the big bands of Glen Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw. For some long forgotten reason I find "Elmer's Tune" the most evocative.
Due to the family atmosphere created by these social gatherings, the youths who tended to misbehave answered to all the adults in town. It was not unusual for an offender to be pulled up and spoken to sharply, sometimes with a clip across his or her ear, by a non-family member. Most often parents never found out about their son or daughter's transgressions. If anything, this tended to improve the relationships between the younger and older citizens often leading to long lasting friendships.
I still recall many pleasant discussions with my school friend Fay’s father, Mr. Harold Mead. We once debated the subject of "Greatness" where I questioned his calling Winston Churchill "a great man." I argued that Mr. Churchill may have been a great politician and statesman, but as a father he had not proved as successful. The American movie magazines I was so fond of reading, informed me of his daughter’s marital and alcoholic problems. From that day on Harold always called me "Winston."
After the War, Kharagpur ceased to be a major centre of manufacturing and maintenance of rolling stock. The Bengal Nagpur Railway was disbanded not long after the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 when Britain’s Prime Minister Clement Atlee and his Labour government divided India on religious grounds. Kharagpur had only been in existence for forty-six years when my parent's, sister and I left.
The village of Hijli, on the outskirts of Kharagpur, now houses an institute of technology.
It was a small rather insignificant place, and yet to me, it represented an ideal. My nostalgic memory recalls it as being well planned with shady avenues and double-bricked houses designed for the extremely hot and humid weather conditions. The places of work, education, worship and recreation were more than adequate for the non-Indian inhabitants.
© Clement 2006
