Kiran Desai – Night Claims the Godavari

‘Hindu vegetarian breakfast,’ proffered the stewardess, but a cold wind had blown the fog from about the Delhi airport, and before we’d finished, the plane landed, unexpectedly on time. The city was dug up for the new metro, looking subversive, broken. We drove past the sadness of poverty at night, slums of plastic bags barely off the ground, gunny sack doors battened against the freeze. I climbed up the stairs between houses all turned into apartments since my childhood. Where one family lived, there were mostly eight, with offices in the basement, servants on the roof, underground, atop the water tanks.

I climbed to our flat, sure that it remained as always: the inauthentic, but beautiful painting of a blue-robed scholar painted over an old Persian manuscript; my narrow bed with its mattress worn into my childhood shape; the photograph of all of us before we left: two silent brothers, two talkative sisters, and a dog who is smiling, his teeth a shining, grinning star. Our love for him was the love that first taught us about death. My father was waiting in his brown dressing gown, familiar to me over years, but oddly, he was also wearing gloves and a hat. His smile arrived slowly, as if from far away. Tonics didn’t help, nor the homeopathic, the ayurvedic, the herbal. He was sinking; the body gives way so fast, so fast. We lived in hospitals that were in a constantly unsettled state between decay and renovation, thronging with people from all over the third or renegade world—Afghanistan, Iran, Nigeria.

Saadat Hasan Manto – Toba Tek Singh

Two or three years after Partition, the governments of India and Pakistan  decided that just as there had been a cordial exchange of prisoners, there should now also be a similar exchange of lunatics. That is to say Muslim lunatics housed in Indian asylums should be repatriated to Pakistan and Sikh and Hindu lunatics, in turn, handed over to India.

It’s hard to be sure of the wisdom of the idea. But in line with the wishes of intellectuals, a high level conference was held, and at length, a date for the transfer fixed. A thorough review was conducted. In India, it was decided that those Muslim lunatics who had family living there would be allowed to remain while the rest were moved up to the border. Here, in Pakistan, as practically the entire Sikh and Hindu population had departed, no question arose of allowing any to remain; each and every Sikh and Hindu lunatic was put under police custody and duly transported up to the border.

Timothy Knatchbull – My own tryst with destiny

My love affair with India is not my own; I inherited it.  From the first time I visited India I was aware of the generations of my family whose lives had been profoundly shaped by the country, none more so than my grandfather, Louis Mountbatten.

He was a hugely influential part of my childhood until the moment he was killed as we were talking together.  It was Monday, August 27^th 1979. A few minutes earlier my friend Paul Maxwell had asked me the time and laughed when I told him it was eleven thirty nine and forty seconds.  We were as carefree as skylarks, out together in my grandfather’s small fishing boat off County Sligo on the west coast of Ireland.  My identical twin brother Nick was a few feet away, tinkering with something in the cabin.  We were fourteen, Paul was fifteen.

The sun was warm, and the sea flat calm.  We were enjoying ourselves like countless other families that morning.  My grandfather was at the helm.  He was never happier than when mucking about in a boat, and now well into old age, he seemed very content.  He had joined the Royal Navy as a small boy and had retired having been the head of all British armed forces, a Supreme Allied Commander in the Second World War, and the last Viceroy of India.  His global reputation as a statesman was well established but it was in his role as a ‘devoted old Grandpapa’ that he now seemed most complete.