Fiction: The idea of India seen through the eyes of a Turkish intellectual and freedom fighter

Halide Edib’s experience of India had several beginnings. One, she would say later, was her contemplation of India’s threshold, the Indian Ocean. Halide sat on the deck at night, absorbing a unique environment – the heaving and breathing of the water’s silken black expanse, the unfamiliar colours of the sky, the fancies engendered by the clouds on the fringes of this anaemic dome. That is the phrase she would use in her written recollection. Crossing that threshold she was in a transition zone between her life up until now and her experience of India, all the consequences lying ahead.

She would begin writing the memoir of her India travels the following year. She had already written some of her books in English and she would write the memoir in a precise, rich English, the kind that has a flavour of not being the writer’s first language or the only one she uses.

You mostly went by boat in those days from Europe to India. The one time she makes this particular voyage, Halide Edib travels alone. It is 1935, almost twenty years after she met Doctor Ansari, and promised him that one day she would visit him in his country. She must have thought about that, about those faraway days before the war – before so many changes – remembering what she allowed herself to remember sitting on the deck of the ship observing the ocean and sky; ocean and sky invite contemplation, dreamlike reverie perhaps, and take the mind on its own voyages.

But now it is time, and a different state of mind must be assumed for the public arrival.

She doesn’t tell us in her memoir what she was wearing when she set foot in India. I imagine her disembarking from an ocean liner down a gangplank to the wharf, I don’t see anyone else with her though of course others must have alighted here, some returning home, some as visitors, some as travellers. Perhaps members of the occupying force also travelled on the same ship. I see her in a loose long coat, a large scarf on her head and shoulders – just like her photograph on a book cover. Is hers a European style, or is it perhaps a kind of hybrid style? Does she dress like other women do, which women? When she describes women, often she writes about what they wear. She notices.

In the novel Halide has recently completed, the main character dresses modestly in the garb of a working woman, though she also throws the veil off her face. Part of Rabia’s work is to manage her father Tewfik’s grocery store; part of her work is to chant the Quran in mosques and at the konak of the local pasha. The author has an affectionate knowledge of this world, though she has not worked in a grocery shop. The title has been decided. It’s called The Clown and His Daughter, it’s about a professional clown, his daughter … But we won’t think about her newly completed novel right now. Questions about that are for the future.

When Halide Edib reaches Bombay at seven in the morning, the 9th of January, 1935, her boat is awaited. She is greeted by the press – something she’s used to, for she’s quite famous. The local press might only just have been alerted to her existence and her advent. They have to ask their pesky questions – why are you here, who will you meet. She knows how to do this. Elegant, there’s an air of strength, maturity, modesty about her. She will declare a good impression of the Indian press. The Bombay Chronicle reports that after eight years in exile she is now happy to celebrate Eid in an “oriental” country.

In exile.

Maybe it was she who brought up the fact of her exile.

Maybe she is newly reminded of it.

It is not only the press, it is also the welcoming smile of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. Already a prominent activist, Halide would have known her. Now it is Kamaladevi’s beautiful face that Halide’s memory embraces; she will describe in detail its lips, its lines, its pleasing curves, the masterpiece of her smile. The lustrous coffee-coloured eyes of Kamaladevi – how they struck her. Those brown eyes and the thick straight brows after all those thin brows and pale eyes of the European women in Europe and on the ship. These eyes these brows…there’s something, an older familiarity, something she responds to, something she’s been missing. In Europe, people’s eyes are pale, in shades of the sky and sea or autumn leaves. This warmth of carob and roasted chestnuts and earth is pleasingly comfortingly familiar. I wonder if in exile, nostalgia can be admitted to. Sometimes we feel we are in exile from the country we most long for.

A certain warmth, some cultural affect or social trait are found in the people of her nation and in this one.

It is something experienced, possibly illustrated in an anecdote. Try to define or explain it and it all dissolves into nonsense. Halide would not say this. That something is an expressiveness, an unquestioned generosity to guests, a something you don’t find among, let’s say, the English with the unbreachable corrals of their classes, their need to tell you how much you are an exception to what they usually think about people like you. “You’ are the foreigner, anyone who is unlike them, or even unlike what they think they are.”

That first response is made warmer and deeper here in Bombay.

Excerpted with permission from Soul Climate, Inez Baranay, Speaking Tiger Books.