Review: Stray Foreigners
Reviewed Work(s): Baumgartner's Bombay by Anita Desai
Review by: Bapsi Sidhwa
Source: Third World Quarterly , Jan., 1989, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 167-168
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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LITERAR Y REVIEWS
Stray foreigners
Baumgartner's Bombay
Anita Desai
London: Heinemann. 1988. 230pp. ?10.95hb
'Leaning forward as if to throw Baumgartner backwards,' Farrokh, the dour owner of
a squalid cafe, bawls: "Push them out. Out into the gutter. Tell them, go and beg ... go
live like lepers in the street, but not come to Cafe de Paris, please." Polite and intimi-
dated, Baumgartner looks towards the 'bag of pale fur on the table; it might have been a
cat'. The young German with 'a mass of blond curls', the object of the cafe owner's
fury and scorn, is slumped in a drugged sleep; and Baumgartner's watery eyes make
out 'two solid brick-red arms of human flesh that lay on either side of it protectively'.
The eponymous Baumgartner, a German Jew who had drifted into India just before
the Second World War, and who has surrendered his home and his heart to the starving
and mutilated cats of Bombay, offers the shelter of his home to the stranger, too. The
consequences of this kindness, though bizarre and violent, have the awful ring of in-
evitability. It is to Anita Desai's credit that she manages this without making the novel
appear the least bit contrived.
Before we reach the end of Baumgartner's Bombay, Desai, with skill, insight and
humour, unfolds the story of her two main characters, Baumgartner and Lotte. But for
the circumstance of their being in India, and sharing the German language, they have
little in common. Baumgartner muses on this when he thinks of dropping in on Lotte
on his way home from the cafe.
She was the only one he could tell about the odd encounter with the fair-haired boy, about the
flood of memories of old Berlin it had let loose. Not that Lotte knew his Berlin ... It was
unthinkable that she could ever have been in the company of his mother, of her friends-disgrace-
ful Lotte with her fat legs that always contrived to show so much of themselves under her skirts,
her hair dyed a livid foxy red with henna.
Lotte, who starts her career as a cabaret performer in Bombay under the assumed name
of 'Lola', has her share of 'ups' when she's young and 'downs' as she grows older. She
is a marvellous creation, recognisable as one of those young European women who
lived on the fringes of Anglo-India during the Raj, fabricating their past, relishing the
attentions of the British tommies, taking what they could-while they could-as mis-
tresses of rich Indians. Lotte becomes the mistress of a skinny, dhoti-clad, beetle-nut
chewing Indian who treats her lavishly. She is happy. 'She swung the sequinned bag on
her wrist ... Outside were the red and yellow canna lilies, loudly chattering mynah
birds, a flowering tree. She seemed delighted to take her part in these cockatoo colours,
this macaw setting.' But, as she says later, 'That was when my Kanti was living. Every-
thing had to be nice then-silver dishes for the nuts on the table, plastic lace curtains in
the windows.' Once Kanti dies, she gradually loses what he has given her and, too old
to attract another rich man, Lotte feels she has missed out altogether. She tells Baum-
gartner, 'Everyone was like that in the war-people made fortunes-then vanished ...
Only we stayed, like fools. Here, amongst the thieves, the cholera, the mosquitoes.'
Baumgartner-who was incarcerated with the other Germans in India for the dura-
TWQ 1 (1) January 1989/ISSN 0143-6597/89. $1.25 167
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THIRD WORLD QUARTERLY
tion of the war, and had elected to stay on after he was released-says, 'Where could
we go, Lotte? Where could you and I have gone? and Lotte, her eyes glazed with gin,
scratching the 'slack flesh hanging from her arms like two legs of mutton', mutters,
'Yes, there was nowhere to go. Germany was gone-phut. Europe was gone ... Let us
face it, Liebchen. There is no home for us. So where can we go?'
But India, strictly structured and oriented to the family, is little inclined to accom-
modate stray foreigners; and as Desai traces their descent from comparative opulence
into loneliness, alienation and poverty, one feels the power of her writing. One of the
most poignant moments in the book occurs when Lotte and Baumgartner fall asleep
together, their ravaged bodies drawing comfort not from any carnal caress but from
the touch of each other as,
With small groans, they made themselves comfortable against each other, finding concavities into
which to press their convexities-till at last they made one comfortable whole, two halves of a
large misshapen bag of flesh.
There are no wrong notes, not a single false sentiment. Desai is in absolute control.
And this is more surprising when one considers she is writing so convincingly about
European characters; it takes a while to register that the book has been written by an
Indian. I feel that Desai has advanced not only her own writing, but also the writing of
the subcontinent in her comprehensive and sympathetic creation of Baumgartner and
Lotte as they live, breathe, talk and think, reacting to the alien Indian environment.
Baumgartner's Bombay is a complex novel of many strands, and many dimensions,
and one facet which struck me particularly was a scene in which Baumgartner stumbles
upon a dark cave. It is almost as if his presence and his senses impose themselves upon
the memorable but exasperating cave scene in A Passage to India (1924), and heighten
our understanding of it just that little bit, that tiny step one wishes E M Forster had
allowed his heroine.
Then there are the cats, 'Like a swarm of pigeons in a feathery flutter', their feline
presences witness and testimony to a lonely life of service:
One came and lay across his feet, something he rarely did in such hot weather. Another stood by
his knee, dug her claws into the material of his trousers, managed to inject their tips into his flesh,
and then dropped away, visibly pleased at having left her mark. A third climbed on to the chair
back and balanced there till he fell on to Baumgartner's neck, then sprang off with a yowl and
retired to the balcony. Baumgartner knew he was being summoned.
No other writer has portrayed as vividly the cyclical nightmare of India's poverty;
which, when combined with the almost bureaucratic stranglehold of its stratified
society-and its nonchalant disregard for life-can destroy all initiative even in the
middle classes. In her previous novel, In Custody (1984), we followed Desai's characters
as they were stripped of hope and direction by the obstacles that confronted their least
endeavour; where even the attempt to tape an old poet's voice turned into a paralysing
series of disasters. Desai is as frank in her portrayal of India's poverty in her new
novel, but in Baumgartner's Bombay she tempers its relentless depiction with touches of
beauty, and a wry and deep understanding of life that lights up the novel.
BAPSI SIDHWA *
University of Columbia, New York
* Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Ice-Candy Man (1988) is reviewed below.
168
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