Being at home and away
UMA MAHADEVAN-DASGUPTA
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A warm, thoughtful account of growing up between two worlds, and thriving.
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Salaam Stanley Matthews; Subrata Dasgupta, Granta, 207 pages.
IN 1950, a six-year old boy, accompanied by his mother and grandmother, boarded the S.S. Jal Jawahar in Bombay to embark on a three-week journey to England. He would learn his first phrases of English — "thank you" and "excuse me" — on board the ship, and repeat the phrases at every opportunity. This was the beginning of Subrata Dasgupta's English childhood.
Salaam Stanley Matthews is a memoir of that childhood. Dasgupta was to spend only a few years in England before returning to Calcutta, but it was a memorable time both for him and for the country. Post-war London, where they spend the first few months in a tiny flat, is cold, grey, and filled with reminders of the war, from food rationing to Blitz-blackened buildings. The year of Elizabeth's coronation, 1953, is a mixed year for the country. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay ascend Everest; Len Hutton's cricket team wins the Ashes back for England; and young Subrata discovers Stanley Matthews. But it is also the year of Ferenc Puskas and England's crushing football defeat on their home ground, at Wembley Stadium.
The young boy begins to notice the paradoxes of immigrant life. Subrata's father rants that Tenzing has not been given his due while the English press makes much of Hillary. At the same time, the Indian doctor is proud of India's towering Himalayas while England has what he dismisses as only hillocks. When England loses to Hungary, the nation is stunned but Subrata's father and their Bengali friends are delighted.
Young Subrata, who cheers for England and feels depressed when they lose, cannot understand this Bengali hostility to England. For him there is no contradiction in feeling connected to his Indian roots at the same time. Even the ignorance of his schoolmates and teachers about India and their questions about tigers, elephants and the Indian rope trick don't bother him.
He deals with matters of race and identity — the name-calling, the sudden awkwardness of neighbours — with the sturdy pragmatism of a survivor, the matter-of-factness of childhood. His only real anxiety is about his parents. At an English wedding, he is pleased that his mother's sari puts the drab English colours to shame. But he is also embarrassed that his mother is the only woman not wearing a hat, and that his parents are unable to locate or sing the hymns.
As time passes, Subrata becomes aware that prejudice is a real thing, and he feels his father's bitterness at being passed up for promotion. But he also finds a whole range of everyday things to love about this land: the football matches, the laughter, the friendships, the ochre-tinted evenings. He writes about the aching sense of loss that he feels when they must leave.
This sense of a lived adolescence is what makes the memoir engaging. With affectionate detail, Dasgupta (who is now in his sixties, living in Louisiana) tells us about being the only child of Indian parents in Nottingham and Derby, in the early 1950s, and learning to negotiate not only the tubes and the escalators of London, but also the several lines that separate Home and Away. Salaam, Stanley Matthews is a warm, thoughtful memoir about growing up in the middle of the 20th century, growing up between two worlds, and thriving.
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