Dec 14, 1998
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BOOKS: Brown Memsahib The memoirs of the last of the Kendals are a passage to India. By Roshan Seth White Cargo There can't be many Indians of my generation who were at boarding school in the 1950s and who don't also know of Shakespeareana and the Kendal family -- with father Geoffrey, his wife Laura, his elder daughter Jennifer and her sister Felicity. They were the backbone if not the driving force behind the company of players that brought so much joy to so many of us through its performances. At the Doon School, where I was, Kendal and his company used to stay for several weeks at a time, the company split between the four houses where we lived. I have the clearest recollection of being transported not only by the performances they gave for the school but by the endless pranks of John Day and Peter Bromilow, two of the actors, who'd have us in hysterics with their jokes and little skits. Jennifer broke many a school boy's heart, including mine, with her beauty and now her sister Felicity, who was a young girl then, breaks my heart once more with the glowing beauty of her prose in White Cargo, the story of her extraordinary life. Felicity spent most of her early life in India and left at the age of 18 -- after completing Shakespeare Wallah, the Ivory-Merchant film inspired by her family and their troupe -- to carve for herself a life and career in England. Her father warned her: "You're a stupid little bugger. They won't appreciate you in England. You'll end up marrying the first clot you meet, who will want you to settle down with a bunch of screaming kids. You'll end up in hell with mortgages and misery." Felicity didn't end up in hell. In fact, she went on to a successful career. Nonetheless, it is patently clear from her book that India and its people permeate her life like scent lingering in the folds of expensive silk worn the evening before. When in a London hospice her father, Geoffrey, finally succumbed to the three major strokes he had suffered and Felicity brought his ashes back to Bombay, she realised "as soon as the first hot blast of pre-monsoon air struck my lungs like a sauna blast, bringing with it the first smell of spices and sewers and perfumes" that a duty had changed to a longing. "Like you, this is where I feel at home. The poverty, the corruption, the begging children, the political madness that prevails half the time -- none of them can alter the spirit of the place. The apparent lack of concern for human life conceals a far greater understanding, more valuable and impossible to describe." Felicity is only too familiar with those aspects of Indian life that drive one mad, but she calls these "trifles". "More important," she says, "are the people ... There is a grasp of reality here, an acceptance of the fragility of this one life and the certainty of death, some unspoken understanding that there is a past and a future as important as the moment, and that we are not to take ourselves so very seriously." There are so many more shades to this compelling story than the relatively large one cast by her India connection, all drawn with the same uncompromising honesty that lies behind any good actor's work -- and Felicity is one of Britain's best. Her story is as much an act of absolution as it is of reconciliation. A wonderful, warm, funny, sad book.
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