One sultry morning last April, standing at the foot of the Gateway to India, the towering arch built in 1924 to commemorate a royal visit that stands overlooking the harbour in Mumbai, my mother’s eyes filled with tears. As architecture, the Gateway isn’t remarkable: imagine a 20th-century faux-Mughal reinterpretation of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. But it resonates as a symbol first of empire, then of Indian independence – the last British troops to leave India, the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, passed through it in a ceremony in February 1948 – and now of the city of Mumbai. On 1 May, Labour Day as well as Maharashtra Day, couples and families who had come into town for the holiday queued to pose in front of it for formal photographs.
What moved my mother, though, was none of these things. Rather it was the memory of the end of the happiest chapter of her childhood. For in January 1945, still not yet seven, she left her birthplace to go to school in England. India was a place of warmth, sunlight, abundant food and close family (her parents didn’t return permanently till 1950); England was a country at war, of rationing, doodlebugs, cold and displacement. The journey from one life to the other took more than a month on a Dutch ship, part of a convoy, that passed through Suez, took on troops at Gibraltar, before looping into the north Atlantic in order to avoid the Channel, which was full of U-boats. There were 24 people in her cabin. The Gateway was the last piece of India she saw.
All my life, my mother, born Diana Mullock on Nepean Sea Road (or Lady Laxmibai Jagmohandas Marg as it was renamed in 1995, though no one, not even the taxi drivers, seems to know it as that), has talked of India and immersed herself in its literature and culture, but she had never till now been back. She may have been very young when she left, but her memories are vivid; crystallised, she always said, by the fact that life in India was so utterly different from anything she knew subsequently.
Our quest was to find as many of the places she knew and remembered as we could. We weren’t optimistic. ‘Oh, it’s changed beyond recognition,’ everyone warned us beforehand. Certainly statistics bear this out. In 1947, the population of Bombay was barely four million; now estimates put it at 18 million and rising. What was once a city of bungalows is now a forest of skyscrapers. ‘I don’t remember Marine Drive [the esplanade that runs from Malabar Hill to Colaba] being so long,’ my mother said as we drove to our hotel. She was right. Nariman Point, site of the super-luxe 20-storey Oberoi, built in the mid-1980s and ‘one of the first atrium hotels in the country’, stands on reclaimed land, which until the 1960s was under the Arabian Sea. In other ways, though, Mumbai has hardly changed at all.
My grandfather, Denis Mullock, came to India as a 22-year-old in 1928. The son of an immigrant Irish doctor, he’d grown up in Southwold on the Suffolk coast, done well enough at school to win a scholarship to read classics at Cambridge, but wondered how he was going to earn a living. His boyhood friend Eric Blair (later George Orwell), with whom he used to go rat-shooting and with whose mother he played bridge, had been born in Bengal and joined the India Imperial Police, which he’d hated. Even so, Denis thought, perhaps India was where his future lay. So he joined Burmah-Shell, and was employed initially as a kerosene salesman, travelling from village to village upcountry, sleeping on a camp bed on station platforms.
