OF JESUITS, CYRANO AND SOFTBALL

by Lionel Lumb

Line them up again, maybe it will help. Line them up by date.

Month of my birth and exactly a fortnight shy of my birthday.

Month of my marriage, month of my wife’s birthday.

A batting average of .500. Not bad for a Sunday player in Calcutta. Even better, that was the year of Chuck Davis, ringer and underarm pitcher extraordinaire.

Well, which of them to give a ritual burial, which to leave in Calcutta like a time capsule to bemuse and bewilder whoever unearthed it months, years or decades after I depart the land of my birth for the land of my forefathers? Why bury anything at all?

All right, I don’t know. I’m thinking out aloud. Let’s see…

There’s this urge, this bond I find hard to explain but whose strength I feel even after nearly forty years away from the dust and chaos. I’d call it the lure of India but that sounds like a travel writer who’s swished through its tourist sites in six weeks and feels qualified to understand India. I don’t try to understand India, I just feel it. [Perhaps you can do that only with the country of your birth, because after all these years away, first in England and then Canada, I still can’t feel them but I believe I understand them.]

The urge. The urge, back in May 1963, to bury something in the week before I leave India, perhaps for ever. To leave something behind I value. Why? Because…well, perhaps…because I don’t want all of me to leave India for ever. Because I feel that I’m going to suffer a terrible sense of loss. England is where my people came from, back in 1811 on my mother’s side. Her ancestor took six months by sea, no Suez Canal or steamships then; on my father’s side, my grandfather went out in 1904, taking little more than three weeks.

We intended to sail back the way he came, through the Canal in just 11 days to Marseilles, then 36 hours by train to Calais, and a few hours later we’ll see the white cliffs of Dover and no doubt Dad will sing it a la Vera Lynn. (He loved George Formby and Vera Lynn; Granddad, faithful Lancashireman, adored Gracie Fields.)

But I know, I feel, that England just won’t work the same magic on me. The sun won’t come straight up and turn even a cool winter’s night into a hotplate of glare and shimmering heat that you can feel assaulting your nerve ends, even your feet through the soles of your shoes. A cold glass of water in England won’t offer the same relief. The sun won’t go down in one smooth flourish, drawing night after it with no more than a cursory nod to dusk - forget twilight - blessed night, cool, restorative night, maybe even a south wind blowing from the Bay of Bengal to add a little zest to the overworked ceiling fans. The moon won’t rise over the coconut tree in the dusty park across from our house, hover there fat and friendly, before a fatter monsoon cloud roils in and obscures it. The rain won’t come down with those first huge drops that sizzle in the warm earth, that spit up dust until more rain sheets down and the dust is flattened, and the rain cascades and the sewers give up the fight and the streets become rivers and the trams and buses and cars cough and die, and the only vehicles moving through the waist-high water are the rickshaws, drawn by reedy men who on monsoon days demand and get what is at last a human wage.

So that’s why I want to leave something behind, but which of the three?

Chevalier William Haley. Chevalier, something less than a knight, something more than an Honourable. In Indian terms, a nawab instead of a maharajah. I guess he made a donation to my beloved Jesuit school. Yes, beloved. I am what I am, I can do what I do, I feel I can do so many things that I don’t know I can do until I try, because of those Jesuits. Belgian Jesuits all of them except for Father Dobson, Father Picachy and Father Gomes, one English and two Indians. They made me believe, not so much in their faith, which is also mine, but in myself.

Over the years I have met so many who speak ill of Jesuits. In Quebec City even the rival Benedictines revile them and stole half of the martyr Brebeuf’s skull or his heart - the tourist guide didn’t seem sure - though such a theft will never make a Jesuit out of a mere Benedictine.

Here's a Jesuit at work.

Father Dobson looks out at his class of 34, some bright, some indifferent, some dull. On a good day I’m sort of midway between the indifferent and the bright. He wants to wake them up, get their minds going. Chess, he decides. So he sets us an essay while he pores diligently over a stack of chess tutorial books, humming, sighing, struggling, defeated one moment, hopeful another.

Essays finished, we can bear the burden no longer. What’s up, Father? He says, These darn chess books (he used words like darn); I don’t know if I’ll ever get the hang of the game. Any of you beggars play chess? I do, Father, I say, my Uncle George taught me. Oh, good, says Dobbie. Maybe you can help. We’ll start a chess club; start practising.

A few days later we’re on a class picnic, to the riverside mansion of one of the rich Indian boys (no Anglo-Indians were rich or had country mansions). After fun in the river, in the garden and a vegetarian meal eaten off banana leaves (darn, something else I miss), Dobbie brings out his chess set. Come on, Lumb, let’s see if I can trap you into fool’s mate. No you won’t, Father, I thought but did not say, I’ve been practising, and Uncle George is a mathematical genius and a very good chess player. So I beat him, once, twice. Enough, he cries. I’m going to study up and then we’ll see; tomorrow, we start the chess club.

So we did that, and every essay period Dobbie spent poring over chess books, marking them with his favourite tool, a sharp pencil, and making clicking sounds of satisfaction. Meanwhile, we played each other and practised openings and end-games and also studied his books, though never as earnestly as he.

Then one day Dobbie announced he was ready to play me again. We headed to the refectory where he set out ten chess sets. Yes, he says, and he cannot hide the gleam in his bright blue eye, I’m playing Lumb and nine others. Of course, he beat us all, and then once again check-mated the lot of us. Just shows what a little intelligent study can achieve, he says, grinning. And I’ll never know whether I did beat him that picnic day, or the whole darned thing was a Jesuit ploy. But the whole class learned chess…and loved it.

So I figure the Chevalier was betting on a sure thing when he chose the Jesuit schools of India to donate money to and institute his challenge cup. Boys from Jesuit schools around India would gather once a year to compete in an elocution contest. This was the first. But first we competed with one another. I guess out of the class of 34 no fewer than seven chose Kipling’s If. Others dug out the Little Yellow God of Katmandu or stuff from our Oxford Reader of English Poems. I’d just seen Jose Ferrer in Cyrano de Bergerac. I found a paperback of Brian Hooker’s marvelous poetic translation, which I think the movie used, but I also dug out of the school library an ancient translation by two Victorian sisters, more faithful to Rostand and set to more traditional rhythms than Hooker’s modern English. So I did my first rewrite (I later became a newspaper editor), blending the best of the two, stealing the ringing language of the sisters and marrying it to the lilt of Hooker. I practised in the locked bathroom, to the dismay of the family and the barking of our very foxed terrier.

On elocution contest day, the other schools sent lads in blazers and flannels and striped school ties. They recited ahead, I was seventh and last. I wore a short-sleeved shirt and cotton slacks, all I could afford. In the wings I prayed to the Father. Dear Dobbie, this is for you. I walked out into the lights. Okay, Dobbie, this is for you. By the time I got to my panache, my white plume, I was no longer on the stage, but had floated up above the apron and was looking down at Cyrano in a short-sleeved shirt, holding an entire audience captive in the palm of his raised hand.

Yes, I believe in Jesuits. So it won’t be the chevalier’s cup I’ll bury. But surely that’s true of the gold medal, too? The Anil Sen Gupta is St. Xavier’s senior school essay medal. I’d already won the junior. Dobbie wanted me to win the gold, too. But Dobbie, and I guess this is a Jesuit thing, never came straight at anyone. He worked at one remove his wonders to perform. He came round to the Grail Club - lots of Catholic references in Calcutta - where he knew he’d find me and my brother playing billiards against the men of the club. We were good because we had to win - most of the time we didn’t have the table fee in our pocket to meet the loser-pays rule.

Between games Dobbie chatted to my brother about me. He’s like the sun, he said, lazy, bright but doesn’t move. Or, I wish he’d make a gun out his mind not a warehouse - it’s time he started using his ammunition. All this, of course, my brother dutifully quoted to me. I got the message. Unasked, I wrote practice essays and handed them in to Dobbie, who savaged them with glee. In one I’d fallen into a reverie by the banks of the Hooghly and wrote poetically about the moon, the stars, profound thoughts, innermost feelings. Dobbie wrote back: A plague upon reveries, they are the first resort of those with nothing to say - and, by the way, your nebular theories are in conflict with those of Galileo. He actived my verbs, slashed my adverbs, decimated my adjectives and, of course, forbade the use of Latin-derived words like decimate.

I'm a Latin scholar, he thundered, Virgil and I are brothers under the skin, but I’m an Anglo-Saxon first, and so are you, Lumb, or shall be by the time I’m done with you. By the time he’d done with me I was a whiplash of language: a slash here, a flick there, an image stung to life in half a sentence. I won gold, sans flab, sans reverie, sans nebular theory. Yes, I believe in Jesuits and Dobbie, so it can’t be the Anil Sen Gupta, a nawab if not a chevalier.

That leaves the softball cup. To the earth of Calcutta should I consign thee, pride of my big season with the Calcutta Dodgers, hottest team in the steamy Dung Diamond League, despite Chuck Davis? That was the year I learned that no one wants to win more than Americans, and that no one will spare effort or money like Americans to win. Expatriate Americans set up the league in the early fifties on the great Calcutta Maidan, the huge expanse of treed and grassy parkland also known as the lungs of Calcutta. Four diamonds where outfielders sometimes slithered in the dung of free-range holy cows. We cleaned the base area but couldn’t clear the outfields, too.

There were at least two American clubs - the official American Club Tigers run by the embassy, and a private one whose players worked for PanAm. The other six teams were manned mostly by Anglo-Indians: the Dodgers, the Kal Katz, the Flashes and others I can’t recall. It galled the Americans that this was their sport, unlike cricket or field hockey, but they never won.

Enter Chuck Davis, tall, lean and skilled. Hired by an American company in Calcutta as an administrator, we soon learned he never ran a thing in the States except bases. A ringer from his first pitch. He curled himself down into the mound like a corkscrew and then unwound and pitched with the ferocity of a jet leaving a carrier deck. The poor batter never even saw it. Three innings, nine pitches and nine strikes each, nine down, that’s how it went until the fourth when David Marklew was so slow winding up that he still had his bat in front of him when Chuck’s pitch hit his bat in a default bunt. David stood there, jaw dropping that he’d actually made wood, and Chuck loped over and threw him out before he stirred. Chuck, we learned, was not short for Charles.

It took another inning or two before we started seeing Chuck’s pitches. I stood behind the plate and studied his body language. He was a work of art but he repeated himself, set up patterns. I made notes. I was never a big hitter, never hit a home run in my three years on the dung diamond. But I could place. That came from billiards. I knew angles, had pictures in my head without looking, learned how to swing late for right field and the big hole over second, figured when Chuck would come down the middle. He knew my reputation as a steady bat and I knew I had him the first time he threw me a deliberate ball. Come on, Chuck, send me a strike, I razzed him. He bit on the razz, his temper flared, he chucked fat, and I floated one over second base. Peter Godenho bunted me on to third. Keith Deefholts sacrificed me home. Chuck was shaken. Sure, we lost the game, but we had his measure, sooner than he expected.

The Americans won the league but I won the batting title. Dobbie taught me to take what I could out of every situation, winning or losing, and I had that cup.

And now it would stay in India. If only it could stay buried for at least 20 years. By then the dung diamond league would surely die as Anglo-Indians left for Britain and Canada and Australia. Indians loved cricket and soccer and would never turn to softball. Twenty, thirty or forty years on no one would remember the dung diamond existed, or what it meant. But then the cup would appear, no ancient Roman coin to be sure, but at least a puzzle and a spur to curiosity if not academic research.

What was the Dung Diamond League? Who the heck is Lionel Lumb? What does .500 Average signify?

Even Dobbie up there might let a twinkle light his eyes. He died on a Sunday, on his morning walk on Park Street, felled in mid-stride by a stroke, on the sidewalk opposite St. Xaxier’s. He walks with me still.

About the author:

Lionel Lumb is an Associate Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, teaching in the School of Journalism and Communication. His first love was writing fiction, and his first short story was published in The Statesman, Calcutta, when he was fourteen years old. Since then he’s had a number published in India and Britain. But journalism and documentary-making – at The Statesman, Reuters and the BBC in Britain, and CTV and CBC in Canada – took him farther and farther away from fiction. He’s now determined to return to his first love and has a novel about Anglo-India three-quarters done. He hopes to finish it by June of next year, just in time for retirement and a “new career” as a fulltime writer. In the meantime, he’s turning out a few short stories. This memoir is a blend of fact – Father Dobinson and the softball scenes – and fiction, the narrative device of burying a memento before departing India.

Emal to:Lionel Lumb.