An extract from 'Maps for a Mortal Moon' by Adil Jussawalla

maps for a mortal moon essays and entertainments

Selected Prose by Adil Jussawalla Edited and Introduced by

Jerry Pinto

sandstorm at sea . . . and other experiences It’s the time of year when windows fly about the city and people get hurt. But despite the high winds, old cobwebs remain. The mind’s gone stagnant.

‘Travel,’ they say and with clouds settling on the hills it seems a good idea. But for several reasons I can’t. Best, perhaps, to while away the time, groping for places in lost memory, get some satisfaction from the fact that landlocked as I may be at present, I’ve seen some strange sights in different parts of the world and heard the weirdest sounds.

There was that sandstorm at sea, for example—3 July 1957.

I was seventeen and on my way to London to study architecture.

The ship was waiting to dock at Aden and this is an account of what happened: I went to the topmost deck with Pounde, and looking towards the horizon—I couldn’t believe my eyes! It seemed as if a devastating fire had broken out in some oil refinery and was sweeping over the land, the smoke having congested half the sky with dense cotton-wool clouds of dirty browns and greys, each merging into the other to form a vast blanket, arching over the sky. The other side of the horizon was perfectly clear except for a slight brownish haze over the mountains.

‘What is it?’ I asked Pounde in astonishment.

‘Yeah, what is it, I say?’ he asked in turn.

‘What on earth is it?’ I asked, my astonishment rising.

‘I can’t make out, I say, what is it?’ he asked again, bewildered.

A tug was standing out prominently against this unearthly

maps for a mortal moon

background, looking like a paper cut-out. I grabbed my camera, and to my dismay, I found I had only one shot left in it.

‘I wish I had colour film,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t know what to take.’

‘Is it fog or something?’ Pounde asked.

‘It looks like some fire to me but I can’t see any flames, and the smoke seems to be remaining in one place.’

And truly it seemed to have frozen there, like some awesome storm cloud, waiting to break over us at the right moment.

The light seemed to grow dimmer every moment and I rushed to the ship’s stern to see if there was anything better to photograph. A couple of sailors were hoisting a flag, staring intently at the cloud. A crowd of shirtless sailors from the tanker alongside were waving their hands and shouting at us.

‘It looks like a sandstorm coming up,’ one of the sailors hoisting the flag said.

A sandstorm? Of course. ‘Look at the edges,’ I shouted to Pounde. For the edge of the cloud was speeding over the horizon like a whirlwind, blotting out the sky more and more, as though trying to enclose us in before breaking over us. Unnoticed, the top of the cloud of dust had arched almost directly above our heads and it looked ominously black as we looked up. The atmosphere was very still, though more and more ships were being blotted out by the haze.

‘May I have your attention please? There is a sandstorm approaching,’ said a voice from the loudspeaker. ‘Please shut all doors and windows.’

We could hear people banging things shut downstairs and the commotion of voices and pattering feet. The storm was coming over. I couldn’t wait anymore and took a chance shot.

It was coming over . . . The wind suddenly hit us and pushed us sideways driving us down the stairs. People were running into shuttered rooms, but thinking another good subject might crop up during or after the storm, I rushed to my cabin and feverishly loaded a new roll of film. Coming upstairs once again, I managed to escape on to the deck through one of the doors and found the dust swirling around me in a murky

travelling

darkness. There were many others out on the deck with handkerchiefs wrapped around their noses, some trying to open the locked doors of the lounge to take shelter, some trying to wipe away the dust that was settling on them. Many had been taken completely by surprise, because, as we found out later, not even the ship’s officers had thought the storm would strike us so quickly. We stood in the gritty atmosphere for a few more minutes until there was a lull in the breeze and it began clearing up . . .

That was from a diary I kept at the time. Teenage stuff and awkward English with expected grammatical glitches. But the experience itself was one of the strangest I’ve had.

Then there was the hailstorm on top of St Paul’s Cathedral, London ‘like a shower of wet mothballs clattering down before us.’ I had never seen hail before and a friend and I had to make our way through it but not before I tried to take a shot of London under hail, with friend shielding the camera with his mackintosh: After a while, seeing that the downpour wasn’t likely to abate, we rushed out, sharing the mackintosh over our heads but the pellets still stung like mad. A small boy was running before us, screaming as though we were chasing him and the three of us reached the stairs, dripping, where a group of people looked at us amazed, as though we had come down with the hail.

Then there was the pea-soup fog which hit while I was on my way to my digs in North London. It was like walking blind, touching the fences of a row of houses for guidance. Strangely, it wasn’t a frightening experience. What was frightening was my one and only LSD trip, when it seemed all London’s streets had changed direction and that I would never find my way home.

Finding myself in another kind of darkness—the one in the school of architecture’s dark room—was another strange experience. Not just because we used the darkroom only to print and enlarge photographs, never to develop film, but also

maps for a mortal moon

because the photographs being printed and enlarged came from a camera that was back in India. The customs at Tilbury wanted me to pay a duty of £75 on it. I couldn’t, no student could have. After months of correspondence which stressed that I needed the camera for my professional work, the customs didn’t relent. The camera was sent back to India. I felt I had lost a limb. A kind cousin provided me with another—his own camera.

So much for some of the sights of my first year abroad.And the sounds? Before the year was out, I heard one of the weirdest, in a club called 2i’s in Soho. In it a man gyrated and pelvised like Elvis. Strange sounds came from his mouth and guitar. He looked familiarly Anglo-Indian.

About two years later my camera came back but I took it around with me more for moral support than to take photographs. My self-confidence had been shattered. I had left the school of architecture, I went downhill,while the singer I’d heard in the club, Cliff Richard, rose step by step, to become, as we all know, Sir Cliff.