Book Review : Lost in Limbo Between Two Cultures

Baumgartner’s Bombay by Anita Desai (Knopf: $18.95; 230 pages)

Half a century ago, Hugo Baumgartner was the pampered son of a Berlin furniture merchant, living in a spacious flat crammed with the choicest pieces from the shop below; rewarded for good grades with marzipan and chocolate; taken by his papa to the park where squirrels frolicked and the band played Strauss under the lindens. That life ended abruptly in 1939, after Papa was taken away by the Gestapo, though Hugo and his beloved Mutti were temporarily spared. When the new Aryan owners of the furniture store urged Hugo to flee to India, he reluctantly agreed, confident that his mother would join him once he was settled in business.

Miraculously, a job actually materialized, and for a time Hugo prospered modestly in Calcutta, though he was never able to persuade his mother to abandon her home. As long as the postcards in her familiar hand kept coming, Hugo managed to persuade himself that his mother was safe, and in truth, Calcutta had few cultural advantages for a woman who so loved German music and literature. Hugo was lonely, but convinced his sojourn in India would be only temporary. Once the political situation in the Fatherland settled down, he would return and everything would be just as before.

When war was declared, young Hugo was interned by the British, who didn’t distinguish among the enemy aliens in the outposts of Empire. He found himself sharing a barracks with a mixed bag of fellow countrymen, including some Nazis, but all in all, his confinement was not altogether miserable. In his later life, he would actually think of those years with pleasure.

Adroit Flashbacks

Released after the Allied victory, Baumgartner found Calcutta in chaos, and unable to return to Berlin, he made his way to Bombay where even in the confusion attendant on the partition of India he is able to work for a time in the lumber trade. All this information is background, supplied through adroit flashbacks.

Now, in the 1980s, Baumgartner is an elderly man living in a squalid flat with a large assortment of stray cats. His business long since gone, he manages to subsist on his meager savings, scrounging food for the cats from the various poor cafes in the neighborhood; a pathetic laughingstock of a man dragging a smelly sack of scraps through the streets. His only friend is a fellow-countrywoman named Lotte, a sometime cabaret dancer now almost as wretched as he. Still, these two relics of a vanished world are able to comfort one another with taunts, arguments and occasional caresses.

A Clash of Cultures

Using a variety of literary and cinematic techniques, Desai continually emphasizes the dichotomy between the rigid order of Baumgartner’s German childhood and the teeming confusion of India. Rejected by Germany, barely tolerated by India, Baumgartner is the eternal alien, doomed to a barren existence in the no-man’s land between two cultures.

One day, the proprietor of Baumgartner’s favorite cafe calls his attention to a young man slumped against the restaurant wall, obviously one of the horde of hippies who have invaded India in search of easy enlightenment and cheap drugs. Suspecting that the boy is German, the cafe owner asks Baumgartner to speak to him and persuade him to leave, but the young man proves sullenly resistant. Unaccountably moved by the sight of someone at once so strange and so familiar, Baumgartner takes the boy home with him. That single aberrant impulse turns the book around from West to East, and what had seemed a poignant novel of displacement becomes a bleak study of inescapable destiny.