Learning Language of Bombay Life

What is Clive James doing writing a novel about India? By what right does he wander away from his post as Chief Wit for the British television industry? With what knowledge does he poach in Rushdieland and build a bildungsroman about a beggar in a country far from his native Australia and his adopted Cambridge?

“There is . . . the consideration, although it should be put with care,” he writes toward the end of his fourth novel, “The Silver Castle,” that “the inhabitants of Bombay are less likely than visitors to look closely at a beggar.” Looking is one thing, seeing another. Fortunately, what James sees is an opportunity to stir a remarkable cocktail of a novel, a documentary of manners, equal parts John Berger and Martin Amis, didactic and comic and finally as dry and caustic as his best TV.

Sanjay, his Bombay hero, is an urchin of disarming good looks. These looks, even at the age of 3, are Sanjay’s passport beyond the perimeter of his immediate slum. “Sanjay soon learned not to snatch at scraps. . . . But sometimes he was given a scrap to eat because of his winning looks. Looks shape life, and among the poor they help to stave off death. So on the pavement among the stalls Sanjay received the tiny amount of extra energy that made the difference between irreversible damage and the possibility of health.”

That extra energy carries Sanjay, now 7, outside of the teeming slums, across a no-man’s land of baked earth to the Silver Castle, “the biggest building he had ever seen . . . as brilliant and precious as a pile of crushed soft-drink cans, which up to then had been the most dazzling thing in his experience.” The Silver Castle is inhabited by hundreds of men in turbans and red pants and silver swords, men in soft suits with brilliant hair and teeth. Best of all, the Silver Castle holds the beautiful Miranda and the stunning Rahul, the brightest stars of the Indian screen. For the Silver Castle is a vast sound stage for Bollywood, the Bombay film industry.

Sanjay’s looks win him two days’ work as an assistant chair carrier for the stars, two days that end with a jealous battle over his services and result in exile, not only from the Silver Castle but from the shanty of his father. James leads Sanjay--as Twain led his Huck and Baum his Dorothy--through a novelful of adventures and lessons before he vouchsafes his hero a fresh vision of his lost paradise. Teenage gangs, mission schools, the hotel suites of foreign homosexuals--Sanjay’s looks open the doors to all of these classrooms, where each lesson garners Sanjay a bit of money, a good shirt, a pair of shoes, another piece of the map back to the castle.

But most important, Sanjay learns about language--how to read and how to speak. From movie magazines to Australian film crews, Sanjay wanders through a forest of words and phrases, struggling to pick up the meanings that no dictionary can supply. At a glamorous dinner party, Sanjay overhears a conversation that one imagines James the journalist might have plucked from his own journals.

“That Oliver Stone movie about JFK, what was it called. . . ?”

“ ‘JFK,’ ” said the journalist.

“Did you see that thing? I saw it in Los Angeles. You know what it made me feel? It made me feel nostalgic.”

“Nostalgic for what?”

“For when I thought ‘Elephant Walk’ was a bad movie. . . . Badness has grown wings.”

If “Huckleberry Finn” is about race, then “The Silver Castle” is about language. Yet the acquisition of language, as Professor Higgins learned as he lost Eliza, is only part of the progression toward the creation of character. And ultimately, it is James the documentarian who triumphs over James the humorist: The streets of Bombay have their own rules that not even the most clever foreigner can romanticize.