Contact! by Jan Morris Page B

simper at each other at thedemand of amateur photographers, and a hubbub of enjoyment and mastication fills the hall. Each trestle table makes a party of its own and eats its pastries with gusto, and shouts cheerfully for the Africans with the drinks; and the whole scene is warm and homely and animated, with the sheen of red velvet dresses, the fizz of bottled pop, smiling weathered faces, white satin, excited little girls and a smell of flowers and scent and sandwiches.
    Shoeshine
    The waiter at Colombo put down my breakfast and said he hoped I would have an enjoyable day. I told him I was going to make a pilgrimage to the grave of my father-in-law, a planter who had died in Ceylon during the war.
    â€˜By God,’ he said at once, ‘that’s good, that’s very good–parents is a bigger thing than the Lord Buddha himself,’ and picking up my shoes, to clean them for the occasion, he bowed gracefully and withdrew.
    We did not linger
    With an American colleague I once went to a ceremony at Alexandria at which some new Czech weapons were to be handed over to the Egyptian forces. In those days many German specialists and advisers were working for the Egyptian army, and as we waited for the ceremony to begin we noticed a crowd of Egyptian officers milling around a tall figure in a black beret at the corner of the grandstand. Weelbowed our way across and found ourselves face to face with as obvious and disagreeable a Nazi officer as ever I saw. His face was congealed with hauteur; his movements were stiff and mechanical, like a robot’s; and icy cold were the eyes with which, flicking his cane against his long legs, he turned to look at us. The jostling Egyptians crowded admiringly all around him, but my colleague was a Jew, and we did not linger.
    A family outing
    It was a festival day of some kind, and in the evening I asked a taxi driver in Beirut to take me for a run around the neighbouring hills, to observe the village goings-on. He brought along his family for the ride–a plump smiling wife in black, a little boy in jeans and a very small baby girl with enormous brown eyes. The driver had spent some years in America, and his English was sprinkled with rather dated Americanisms–‘Say, what you say we stop for a sundae?’ or ‘How d’ya feel like a Coke, baby?’–as we progressed through the balmy evening. We frequently stopped in villages for some quick refreshment among the celebrations. Candles were burning in many windows, and there was a constant crackling of fire-works and whizzing of rockets. Gangs of young men strolled about the hilly streets, singing and shouting. Innumerable friends and relatives of the taxi driver emerged from houses to impede our progress, and we had so many bottles of pop that the baby was visited by a staccato series of burps. ‘What feast day is this?’ I asked the driver. ‘Christmas, friend,’ he replied (it was the middle of July).
    When we started our journey back the family was fast asleep in the back seat, in a tangle of ungainly abandon, and the driver and I smiled at each other. ‘Dig those crazy guys,’ said he, as another festive party rollicked by.
    Tactful parent
    During my stay in Darjeeling I often saw a young American dressed in the habit of a Buddhist monk. He was studying at a nearby seminary, I was told, and wore the brown cloak, the sandals and the hair bun as to the manner born. Nobody appeared in the least surprised by this anomalous figure, and his father, who was paying him a visit from the States, seemed entirely at home with the turn of family events. ‘I’m going to drink, Jimmy,’ I heard him saying to his son one day, puffing at his cigar and raising his glass, ‘I’m going to drink to all these wonderful, wonderful people of Darjeeling!’ (And ‘Say,’ he tactfully added as he put his glass down, rather hastily I thought, ‘is this Indian wine?