Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  The result of Gerry’s pep-talk was that I left Cawnpore in a distinctly subdued frame of mind, and with my morale once more in flinders. But one look at Delhi Central as the train drew in did wonders for my drooping spirits, for it looked exactly the same as it had on the sad day when I had last seen it. And suddenly it was as though all those grey, intervening years of exile were no more than a brief dream from which I had just awoken. Nothing had changed!

  Here once again were the same sounds and smells and sights. The familiar grey-headed crows, the jostling, shouting luggage coolies, the same vendors of food and drink, fruit and toys; the same milling and vociferous crowds of passengers, some, like ourselves, with their journey done, descending from the train, while others scrambled aboard it, bound for towns and cities in the north. I had last seen this station through a haze of tears, afraid that I might never see dear Delhi again. And now, once more, I found that my eyes were swimming because I was so happy to see it again and to know that I had come back to a loved and familiar place, even though there was something missing: of all the many friends that had crowded the platform to wish us ‘bon voyage’ on that long ago day of our leaving, none were there to welcome us back, and I was suddenly aware of the gap between ten and nineteen … the enormous gap.

  Bets and I had travelled up in the care of a Major and Mrs Something-or-other who were bound for somewhere further north, and only our parents and Abdul Karim were on the platform to meet us. And presently we were driving out of the station yard through the ranks of tongas and tikka-gharies, along familiar streets and past familiar places. But this time, alas, we did not, as in the old days, turn left towards Old Delhi and the Kashmir Gate, but right — towards New Delhi, a place that had consisted of little more than the foundations of buildings when we had last seen it. Now it was the capital city of India and most of its buildings were not only completed but occupied. I thought it looked raw and ugly and barren, and found it difficult to believe that the thousands of small, struggling saplings that had been planted on either side of the wide avenues, each one surrounded by a zariba of chicken-wire or iron stakes to protect them from the depredations of wandering goats and cattle or the destructive attentions of vandals, would ever live to become tall and green. Or that the barren wastes of parched ground would ever be covered with grass and shrubs and flowerbeds.

  The whole place looked as hot and bleak and colourless as the Thar, the great Indian desert that lies between Jodhpur and the Indus, while the grandiose buildings that Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Richard Baker had designed to lend splendour and dignity to the latest and (it was hoped) last and greatest city of Delhi, were, in my opinion, the ugliest things I had ever seen. In those early days the aggressively new red and white sandstone of which they were built had not even begun to weather, and at first sight the red lower third of the two huge Secretariat buildings that faced each other from opposite sides of the wide, rising slope of what was then known as the Kingsway (and is now known as the Rajpath, which means the same thing) was, to my mind, distressingly reminiscent of a tiled splashback in a bathroom, while the top section glared as blindingly white as though coated with fresh whitewash. I thought the whole thing was hideous, and a poor exchange for the leafy gardens and beautiful, mellowed buildings of Shah Jehan’s Old Delhi.

  We spent our first week in New Delhi in one of the houses designed by Sir Herbert Baker for the use of senior officials of the Government of India, and which had the appearance of being mass-produced. Each one stood on its own ample square of stony earth that would one day — nature and the monsoons permitting — be a green and shady garden; and each one faced in a slightly different direction to give an illusion of individuality. All these buildings were whitewashed, and the architect had striven to give them a slightly Eastern look by the addition of an ornate brickwork lattice here and there in place of a window. This may have helped to keep the rooms cooler during the hot weather, but certainly made them very stuffy during the winter and early spring, and earned them the tide of ‘Baker’s Ovens’.

  Our particular oven was shared by two senior bachelor friends of my parents, who had invited them to stay until Tacklow had made arrangements to house his family for the season, and they insisted that Bets and I, whom they had known practically from our cradle days, should stay with them until our ‘camp’ had been set up. For Tacklow, finding it difficult to get rooms in New Delhi (and impossible to rent even the smallest bungalow there), had arranged with the Committee of the Gymkhana Club to house all four of us in the tented camp that was in the process of being set up in the grounds behind the club-house, for the use of members with families, who would sleep under canvas and have their meals in the Club’s dining-room. This scheme enthralled Bets and me, for we had many old friends — Buckie* among them — who not only used to spend their cold weathers in a luxurious tented camp on the far side of Old Delhi, originally set up for VI Ps attending the great Durbar of 1911, but continued to do so.

  Tents had always held an enormous fascination for us, particularly the semi-permanent variety, for India really went to town on those. They had wooden floors, raised high enough to keep them clear of flooding during the months of the monsoon or the short-lived winter rains, on which carpets or durries were laid. The canvas walls were double, with enough space between them to keep the interior of the tent cool in summer and warm in winter, while the furniture was much the same as you would expect to find in a house, and leading off each bedroom tent was a small India-style bathroom.

  The tents were part of the dear, remembered days of our childhood, and when we moved into them it was with delight. The Club itself was at that time only standing in for the real Club, which was still unfinished; and when, in the following year, it was finally completed, the temporary one was bought by His Highness the Maharajah of Kashmir and renamed Kashmir House, while the new one became known as the ‘IDG’ — the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club.

  We had barely got settled in our tents before we acquired the usual cat who, like all Kaye cats, was immediately named ‘Chips’. I have no idea how we managed to collect it, and can only suppose that it had attached itself to Tacklow, who attracted cats like jam at a picnic attracts wasps. All I remember about this one is that he was a ginger kitten, presumably a stray and, at the time we acquired him, about six inches long and exceedingly talkative. Fortunately, since Tacklow was away so much and we would accompany him on his tours whenever we could, ‘Club’ Chips soon transferred his allegiance to the Club’s cook, who used to feed him for us whenever we were away. Preferring a static owner to ones perpetually on the move, ‘Club’ Chips very sensibly decided to move in where the food was, and since the cook became quite fond of him, we lost him to the kitchen department some time during one of our Rajputana trips. This was lucky, since shortly after his defection, the Club mali (gardener) presented us with ‘Pozlo’* — a tiny, naked hideosity, all eyes and beak and about the size of a somewhat battered golf ball. An unalluring object that, given the chance, should grow up to be a purple-headed parakeet.

  Pozlo’s parents, for reasons best known to themselves, had pushed him out of the hole in a silk cotton tree in which they had made their nest, and the mali had found him cheeping forlornly on the ground and had put him back. But an hour later he had been pushed out again. The same thing happened when we took over and returned him to his nest — twice. Nature is ruthless in these matters, and presumably there was something wrong with the poor fellow that was imperilling the rest of the fledgelings.

  Since it was obvious that if we did not take him into care a cat or a snake would make a meal of him, we decided to keep him, even though he hadn’t a single feather to fly with, being still only skin and quills, and we had no idea what to feed him on. However, he was far more afraid of falling than he was of us, and regarding a finger as a lifebelt, he would cling to it for all he was worth. It obviously spelled safety in a harsh world, and from then on we were friends and allies. I think I am right in saying that we started
him on a cannibalistic diet of chopped hard-boiled egg, before abandoning it in favour of mashed banana and any other available fruit, on which he flourished and grew feathered. And, as with all our pets, he ended up by attaching himself firmly to Tacklow.

  Purple-headed parakeets are small birds that look larger than they are because their blue tail-feathers are at least three times the length of their stumpy little bodies. But since Pozlo had not acquired a tail, he fitted very nicely into the palm of one’s hand. Tacklow bought him the biggest cage he could find in the bazaars and Pozlo loved it. He learned very soon how to open and shut the door and it was a treat to see him turning to latch his front door carefully behind him. I daresay if we had provided him with a notice saying ‘Do Not Disturb’ he would have learned to hang it out when he felt like it.

  It was in the ballroom of the future Kashmir House that I attended what was to be my very first ball, as opposed to a mere dance. A ‘Blue Cross Ball’ in aid of the RSPCA, it was a best-dress, sixteen-button glove* affair, since it was attended by an assortment of the Great, including His Excellency the Governor of This, That and the Other Province, as well as the Viceroy and his wife, a glitter of Indian royalties, a shimmer of Indian Civil Servants, a froth of Foreign-and-Politicals, and any number of full-dress uniforms — the Raj in splendour!

  Fortunately, we had been invited to join a large party, and since it was the custom for every male guest to dance at least once with every female one, I cannot have had to sit out too many dances. Anyway, it stays fixed in my memory as a wonderful and exciting occasion — which it certainly would not have done had I spent it being a wallflower. But although I can’t remember the colour of the dress I wore, or who I danced with or talked to, I still remember very clearly one particular item of the amateur cabaret show that was almost an obligatory accompaniment to any charity ball.

  The lights in the ballroom were all switched off, except for a single spotlight focused on a lone woman who danced and sang in the centre of the darkened floor. A thin little woman who wore a blouse, tights, and one of those flat, peaked caps in midnight blue, and sang a song that I had never heard before. It was called ‘Me and My Shadow’, and is, by now, a very old song, but it was new then, and I have never forgotten the words or the tune, or how the singer’s shadow followed her every movement until the spotlight blinked out on the last note.

  To this day, whenever I hear that tune played on some ‘golden oldies’ programme on the TV or the radio, I am once again the young Mollie that I was, sitting enthralled in that darkened ballroom in New Delhi and watching a spotlight in which someone is dancing with their shadow … It can even bring back the strong mixture of odours that permeated the ballroom. Coty’s ‘Mon Boudoir’ and ‘L’Aimant’, cooked food and cigarette smoke, and the strong scent of orange-blossom, sweet peas and roses that drifted in from the garden and brought with it the strange and wholly individual smells of the dusty roads and raw-new buildings of this latest Delhi.

  * Yes, we still had dance-programmes — and kept on doing so to the very end of the Raj.

  * Sir Edward Buck, head of Reuter’s in India for many years, and author of Simla Past and Present.

  * Kaye-language for ‘Polly’.

  * Sixteen-button gloves were the very long, white kid gloves which custom decreed should be worn by all memsahibs of the Raj when attending any Viceregal function.

  Chapter 5

  Tacklow, when not away visiting princely states, was busy for most of the day in an office in the Secretariat building, and Mother, Bets and I spent a lot of time looking up old friends. But, for me, a lot of the old magic had gone.

  The Khan-Sahib had been dead for several years, and his children and grandchildren had moved away from Delhi long ago. And though we often visited his widow, the Begum, who still lived in their house in the old walled city, spoke no English and had always kept strict purdah, bereavement had turned her into a sad, prematurely old woman who preferred to moan to Mother about the misery of widowhood and the difficulty of getting really trustworthy servants in these degenerate days, or attempting to talk to Bets and me in our now halting Hindustani.

  The Diwan-Sahib had returned to his home in Rajputana, and I remember seeing him only once, when he called in to see Tacklow on his way north to visit relatives who lived somewhere near Karnal. The fathers of most of the Indian children with whom I used to play in the old days had either been promoted or left to take up senior appointments in other provinces or districts, or, like Tacklow, retired after years of service in the Government of the country and gone back with their wives to spend their old age in their own home towns or villages. Their families were scattered: the daughters married and gone to their husband’s homes, and their sons studying in universities in Bombay, Calcutta or England, if not already in jobs in one or other of India’s great cities.

  Vika* had married the son of some merchant prince and now lived in great splendour in, I think, Madras, while the house off the Rajpore Road in which lovely Lakshmi and her parents had lived had changed hands several times during the last nine years, and the only person who remembered them was an old mali who said he thought they had been transferred to Lucknow. Of the rest, very few still lived in Delhi, and since all of them had, like myself, spent a large part of the intervening years in school, their English had improved out of all knowledge and they no longer spoke to me in their own tongue, but in mine.

  When we were young it had been different. Because they knew that I could speak and understand their language we used that as a matter of course and without thinking. But now that they were grown-ups and it had become fashionable to speak English, they were not going to slip back into the old ways. This was all right by me, because I’d forgotten far too much of theirs — and was ashamed of having done so. But there was one change that I should have been prepared for, since Tacklow had spoken of it often enough, it having been the reason why he had meant to retire after his job of Deputy Chief Censor came to an end.

  He had wanted to go while he still had many Indian friends, and before those friendships soured. Like many Anglo-Indians,* he had supposed that the invaluable help that India had given the Allies during nearly five murderous years of war must, with victory, be rewarded by an immediate move toward Dominion Status, at the very least. When that did not happen he foresaw serious trouble ahead, and the breaking of many old ties.

  He was right. For as the prospect of self-government and freedom from Imperial rule receded, hostility toward the Raj increased. I became aware of its effect among many of my one-time friends. Not among the ordinary people, the servants and shopkeepers, villagers, artisans and the poor, or among the princes, the hereditary rulers of semi-independent states; but among Indians of our own social level, the well-educated middle and upper-middle classes who sent their children to convent schools and colleges, and who stood to gain the most from Independence. Or thought that they would. The ordinary people were as friendly as ever, and the royals continued to be as regally pleasant as they had always been. But with several of the families I had known, the ease and companionship which I had enjoyed as a child, and had confidently expected to find waiting for me, had become tinged with reserve, and I became conscious of a barrier that had not been there before: an almost undetectable one, for Indians have beautiful manners. But a barrier just the same.

  They were as charming as ever, but I was no longer one of them; it was as though I had once been ‘family’ and was now only a guest. To all appearances a welcome one — except in only one case, where the family concerned, having joined the Congress Party, made it woundingly plain that they no longer wished to have any close contacts with ‘the enemy’. In particular, not with the daughter of a one-time Director of Central Intelligence.

  ‘You can’t blame them, you know,’ said Tacklow, comforting me. ‘If they are seen to be too friendly with you, their fellow Congressmen might suspect them of double-dealing. You have to put yourself in their place.’

  He did his be
st to explain away that hurtful unhappy episode. Without much success, for I have never really got over it, and although it happened so very many years ago, the scar is still there. Even now, looking back on it, I can still remember the pain and shock — and the shaming embarrassment. We had all been such friends! I suppose part of the trouble was the inferiority complex I have already referred to.

  It made me notice, too, and become painfully conscious of the fact that although the mothers of various Indian girls I had known seemed happy enough to let me remain on friendly terms with their daughters, it was a different matter when it came to their sons. Friendship between their darling boys and Angrezi girls, with whom they had played and laughed and squabbled in childhood, was not to be encouraged. Not now that they had left childhood behind them and become young men and women. Politics, religion and caste had become important, and the old careless, casteless, happy-go-lucky relationships were not to be recovered. It was not possible to be unaware of this; or unhurt by it.

  Nowadays, when I read books about the Raj written by people who were not even born in those days, yet who like to make out that the British memsahibs despised Indian women and either patronized or snubbed them, I remember the times when I was made acutely aware that the boot was on the other foot, and that it was I who was not considered to be the equal of some well-bred and high-caste lady who not only would not socialize with the British, but would not allow her menfolk to enter the living-rooms of her house wearing western clothes, insisting that before doing so they must change into traditional Hindu dress, and who, if she could not avoid taking the hand of a European, would first cover her own with a fold of her sari.