Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  The mountains dwindled in size and became hills, and the hills in turn drew back from the road, taking the mist with them, the valley opened out in front of us, and soon we were driving through the streets of Barramulla, the town that stands sentinel at the entrance to the valley.

  I have described in The Sun in the Morning the culture shock that the sight of my native land dealt me on the day when, as a dismayed and deeply apprehensive ten-year-old, I followed Mother and Bets down the gang-plank of the passenger ship that had brought us from Bombay — then one of the most beautiful cities in India — into the depressing squalor of London’s Tilbury Docks and the miles of mean streets, grimy commercial buildings and sea of smoky chimneys that stretched between the docks and Charing Cross station. And this was the country that my parents called ‘Home’! It had been a traumatic experience, and here it was repeating itself all over again. This was the fabled ‘Vale of Kashmir’!

  I had read Moore’s Lalla Rookh and Younghusband’s Kashmir, admired Molyneux’s delightful watercolours and Mother’s amateur efforts at copying them, seen endless snapshots in other people’s albums as well as the ones Mother kept so carefully, and in general heard a great deal about the spectacular beauties of that favoured country — starting with the famous tale of the Mogul Emperor Jehangir, son of Akbar, greatest of the Great Moguls, who built the most beautiful of the Kashmir gardens, Nishat Bagh, and so loved the country that when he lay dying and those who watched around his bed asked if there was anything he desired, he is reported to have said ‘Kashmir … only Kashmir!’

  Well, here I was in this fabled valley and, save for the day of my arrival at Tilbury Docks, I have never been more disappointed. Frankly, I thought the place was perfectly hideous. Here there was no trace of spring, only the leavings of winter — gaunt, leafless trees, great patches of dirty snow that had slid off the roofs of houses, or been shovelled to one side to clear a pathway, and now lay blackened with mud and soot and pitted with small dark holes where icicles which had formed at the edges of overhanging roofs had dripped on it from above. The houses themselves were built on the same pattern as Swiss chalets, though here there was none of the decoration and spick-and-spanness of the Swiss prototypes, or of the colour. There was, in fact, no colour anywhere, unless one counts mud as a colour. There was plenty of that — muddy streets, muddy fields and mud-coloured houses. The river which had raged through the gorges behind us was placid here, a wide, sluggish stream reflecting the overcast sky and leafless willows, and the wet thatch of the country-boats that were tied up to the muddy banks. Even the people appeared mud-coloured: their clothes in drab shades of brown to dingy black, men, women and children alike wearing the knee-length smock-like garment which is known as a phiran over Isabella-coloured shalwa — the loose, full cotton Mohammedan trousers that are worn with a drawstring. None of them looked as though they or their clothes had had a wash in months. It would have been difficult to tell which were men and which women if it had not been for their headgear, the women covering their heads with shawls and the men with a turban, and, in general, only the men wearing shoes.

  I remember feeling my own cold toes curl in sympathy for those brown bare feet walking casually through that icy mud and those patches of frozen snow. The majority of them appeared to be pregnant, if female, and outstandingly pot-bellied if male, and it was only later that I learned that it was the custom of the Kashmiris to ward off the cold by carrying a basket-like arrangement containing a small earthenware pot filled with live charcoal underneath their voluminous phirans to keep themselves warm. All too often this led to bad burns and, on occasions, setting their clothing alight. It does not make the wearer look particularly attractive.

  There is a legend in the valley to account for this. The story goes that long and long ago Akbar the Great was denied entrance to the valley by a small body of its citizens. He was surprised, for the Kashmiris have always been a peaceful and artistic people; those who are not farmers or shepherds are craftsmen — weavers of cloth and carpets, embroidered shawls and carvers of wood. Their gesture did not amount to much, for they broke and fled before Akbar’s seasoned fighting men, and his small army met no real resistance until it reached Srinagar,* where the Fortress of Hari Parbet was found to be strongly held and well stocked with guns and ammunition. When Akbar’s demands for its surrender were treated with scorn, his troops settled down to besiege it, to discover, as the weeks went by, that the garrison at the fort appeared only too happy to sit it out until the coming of the cold weather forced the Mogul court and its soldiery back to the plains.

  There was nothing for it but to take the fort by assault, and this was done, though not without a good many casualties among the attackers. But when at last it fell, the garrison was found to consist entirely of women, whose menfolk had run away at the first sight of the advancing troops. Fortunately for them, Akbar is reported to have regarded this as a hilarious joke, and to have issued an edict that as the women of the valley were plainly far braver than their men, in future the men would wear the same dress as their women; which they do to this day, save in the matter of headgear.

  The story is probably apocryphal, for I have never found any historical evidence for it, though the history books credit Akbar with ‘conquering the territory’ at the end of the sixteenth century. He evidently visited it at least three times and there are two separate bridges in Srinagar, one in a lakeside village on the way to Nagim and another one on the lake, facing the Nishat Bagh, both of which are known as ‘Akbar’s Bridge’. Nevertheless, the legend persists, mainly among the women. I never heard a man admit that it was true. I heard it first from the wife of our manji (boatman), a beautiful creature whom I used as the model in a series of paintings that I did for the Illustrated Times of India Weekly, illustrating Lawrence Hope’s Kashmiri Songs: ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’ and ‘Ashoo at Her Lattice’ and all those. I still have two of the originals, ‘The Bride’s Song’ and ‘Kingfisher Blue’. I suppose I must have sold the others.

  * Kashmir. Described by Sir Francis Younghusband and Illustrated by Major E. Molyneux DSO. Published 1901 by A. C. Black Ltd, London.

  * See The Sun in the Morning.

  * S’rin-ugger. The tourists started calling it ‘Shri-na-garr’ for reasons of their own. In my day, and my father’s and grandfather’s, it was pronounced by the Kashmiris as S’rin-ugger (accent on the second-to-last syllable).

  Chapter 12

  We left Barramulla behind us, and drove along the long straight road that leads through an avenue of Lombardy poplars and is raised several feet above the level of the valley to protect it from floods and buttressed on either side by the stout silver trunks of those tall, straight trees. There are mountains all round the valley, walling it in, their lower slopes dark with forest trees and their crests white with snow. But that day the rain-clouds lay so low on them that all we could see between the poplars were wet, level fields with here and there a huddle of houses and a clump of leafless willows, and an occasional glimpse of forest as the cloud-banks shifted uneasily to a sullen wind.

  Thirty-four miles of this brought us to Srinagar, which was a larger and more dismal and even wetter version of Barramulla, since its main street, like Venice’s, was a river — the Jhelum, of course. And though up to now there had been surprisingly little traffic, suddenly we were joining a traffic-jam of buses, lorries and cars — the first two hooting their horns like crazy — tongas and cyclists ringing their bells, and hordes of very vocal pedestrians, as we all crawled cautiously forward over a long wooden bridge and into what appeared to be the main bazaar. I have a dim recollection of stopping somewhere to sign bits of paper — customs or immigration, or another toll? Or were we merely asking directions? I remember checking to see that Pozlo was still safely back in his Upton’s Tea tin, so perhaps it was a toll. Anyway, the stop was a brief one, but it gave me the chance to take a look at Srinagar city. I didn’t think much of it. The wooden-built houses were just as hu
gger-mugger, rickety and drab as the ones in Barramulla and Parten (the only town of any size that we had passed through on the road between Barramulla and Srinagar), the people as chilled and drab, and the same dirty patches of pockmarked snow lying piled by the roadside and between the houses.

  We drove on in the gathering dusk up to the Gupkar road, to one of the modern houses built on the hillside above the road. I have forgotten the number and the name of the house, and with it the name of its Kashmiri owner, a doctor and a long-time friend of my parents, who had offered to lend us his house for a few weeks while we looked around for somewhere to live for the next eight or nine months. Mother wanted a furnished house (instead of the usual houseboat that most people settled for) but wasn’t sure whether she preferred to try for a house in Srinagar or a hut in Gulmarg — a resort in a green cup in the mountains, roughly twenty-five miles from Srinagar and a good 3,000 feet higher up, and consisting of little more than a series of pleasant golf courses encircled by a liberal scattering of wooden bungalows that were known as ‘huts’ and strongly resembled those in any of the cowboy films set in frontier towns in the American Wild West.

  Bets and I were all for a houseboat, and Tacklow remained strictly neutral; his tastes were simple and he had never bothered much about his creature comforts, or been fussy about food. He would, I think, have been perfectly content to spend the rest of his life in a Dâk-bungalow — preferably near some river in which he could fish, and always provided, of course, that there was plenty of room for his books! Meanwhile, until the question was decided, we could stay in the house in Gupkar Road.

  Bets and I hoped that this would not be too long, for though grateful for the doctor’s kindness, we took an instant dislike to his house. It was a modern two-storeyed house built in the Colonial hill-station style, from wood with a tin roof and, as far as I remember, with echoes of Victorian Balmoral in a pointed turret, and furnished in a manner that matched its architecture. It was also deadly cold, for it was normally kept locked and shuttered from mid-October to the end of April, and had only been opened up as early as this for our sakes. The doctor had written to the middle-aged gentlemen who went with the house (one acting as chowkidar and the other as a sort of cook-housekeeper) to warn them of our arrival, but had given them insufficient time to get the place shipshape before we turned up. This was patently not his fault, but was mainly due to bad weather and the consequent delays to the mail caused by late snowfalls and a series of landslides on the main road through the mountains. These permanent retainers had their own living quarters behind the house, but they had plainly not kept to them, preferring — somewhat naturally — to occupy the sitting-room and bedrooms of the main building.

  A fire had been lit in the drawing-room but it smoked badly and gave out little heat, and though the house was lit by electricity, the light was both low and erratic, for the power station at Rampur, which provided the power for the whole valley, was not up to coping with the demands that were made on it after dark and in cold weather. All in all, it was a depressing introduction to Kashmir; and the bad impression that this so-called paradise had made on us was not improved when, after breakfast next morning, Bets and I put on our winter woollies and our thickest coats, mufflers and berets and set off to explore.

  Gupkar Road runs up and along the lower slopes of the ‘Throne of Solomon’, the Takht-i-Suliman,* a rocky, isolated hill which in those days was almost treeless and which pilgrims would climb by a single stony pathway to reach the small, stone Shankahara temple, dedicated to Shiva, that crowns its rocky summit 1,000 feet above the city. This is said to be the ‘new’ temple, raised on the spot by one Raja Gopaditya (I always liked that name) in or around 400 bc to replace a much older shrine that was built over 2,000 years earlier — two thousand! No wonder they think of Raja Gopaditya’s as the ‘new’ temple. The doctor’s house had been built on the lower slopes of the hill, and Bets and I set off to climb up to the temple from the back of the house, using one of the many goat-tracks that twist and turn between the rocks and move on a slanting line up the hillside, rather than attempting to claw our way straight up it.

  The line we took eventually brought us out half-way up a sharp ridge and through a little wood of pine trees that, except for a single ancient chenar tree that grew by the temple, were, in those days, the only trees on the Takht. It took us quite a time to climb above them, and we still had some way to go before we reached the temple when we ran out of breath and stopped at a point from where we could turn and look down on the city and the lakes and the low, fort-crowned bulk of Hari-Parbat, which sits like a crouching lioness watching over the city.

  We sat and stared down at it in silent disbelief. True, it was a dingy day. There was a hint of sleet in the cold wind that whinged complaining around the rocks and through the pine trees, and a blanket of cloud like a sodden layer of grubby cotton-wool concealed the tops of the amphitheatre of hills that throw a protective arm about Srinagar and its famous lakes. But it was hard to believe that even if the day had been clear and the sun shining, there could be anything much to admire in the unalluring scene that lay stretched out below us; for the clouds were not low enough to disguise the fact that the hills surrounding the lake were completely bare, while as for the Dāl lake, which we had expected to be an enormous stretch of water reflecting forest-clad mountains and glittering snow-peaks, like a glorified Lake Geneva — it looked like nothing so much as a derelict flooded fenland, a shallow sheet of water cut into sections by bunds that were prickly with leafless poplars and willows, and innumerable quantities of what looked like dead rushes.

  It was only later that we learned that those masses of dead rushes were, in fact, floating islands, a familiar sight on Kashmir’s lakes. There is such a shortage of arable land around Srinagar that the Kashmiris manufacture more by the simple expedient of collecting a mass of dead rushes, which they lash together and then plant with live rushes which grow downwards to the mud, thus anchoring the original bundle to the lake floor. Once that is done the living reeds are cut back and more and more water weeds are collected by thrusting a long pole into the lake, twiddling it round and round, and hoisting out the resulting dripping spool of weed, which is then slapped on top of the reed islands, where they look exactly like a swan’s nest. This in turn can then be planted with any crop that likes plenty of water and a rich compost of rotting vegetation — such as melons, marrows, cucumbers and tomatoes. Towards the end of autumn, when the air turns chilly and the summer visitors have gone, these floating allotments are towed out and anchored firmly in deeper water, from where, in early spring, they will be cut loose again and towed away by their owners to be anchored in more accessible positions. What Bets and I had seen that gloomy morning were these islands, still in position, or being towed away to their summer moorings. No wonder the lake looked like floods in the Midlands!

  We never got as far as the temple that morning, for not only had our first sight of the view from the Takht put a damper on our spirits, but the hint of rain changed from a hint to a threat, and we decided to get back to the house. When we did, we found that the resident caretakers had had a turn-up with Abdul Karim, who had accused them (rightly, I may say — the crime had been patently obvious from the moment of our arrival!) of moving themselves and their families into the house during the winter months, instead of keeping to their own quarters behind it.

  The row had reached major proportions and, in the heat of combat, no one had remembered to produce any lunch, while the fire in the drawing-room had been allowed to go out. Mother re-lit it, and we huddled round it and ate something out of a tin — probably sardines. It was not an auspicious start to our first visit to Kashmir; Bets’s and mine I should say, since Mother and Tacklow had been there before, and apparently enjoyed every minute of it.

  There is a theory that first impressions are very important and can make or mar our opinions of people and places. But I have reason to know that this is not always true, since no one could possibly
have had a worse introduction — or received a lousier first impression of Kashmir — than Bets and I. It was dire. There is no other word for it. Yet in spite of this, we both ended up regarding the place as the most beautiful we had ever seen, and it became the yardstick by which I judge true beauty. To this day, when in any really beautiful or charming place, I think to myself: ‘It is almost as beautiful as Kashmir.’

  The beauty of the place did not hit me all at once, but crept up on me gradually, while I wasn’t looking. The weather improved and the wind lost its cutting edge, and one day the clouds lifted and we looked out from the verandah of that damp, unfriendly house, across a sea of almond trees that were fast breaking into blossom, to the bright ribbon of the Jhelum river curving through the valley, and behind it, against a cloudless sky the colour of an aquamarine, the long line of the mountains on the far side of the valley, the opal tints of the foothills merging into the dazzling white of snow-peaks and snow-fields, glittering like a long, crumpled swathe of the best white satin.

  Months later, sitting on the roof of a houseboat anchored on the shores of the Dāl, watching the daily magic of the sunset on those treeless hills that I had thought so dauntingly stark and barren, and seeing them catch the dying light and glow apricot and gold, rose-pink and rose-madder, crimson and lilac and purple, streaked and shadowed with pure ultramarine in the gullies and crevasses, I remember saying: ‘I can’t think how the same thing that I’m looking at now could possibly have looked so ugly to me when I first saw it.’