Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  Nor have they registered the fact that a good many of these states were Muslim, and that most of the Punjab was ruled over by Sikhs. It was the British who by conquering the country for their own ends — which were trade and profit! — welded it into a cohesive whole. But their task was only made possible because they liked the people of India and that liking was returned by many — perhaps because we are all, basically, Aryans. I don’t know. But I do know that, for the vast majority, the liking was mutual, which was perhaps our tragedy. I have yet to meet an ex-Indian Army officer who was not deeply devoted to his regiment and to the men who served with him or under him, or who did not grow attached to the country and look back on his years of service there with deep affection.

  * I think he gave an exact hour, but if so I have forgotten it.

  Chapter 18

  — Ulwar sabre and Tonk jezail —

  Tonk. That name is still an ominous one to me. As for the jezails — those long-barrelled, muzzle-loading muskets that were in general use among the Frontier tribes when Tacklow was a young man (and which I last saw in use long after the partition and independence of India, carried slung across the shoulder of an elderly Pathan tribesman who was buying walnuts in Torkham bazaar, a scant fifty yards from the Afghan border), they were still in evidence in Tonk when we went to live there in the winter of 1928. For Tonk was in many ways a piece of the ancient India that was still living in the past.

  Most of my seasons in Kashmir remain crystal clear in my memory. Yet for some reason I cannot remember how we came to spend that particular cold weather in Tonk. I know that Tacklow had made that antique state his headquarters for some months, so that from it he could more easily visit a number of neighbouring ones, and that in the course of his stay there he had come to know its aged ruler well. Moreover, the old Nawab (the ruling house of Tonk was Muslim) had taken a great fancy to him, and had requested permission from the Government of India to engage Sir Cecil Kaye as President of Tonk’s Council of State as soon as the work that he had been called back to India to do had been completed. What I am not sure about is when that offer had been made to Tacklow. Or, I am ashamed to say, when his work on those treaties was completed.

  All that I can remember is that by invitation of the Nawab, Tacklow was in residence in one of the guest-houses in Tonk, but not yet working for the state, when Mother, Bets and I, together with Sandy Napier (who was spending a short leave in our company) and accompanied by Mahdoo and Kadera, joined him in the winter of 1928.

  At a guess, I imagine that the Nawab’s offer of employment must have looked like a lifeline to Tacklow. The work he had come out to do would have been almost finished, and he would have had no desire to join the ranks of those who, having spent their working lives in India, found that they could not face the prospect of retiring on a small pension to end their days in the rain and cold of England, so opted instead for a bungalow in some hill-station, or a houseboat in Kashmir, in the land (and the climate) that from long association had become home to them. If he were to stay on in India it could only be because there was still work there for him to do. And now he had been offered it by an old man whom he had come to like and to respect. But would Daisy like being buried in a medieval state, well off the beaten track? Or the girls?

  Tacklow was well aware that all three of his women-folk would rather live in India than anywhere else in the world, and were dreading having to return to England and housework and the search for paid employment, which it had not occurred to their parents to fit them for. At least they were all three doing well out here with their paintings. But his daughters were not going to find husbands in Tonk. Or much social life either, since the little-known state was not even on the railway or a made road. Nor was there any electricity, which meant, among other things, no electric lights, ceiling-fans, ice-boxes or artificial means of heating or cooling. No running water or telephones either, and very little in the way of entertainment. No Viceregal balls or garden parties. No race meetings, Club dances (no Club!) or European-style shops. And certainly no art exhibitions. He had asked for time to consider the Nawab’s offer, and looking back on those days I have come to think that our first stay in Tonk was really only a sort of trial-run, a visit, at the Nawab’s invitation, so that we could see what we would be letting ourselves in for if Tacklow took on a full-time job there. Whatever the truth, for my part I couldn’t have been more delighted because it meant, among other things, that I would be seeing a new part of the beloved country.

  When Tacklow had first gone there I had been interested enough to look up the history of the state, and been charmed to discover that it had been created by the ruler of one of the more powerful and war-like Hindu states who, in India’s turbulent past, had presented it as a reward to one of his condottiere generals — a Muslim soldier-of-fortune who had won a number of spectacular battles for him, and ended up ruling over a by no means inconsiderable portion of Rajputana with the title of Nawab of Tonk.

  The history of the princely states had fascinated me ever since Tacklow had introduced me, as a twelve-year-old, to the first volume of Kipling’s Letters of Marque, which is an account of the young Kipling’s rovings as a youthful newspaper reporter in the ‘Country of the Kings’. And since both Rudyard and Tacklow had made mention of Todd’s Rajasthan, I had managed to get all four volumes of that fascinating work out of a local library in the course of a school holiday and, having read all of them at breakneck speed, become hooked on Todd* for life. Though I took a poor view of his dedication to King George the Fourth — the one-time fat and scandalous ‘Prinny’. Todd was obviously riveted by the history and annals of Mewar and the Maharajahs and Ranis of the fabulous Country of the Kings, and could no more resist chronicling their doings than I could resist reading his books.

  If Todd could have come back from the grave he would have felt perfectly at home in Tonk, for it was the old Rajasthan, preserved like a fly in amber. A piece of the past, left behind by the receding tide of the Mogul Empire, rather in the manner of some ancient deep-sea shell that has been stranded on the shore by a neap tide. Very little of it spoke of the twentieth century and a great deal of the past. It lay well off the beaten track, and its nearest railway station was Sawai Madhopur, itself a small town where few trains stopped and you had to change trains to get any line that would take you to Delhi or Agra.

  The Nawab had sent a couple of cars to meet us at the station, though this was more a polite gesture of greeting than for transport, since Tacklow had informed him that Mother and Sandy would both be driving their own cars, which they had brought from Delhi on the same train. However, we were grateful for the gesture, since it helped lighten our loads and also acted as a guide — one of the Tonk cars going ahead while the other followed in case of accidents which, judging from the state of the kutcha (unmade) road, must have occurred only too frequently.

  The road from Sawai Madhopur to Tonk wound through miles of barren, waterless and apparently largely uninhabited land, scored all over by dried-up river-beds and stony water-courses which, in the season of the monsoon, would become subject to flash floods and turn into raging torrents. A land dotted with small, stony hills and sprinkled with camel-thorn, cactus and an occasional kikar-tree whose thin, prickly foliage cast little or no shade. It was not exactly a hospitable country, and I remember that the comments of Mahdoo and Kadera, hill-men both, were far from complimentary. Sandy, too, did not think much of it. But it did not seem hostile to me, for I had always had a particular fondness for the plains: the sense of space and enormous skies — and the silence …

  When I think of Tonk, the things that I remember return in disconnected fragments. Sometimes it is a melody that comes back. A dance tune, ‘Just Imagine’, that I used to play over and over again on our wind-up gramophone. Sometimes my first sight of the little city, the palace and the bazaar, viewed from the howdah of an elephant that the Nawab sent on our very first morning to take us on an exploration of the town. Sometimes it’s a new m
oon, the signal of the end of Ramadan, hanging like a thread of silver in the green of an evening sky; or a row of earthenware gurrahs — water-jars — suspended by their narrow necks in the full glare of the blazing sun, from a rope stretched between two kikar -trees. For people still used the old way of cooling their water: by evaporation.

  Having a totally un-scientific brain myself, as well as a hopelessly un-mathematical one, I have never understood why this should have worked. I can only say that one of the first things I learned in Tonk is that it does. If you fill your water-jar with the available tepid water, and then hang it up somewhere in the open where there is no shade, sufficient water will seep through the porous earthenware to keep the surface damp, and the hot sunlight will do its best to dry that damp. The resulting evaporation does not, as one might suppose, help to warm up the water inside, but chills it. This still sounds pure spinach to me, but it works like a charm and the egghead in your family, aged seven, will almost certainly be able to explain to you why it does.

  Our guest-house was on top of one of the many small, conical hills that abound in Rajputana, and above it, on a slightly higher one, was the No. 1 state guest-house, where VIPs on tour put up, and where the Nawab’s senior wife, ‘the Begum’ (as opposed to ‘So-and-so Begum’) occasionally threw a zenana party for the inmates of the women’s quarters in the palace. There was another and similar house, where a Major and Mrs Meade lived, and somewhere on the fringes memory suggests a couple called Ferguson — May Ferguson? But I don’t remember where they fit in, or if Mr Ferguson was the AGG from Ajmer that winter. Anyway, that concluded the Raj’s section of Tonk. All else was as it must have been in the days when the first Nawab was presented with the territory, built himself a palace and seated himself on the throne.

  Our house was the usual flat-roofed, whitewashed bungalow surrounded by a wide verandah with steps leading down from it on to a path that was strewn with kunkar — a dark, reddish, sharp-edged species of charcoal that covered all the nearby paths and was said to discourage snakes from entering the bungalows. And so it should, for it was hard and harsh enough to make it very uncomfortable to walk on in anything but stout leather shoes. Not that it was entirely successful as a discourager of snakes: in the early days of Tacklow’s tenancy there was a hot night when Tacklow, wearing, he told me, nothing but a towel tied sarong-fashion round his waist, entered his bathroom with the intention of taking a cold dip in the tin tub (modern sanitation had not yet reached Tonk) and found a snake there.

  Afterwards he always insisted that it was the backwardness of Tonk and the fact that there was no electricity that saved his life. Because had he been able, by pressing a switch, to flood the room with light from a bulb near the ceiling, he would not have seen the cobra until it was too late. As it was, he was alerted to its presence by the fact that he was carrying an oil lamp — a ‘hurricane butti’ — and its flaring wick, shining from much lower down, threw the enormously enlarged shadow of the menacing cobra on the wall behind it, as it swayed ominously to and fro, preparing to strike. Tacklow says he stood very still and called softly to Abdul Karim (who in the absence of Kadera — left with us in Kashmir — had returned to serve him on the strict understanding that the service was only temporary), who loaded Tacklow’s shotgun and, entering cautiously behind him through a crack of the door, shot the creature’s head off.

  There was only one way by which it could have entered the bathroom — through the sluice which carried the bathwater away. How it had managed to cross the kunkar was a mystery. Abdul Karim said that it had been ‘put there by an enemy’ — most probably, in his opinion, the caretaker who had been in charge of the bungalow before Tacklow’s arrival and who, according to Abdul, had hoped to be offered a place as the Sahib’s bearer himself. Tacklow said that personally he did not see how eliminating the Sahib would help to improve his prospects of becoming that Sahib’s bearer. To which Abdul merely replied darkly that on any normal occasion it would have been he himself who would have entered the gussel-khana first.

  I used the cobra incident many years later in Shadow of the Moon. The very next day Tacklow had a double layer of wire netting fixed over the outer ends of all the bathroom sluices, after which we never saw another snake. Though one day one of the junior Begums was bitten by a cobra, and was treated by the Nawab’s senior hakim in a fashion that was purely medieval …

  A rat was caught (did they, I wonder, keep a supply of them, just in case?) and, after a deep cut had been made on the unfortunate Begum’s arm, just above the double puncture marks, the rat was cut open and tied over the wound. This, we were told, was a sovereign remedy for snake-bite. And certainly that Begum lived. Though she very nearly died — not from snake-bite but from blood-poisoning. For it was during the hot weather, when snakes like to slither into cool places like bathrooms, and the corpse of the rat had gone bad in the heat.

  I remember being shocked to the core by the fact that such ‘witchdoctor’ forms of medicine could possibly have lasted into the enlightened twentieth century, but our doctor laughed and said that behind every instance of such treatments there was sound common sense. The freshly killed rat was the ancient equivalent of a poultice, and acted in the same way — the heat drew off poison. The theory was sound, but it had been left on long enough to go bad, the fault of the hot weather. Interesting.

  The Meades offered to give Bets and me riding lessons; an offer which Bets accepted with enthusiasm and I with reluctance. Bets took to it like the proverbial duck to water. But I found that I was as allergic to horses as ever. Or possibly it was the horses that were allergic to me. I struggled with the wretched creatures for a while, probably in the hope that I might suddenly become a superb rider and thereby catch the eye of some dashing cavalry man. But it was no good: I could manage the plodding little hill-ponies — the Kashmiri tats — all right, but I was still afraid of proper horses; the animal provided for me sensed this immediately and, despising me as a poor specimen of humanity, treated me with the utmost disdain, refusing to move until it felt like doing so, and just standing insultingly stock-still with one hip negligently thrown out in the manner of a bored fashion model. If I wanted to turn left, it turned right, and if I wanted it to trot it either broke into a canter or took off for the horizon as though shot from a catapult. Bets continued to ride, but after a few days of this I gave up the whole idea once and for all.

  However I did learn to drive a car. Tonk was a marvellous place to do that in, for there was hardly any traffic. The Nawab owned an enormous selection of cars — you could say he collected them — but they seldom left the royal garages. A few of the purdah cars could be seen towards sundown, taking the zenana ladies for a drive along the dusty, unmetalled roads to ‘eat the evening air’, or members of the court and the local nobility and gentry out to shoot duck and teal on the lake or the river, or partridge and black-buck in the open country. Sometimes one would meet a lorry or a rickety bus taking innumerable passengers and their goods and chattels to some market. But such petrol-propelled traffic as there was was only to be met with in or near Tonk City and its outskirts, and once beyond that the road stretched away to left and right across the empty land, to Sirohi on one side and Sawai Madhopur on the other. Any activity on the roads was apt to be confined to the early morning and the evening, when the air was cooler and the rocks and the little hills threw shadows on the plain; and that was mostly ox-carts or horse-drawn vehicles, tongas or eccers, the occasional cyclist, and now and again a plodding group of pedestrians from one or other of the small farming communities on the plain.

  It was a perfect place to be a learner driver. No traffic, and long, straight roads that seemed to stretch out before one for miles and miles. If there was anyone on the road you could see them from about a mile away, and all you had to do was to start tooting your horn as loudly as possible, whereupon, in the time-honoured manner of India, anyone walking, riding or cycling on the right-hand side of the road would decide that the left-hand side was
safer, and vice versa. There would be a rush to change sides, which frequently led to confusion and collision in the middle of the road. But by the time you arrived at the spot, they would have sorted themselves out again, and you tooted gratefully and trundled on.

  Driving in such circumstances was a piece of cake. But I was never any good in built-up areas, where there were no rules of the road (there still aren’t) and not only was it ‘every man for himself and last across the road is a chicken’ but the crowded streets contained swarms of livestock and children, playing or pecking around between the feet of pedestrians and the hooves of horses, as well as sacred Brahmini bulls and t***l occasional cows to be avoided. I stuck to the empty highways and avoided the town as much as possible, and was fortunate enough to escape running over anything — not even a pi-dog puppy or a hen.

  The Nawab proved to be a charmer, and I was not surprised that Tacklow had become so fond of the old man. We, too, became fond of him. He had a curiously pear-shaped head, adorned with a neat turban, and was small, merry and stout, though his tubbiness was partly due to the fact that the achans that he habitually wore — those straight, three-quarter-length coats that button down the front and are almost a uniform for middle- and upper-class India — were made of padded silk. I imagine he wore thin white cotton ones during the hot weather, since if he didn’t he would have died from heatstroke, but I don’t remember ever seeing him in anything but padded silk ones, and I have a vivid recollection of the day on which he arrived at our house wearing a particularly attractive one in dove-coloured silk, scattered all over with a pattern of small flowers.