Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  * Muffety Mai bhaiter hai

  Dood or rati karter …

  Burra s’muckra cupera puckera

  Bargia Muffety Mai!

  (Punj-ayah’s version)

  Chapter 20

  In spite of being born and spending the first years of my life in India, I still had no idea what a hot weather in the plains can be like — let alone a hot weather in the plains of Rajputana. It was something that I was about to find out from personal experience; for though Tacklow’s contract was exceedingly generous on the matter of leave (to all intents and purposes allowing him, as far as I could see, to take as much as he liked, whenever he felt like it), certain matters connected with the state and needing his attention had cropped up, and until they were sorted out and settled, it was impossible for him to leave Tonk. And as Mother would not go without him, and we could not go without her, we all stayed on well into the hot-weather months.

  It was an experience that I would be called upon to endure many times in the future, and one that I never got used to. But this was not only the first time, but quite the worst, largely due to the fact that there was no electricity in Tonk. Therefore no fans, no fridge (they hadn’t been invented yet), no ice. And in place of sixty-watt bulbs, there were only kerosene lamps and the occasional Petromax, both of which hissed and flared and generated enough heat to make the hot rooms a great deal hotter.

  Outside, the sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky that was not blue, as it is during the months of the cold weather, but a curious washed-out steel-grey; and during most of the day, between an hour after the sun rose and an hour before it set, the land seemed completely deserted. No humans, no animals, no birds. The only thing that moved was the landscape, the earth itself, that danced and jigged and quivered in the heat-haze, and an occasional dust-devil that, snatched up by some wandering breath of air, whirled across the stony ground and died again. Even the nights were not black, but a thin, washed-out grey, and every now and again one would see the horizon begin to darken threateningly and know that another dust-storm was about to blot out the scorching land.

  We sat the heat out for weeks in Tonk, and then the Lou began to blow, and life became bearable.

  The Lou is a hot wind that blows across Rajputana in the months before the monsoon breaks and, but for the kus-kus tatties, it would merely add to the discomforts of hot weather. But Mother Nature has thoughtfully provided a weapon against it. The kus-kus, whose roots, woven into a curtain and hung in any open doorway where there is a through draught and kept soaked with water, cool the hot air with dangerous efficiency. Dangerous because unlike a modern air conditioner you cannot control its temperature; when the thermometer in your verandah is registering a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade, the inside rooms can easily drop to a mere sixty or seventy — which can lead to a severe chill on the liver, if you don’t watch it.

  We fell into the hot-weather routine that entails spending every day in the dimness of a closed and shuttered house which, when the Lou is blowing, can be beautifully cool. Too cool in fact for the Residency doctor, whose HQ was, as far as I remember, Ajmer, but who visited us at intervals and insisted that we wear cummerbunds to protect us from getting chills on the liver. As soon as the sun neared the horizon and the shadows began to stretch out long and blue on the hot dust, we would emerge like troglodytes into the last of the daylight, to walk or drive and make the most of the cooler evening air. Every door and window in the house was then opened wide, and our beds were carried out to the bara-durri, where, under our mosquito-nets, we would spend the night in comparative coolness. But at the first blink of dawn we would wake and hurry indoors; and before the sun rose every door and window would be closed again and every split-cane chik (blind) on the verandah unrolled to its fullest extent, in an attempt to keep as much as we could of the night’s coolness trapped indoors.

  In the late spring of 1929, in order, I imagine, that Tacklow could make himself familiar with the affairs of Tonk, he returned to Simla, taking us with him. So Bets and I, who had been living for this day, saw again the small hill town in which we had both been born, and where we had spent so many happy summers of our childhood.

  This time we did not, as in the old days, take the little train that puffs and chugs its way laboriously up the interminable twists and turns of the railway track that links Kalka, on the fringes of the burning plains, with the cool summer capital of the Raj, but drove up instead in the two cars, which we had arranged to leave in a couple of garages below the Cecil Hotel in Simla — the rule still held that no cars except those of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief were allowed in the summer capital.

  Every foot of that road was dear and familiar, and I drove up it with a lump in my throat and mentally singing Alleluias at the top of my voice. The road on which Emily Eden, Kipling, Henry and John Lawrence, and many a Governor-General of the East India Company (and, later, Viceroy of the Raj) and my own grandfather and father in their youth had travelled on, in tongas or palanquins, in the days before the railway was built, still, for the most part, ran parallel to the track, rising up slowly from the hot lands, along bare hillsides where nothing grew but sun-scorched grass and tall clumps of candelabra cactus. Kipling, who travelled on that road many times, has described it in a number of his stories and verses, and it has not changed much since his day; or mine.

  The air changed and became cooler and the hillsides greener and more leafy as we left the plains behind; and soon we were among the pines and the familiar sights and scents of my enchanted childhood: ferns and pine-needles and wafts of the delicious scent of the wild climbing roses that the garden centres call ‘Himalayan Musk’. Presently we saw the signpost that marks the turn leading upwards to Kasauli and Sanawar, and the one that leads down to Dugshai — the little military cantonment to which Tacklow had been posted on his arrival in India as a raw young ‘griffen’ in 1889. From there he would cross the Kalka–Simla road, and climb the steep hillside above it to sit and study for his language exams in the peace and quiet of a small British cemetery that dated back to East India Company days, when Sir Henry Lawrence, of Mutiny fame, first established a school for the sons of army men in Sanawar.

  The Dâk and PWD bungalows, which had been built a day’s march apart for the convenience of travellers, and the bazaars of little hill villages that now boasted ramshackle but surprisingly efficient garages where petrol was sold by the can, were unchanged. And so too, when at last the road parted from the Jatogue tunnel and swept round the slope of the mountain, was Simla …

  We stopped the cars at the edge of the road and sat there staring at it, finding it difficult to believe that we were seeing it again, and that after those nine long years of exile it had not changed. There it lay, sprawled along the top of a ridge of the foothills and bright in the evening sunlight, with its bazaars pouring down to the valley below in a cascade of flat tin rooftops, and the pine- and deodar-clad heights above it dotted with the houses, hotels and offices of Sahib-log and rich Indians. There was Christ Church, standing out ivory white against a backdrop of trees and buildings; and there, at the opposite end of the town, perched up on a hilltop, was that Victorian monstrosity, Viceregal Lodge, its windows, like many others from Summer Hill to Chota Simla, glittering like diamonds as they caught the late afternoon sunlight.

  Tacklow had arranged for us to stay at the Grand Hotel in the ‘Cottage’, a wooden building separate from the rest of the hotel which was built out on a hilltop at one end of the central section of Simla. The public rooms, the entrance hall, sitting- and dining-room and so forth, were on a comparatively level plot of ground. But from there the rest rose up sharply, the guest-rooms, bisected by the steepest of drives, rising with it in tiers on either side. The most convenient rooms were those nearest the public rooms, and the best ones, though approached by a steep walk (up which the older, stouter and less agile guests preferred to let their rickshaw-coolies pull them), were the suites built on the flat of the hill, from where the v
iews were superb. The cottage, however, lay some way below these, and could have been visible to them only as an area of red-painted corrugated-tin roofs; for the drive, having reached the crest of the hill, dived sharply downwards for a couple of hundred yards to end at the front door of the cottage, which had been built to fit neatly on to a flat-topped bit of rocky ground that jutted out of the hillside. The building, like most of those in Simla, was constructed out of the lightest possible materials, wood and tin, and this one had the usual corrugated-tin roof and was surrounded by a wide, glassed-in verandah, from the edge of which one looked straight down a terrifyingly long drop on to the tops of trees and the roofs of other houses built far below. We were, in fact, perched upon the top of a small hiccup of rock on an exceedingly steep hillside.

  I had not been allergic to heights during the first fifteen or sixteen years of my life, and could not understand it when I suffered a bad attack of vertigo while climbing a smallish mountain in Switzerland called Mont Cray, whose name is graven into my memory when much else has left no mark. I had suddenly found, when nearing the top, that I couldn’t move, hand or foot, and had to be escorted down, inch by inch, by two infuriated members of the party who had wanted to reach the summit. I have seldom felt so humiliated. But though looking down from the edge of our verandah brought back a horrid memory of Mont Cray, earlier memories of playing in the garden of Chillingham, and similar Simla gardens poised on the edge of precipices, helped me to get over it; and after the first day or two I ceased to worry. This, after all, was where I came in …

  The ‘cottage’ consisted of a round, single-storey building with a large and somewhat dark centre room, out of which the bedrooms and bathrooms led, and since the road that led down to it was a cul-de-sac, and we took all our meals except tea in the hotel’s dining-room, you can see that in order to eat, shop, visit friends or go for walks, we were faced with a stiff climb to the top of our cul-de-sac, followed by an equally steep descent down to the dining-room or the town, and the same in reverse when we returned to our eyrie. The result was admirable. We all became beautifully svelte.

  Immediately after breakfast on the morning after our arrival, Bets and I set out to explore and were enormously relieved to discover how little Simla had changed. Everything was just as we had left it, with two notable exceptions. As in old Delhi, too many of the shopkeepers on the Mall whom we had been on familiar terms with had retired or moved away or died, while their children with whom we had played had grown up and married; the girls to leave home and become mothers of large families, and their brothers to attend colleges or acquire wives and jobs in far-away metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay. We had forgotten that nine years is a very long time in the East, where children are often betrothed while still in short socks, and are married and have children of their own at an age when a western child would still be struggling with homework.

  None of the older generation, all of whom were now grandparents, even great-grandparents, recognized us, and only a handful remembered us — or pretended to do so. The only noticeable exception was one of the men who worked in the ‘waxwork’ shop, who, long ago, we would watch by the hour together as they patterned pieces of plain dark cloth intended as wall-hangings, cushion-covers or shawls, with lotus lilies and sprigs of blossom, and a gaudy assortment of birds, bees and butterflies. Even he did not immediately recognize us, but after we had reintroduced ourselves, and possibly because we had once been such dedicated admirers of his skill, he managed to recall us well enough to ask after Punj-ayah, our long-suffering but much loved ayah.

  As for the kids we used to race down the one-in-one slope of the Lucker-Bazaar hill on our way to school at Auckland House, they were all grown men — fathers of families and heads of households, and totally unrecognizable. The only other way in which Simla had changed was its size. The place had shrunk. I had thought of it as a very large town. The distance between Scandal Point and the Cecil Hotel, for instance, or Harvington to the Bandstand on the Ridge — which I used to walk six days a week, there and back, when in the care of the dreaded Nurse Lizzie — had seemed an enormous distance to the short legs of a child. Yet now they were no distance at all. A fifteen-minute walk at most. The Town Hall, which I remembered as an imposing building, was nothing to write home about, while as for the Gaiety Theatre, on whose boards Bets and I had pranced and danced in so many children’s shows, it was tiny. How could we have fitted the entire dancing class on to it for the rainbow ballet in The Lost Colour, one of the last children’s plays that I had appeared in before being shipped ‘home’ to England and boarding-school?

  I was to spend part of three separate ‘Seasons’ in Simla. But since I never kept a diary or any written record of my life, I cannot, at this date, be any too certain what year this or that happened in, or in what order. For which reason I shall steer clear of dates. What I am clear about are the events of that first return to the much-loved town in which I was born.

  Sandy Napier, a schoolfriend of my brother Bill’s, who spent much of his school holidays with us and had come to be regarded as a member of the family and a brother-by-adoption, was also in Simla that year, having been made an ADC to the Governor of the Punjab. So was Bob Targett, and a number of other friends from Delhi. And, of course, ‘Buckie’ — Sir Edward Buck, Head of Reuter’s and still greatly loved by all the children of his friends, as he had been when Bets and I were small.

  Buckie — or to be accurate, the Times Press in Bombay — had just published a revised and more up-to-date version of Simla Past and Present, a book he had written over twenty years before at the bidding of Lord Curzon, one of the earlier Viceroys of India, who had just discovered that the house he was living in had originally been lived in by that excellent author, artist and Queen of Snobs, the Lady Emily Eden — sister of the deplorable Governor-General, Lord Auckland, who back in the days of the East India Company had, almost single-handed, brought about the disastrous Afghan war of 1840–42. Lord Curzon, who had evidently read and enjoyed Emily’s chatty and catty account of her time in India, wanted a book about the Simla of her day and his, and Buckie had duly come up with one, which he dedicated to Curzon. The reprint, much updated, was dedicated to another, and more recent Viceroy, Lord Reading …

  To anyone interested in the history of a town — once made world-famous by the tales that were written about it by a young newspaper reporter by the name of Rudyard Kipling (see Plain Tales from the Hills and Kim), Buckie’s Simla Past and Present is a must, and I was charmed to see the updated version prominently displayed in every bookshop one passed. Buckie himself had retreated to his beloved house, Dukani, perched on its hilltop some six miles outside Simla, above the little village of Mashobra. When at last Bets and I got around to paying him a visit, we left our rickshaws on the mule-track behind Oaklands, the house in which as children we had spent two happy summers, and instead of going on by road, we climbed up from there by the almost invisible goat-track which had been our favourite way of reaching Dukani in the old days.

  Buckie was at home, and delighted to see us; as was his old head-mali, Kundun, and Kundun’s bibi (wife), both of whom, apart from some grey hairs, were surprisingly unchanged. Dukani too had not changed — though like Simla, it had shrunk a bit in the course of time. I had remembered it as much larger. The bunches of violets that patterned the wallpaper in the guest-room in which Bets and I had always slept when we visited Buckie of old were a bit faded, and blotched here and there with the faint stains of damp. But otherwise we could have occupied it only yesterday. The lower verandah was still banked with the pots of cinerarias that had always been Kundun’s pride, and Buckie’s cluttered study was reassuringly familiar.

  We spent a wonderful afternoon there, and when the time came to leave, Buckie said that we must sign his guest-book — a bulky volume that took up a lot of space on his overcrowded desk, and was full of the names of those he had entertained at Dukani during the years. Many of those names were famous, or have become famo
us. But what interested me most were certain topical verses by Tacklow that had appeared in the comments column of the guest-book to mark various weekend visits by my parents. I wish I’d had the sense to ask Buckie if I could copy them out, but I didn’t think of it. It was pushed out of my mind by an intriguing coincidence that still fascinates me. Buckie had said: ‘Let’s look back and see when you two last visited me; it’s bound to be here.’

  It was. There were our names in handwriting that was still childish and unformed. But what made it startling was the date, which, except for a single numeral in the year, was the same as the one we had only just written after our names on the current page of the guest-book. We had returned to Dukani ten years to the day after our farewell visit in 1918. We stood and stared at it unbelievingly, and a little later, walking back down the narrow hill path to our old home, Oaklands, we both half expected to meet ourselves round every turn — two small girls in short brown dresses, brown strap-shoes and khaki topis (those large pith-helmets that all ferengis wore as a protection against heat-stroke) — scrambling up the familiar goat-track to play in Buckie’s garden with Kundun’s latest baby; as, somewhere back in time, we are certainly still occasionally doing.

  That we should join the Amateur Dramatic Club goes without saying. After all, both of us, and Mother before us, had appeared on the boards of the Gaiety Theatre a good many times already. And though compared to the vast expanse of stage that we remembered it seemed to have shrunk to the size of a pocket handkerchief, Simla would not have been Simla without it. So naturally we joined the players, and appeared in our first grown-up play in walk-on parts. Mine consisted of a few lines of the ‘Madam is not at ‘ome ziz morning’ genre (I played a French maid) and we don’t think Bets spoke at all. As far as we can remember she merely delivered a parcel from a dress-shop, and that was that. But we were jointly responsible for designing the costumes and the set, and we really went to town on that.