Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  One day, and without any warning, an army of monkeys descended en masse from the forested hillside that lay beyond the Bevan-Petmans’ domain, and attacked the house. It was, insisted my host, a carefully thought-out exercise, for they had obviously encircled the place before launching their attack. ‘They came at me from every direction, screaming, grunting and shrieking defiance. It was terrifying,’ he said, and the humans took to their heels and rushed for the house, though not in time to prevent a number of monkeys getting in through doors and french windows that had been left open. Mrs B.-P., the bearer and the head mali could all handle a shotgun, and they and Mr B. -P. ran from window to window, firing, while the rest of the household snatched any weapon they could and laid about them with polo-sticks, squash racquets, walking sticks and anything else that came to hand. Mr B.-P. described it as being exactly like a Tom Mix cowboy film, in which the Indians attack some lonely farmhouse, and that it should have been uproariously funny — if it hadn’t been so frightening.

  He said the creatures kept it up for what seemed like ages, but was probably not more than the inside of an hour, and then they called it off as suddenly as they had started it. One minute they were still fighting to get in at the windows, shrieking, biting and clawing, and the next they had vanished into the forest. Their casualties had been heavy, and later that day the victors buried the vanquished in a mass grave in the orchard. And from that day on, no monkey had been known to come within several hundred yards of the Bevan-Petmans’ grounds. Personally, I think the whole story is a very scary one. There is something very frightening about animals having the same kind of brains as humans — and using them in the same way. I wasn’t sorry to leave that house.

  Anyone who wants to know more about Simla’s bandar-log, and their temple on the crest of Jacko, can find it in a book by Raja Bhasin, entitled Simla, the Summer Capital of British India, which contains dozens of stories about that once fabled little town.

  Chapter 23

  We left Simla a few days after my twenty-first birthday, to drive to Kashmir; Mother at the wheel of the big car, with Tacklow and most of the luggage aboard, and Bets and I taking turns to drive the small one, with Kadera to keep an eye on us. I don’t remember much about that journey, except that the monsoon rains had been heavy that year, particularly in the north, and the floods were out in the Kashmir valley, though not too badly to hold us up.

  That journey was to become so familiar and, much as it often scared me, so dear, that sometimes still, on nights when I cannot sleep, I drive along that road in my imagination, having first decided which one I will take, for there are three ways into the delectable valley. The one by Abbottabad, which I have already described; the one via Murree, and the last via Sialkot and Jammu and the Banihal Pass, which I still think is the best one to approach it by. Because, after you have zig-zagged up that treeless mountainside, with its interminable hairpin bends — and its frequent horrific reminders, in the way of wreckage strewn across the barren slopes far below you, of what can happen if you take them too fast, or if your brakes fail — and when you have negotiated the long dark, dripping tunnel at the top, you suddenly come out on to a wonderful panoramic view of the valley spread out at your feet, far, far below you, green and blossoming and beautiful, ringed with snow-peaks and looking, after the bleakness on the far side of the tunnel, like a skylark’s view of Eden.

  I don’t remember which route we took that year, but I’m pretty certain that it can’t have been via the Banihal, because driving up that fearsome road would have scared me stiff and I couldn’t possibly not have remembered it! But I remember that old Ahamdoo Siraj had not failed us, and the houseboat he had hired for us was ready and waiting, half-way between Gagribal Point and the Dāl Gate, which is the place where the Jhelum river flows into the Dāl through a water gate that can be opened or closed according to need. The houseboat he had rented for us was the H. B. Carlton, which was, at that time, one of the larger boats on the lakes. It seemed enormous to me, and I couldn’t see how on earth it was going to negotiate the narrow waterways and canals that led out to Chota Nageem, where Ahamdoo had arranged a more permanent mooring for us.

  Bill had managed to get a few days’ leave in which to come up and meet us, and we found him waiting at the Dāl Gate, where we all piled into shikarras and were rowed across to the H. B. Carlton.

  We had been afraid that Bill would have brought his fiancée along to meet us, for the fuss and bother of arrival after a long tiring day was hardly the setting that any prospective in-law would have chosen for a first meeting. Fortunately, however, he had not been able to see her himself, for she had been out when he arrived unexpectedly early — several hours earlier than we had — and called briefly at her parents’ boat. He had left a message saying that he would be along later in the evening to take her out to dine and dance, and now he bathed and changed into his dinner-jacket, and having asked the manji to call up a shikarra and arrange for a tonga, apologized to Mother for having to go out on our first evening together, and was rowed away to the Dāl Gate.

  The next few minutes remain fixed in my memory because it taught me a sharp lesson about making judgements. Bill had looked far from cheerful, and I wondered if Mother, who was never very quick on the uptake, had noticed it. She was leaning out of the window watching him go, looking as all those thousands of women must have looked, back in the dark days of the 1914–18 war, as they watched the troop-trains that were carrying their men away to the battlefields of France and Flanders pull out of a railway station. She had seen so little of him as a child or a schoolboy or a cadet; and even less of him as a soldier. Now she was going to lose him to an unknown girl. It cannot have been a happy moment for her. But all she said as she watched him leave was ‘I do hope she’ll like us.’ Not ‘I hope we’ll like her,’ you notice.

  Mother and I had never got on very well. Bill, her adored firstborn and her only son, was her pride and joy, while Bets, as the baby of the family, was her darling and her pet. I came somewhere in the middle and as far as she was concerned didn’t count for very much — which had never worried me because I came first with Tacklow, first of his children I mean. Mother came first with him. I must have been about sixteen or seventeen when it first dawned on me that my mother, instead of being a fount of wisdom (as, in the manner of most children, I had imagined her to be) was in fact a rather silly woman. For example, she confessed one day that she had not wanted another baby while Bill was still so small, and that she had done everything she could think of to get rid of me — ‘The sort of things all your married girlfriends seem to know about and advise you to do,’ said Mother blithely; adding with a distinct tinge of irritation that she had done everything they advised, but none of it had worked.

  What a thing to tell me of all people! Yet she would have been horrified if anyone had accused her of being tactless or unkind in telling that tale to the least-loved of her brood, when all she thought she was doing was having a grown-up talk with a daughter who was now old enough to realize babies were not discovered under gooseberry bushes or brought by storks. There was no malice in Mother. She just didn’t think — or not very often. Yet seeing her face as she watched Bill leaving us, and hearing her express the hope that his girl would like us, I was proud of her; for I know that if I’d been in her shoes I wouldn’t have been able to say that! It also made me realize that that sort of thinking cancelled out any amount of silliness, as well as explaining why Tacklow was still so much in love with her after all these years.

  But in the event she didn’t have to worry for long, for in considerably less than half an hour a shikarra bumped alongside and Bill catapulted in through the dining-room windows, beaming from ear-to-ear in the manner of the Cheshire Cat, and bursting with good news. It seemed that he had arrived at his fiancée’s houseboat, clutching the small velvet box that contained the engagement ring, only to be fended off before he had had a chance to present it. For Bertha had fallen in love with somebody else and no lon
ger wished to marry Bill. She had been incoherent with apologies, and Bill, torn between relief and embarrassment, had apparently managed to blurt out something about hoping that she would be happy and that they could remain friends, before hastily removing himself.

  Tacklow was asked to take charge of the ring again until such time as Bill could flog it, which he subsequently did, at a loss, as no one who has ever been in the same position will be surprised to learn. Mother shed a few relieved tears and Bill celebrated by going solo to the Nedou’s Hotel dance where, inevitably, he met yet another, ‘absolutely smashing girl’. ‘The trouble with me,’ confessed Bill at breakfast next morning, ‘is that I fall in love with every girl I meet, and I don’t know what to do about it!’ ‘Keep off the drink,’ advised Tacklow drily. But except on that one inexplicable occasion, drink was not, and never would be, a problem with Bill, for the simple reason that he could not hold it. A blessing in disguise if ever there was one.

  The matter of his nuptials having been settled to everyone’s satisfaction, Bill returned in good spirits to his battery, and the H. B. Carlton, which was to be our temporary home for the next few weeks, was poled out to the ghat that Ahamdoo had hired for us a mile or so away, not far from the Nageem Bagh lake.

  One of the great charms of living on a houseboat in Kashmir used to be that you could move your home, plus your entire family and its belongings, from place to place as the whim took you — always provided that you had made sure that there would be a ghat available for you to tie up to at your journey’s end. No one can really appreciate the charm of Srinagar and its chain of lakes until they have sat at ease on the flat roof of their boat and watched the world go by as a team of stout Kashmiris (or if their boat is small enough, their manji and one or two of his relations) pole them through green willow-bordered waterways, spangled with lily-pads and the brilliant, flashing jewel colours of kingfishers, to emerge into bright sunlight and find themselves moving grandly through the main street of one of the outlying suburbs, for here, as in Venice, many of the streets are replaced by canals. I had passed this way often in a shikarra but never before from the vantage-point of a houseboat roof, and it was like watching a play from a seat in the front of a dress circle.

  Every houseboat has a ‘cookboat’ in which the manji (who usually doubles as the cook) lives with his family, and has his own ‘working’ shikarra in which the staff can go shopping and generally fetch or carry. This last is a strictly utility craft and does not boast padded seats or a canopy, as the ‘taxi’ shikarras do, and when a houseboat is on the move, it is trailed behind the cookboat which follows behind the houseboat. So we made a stately procession as we moved to the rhythmic chant of the men who were poling us. These poles are enormously long and must be exceedingly heavy, but they handle them with the ease of long practice, dropping them into the water at the front of the houseboat, and walking back along the duckboards pushing them, until by the time they reach the end of the boat there is only a scant yard of wood left above the water for them to push with their shoulders, before hauling the great, dripping poles out and walking forward, trailing them, to repeat the process.

  Our floating home glided us past an ancient mosque, shaded by chenar trees and fronted by a wide flight of stone steps that ended in the water; past a little Hindu temple whose tall, pointed roof glittered blindingly in the bright sunlight, because it had recently been retiled with plates of tin taken from the sides of kerosene tins, which may sound unromantic, but in fact looked wonderful. An excellent lunch was served as usual, in the middle of all this, but Mother, who had been making pencil sketches all morning, became aware that there was some slight hitch in the proceedings and a certain amount of whispering in the pantry between courses. She asked if anything was wrong. No, no, said the manji — it was nothing. A slight inconvenience only. His wife was in labour, that was all. They had not expected it for another week, it was a pity that it happened today, but there was nothing for the Lady-Sahib to worry about.

  Mother was appalled. The very idea of that unfortunate girl having a baby in the overcrowded cookboat, with no privacy at all, and while it was being poled by hired coolies, and her husband and his brother were cooking a three-course meal for us, and various members of her family were falling over each other helping to wash dishes —! The boat must be pulled into the bank and moored at once and the coolies sent home and no more cooking must be done until the baby arrived and it was certain that all was well with its mother. We could easily stay here until then, and send for coolies at a later date.

  It was the manji’s turn to be horrified. He wouldn’t dream of stopping the boat for such a trivial reason. It would be shuram ki bhat* and his wife would be terribly upset to think that she was the cause of it. What would people say? He was plainly shocked to the core, and Mother had to give in, though she spent an anxious day and night. We arrived safely at our moorings, having been served tea en route at the normal time, and dinner (four courses) on the dot. There was no further word from the cookboat but Mother did not sleep well, wondering if she should send for the nearest woman doctor. She need not have worried. The morning dawned cloudless and bright, and the first thing we saw when we looked anxiously at the cookboat was an enchanting baby boy, roughly the size of a small cottage loaf, sitting propped up on the prow of the cookboat, wrapped in a gaily coloured blanket, wearing a red and gold cap on his head and looking as chipper as a cricket.

  Our ghat turned out to be on a spur of land that was almost an island, on which the rich Indian who owned it had started to build a two-storey house where he and his family could spend the summer months. But when it was almost finished, something must have happened to make him change his mind, for he abandoned it, and rented out the land as a ghat instead. The unfinished house acquired the reputation of being haunted, though no one knew why. The only reason why we never entered it was because the sun, rain and snow of many years had played havoc with it and made it too dangerous a place to go wandering around in. Willows, poplars, weeds and wild roses had grown up around it, and there were several large chenar trees and an ancient wild cherry that must have been there long before the house was built.

  The mooring itself was on a quiet backwater known as Chota Nageem (small Nageem), separated from the larger lake of that name only by the Nageem Bagh Bridge and the main road that leaves Srinagar to circle the Dāl and touch, in doing so, no fewer than four of the gardens with which the Great Moguls gilded the lily that is — that was — Kashmir. And since the entire island was included in the fee that was paid for our ghat, we found ourselves in possession of enough space to accommodate at least three more houseboats. Which was our good fortune, because the only drawback to having one’s houseboat moored at Nageem itself was that even at that date it had become much too popular, and by now was getting grossly overcrowded. There were places where cookboats were moored parallel to and far too near their houseboats, which led to a certain amount of friction between the holidaying occupiers. One of them, goaded into action, sent a crisply worded letter of complaint to his next-door neighbour, pointing out that her masalchi had taken to flinging the dirty water in which he had been washing her dishes straight into his drawing-room windows, and that this practice must now cease. Since he signed his letter ‘Russell of Liverpool’, the lady on the receiving end leapt to the conclusion that he was being frivolous and, unaware that he was in fact Lord Russell of Liverpool, signed her apology ‘Mary Magdalen of Jerusalem’. He was not amused.

  Nageem was a deservedly popular spot, for though it is quite a small lake and cannot compare in size with the Dāl, Nasim or Gagribal, it is the deepest of all the lakes (local opinion insists that it is bottomless) and, being fed by underground springs, is also the cleanest and clearest, which made it an excellent place for swimmers. It also boasted a large bathing boat (only one, at that date!), which was moored well out on the lake opposite the Club, and furnished with changing rooms, a bar, and diving boards from which, for a small sum, one could bathe,
dive, or just sit around talking and sipping gimlets, a popular local drink with the Raj, consisting of gin, Rose’s lime juice and ice. But the overcrowding that was due to its popularity was not the only drawback to acquiring a ghat on Nageem. A worse one was the almost total lack of privacy.

  No conversation was private, and a disgusted young American friend of ours, globe-trotting through India, complained that he had been told that the immoral goings-on of the holidaying British in Kashmir were beyond belief, but that in his opinion anyone who had the ‘noive’ to be immoral on a houseboat deserved a gold medal for Courage Beyond Call of Duty. He had a point there, for it is impossible to move in a houseboat without rocking it gently, and creakingly, at every step. In addition to which, no word spoken in a normal voice went unheard.

  The same went for the wooden-built huts, hotels and guest-houses of Gulmarg, which had given rise to endless stories. The best known of these concerns a middle-aged Major on leave who, arriving at a late hour of night at Nedou’s Hotel in Gulmarg, was given a notoriously draughty single room, untenanted for the past week and the last-but-one of a row. His journey up from the plains having been a particularly exhausting one, he went straight to bed — and to sleep. Only to be rudely awakened (the phrase can be taken literally) by the arrival of an amorous couple in the end room who, it soon became clear, had no idea that the next-door room was no longer unoccupied.

  The unfortunate Major found himself forced to listen to a good deal of scampering and scuffling, punctuated by maidenly squeaks or guffaws of manly laughter and occasional protests that suggested that the pair were attempting to take each other’s clothes off. Presently the unwilling listener was regaled with the sound of a crisp slap and a male voice inquiring roguishly, ‘Whose little bottom is this?’ followed by a flurry of squeaks and giggles, the sound of a second slap and a breathless soprano voice demanding, ‘And whose little bottom is this?’