Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  Mother had pointed out a shade tartly that although Tacklow no longer had a right to a seat at the top table, he would on this occasion be representing His Highness the Nawab of Tonk, who had. But the Major shot that one down by observing regretfully that Tonk was only a minor state and ‘outgunned’ by so many of the senior and more powerful ones that a mere representative, who happened to be employed by its ruler, would cut very little ice. As to Tonk House, the Major was afraid that we could find we had let ourselves in for a most uncomfortable three or four days, since it was seldom used and had been allowed to fall into a shocking state of disrepair. While as for the staff …!

  All in all he painted such a gloomy picture that, visualizing a repeat performance on a larger scale of my first disastrous dance at the Srinagar Residence and having no desire to be relegated to the ranks of a wallflower for three days on end, I sided with the opposition and could only hope that Tacklow would stick to his guns and refuse the invitation. Which he certainly would have done had it not been for Mother.

  Mother had never cared a toot for precedence. In fact I very much doubt if she even noticed who sat where at Buna Khaners (big dinners) let alone who went in on whose arm or ahead of whom. She never gave a Burra Khaner herself (apart from anything else, I don’t think Tacklow could have afforded it!). She only invited people she liked and who made her laugh, and if anyone took offence over her seating plans, she either never learned about it, or, if she did, refused to believe it on the grounds that no one could possibly be so petty. But, as I have said before, she dearly loved a party, and of late she had spent a lot of time living under canvas and wearing the gear that went with that — khaki shorts, knickerbockers and putties, sensible walking shoes and a khaki topi. Not that she hadn’t enjoyed every minute of our trip down the Ganges and the Christmas camp. But she couldn’t wait to put on her prettiest evening dress and go off partying, and didn’t disguise her disappointment when Tacklow, after listening to the Major’s discouraging talk, said that in that case he thought we had better give up the idea of attending the Ajmer festivities.

  The Major said that he was sure that Tacklow had made the right decision. After which he changed the subject and we chatted a bit about this and that and he left.

  Well, it was three to two against. But since the two were Mother and the old Nawab, they won easily. For when had Tacklow ever been able to refuse his darling Daisy anything that it was in his power, or his purse, to give her? While, as the Major had pointed out, the Nawab was his employer. So, of course, we went to Ajmer. And contrary to the Major’s dire predictions, had a wonderful time there. This was largely because the new Viceroy, Lord Willingdon, and his wife, knew my parents, as did every ruling prince whose forebears had made a treaty with the Raj, which I presume meant all of them. Bets and I had met a good many of them and got to know their wives and daughters and it was nice to see them and their schoolboy sons and applaud their boys’ skill on the cricket field, or at the prizegiving.

  The focal point of the garden party, which I presume must have taken place in the college grounds, was a marble pavilion (or platform) reached by a long flight of steps and furnished with carpets, chairs and sofas and a scattering of small tables. Here the Willingdons were seated, together with a number of the more important rulers and their wives (the few who were not in purdah — most of them were in those days, as were all unmarried daughters who had reached marriageable age*) and a selection of the more senior British officials and their ladies. The rest of us circled around on the spacious lawns, or beside the long tables laden with sandwiches and cakes, while scores of liveried servants handed round cups of tea, and a band played.

  The Indian guests outnumbered the British ones by at least ten to one, as was normal in Rajputana, since this was Rajasthan — ‘the Country of the Kings’. Almost every ‘King’ was present, and there was a constant coming and going of people up and down the long flight of red-carpeted steps that led to the marble pavilion. It looked, I thought, a bit like Jacob’s Ladder, and watching it, I noticed the Viceroy’s ADCs were having to work hard, some of them leading guests up from the lawns while others escorted down those who had spoken to one or other of the Willingdons for what was presumably an allotted time, their place taken by a newcomer. Lady Willingdon, watching the lawns below from the vantage point of the pavilion, had spotted Mother just as tea was being served to her and those on the surrounding sofas, and, beckoning to an ADC, she sent him off to fetch my parents. I saw Mother being removed from a dense cluster of friends and acquaintances — she was always at her best at a party, for she possessed the invaluable knack of making everyone near her feel that they too were enjoying themselves. Led up Jacob’s Ladder, she was plonked down next to Lady Willingdon and plied with tea and cake, and later Tacklow, too, was fetched up to the pavilion, where they both stayed until the tea interval was over and the Willingdons went down to do what was later to become known as ‘a walkabout’, meeting as many of the guests as possible — something that ‘Mauve Marie’† was exceptionally good at.

  Bets and I, true to the Major’s prediction, were not invited to the state banquet, but my parents were, and though the senior lady present went into dinner with the Viceroy, Mother found herself seated on his other side. It seems he had attended far too many state dinners of late, and been landed with making conversation to too many elderly ‘burra mems’, so he had gone on strike and demanded to have at least one woman next to him who could be relied upon to entertain him and make him laugh. Tacklow’s position at the table was probably a fairly lowly one — I know that it was a long way away from Mother and nowhere near Lady Willingdon, and also that he would never have noticed, or cared, where he was placed.

  Bets and I were asked to a dinner party and ‘gramophone hop’ thrown by some of our age group, so we too had an enjoyable evening. In fact the entire visit was a great success, and the old Nawab — who considered that he and his state had acquired much izzat (honour) from the favour shown to his President of the Council of State by the Viceroy and Vicereine— was delighted. We hoped that Major Barlow, who as Assistant to the AGG Rajputana ranked only one step below his chief in the Province, and had of course been present, was equally pleased at the way things had turned out. But since Tonk was only one among many states that he had to visit, and (as he had pointed out to us) not one of the really powerful ones, we were not to see him again for many months. By which time so many other and far more interesting things had happened that we had almost forgotten about it. Unfortunately, the Major had not. But we were not to discover that until later.

  The most interesting happening of the next year was Nunni-mia’s wedding. Nunni was only twelve years old, but he had been betrothed to the ten-year-old daughter of a Bhopal nobleman, and their marriage was one of those token affairs in which the girl bride would spend the first three days of her married life in the care of her new mother-in-law and under the eagle eyes of the ladies of the zenana so that she could get to know something about her young husband before being returned to her own family until she was old enough for the marriage to be consummated. As his father’s favourite son, and heir-designate after Saadat, Nunni was a very eligible bridegroom, and the shadi was celebrated with all the usual colour, pomp and ceremony of an Indian wedding. No expense was spared, and Tacklow became a little worried as to whether the state’s exchequer could stand it. But our old Nawab doted on Nunni and nothing was too good for him.

  A special train was laid on to take the wedding party to Bhopal from the railhead nearest to Tonk, and that alone must have set the old boy back quite a packet. Not to mention the fleet of cars and lorries needed to take us all there, which included the Meades and ourselves, as well as all the young bridegroom’s kith and kin, every nobleman in Tonk and anyone in any position of authority, plus a host of Nunni’s friends and any number of courtiers, servants and assorted retainers.

  It soon became obvious that the train was going to be shockingly overcrowded, and Tacklow — who w
ould be attending the wedding in his official capacity while his wife and daughters were going as invited guests — suggested that it would help towards easing the congestion if he and his family, their luggage and our two servants, were to travel to Bhopal by car. This would not only put our four-berth carriage and adjoining servants’ carriage at the disposal of the wedding party, but allow him to be waiting on the platform to receive His Highness when the Nawab arrived at Bhopal, since the distance by road was a good deal shorter. The offer was accepted with undisguised relief, to the disappointment of Bets and me, who had been looking forward to the long, leisurely train journey which would have allowed us to gossip with the ladies in the purdah carriages.

  However, the trip by road, though hot, bumpy and dusty, was not without interest and, since the Nawab had insisted on putting two of his best cars at our disposal, as well as picnic baskets full of delicious food and fruit and iced drinks in Thermos flasks, we were chauffeured like millionaires across the lovely, empty spaces and through the narrow valleys and low, stony hills of King’s Country, and arrived, as Tacklow had said, well ahead of the wedding party from Tonk.

  His Highness the Nawab of Bhopal was away, but he had left orders that we were to be put up in the New Palace — a disappointment, since I had hoped that it might be the Old Palace, the new one being one of those modern ones. I envied the Tonk party, who were housed in older and far more attractive buildings in the city.

  The wedding party was greeted with garlands and a fu-fu band and much banging of tom-toms, and that night there was a men-only party, given by the bride’s family. Everything looked set for a thoroughly pleasant occasion. But it was not to be. The very next morning a spanner was tossed in the works by the bride’s father, who suddenly announced that the bride-price — the sum paid by the groom’s family to the bride’s father for the privilege of marrying his daughter — was insufficient, and that his vakils (lawyers) advised that it must be doubled. This, not unnaturally, led to considerable gurr-burrh or Indian uproar. For a time everything came to a grinding halt and it began to look as though we would all have to turn round and go home again. However, after endless argument and acrimony, my darling Tacklow, in whose lap this nonsense-work had landed, managed to sort it out and settle it to everyone’s satisfaction.

  That evening I saw the prettiest sight I have ever seen at any Indian festivity. Nor did I ever see anything like it again. Bets and I must have been to some party, probably dinner in the zenana quarter with the begums. Whatever it was, we ended up at a comparatively late hour of the night, sitting on top of a high wall in the dark, waiting to see a procession pass. The wall was one of a pair that ran on either side of a narrow street, somewhere in the old city, and presumably near the zenana quarters of some nobleman’s palace, for several of the begums, shrouded in bourkas, were perched on the wall beside us.

  It was a little like sitting up in a machan at a tiger beat, listening for the beaters to approach and wondering what would come out of the jungle opposite you. We could hear the noises of an Indian city all around us. But there was nothing and no one in the dark slot of the lane below us, until at last we heard drums and flutes and all the joyous din of a fu-fu band approaching from somewhere on our right, together with the bright flame of torches.

  The torchlight and the noise came steadily nearer and suddenly the lane below us was full of men, some bearing torches, and the rest marching four or five abreast, carrying wands of leaves and flowers made from tinsel and glittering sheets of foil. I had seen these tinsel and paper flowers before, since they could be bought in almost any fair-sized bazaar throughout India. But I had never previously seen them put to such good effect, and it taught me an excellent lesson on the wonderful effect of a single colour used en masse as opposed to a dozen different ones …

  The latter were merely gaudy, while the former could be magical — as here. The white flowers were small and silver, and barely noticeable among the mass of large pointed leaves, roughly the size and shape of mango or avocado leaves, and cut from green foil that glittered in the torchlight and turned to every possible shade of that colour as they rustled past us. The men who carried them wore dark coats and green muslin turbans, which made them completely invisible and created the illusion that Birnam Wood was on the move again, marching on Bhopal instead of Dunsinane.

  I must have been told where they were going, and with what purpose. But if so I have no recollection of it. Only the picture remains; to become like one of those jewelled fragments in the rag-bag of offcuts thrown out daily by the costume department from the lovely costumes that Raymond Hughes designed for the film of my novel The Far Pavilions.

  Considering that this was my first experience of a royal wedding in India, my recollections are remarkably few. Among them was a morning visit that Mother and I paid to the Senior Begum and her ladies. We arrived just as the Senior Begum was about to choose the jewels that she would wear for the wedding ceremony.

  I don’t think that we of the West have any idea of the riches that India used to take for granted. Not even Elizabeth II — or Elizabeth Taylor! — could match the state jewels of the richer princely states. Tonk was, as we had recently been reminded, a comparatively minor state; yet the selection of jewels that the Senior Begum’s women had thought fit to bring with them staggered me. You’ve no idea what a picture it made. The old lady, who can’t have been all that old (but then I was at the age when anyone over twenty-five was middle-aged) was sitting on a pile of brightly coloured cushions on a low platform under a roof that was all arches, supported by slender pillars. The room gave on to a balcony from which one could look out across the city through elaborately carved marble screens, for this was part of the zenana quarters, from where the occupants could look out unseen, but no one could look in.

  The Begum was wearing a warm colour — probably orange or red — and her women passed by her in procession, each one showing her a piece of jewellery, displayed in a conventional velvet case that was presumably made by some modern jeweller, since most of the jewellery predated the boxes by at least a century. The contents of those boxes left me gasping, and I remember being deeply impressed by the casualness with which the old lady treated them. They all seemed to be fabulous, and I could not understand how she could dismiss so many with a careless flick of her hand after barely glancing at them.

  Now and again she would lift a finger, lean forward, and look more carefully at some particularly gorgeous trinket before waving it away. She must have looked at and discarded at least twenty or thirty items before making her choice. I can’t remember what it was, or even what colour she finally decided upon — only that it wasn’t the one I would have chosen! I put in a strong plea for that one, and though she wavered for a bit, she eventually decided against it on the grounds that its beauty and superlative workmanship could only be appreciated at close range. Besides, the jewels did not glitter and so would have little or no impact when half shrouded in the gauze sari she intended to wear, which anyway, was the wrong colour.

  I saw her point. If you had not been standing close to her you could well have believed that my choice was the real thing, and not jewellery at all. Because the set consisted of a necklace and bracelets that had been fashioned by some master craftsman to look as though they were garlands of jasmine blossom. The leaves had been carved from emeralds and the flowers were pearls — every one of them pear shaped and most beautifully matched — and except for the buds, at the centre of each flower was a yellow diamond. The things were a work of art, and I have never seen anything remotely like them again. Nor can I make a guess at what they must be worth now. But I could see why the Begum did not choose them, and she was right of course. In a country that uses garlands of fresh flowers not only every day, but every hour and minute of every day as a gesture of greeting or farewell, adorns the bride and groom and their many relations and friends with wreaths of roses and jasmine for the heads of its women, and drapes the biers of the dead with strings of marigold flow
ers, a necklace and bracelets of jewels made to imitate the real thing would, except at close range, be taken as just that.

  On the day of the wedding two or three members of the bride’s family took Mother, Bets and me to see the bride being dressed for the great occasion. Their house, like the one that the ladies from Tonk were staying in, was one of the old buildings in the city, and the only thing I remember about it is that it had no electricity and appeared to consist of a rabbit-warren of small, ill-lit rooms and long dark corridors, and that it smelt faintly of sandalwood and faded flowers, and strongly of damp and the slow centuries. The room in which we ended up, by contrast with all the others we had passed, was enormous, but I can give no description of it, because despite its size and its high ceiling it was lit by a solitary oil-lamp and the light from a single narrow window.

  The room was also crowded with chattering women, some of whom we had already met, though it was difficult to recognize anyone in that gloomy dungeon. What with the inadequate lighting, the excited, giggling mob of girls and crones, all in their wedding finery and clashing with jewels, it was impossible to see if there was any furniture in the room or not.

  As for the bride, all we saw of her was a bundle of red and gold gauze, crouched on its knees, head in hands and bent almost double, surrounded by a ring of waiting-women who were engaged in brushing and combing her hair, prior to smoothing it with scented oil and braiding it with jewels and jasmine buds. At present it fell to the floor in a silky black curtain that prevented us from getting so much as a glimpse of her face, even if she hadn’t hidden it in her hands. I suspected that she was not only shy but was trying to hide the fact that she was crying, and I was grateful when Mother hissed in my ear that it was high time we left, adding indignantly that it was a shame to expect the poor child to meet strange foreigners at a time like this — she was after all, only ten.