Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  This had its disadvantages, of course. I well remember seeing, among the new selection of materials at Kirpa Ram’s shop, a really fascinating material which the proprietor said was French (half the cloth shops of Asia used to buy the offcuts and remnants of material made in Europe). It was black, printed with sprays of flowers, and I yearned to buy a dress length of it and would certainly have done so except that (a) I couldn’t afford it, and (b) I knew only too well that I hadn’t the figure for it. However, it was just as well that I didn’t buy it because next week I attended a cocktail party at which no fewer than five women turned up wearing dresses made from the same material. The first two had glared at each other like a pair of angry cats when number two entered, and a deathly and embarrassed silence fell when number three made her appearance; but when number four arrived there was a moment or two of stunned silence, and then the guests collapsed into shrieks of mirth. Then number five walked in, whereupon the shrieks redoubled; the unfortunate five laughing with the rest of us. In fact it made the whole party into a howling success — literally.

  Returning from Kohat, Mother got her usual rapturous welcome from Angie, who had been left behind in the charge of Kadera, and later that year, when the snows melted and the almond trees made a pink froth in the valley, we moved back into a houseboat which we moored once again at the Moons’ ghat at the end of their garden. The only drawback to a riverside mooring was the risk of floods; and once again, as a result of an exceptionally heavy monsoon at the beginning of June, the Jhelum river rose until, with appalling rapidity, we found ourselves dangerously near the top of the bund and looking down into what had once been the Moons’ garden but was now an unkempt wilderness, because at some time during the winter their house had been destroyed by a fire that had left only the outer walls standing. Everything else had gone, and the ruined garden was now a shallow lake.

  The Jhelum, according to the few newspapers that managed to get through, had risen over sixteen feet above its normal level, and seventy-five feet in the gorges, where it had ripped away a span of the Kohala Bridge. Both the Banihal and the Rawalpindi roads were flooded for several miles, and the papers reported that ‘rocks and rafters are blocking the road at several places’ — Rafters? What on earth do you suppose they meant by rafters? Logs? Roofs of houses? — No, I am not quoting from memory (I have a very good one, thank heaven, but it’s not as good as all that!). I am quoting here from a couple of newspaper cuttings that Mother pasted alongside snapshots in her 1931 album. A later one says that ‘a large number of motor vehicles, with stores and hundreds of passengers, are held up on the roads. So far no loss of life has been reported though much damage has been caused to property.’

  They don’t report that among the ‘motor vehicles’ held up in the valley (in the Moons’ garden, actually, where they had been given asylum) were half the vehicles and members of a French expedition, sponsored and launched by Monsieur Citroën of Citroën cars, who had already pulled off a Trans-African crossing in a fleet of specially designed trucks, forerunners of the Jeep and the Land Rover. That African crossing had been a wild success, and with a book and film about it, The Black Journey, already on sale, the enterprising French had decided to attempt an even more hazardous feat, this time by two expeditions: one would start from Syria and drive overland by the way of Kashmir and Gilgit to Kashgar, where they would meet up with the other lot, who were to set off from Peking. Both expeditions were filming as they went, and someone or other would be writing it all up, this time under the title of La Croisière Jaune, the ‘Yellow Crossing’ (China, Mongolia and the Gobi Desert), as a follow-up to the original ‘Black Journey’.

  The leader of the first Citroën expedition, and most of its top brass, including the official artist, were to do the toughest stretch, Syria to Kashgar, and it was they who were stranded in the Moons’ garden on the other side of the bund from where we were moored. Never have I been angrier with myself for not learning to speak French when I was at school. It had never occurred to me that I should need to. It wasn’t France I intended to make for when school was over, but India. Oh dear, how silly can one be? However, having instantly made friends with the stranded Citroën on the other side of our bund, I managed somehow, though only because their leader, Georges-Marie Haardt, his number two, Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, better known as ‘Little Louie’, the expedition’s artist, Alexandre Yacovleff, a young Russian, and ‘Waddy’, Colonel Waddington (who was up in Srinagar again that season) all spoke enough English to cope with uneducated little twerps like me.

  I don’t remember if I have mentioned ‘Waddy’ before. He was a friend of the Moons and we had seen a lot of him when he had been visiting them in a previous summer. He was a Frenchman who spoke English like an Englishman, which was only natural, because his family had originally been English, and had emigrated to France in the seventeenth century. One of his forefathers had helped to hide Charles II — then only Prince Charles — in an oak tree on the family farm, after the Royalists were defeated at the Battle of Worcester.

  It must have been after that that Waddy’s ancestor fled to France, and when Charles came back to England as King, the ancestor was given a pension amounting to five pounds a year, ‘in perpetuity’, by the Government — in those days, quite a tidy sum, I gather! This ‘pension’ had been solemnly paid ever since, right up to the time of Waddy’s father, though by then they had been French for generations. But Waddy’s father, an unromantic type and obviously no historian, accepted an offer of a lump sum in lieu.

  Anyway, Waddy was up that year, and naturally spending a lot of time with his compatriots. In fact, for as long as the French expedition was there he used our boat as a home from home, and there were always some of them parked on it, drinking and chatting. I was charmed when Tacklow told me that Little Louie had said my French was ‘ver’ ver’ bad!’ but this didn’t matter, because ‘When she talk, she talk like a Frenchwoman — with her hands and her face; she make them speak for her.’

  The young Russian, Alexandre, had a stack of paintings with him and we persuaded him to let us see some of them. He brought a huge portfolio to our boat one morning and gave us a private exhibition. It was wonderful. He had used tempera mostly, using white-of-egg as a medium because, he said, even in the wildest and remotest parts of the world, one could always get chickens. I have never seen anything quite like some of those pictures. They seemed to jump off the canvas at you; portraits of light-haired men and women who claimed descent from the Greek and Macedonian captains and governors that Sikandar Dulkhan — Alexander the Great — had left behind him to hold the vast Empire he had conquered. Wrinkled faces of old, old men and smooth-cheeked young ones; pretty girls and grey-haired grandmothers; mountain people who had been born and lived all their lives in little, lost valleys that no westerner had ever heard of before.

  Their faces looked back at one as though they were alive. And the larger canvases showed the country through which the expedition had come so brilliantly that afterwards you could almost swear that you had actually been there yourself and seen it with your own eyes. There were magical paintings of the smoky interiors of Mongolian yurts, crammed with duffel-clad figures huddled around a small cooking-fire; and others of men on small shaggy ponies, riding herd on a string of yaks and dwarfed to pygmies by the enormous size of the land they rode across — a vast plain streaked with patches of snow and rimmed along the far horizon by low barren hills, snow-topped and very far away.

  The only sad thing about those pictures was that they very nearly drove me into throwing all my painting gear, pencils, paintboxes and blocks, into the Jhelum, and stopped me from painting for months afterwards. What on earth was the use of my messing about with producing my half-baked little pictures when there were artists like that around? Not in a hundred years could I begin to approach that standard. To this day, when I am writing a novel — even if it is only a whodunit — I never read anything by an author I really admire, or am afraid I may admire, because it
puts me off my own.

  Mike turned up again somewhat unexpectedly. He walked on to the boat one morning, looking a bit apprehensive and as if he wasn’t sure of his reception. It was good to see him again, and more than good to find that I was still fond of him but not in the least bit in love with him any more. All that was over and done with, and we laughed ourselves into hysterics over that row and its results and ended up the best of friends. I introduced him to the members of the expedition, with whom he got on like a house on fire since, unlike me, his French was good enough to stand the strain. And the rest of the summer was a repeat of the picnics and bathing-parties and amateur theatricals of a typical Srinagar season.

  A magnificent party was given at the City Palace for the Citroën Expedition, where The Black Journey, the film they had taken of their Trans-African crossing, was premièred. And later on in the year, all Srinagar — or as many of its inhabitants and holiday-making visitors as could fight their way through the cheering crowds that lined the river-bank from His Highness the Maharajah’s ghat at the turn of the river above the Club, down to the City — were given a magnificent spectacle as His Highness showed off his baby son and heir, who earlier that summer had been born in the South of France and was now being brought back by his parents to be shown to his people.

  They came down the river in the glittering royal barge, escorted by a fleet of flower-decorated boats rowed by men in gold-trimmed uniforms, and accompanied by an armada of coloured shikarras. Her Highness the Maharani shimmered with gold brocade and tissue and sparkled with diamonds, while her tiny son, the centre of all this splendour, slept placidly on his mother’s knee. We had a splendid view, having arrived early enough to stand against the wooden railing that surrounded the Club’s pier, which was crowded by members, many standing on chairs and the ones at the back on tables. Bill was up on short leave at the time, and he and a friend of his, one Jeff Dimsey, were standing with Bets and myself, squashed up against the rail and leaning far out to watch the approaching boats, when a girl some way further up, and also leaning out as far as she could, turned her head and looked back at us. ‘Wow!’ breathed Bill.

  I did not know then that she would become one of the best of my friends; and although more than sixty years have passed since that sunny morning on the pier of the Srinagar Club, she still is. Bill, riveted, clutched my arm and said, ‘Gosh, what a girl! Did you see her? I must find out who she is, Jeff. — did you see that smashing girl? I must find out who she is!’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Jeff, apparently answering both questions, and equally smitten. Being a man of action, he turned and vanished into the packed masses of the crowd behind and around us. Which is why Bill never even got to first base with young Yda Reynolds — who, as it happened, had been totally unaware of my susceptible brother’s admiring gaze, her own having been caught by Jeff Dimsey’s equally smitten one — and by the fact that Jeff had burrowed through the crowd like a purposeful mole until he managed to end up just behind her, after which the rest was comparatively easy. To make this a better story, he should, of course, have married her and lived happily ever afterwards. But then Yda always had a whole set of suitors, and though she may have shown a momentary preference for Jeff, that was all it was — he ended up as just one of her many admirers. Bill for his part continued to adore, but by the time Jeff had been crossed off the list, he was back with his battery and that was that.

  Odd, this attraction that she had, because she wasn’t especially pretty: a little damsel, with dark curly hair and a figure not much better than my own, whom men fell for like ninepins and of whom women used to say, ‘I can’t think what they see in her!’ Which was silly, because there was plenty to see. She played an excellent game of tennis and an equally good game of golf, and at the age of fifteen had been selected to represent Australia (the country in which she had been brought up by her grandparents and gone to school) at the Olympic Games in both the junior tennis and the swimming and diving, and would have done so if her father had not refused to allow her to do any such thing, on the grounds that ‘well-bred young ladies did not make public exhibitions of themselves’.

  I have just been talking to her on the telephone, and getting the latest news of the progress of one of her granddaughters who is playing in the Junior Tennis Championships. Yda still resents the fact that she was done out of playing for Australia at the Olympics, and, when reminded of that day on the pier of the Srinagar Club, said that if she had a preference, she thinks it was for Bill rather than Jeff, but that she didn’t take either of them seriously. Poor deluded young chumps.

  Later that month there was another glittering ball in the Old Palace; this time in honour of His Highness’s birthday. Having heard that a fabulous price had been paid in order to persuade the most famous nautch-girl in all India to travel to Kashmir and entertain the guests for the occasion, I had been looking forward to seeing this famous lady. But as the evening wore on, I could see no sign of anyone who looked spectacular enough to fill the bill, so I latched on to one of His Highness’s ADCs and demanded to be told what had happened to the celebrity. Had she missed the train or the plane or been held up by a landslide? No, no. Nothing like that, my handsome young friend assured me. She was here all right, but her performance was strictly for men only.

  It needed a lot of coaxing, but in the end I managed to inveigle the poor man into letting me have just a peep. And that was all it was. He hurried me down a series of red-carpeted corridors and stopped by a door from behind which came the sounds of sitar and tabla accompanying a shrill Indian soprano, punctuated by and almost lost in roars of male laughter. The door-keeper, looking startled and disapproving, began to protest in a hushed whisper, and after a brief colloquy, and the passing of something that I took to be a five-rupee note, he opened the door just wide enough for me to stick my head inside …

  So this was why there was such a shortage of Englishmen on the ballroom floor and in the rooms immediately surrounding it! I had thought they must have become bored or drunk too much champagne, and left early. But here they all were — or far too many of them, anyway — laughing their heads off at the most famous nautch-girl in India, and clapping almost every word she said. As for the ‘dancing-girl’ herself, she may have been pretty once, but now, to my young eyes, she was just a fat old woman bundled up in a glittery sari over a Rajputana-style skirt, lavishly embroidered with gold thread and spangles, that stopped just above her ankles; her feet were bare below jingling anklets, and like the lady who rode a white horse to Banbury Cross, she had ‘rings on her fingers and bells on her toes’ — and more in her ears and her nose as well. As for her dancing, it was restricted by the fact that she had a brought a small carpet with her, one that couldn’t have been larger than the average bathmat, and she never moved off it. Standing on it, she stamped and shimmied and swung her massive hips so that her skirts whirled and undulated to the twanging of the sitar and the thumping of the tabla. Her arms and her bejewelled neck did more dancing than her stamping feet, and the movements of her eyes and chin and those supple, elegant hands were a marvel to behold.

  I haven’t got a good enough ear to appreciate Indian music, and, perhaps fortunately, my Hindustani was no longer good enough to take in more than a fraction of the words she was singing, for they were undoubtedly not of the kind that Mother would have approved. But her strictly male audience, which included His Highness and every man, Indian or British, who could manage to sneak off while his womenfolk were not looking, were literally mopping their eyes and rocking in their seats with laughter. And from that brief look at her I realized that however much she had been paid for her performance she was worth every anna of it. I wish I could have seen more of it, but my agitated young friend tugged at my arm and pulled me back after a mere minute or two, and hurried me back along the corridors to the ballroom.

  I was aware that a lot of correspondence was going on between Tacklow and Mother’s friends and relations in China about our move there, and was relieved
to learn that there was no chance of our booking one of the Brysons’ bungalows at Pei-tai-ho that summer, or of getting a passage to Shanghai and Tientsin that would land us up there at the right time of year — Mother did not fancy getting involved with the typhoon season, and I don’t blame her. And though Tacklow, if he had had the choice, would have left at once, our departure for China was eventually arranged for the spring of the following year, when a bungalow at Pei-tai-ho would be at our disposal for the summer — and for as many of the following summers as we chose — and a passage booked on a China-going ship at a time that would miss the freezing North China winters, and land us in Shanghai at the best time of year to fit in with visits to those of Mother’s relations whom she particularly wanted to see.

  I still had a whole year stretching out before me — more than a full year. A whole summer and part of autumn in Kashmir, and after that a cold weather season in Delhi. Why worry about anything after that? I had a wonderful summer.

  That party, plus a final cabaret show and dinner-dance at Nedou’s, and Bets’s birthday on 13 October, for which Ken Hadow again laid on a party at the Hadows’ hut in Gulmarg, brought the Kashmir season to a close for us.