by M. M. Kaye
It worried me too, and I remember discussing the whole problem at length with our jhampanis in the course of a ride into Simla to attend a dancing-class; and being interested to discover that they held very different views. To them it was both a living and a way of life, and they considered it a good one. What, they demanded, would happen to them if everyone suddenly acquired these foolish views about it being beneath the dignity of one man to pull the rickshaw of another one? Bah! work was work, and they, personally, considered themselves fortunate to have achieved the status of the privately employed, which entitled them to wear a smart and distinctive uniform supplied by their employer, plus the right to be referred to as jhampanis instead of ‘rickshaw-coolies’, as was the case with the casually employed.
The gods, being sensible, said Durroo, the head jhampani, saw to it that there was work for all kinds and conditions of men; not merely for bunnias* and those who had brains and book-learning. The rich and educated needed people to look after them so that they, in their turn, could look after their own high affairs; which was the making of money — and the spending of it, which created work for others. The rich, according to Durroo, were put into this world for the benefit of the poor and uneducated, without whose labour they would be unable to live or, more important, make the money that paid for that labour.
It was a novel point of view, but an interesting one. And only recently, watching my Far Pavilions being filmed in Rajasthan, and taking in the sheer numbers of the multiracial army of fellow humans: actors, extras, stunt-men, directors, producers, cameramen, technicians, costume and set designers, electricians, make-up experts, car-drivers, coolies, darzis, jewellers, mahouts — the list is staggering even if one does not include the families of all the people who were earning their living by working on that particular film, or the hordes of hotel servants who cooked and fed and looked after the vast number of people who had been flown out by the film company and put up in one or other of the local hotels —- I began to realize that Durroo and his fellow jhampanis had had a point.
Just because I had kept my nose to the grindstone and worked myself into the ground to write The Far Pavilions, I, personally, was for a brief space of time responsible for the employment of all these people: many of whom were making far more money out of that book than I myself had done! Granted, if they had not been working on my story they would have been working on someone else’s. But the fact remained that they were all, at that particular time, employed and making a living out of and because of me and the work that I had done. It was a slightly awe-inspiring reflection, and I thought of that long-ago rickshaw ride into Simla. ‘Full employment’, in fact: a slogan that had not been invented then, and would have been regarded as an impossible slice of pie-in-the-sky to two thirds of the citizens of what is now known, with lofty condescension, as ‘the Third World’! (What ‘Third World’? Or, come to that, where’s the second one?).
One of the great advantages of being born and brought up in India by liberal-minded parents (or, to be strictly accurate, one liberal-minded one and one fun-loving, bird-brained one who flitted through life with the airy inconsequence of a butterfly on a sunny morning) was that Bets and I were on excellent terms with the local citizens and, being able to chatter to them in the vernacular, acquired a lot of interesting information as to their likes and dislikes, their home life, beliefs, philosophy, superstitions and politics (if any). A great deal of this would, I suspect, have horrified our dear parents had they known about it; for like all Victorians, they valued innocence and would have wished to protect us from the harsher facts of life, in the belief that children would learn about such things soon enough and that a child should be allowed to enjoy childhood to the full.
Well, I’m all for that myself. But I do not remember that the things I learned about real life or real death upset me very much; largely, I suppose, because they were told so matter-of-factly by people I knew and liked, who accepted them philosophically and did not whinge or rail against fate, or take to drink, but just shrugged and got on with the business of living. I loved them because they never treated me as a baby or told me to run away and play, but were always willing to explain and discuss matters in which I was interested or had not properly understood. They were never brusque or impatient with me, as grown-ups of my own race often were, and they were never too busy to answer a question. Time seemed to move far more slowly in Asia, and Asians treat it with a lordly carelessness that takes no account of such abstract things as ‘the unforgiving minute’ — they wouldn’t know what you were talking about! It is an attitude that frequently maddens the West, but it does make life seem a lot longer; and a lot more peaceful than our own swift, frantic scamper from the cradle to the grave.
Perhaps this is why my childhood in India — and my girlhood too — seems to me, in retrospect, to have lasted twice as long as the whole of the rest of my life. And for this ‘I thank whatever Gods there be’.
Living at Mashobra did not make much difference to Mother’s social life. She would take the rickshaw and go into Simla with Tacklow at least twice a week, and her friends were always coming out to visit us: sometimes only for the day, but often to stay for a night or two. Their children came with them, so Bets and I had a constant stream of young visitors, most of whom I could have done without: the shining exception being Guy’s sister, my great friend Bargie Slater, who came whenever she could. It was always a delight to see her and wonderful to have her stay with us, because with her arrival life — which out at Oaklands seemed to flow gently along like a placid, slow-moving river — suddenly woke up and turned into a sparkling torrent that resembled Tennyson’s famous babbling brook.
There was never a dull moment when Bargie was around. I would take her to see all my favourite retreats and we would spend hours perched among the branches of one of the orchard trees or lying comfortably in a hot, grassy hollow a hundred yards or so below the mule-track, gazing out at the wooded slopes of the far mountains while we discussed life and our contemporaries, exchanged gossip about the grown-ups and speculated about the future and what we would become when we grew up. We would, of course, get married. That was taken for granted, for we both thought highly of Love and Romance and had every intention of Living-Happily-Ever-After. Yet our interests were by no means confined solely to gallant princes and handsome husbands, for before we got around to marriage we were going to write in partnership a book that would make us rich and famous.
This opus was to be about a haunted house, and the surprise twist at the end was that the twin spectres who haunted it were not the ghosts of people who had lived there, but of their emotions. The hate and selfishness that had motivated the behaviour of two sisters who had been born in the sixteenth century, lived through the reign of Charles II and died unmarried — still at odds with each other because one of the two was a sour and bigoted Puritan, a passionate supporter of Cromwell and his Roundheads, while the other was a frivolous partisan of Charles I and his Cavaliers. These two, having vented their ghostly fury on succeeding generations, were to be finally exposed as nothing more than a couple of nasty, quarrelsome egos, and exorcised — surprise! surprise! — by the true love of the latest occupant and his wife. (He turns out to be a distant cousin; the great-great — or great-great-great? — grandson of a nephew who inherited the house from his unpleasant aunts and came under the influence of the malevolent emanations they had left behind to haunt the place.)
We thought this idea was staggeringly original. And possibly it was, since even if Kipling had written ‘The House Surgeon’ by then, we were too young to have read or understood that kind of story. I was grown-up by the time I read it, and was fascinated to find that someone of such eminence had had the same idea! Needless to say we never got around to writing this masterpiece; though we got endless pleasure out of discussing it and inventing the various evils that befell the successive owners of the house. And even more out of deciding how we would spend the vast sums of money that would reward our labour
s! I remember that yachts and diamonds were mentioned. A whacking great diamond tiara for Mother, and a yacht for Tacklow. Tacklow who would, if he had had Aladdin’s lamp, have wished for one to take him round the world, hugging the coasts and with no time limit, so that he could stop for as long as he liked — a month or a year or two years, perhaps even longer — in any port that pleased him; moving on at once from those that did not, putting in at the Andaman Islands (from where a long-time and like-minded friend of his who had served several terms as Chief Commissioner had written him lengthy letters extolling their idyllic beauty) and, finally, spending months at a stretch on the Great Barrier Reef. This last, for some unexplained reason, had taken a firm grip on his mind. He had promised himself that he would visit it before he died, and I suspected that if he ever did, his travels would end there; for in those days, and until fairly recently, I believe that anyone landing on one of the great reef’s hundreds of tiny uninhabited islands could, if they chose, establish squatter’s rights and claim it for their own. Provided, of course, that they lived on it. I didn’t put it beyond Tacklow to have this in mind!
When not planning novels and dream-shopping, Bargie and I, accompanied by Bets and her special friend, Bargie’s second brother Tony, would climb the hill path to Dukani; a house that stood on the crest of the hill behind Oaklands and which belonged to Sir Edward Buck, known universally as ‘Buckie’ — ‘the finest shot in India’. He was also the author of Simla Past and Present, and for more years than anyone could remember had been Reuter’s chief representative on the subcontinent. Any number of Simla’s children knew and loved Buckie, and Bets and myself, his nearest neighbours except for the Roberts who lived in a house called The Bower on the far side of the hill, were allowed to treat Dukani as a second home.
If Buckie should be out we would take the path at the back of his house that led downward for a few hundred yards to The Bower, and look up Sybil Roberts, another Simla child who has remained a lifelong friend, and whose mother, Lady Roberts, had fascinated me ever since I learned that she was the grand-daughter of ‘Afghan’ Warburton, whose story had been told to me by the Khan Sahib: a story that, to borrow a favourite phrase of the Kojah’s, ‘since you have not heard it, I will now proceed to relate’ —
During the British occupation of Kabul in 1841, a young man in the service of the East India Company, Henry Arthur Warburton of the Bengal Sappers and Miners, while taking a stroll through the streets of the city, had been seen by a beautiful Afghan Princess who had been peering down through the carved wooden lattice that screened the windows of the women’s quarters. The Princess was already married to a nephew of Dost Mahommed, the Amir of Afghanistan, whom the British had just deposed. But this did not stop her from falling in love on sight with the young Englishman. She managed to find out who he was and to smuggle a letter to him arranging an assignation, and as soon as he saw her he too fell fathoms deep in love; for she was very beautiful. Eventually the two eloped and her husband divorced her. But though her brother-in-law, Akbar Khan, put a price on her head and gave orders to the Afghan Army that she and her lover were to be hunted down and killed, they managed to escape, and after many adventures were married. Their son was the Warburton I referred to in the last section of The Far Pavilions; the one who had been about to leave India when the Second Afghan War began to loom upon the horizon, and who had offered to return to the Frontier. Had he done so, our chances of abandoning that unjust and futile campaign (or, alternatively, of winning instead of losing it) would have been greatly improved, for his mother’s kinsmen saw to it that he was kept in touch with Afghan affairs, and the Government of India, had they listened to him, would have avoided stumbling into many fatal quicksands. As it was, they declined his offer and he duly sailed from Bombay — and the repercussions of that war are still with us.
Sybil’s mother, Lady Roberts, always known as ‘Lady Mickey’, was a grand-daughter of ‘Afghan’ Warburton and his lovely, wayward Princess; and I have been told that another Warburton, this time a great-grandson, arriving to join his unit on the North-West Frontier just after the Second World War had ended, and not long before Partition and Independence, got out of the train in his pyjamas to stretch his legs in the dawn, and found himself faced with a vast crowd of Afghans who packed the little platform from end to end. They were all kinsmen of his great-grandmother, gathered here to welcome and pay their respects to her great-grandchild. And if anyone still wants to know why the British who served in India had such a deep and enduring affection for that country, this episode alone should serve to explain a great deal!
Most of our meals during Bargie and Tony’s visits were picnics. Sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, curry-puffs and cake were packed into rucksacks by Mother and eaten by us on the slopes of the golden, grassy hillsides that looked out across the enormous valleys below us towards the great Himalayan ranges that are the outer bastions of Tibet. Even the nights were exciting when Bargie was a visitor, for we would hold midnight feasts; popular entertainments that were tremendous fun to plan and prepare, though it must be admitted that nine times out of ten by the time midnight struck and our elders and betters were (we hoped) safely asleep, we ourselves were far too drowsy to get much enjoyment out of them. As for the provender that we so carefully collected and hid away in toy-cupboards or under the beds, the best that could be said about it was that it could have been worse. Though not much. This was because the first rule governing such nocturnal bun-fights was that the feast must consist of food that had been collected without the knowledge of any grown-up — which restricted it to cold potatoes or soggy lumps of pudding whipped off our plates into a waiting handkerchief during lunch, bits of cake or biscuits filched during tea, and bottles of lemon squash surreptitiously sneaked from the larder when no one was looking. And since the pudding- and/or potato-filled handkerchiefs were then stuffed up our bloomers in order to remove them unseen from the dining-room (children’s knickers in those days were invariably bloomers with elastic at the waist and knee) the collected delicacies were not all that appetizing. But then anything eaten by stealth and at an unauthorized hour possessed the charm of forbidden fruit.
These midnight feasts came to be known as ‘Chunkychaddles’, because Bargie, being of a methodical turn of mind, had on one occasion written down a detailed plan: who was to collect what, the exact time that each one of us left his or her room, etc., etc., in the manner of a military exercise. And having concluded the list, she had thrown her pencil down and said: ‘And after that, Chunkychaddle bust!’ The newly-minted word appealed strongly to her fellow conspirators and from then on, to any member of our own particular circle of friends, a midnight feast was always known by that name. But the final and most famous of our Chunkychaddles was destined not to take place at either our house or the Slaters’, but at Sybil’s — or rather her mother Lady Mickey’s.
The Bower was one of Simla’s oldest houses, having been built in the heyday of the East India Company and later on owned for a time by a certain Lieutenant-Colonel in the Company’s 7th Bengal Light Cavalry; one Thomas David Colyear. Thos. David had married twice; both times to Indian ladies. The coffin of the first Mrs Colyear (a Muslim lady who died in 1865 and whom he had buried in an elaborate marble mausoleum in the garden of one of his houses) was eventually dug up and re-interred beside that of her husband in the third of Simla’s five cemeteries, after a subsequent purchaser of the house objected to the presence of a corpse in the garden. The Colonel, according to the marriage register in Simla’s Christ Church that records his second marriage, claimed to be a son of the Right Honourable the Earl of Portmore. Presumably an illegitimate one, since he is referred to only by his military rank and never as ‘Lieut.-Col. the Hon. Thomas Colyear’. His second wife, who appears on the same document as ‘Alice, spinster, daughter of Jewtoo, Hindu’, hailed from Kangra; which makes me wonder if she could have been the inspiration for Lizpeth, the girl in one of Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills who also appears in Kim as t
he Woman of Shamlegh. Hill women from that region are known to be fair-skinned and very beautiful.
The Colonel married Alice, daughter of Jewtoo, Hindu, only a few months after the death of his Muslim wife. And ten years later when he himself died he left her The Bower (then called ‘Alice’s Bower’) in his will: together with a very comfortable fortune. Buckie says in Simla Past and Present that her relations in Kangra Valley immediately descended upon the widow with the intention of getting their hands on the money, and that she ‘died soon afterward’ — he does not say of what. He adds that ‘for a time’ her ghost was supposed to haunt The Bower, and includes a story that was certainly not the one that I was told in the early 1930s by old friends in the bazaars of Mahasu, Mashobra and Simla.
In the years I am writing about The Bower belonged to Buckie, who had rented it to Sybil’s father, Sir ‘Mickey’ Roberts; and it seems that at that time half Simla knew that one room in the house was haunted. But since this particular room was always kept unfurnished and unused, no one bothered much about the ghost of poor Alice, which for its part behaved with the utmost tact and kept itself to itself. That is, until Lady Mickey threw a weekend party for a number of her friends, including Bargie’s parents and mine, who were invited to bring their children with them in order to keep Sybil amused — there being nothing more certain to ruin an adult party than a bored seven-year-old tagging around after the grown-ups and generally getting underfoot.
The Bower was a good deal larger than it looked, but with so many guests the only way of fitting them in was to put all the children together in one room, dormitory fashion. And since the adults had been very careful not to breathe a word about the ghost to any of the children (and an order to that effect had long ago been issued to the servants), it was decided that it would be quite safe to put the kids into the haunted room — in the belief that although anyone who knew about the ghost might well start imagining all sorts of peculiar things and seeing and hearing all kinds of imaginary movements and noises (their nerves would see to that!), a bunch of high-spirited and blissfully ignorant children would be entirely unaffected: and in any case, the story was a load of old rubbish! The haunted room was therefore opened and thoroughly spring-cleaned, and five beds were procured and made up in it.
