by M. M. Kaye
But only two hundred and eight thousand people living in Old Delhi! It does not seem believable; I wonder how many millions today live in the sprawling metropolis that is the two Delhis, the Old and the New, now joined together by crowded, ever-growing suburbs? Considering those numbers, I realize how comparatively small the city must have been when I was young. So small that it is even possible that I could have had a nodding acquaintance with a quarter of the citizens who lived between the Kashmir and the Cawnpore Gates; beyond which, in the days of my childhood, stretched open country all the way out to the Purana Kila (the Old Fort), and on past Humayun’s tomb to Okhla, where the Jumna Canal branches off from the main river. Further to the westward lay the beautiful ruins of Haus Khas, which was a famous seat of learning long before Oxford or Cambridge were even thought of; and further still that enormous, lonely minaret, the Khutab Minar, and the curiously Egyptian-style tomb of the Emperor Tuglak — the ruins of whose city, Tuglakabad, look down on his tomb which stands islanded at the end of a long stone causeway in what was once a vast tank that must have provided the water for the city whose crumbling walls gaze blindly across it.
The Old Delhi that I loved so much was fated to become a backwater when New Delhi was finally built. For the senior members of the Government of India and Army Headquarters, together with their staffs, their wives, their families and their servants, moved there; exchanging their old-style bungalows in the green suburbs of Old Delhi for the modern concrete houses nicknamed ‘Baker’s Ovens’ after the architect* who designed them for New Delhi; and as a result of that exodus the focus of official and social life shifted to the new centre of power. Yet when, sixteen years after India became independent, Bets and I went back there again, it was still the familiar place we had known first as children and later as young women, though it had become much quieter and now wore, like a fragile and faintly dusty lace shawl, an air of shabbiness and neglect where once it had been so full of gaiety and life.
Perhaps, having made that sentimental pilgrimage and found all our old familiar places so little changed, we should have left well alone — kissed them goodbye for the last time and never gone back again. And but for the success of The Far Pavilions, we would probably have done just that, because we would never have been able to afford to return again. But once the financial side of things became easier, how could we possibly resist? Delhi drew us back again like a magnet with a pair of pins — only to find that most of the things we had loved best had been swept away or crushed under the trampling hooves of that sacred cow, Progress.
The Delhi that still keeps a firm hold on my heart is no more than a memory, though even now, returning to it, there have been moments when for a brief space at dusk I have heard a peacock calling from among the shadowy thickets of the Ridge, and found myself back in imagination in the dear city of my childhood and my gay, careless, dancing teens and twenties.
Accommodation in Old Delhi was always in short supply, and a great many people, Buckie and Annie B among them, lived under canvas in the luxurious tented camp originally set up for the use of the VIPs who had come out to attend the great Durbar of 1911. But since there were neither tents nor bungalows available for us, we were allotted two adjoining suites, Numbers 38 and 39, in Curzon House; a large, two-storeyed building that had been put up for the same purpose as the camp, though for an even earlier Durbar — the one held in 1903 to celebrate the Coronation of Edward VII. Later on it had been turned into a cold-weather hostel for Army officers and Civil Service officials and their families; and later still, in the post-war Twenties when New Delhi was springing up out of the empty plain to the south-east of Old Delhi, it became The Swiss Hotel.
The quarters at Curzon House were all alike, each one consisting of a large living-room separated by a tall, curtained archway from an equally large bedroom with a bathroom leading out of it. The only light in the bedrooms came from windows set high up near the ceiling and looking out onto the flat rooftop. These could only be opened and shut by means of long cords that were attached to hooks much lower down the wall. The bathrooms were of the old-fashioned tin-tub and thunder-box variety — India not having got into modern plumbing at that date — and their windows and back doors opened onto long, narrow verandahs; the upper-storey ones being reached by a stout wooden staircase for the use of the pani-wallahs who carried up the tins of hot water, and the sweepers who cleaned the thunder-boxes. There were connecting doors between every quarter and the next so that they could, if necessary, be made into larger units, such as ours, which consisted of two quarters. Bachelors and childless couples occupied single ones. The front doors of all these quarters led directly into the living-rooms from long, wide, communal verandahs, paved with squares of red sandstone and carpeted with a long strip of coir matting, and the white, double-storeyed building with its arched frontage and two parallel wings formed a big rectangular U.
There was a formal garden in front and a wilderness of flowers and trees behind, and beyond the left-hand boundary wall stretched the spacious lawns, gardens and tennis courts of a large, single-storey, castellated house, grandly entitled Ludlow Castle. In the days of the East India Company Ludlow Castle had been the residence of the Commissioner of Delhi, but in my young days had become the Delhi Club; later on to be re-titled the Old Delhi Club. Later still, after Independence, it became a college.
Beyond the boundary wall on the right-hand side of Curzon House lay the cemetery in which John Nicholson, ‘the Hero of Delhi’, who died leading his men into action during the battle for the city in the Mutiny summer of 1857, is buried, together with many of the Mutiny dead. The stone-built wall was not too high for an active child of six or seven to scramble over, and though I don’t think our parents ever knew it, the cemetery soon became one of our favourite playgrounds. It was a very peaceful spot: hot and quiet and drowsy, chequered with tree-shadows and freckled and barred with brilliant sunlight. And since Punj-ayah’s sari was not adapted to climbing over walls, she couldn’t follow us there, but would hunker down in a patch of shade to wait for us on the Curzon House side until such time as we returned; confident that no harm would come to us from her people or ours — either living or dead.
Punj-ayah could never understand our fondness for the cemetery, which she herself regarded as a ‘place of the dead’ and therefore an ill-omened spot. But it never occurred to either of us to think of those who lay buried there as ‘dead’. John Nicholson — Nikal-Seyn — and all the men who had died in the battle for Delhi and whose names were carved on the worn, lichen-blotched slabs and headstones, together with the many British men, women and children who had joined them here in the long years since then, were only asleep; drowsing peacefully in the warm silence under the grass and flowers and the lilting butterflies, lulled by the soporific cooing of the little grey ring-doves, and dreaming of home.
There was nothing to be frightened of in this pleasant backwater; and if there were any restless ghosts, they did not walk along the gravel paths that wandered here and there between the worn gravestones, or on the grass that the malis kept trimmed but not close-shaved and formal like the lawns of Curzon House and the Club. The grass here was allowed to look like grass, and there was bougainvillaea everywhere and great bushes of roses and jasmine that had run wild and smelled heavenly. The air was always full of scent and birdsong and butterflies — more butterflies than I remember seeing anywhere else — and the whole sun-soaked and tree-shadowed place was strongly suggestive of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden because, apart from the occasional elderly mali pottering around with a rake or a small hand-sickle, no one but ourselves ever seemed to visit it.
Close to the cemetery were the Nicholson Gardens: a public park full of trees and lawns and neat flowerbeds, where there was an ornamental fountain that was supposed to have come from Chats-worth — or was it Blenheim? — and two stately avenues of bottle palms at the junction of which, perched on a high plinth, stood a statue of John Nicholson, sword in hand, facing the
battered walls of Delhi and the shell-pocked Kashmir Gate near the spot where he had fallen. Punj-ayah approved of the Nicholson Gardens. It was a nice tidy place in which the chota-missahibs were unlikely to get up to any mischief or dirty their hands, shoes or clothes. Besides, there were always plenty of other ayahs as well as European nannies and their charges in the gardens, and she enjoyed a good gossip with her fellow countrywomen.
The Moguls, a nomadic people from the harsh treeless uplands of Central Asia, had a passion for gardens, trees and running water, and there are many of their baghs* in and around Delhi: among them the Roshanara Bagh which boasts a lake with a tiny island in the middle of it, thickly overgrown with date palms which provide a roosting-place for scores of white ibis. There is also a white marble pavilion, in which Roshanara Begum, the Princess who built it and made the garden, and who died in 1663, lies buried. Her father was the Emperor Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal at Agra, and legend has it that she was a marvellous dancer. But our favourite garden by far was the Kudsia Bagh which lay opposite Curzon House; so close that we had only to cross the road to reach its main entrance.
This garden had none of the primness and public-park tidiness of the Nicholson one — except in the ‘public facilities’ areas devoted to tennis and cricket, and a certain treeless space where the grass was worn thin by the feet of Delhi’s children who played games, ran races and flew kites there while their elders exchanged gossip or strolled to and fro ‘eating the air’ of an evening. Apart from that, the rest of the bagh was a glorious, planless jumble of creeper-clad ruins, flowering trees and shrubs, bamboo thickets, date palms, eucalyptus, peepul and kikar trees. There were roses everywhere: the old-fashioned cabbage ones as well as the far older Persian variety that Omar Khayyam sings of and from which attar-of-roses is made and all our modern roses are descended. Jasmine too; and canna lilies; poinsettias and orange trumpet-flower creeper; and the white, piercingly sweet-scented rhatki-rani that flowers only after sundown and whose name means ‘Queen of the night’. The entire garden had once been enclosed by a high wall inside which Kudsia Begum, wife of the Emperor Muhammed Shah and mother of his son and successor, Ahmad Shah (whose disastrous reign finally brought about the decay of the Mogul Empire), built herself a palace and a mosque on the banks of the Jumna River.
When I was a child in Old Delhi all that remained of these buildings was a battered but still beautiful gateway, and the shell of an enchanting triple-domed mosque facing the river across a stretch of open ground — part of which must have been the courtyard, for it contained a sunken stone-lined tank in which the Faithful would have bathed before saying their prayers. I have heard that the ground beyond this used to be covered by a stone-paved terrace from which a broad flight of stairs descended to the water’s edge; and even in my day the Jumna ran almost directly below the bank. However, no trace of the terrace remained, and the Jumna, which like all India’s rivers is perpetually changing course, has moved well away from it since then.
A small shallow stream, barely more than a drain, in which we could catch tiddlers but were forbidden to paddle (since who knew, said Punj-ayah darkly, whence it came or what drained into it?) crossed the gardens to join the river; running en route under a little wooden bridge shaded by kikar trees whose scented, mimosa-like blossoms seemed always to be in bloom and provided an endless supply of miniature powder-puffs with which we would powder our noses yellow.
The gateway that had once been the main entrance to Begum Kudsia’s palace was a massive affair: a vast, tunnel-like archway capable of allowing entrance to a howdahed elephant. There were guard-rooms built into it on either side, two of which had been allotted to the chowkidar of the gate; one for his own use (the only one which still possessed its original iron-studded door that could be barred and padlocked) and the other as a storage place for ‘second-day flowers’ which, as a sideline, he collected each day from Maiden’s Hotel and the Tennis Club, exchanging them for fresh ones. Many of these slightly-used flowers, though not at their best, were far from faded, and he would let us select and take away any we liked. The rest, I suspect, were bunched and resold in the bazaar or to the owners of nearby bungalows. The archway in consequence always smelt deliciously of flowers, and for years afterwards the scent of fading roses, sweetpeas and carnations was an instant short-cut to the ruined gateway in the Kudsia Bagh.
The chowkidar became a great friend of ours, and it was he who told us that in the days when the gateway was the entrance to a Queen’s palace, there used to be staircases in the thickness of the wall leading out of it and up to the roof and the battlements which surrounded a long-vanished inner courtyard. The stairs on the right had fallen long ago, but though the outer wall of those on the left had also fallen, the steps remained; hidden from view by the tall thicket of bamboos growing against that side of the gateway. He himself had never used them, and it obviously did not occur to him that once we knew of their existence we would not be able to resist climbing them. If it had, I am sure he would never have told us, for the staircase, when he showed it to us, was not only very steep and narrow, but lacking several of its treads, while those that remained were deep in debris and in a shocking state of disrepair.
Bets and I were both afraid of snakes and scorpions, and frankly terrified of spiders. But we could no more resist climbing that staircase than Bluebeard’s wives had been able to resist entering the forbidden room. We could at least be certain of one thing — that there was no danger of falling off the stair, because the bamboos pressed so closely against its wall-less outer side that nothing larger than a mongoose could possibly have fallen between those ranks of stout stems.
Punj-ayah (no hawk-eyed duenna!) had fortunately met a friend with whom she was chatting happily in the shade of one of the fiscus trees, well out of earshot, when, to the accompaniment of agitated warnings from the chowkidar, we pushed back the curtain of weeds and creepers that concealed the base of the stairway and the wall to which it clung, and wriggling through, climbed cautiously up through what looked like a green tunnel of bamboo leaves — testing each step before putting any weight on it — to emerge finally on the flat roof of the great gateway.
At first sight it looked a bit like an empty swimming-pool which the jungle had taken over, for the parapet surrounding it was much taller than we were and the bamboos to the left and right soared high above it, shutting off a good deal of the sky. The centre arch of the gateway was comparatively clear of creepers, but bougainvillaea, orange trumpet-flower and jasmine had climbed the walls and the decorative turrets on either side, to foam down over the castellated parapets in fountains and waterfalls of colour. The roof itself was hidden under a foot-deep carpet of leaf-mould, bird-droppings and assorted feathers — the discarded plumage of innumerable crows, blue jays, doves, pigeons, parakeets, peacocks and other birds which down the long years had perched on the parapets and roosted or built nests among the tangled mass of creeper — and though in and under all that debris there was bound to be a whole world of creeping and crawling creatures, and probably a few rats as well, I do not believe that the thought of them so much as crossed our minds. For we had stumbled on El Dorado!
Not Columbus himself, taking his first sight of America, nor ‘stout Cortez’ staring out at the Pacific, could have felt more awed and excited than we did as we took in the fact that we had discovered a hidden, private world which nobody else knew about! Nobody but the chowkidar (who besides being a friend would not, for his own sake, betray us), and Punj-ayah, who would have to be let into the secret, but would keep quiet for the same reasons. It was a marvellous find and we wasted no time over taking possession. By the time Punj-ayah came in search of us we had cleared a portion of the roof and pushed all the rubbish off the stairway, and during the next few days, with the aid of a broom, a rake and a wicker basket used for carrying food and cut flowers, all kindly lent us by the chowkidar, we managed to get rid of all the litter from the roof.
After that the place became a perm
anent source of enjoyment and a safe retreat from the everyday world. It was ours. Our very own! On it we were hidden away where no one could find us, and we spent hours up there, playing ‘house’, reading, talking, discussing life and our elders, inventing stories, or being Mrs Jones and Mrs Snooks — a couple of harassed housewives and mothers whose children were a perpetual source of worry. I was Mrs Jones and Bets was Mrs Snooks, and our respective children were my Moko, a life-sized toy monkey which had originally belonged to my brother Bill and been annexed by me when he outgrew such toys, and Bets’s large teddy-bear. Moko and Teddy accompanied us everywhere. And would still be doing so had they not been eaten by those tiny but voracious insect pests known as ‘woolly bears’ that attacked them during six months in the late 1930s, when they were in storage with a good deal of our heavy luggage in a godown in Lucknow. When unpacked, so little remained that it was impossible to re-assemble them; and since their murderers had obviously been breeding like fun, there was nothing for it but to consign them with lamentations to the fire; which we did. Cremating them on a pyre in the back garden of my sister and brother-in-law’s house in Lucknow, together with the ruined contents of the packing-case in which they had met their end — plus uncounted thousands of their pestilential destroyers and about a billion woolly-bear eggs. It was a sad moment, because I had looked forward to handing Moko on in turn to be loved, cared for and played with by a child of my own who, with luck, would hand it on to a grandchild.
I don’t remember how we managed to beg, blarney or possibly blackmail Punj-ayah into letting us go on using the top of Kudsia Begum’s gateway as a secret hideaway and playground. We probably used a mixture of all three. But whatever it was, it worked. She refused flatly to climb up after us (she was scared stiff of all forms of creepy-crawlies and not particularly partial to any form of animal life), but she never gave us away and we continued to use it for two glorious cold weathers. But alas, nothing lasts for ever.
