The Sun in the Morning

by M. M. Kaye

  During the long, hot afternoons when half India indulges in a siesta, Bets and I would go off to the rooms of a middle-aged couple who were particular friends of ours and whom we chose to call, for some forgotten reason, ‘General and Mrs Ponson’. They were in fact a Colonel and Mrs Tyndale-Biscoe — the Colonel’s brother being that Canon Tyndale-Biscoe who founded the famous school in Kashmir that still bears his name and is attended by Muslim, Sikh and Hindu boys regardless of creed or class. But our name for them stuck, and to everyone in Curzon House (and, I was told, throughout Army Headquarters and half Delhi) they became known as ‘The Ponsons’. General Ponson was naturally tied to his office in Metcalfe House, but Mrs Ponson, an indefatigable war-worker, did not waste her afternoons in sleep but spent them — and all her free time! — making papier-mâché kidney-bowls for the Red Cross hospitals.

  She was a thin, grey-haired, Victorian lady of the old school, and to us she seemed incredibly ancient, the sort of age that a great-grandmother should be. I don’t think she had ever had any children of her own, but she ought to have had dozens, for she was fond of them and knew exactly how to treat them, and we loved her dearly. She owned a whole shelf of children’s books and for an hour every afternoon she would read us a chapter or two from one or other of them while we, in exchange, tore up and soaked the strips of newspaper from which she made her kidney-bowls, and were sometimes even allowed to try our hand at making a bowl ourselves. It was dear Mrs Ponson who first introduced me to The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows; two children’s classics which I have read and re-read scores of times and which continue to enchant me to this day. But the ‘Ponson-book’ I remember best, though I have no idea who wrote it and have never been able to trace it, was called The Witch’s Kitchen; about a witch who kidnapped some children and held them captive in her kitchen where she used to cook up some kind of alluring (and dangerous!) yellow goo that I think of as looking, and tasting, like uncooked sponge cake, which is always delicious.

  Our mornings were occupied with getting educated, for we attended classes given to a handful of children by someone else’s English governess — I don’t remember whose, or much about the classes. Then once a week there was a dancing-class held by the same much-admired instructress who took them in Simla, pretty Mrs Strettle who was not yet Lady Strettle. These dancing-classes were held in the ballroom of the oldest Old Delhi Club; a long, low building by the side of the Karnal road beyond Metcalfe House and the Kashmir Bazaar, where the Ridge of Delhi peters out on the plain and a huge standing camp had been built to house the VIPs who came out from England and from all over India for the Great Durbar of 1911. Much of that camp was still standing; and, as I have said, many of our parents’ friends and their Indian servants lived there under canvas, in great comfort and state, for the tents were lavish affairs; double-lined against rain and cold or the blazing sun, with durable wooden floors on which carpets were laid, brick fireplaces with proper chimneys, and electric fans and telephones.

  There were tents furnished as drawing-rooms where pictures hung on the coloured canvas walls. Dining-room tents with tables, chairs and sideboards, and bedroom tents with adjoining bathrooms — though as far as I remember, no running water. Kitchen tents and numerous servants’ tents were ranged behind these and each cluster of tents stood in its own compound, most of which had been planted with shade trees, lawns and flowerbeds, beside wide roads and avenues as in the suburbs of any town. Each compound had gates, name-boards and numbers, and the red gravel paths leading to them were edged with bricks sunk endwise into the ground and their visible triangular tops neatly whitewashed. That camp was still there right up to the end of the Raj — and Buckie and his wife and daughter still lived in it in their tented quarters throughout most, if not all, of the Thirties and Forties.

  Punj-ayah used to take us to dancing-classes in a tonga since it was much too far to walk, and I remember being involved in what must have been one of the earliest car-crashes in Delhi — for there were not all that many cars there in those days and nearly all the public transport was still horse-drawn. Our tonga had been turning out of the side-road at a spot known as the ‘Khyber Pass’ where there was a small bazaar, when a car coming along the main road rattled past in a cloud of dust and tooted its horn at us in warning. The tonga pony, unused to these newfangled monsters of the road, almost leapt out of its skin with fright and took off for the horizon. And since I had been engaged in waving to various friends and acquaintances who kept shops in the bazaar, and not paying sufficient attention to the traffic, I was instantly dislodged and tumbled out into the road; incurring no more than a few minor cuts and bruises, but ruining my dancing-slippers, natty white socks and frilly white broderie anglaise dancing-dress as I rolled in the dust. An agitated contingent of stallholders leapt out and scooped me in, making soothing noises, while others raced in pursuit of the tonga, which lurched to a noisy halt when its off-side wheel caught the wheel of a passing bullock cart. Punj-ayah, who had been holding Bets with one arm and clinging like a limpet to the woodwork with the other, seized the opportunity to nip down and, still clutching Bets, gave the tonga-wallah a spirited sketch of his ancestry, with particular reference to the female side; not forgetting the sire and dam of his horse. You could hear her all down the road, and the bazaar applauded every word.

  She refused flatly to allow us to get back into the tonga or even call up a new one, so we covered the last quarter of a mile to the Club on foot, where she cleaned me up to the best of her ability and the Club ayah anointed my scratches with what I think must have been iodine: I remember it was dark brown, smelt strongly and stung painfully. (It could have been Jeyes Fluid of course.) Today I would probably have been rushed off to a doctor and given an anti-tetanus jab, but we took things more easily in those days. On the whole I was rather proud of myself for having been thrown out of a tonga. It had been an exciting adventure and I boasted about it to the other children at the dancing-class. Someone (I presume Mrs Strettle) rang up Metcalfe House, where Mother spent most of her mornings rolling bandages and packing parcels for the Red Cross, and told her what had happened, and Mother rang up Buckie who lived nearby but invariably lunched at Maiden’s Hotel, which was just up the road from Curzon House, and he fetched us in his car. So we rode home in state — much to the gratification of Punj-ayah who had not ridden in a motor-car before.

  Bets and I hadn’t ridden in one very often either, and it was not until a year or two later that Mother succeeded in badgering Tacklow into buying a car of our own, which she learned to drive; I don’t think we could have afforded a chauffeur. After that we stopped going out in hired fitton-gharies (open, four-wheeled carriages drawn by one or sometimes two horses) to such delectable spots as Okhla and the Khutab. Instead we were whirled out by motor-car on Saturdays and Sundays to picnic in places which had previously taken hours to reach, since they lay quite a few miles outside Old Delhi so that the journey, at a slow trot, was a hot, dusty and boring one; unless Tacklow was with us.

  Tacklow had an exhaustive knowledge of Indian history and could make every bit of country that we passed through glitter with interest as he told us about the great cities and civilizations that had once flourished there, and of violent events that had taken place centuries ago on this or that very spot. He could make it all come alive again; and so real that one could almost see and hear those long-dead warriors charging into battle and the broken fragments of their cities rising again in splendour. Dark-eyed Queens and Princesses, veiled in gauze and shimmering with jewels, peered down again through the marble tracery of zenana windows to watch their men ride out to fight or hunt, to celebrate some day of festival or greet an emissary from one or other of the endless list of sovereign kingdoms, many of them larger than the whole of Britain, which made India a land of Kings — most of whom were perpetually at war with one or other of their neighbours, and very few of whom died a natural death.

  A great school-teacher was lost when Tacklow dutifully follo
wed his father into Indian service, for he could turn history into an enthralling story that knocked spots off The Perils of Pauline — not to mention Dallas and Dynasty and all the other serialized ‘soaps’ — and drove one to read history books just to learn more and find out what happened next. It was on one of these expeditions that he recited, by way of illustration, a poem of Kipling’s that begins: ‘Cities and thrones and powers stand in Time’s eye, Almost as long as flowers, which daily die …’. I never forgot that poem; or lost my fascination with Kipling’s verse either.

  The return journeys from these expeditions, taken by evening when the sun was setting and the dust gathering over the plains, or, best of all, when there was a moon to light the last few miles, were always a delight, for Mother would sing us the latest songs to pass the time. Tunes that were the pop songs of the First World War: ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’, ‘There’s a Long, Long Trail’, ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’, and ‘Vilja’, the hit song from that long-running success, The Merry Widow. And if night fell before we reached home, Tacklow would tell us about the stars and show us how to find the Dog Star and the Pleiades, Andromeda and the Great Bear and a dozen others. These all-day picnics took place at weekends, for that was the only time when Tacklow was able to come with us. Too often some emergency would arise that prevented him from doing so.

  Of all our picnic places near Delhi the favourite by far was Okhla, where the Jumna Canal began and the main stream was controlled by floodgates and a long weir that spanned the river from side to side. Above the slope of the weir the water was held in check by stout wooden planks supported by baulks of timber, and only a certain amount of it escaped through gaps between the planks to froth down the stony slope below and join the main stream once more. There was a shallow stone gutter, two to three feet wide and not more than six inches deep, just below the slats. It was always full of water even when the river was at its lowest and the weir was dry, and it was here that we would paddle and fish for chilwa with long-handled, home-made shrimping-nets. The silver fingerlings used to swarm here, and with them we sometimes caught baby turtles, miniature creatures no bigger than a four-anna piece but perfect in every detail. The turtles were considered great prizes and we would take them down to the flat sandbanks below the weir and dig pools in which we would release them and watch them flippering their way round and round.

  In those happy days few people ever visited Okhla, and Buckie, Sir Charles, Tacklow and their friends would often take their shotguns — and sometimes, if we were lucky, Bets and me too — and drive out there for the evening flighting of the duck, teal and geese who daily, as the sun set, would fly in from across the river in long wavering lines, dark against the dusty green and gold sky; swooping in from the croplands of little lost villages miles away on the far bank. Tacklow, who was a poor shot (except, oddly enough, when after snipe), did not take much interest in these impromptu duck shoots, preferring to sit and watch, and admire the evening sky and dusk falling over the plain. But Buckie was said to be the finest shot in India, and when he made one of the party everyone present, including the drivers and shikaris and any Canal employee who happened to be around, was sure of going home that night with a brace or two of mallard or teal and the prospect of delicious roast duck or goose dinners. To watch Buckie shooting was an education in the art, for he never missed; and despite the inadequacy of my own parent and other sportsmen, I gained the impression that all one really had to do to shoot a bird that came over at any angle, high or low, whizzing past at sixty miles an hour, was to point your gun at it and pull the trigger. Simple! And to Buckie, of course, it was.

  Sometimes at weekends Sir Charles, Tacklow and Mother and a particular friend of theirs called ‘Bunting’ (I have an idea that his real name was Hunting) would take Bets and me with them and drive out to Okhla for the weekend where we would sleep in the Canal Bungalow or in tents. Sir Charles kept a little motor-boat at Okhla, in which the five grown-ups (the fifth being Sir Charles’s head shikari, Kashmera, who always accompanied them when they went out shooting) would go upstream to hunt the mugger and gharial which, in those far-off days could be found in great numbers in the waters of the Jumna, both below and above the weir and the canal head.

  Muggers, the blunt-nosed, armour-plated crocodiles of the Indian rivers, are notorious man-eaters. They prefer flesh — preferably well rotted — to any other food; and in those days they were responsible for thousands of deaths every year among people who lived in towns and villages on the river banks and came down daily to bathe, fill their brass water-pots, wash clothes, water their cattle, or set fish traps while their children paddled and splashed in the shallows. It was easy for a hungry mugger to snatch a meal, for their diet also included unwary goats, sheep and cattle, as well as incautious wild animals coming down to drink at a spot where the water was deep enough to hide a lurking killer. And when, in times of plague or famine, the death toll rises so high that the survivors can no longer afford to cremate all their dead and consign them instead to the river, placing a token live coal in the mouth of the deceased, the muggers compete with the fish and the turtles and other wildlife along the river to dispose of the dead.

  Their cousins, the fish-eating gharials who have long, slender snouts with a knob on the end, are by comparison gentle and harmless creatures. Yet they are regarded with dislike by the fisher-folk, who complain that they take an unfair share of the fish and cause considerable damage to nets and fish traps, while almost every village, and certainly every bridge and every ford, has — or used to have — a resident mugger who is known to have taken any number of lives, but is nevertheless regarded as semi-sacred; a sort of minor nature-demon who must be placated with garlands of marigolds and other offerings flung into the water, often by a local priest.

  There were many muggers and gharials near Okhla, and wandering along the margins of the river in the evening we would come across the unmistakable marks that they had left in the wet sand: the long smear and deep curved groove where the end of an armour-plated tail had slid into the water, flanked by clawed footprints to left and right. Sometimes we would take careful note of these marks and lie up next day on the river bank among the clumps of pampas grass and casuarina scrub within sight of them, to wait for hours until the ugly water-dragon decided to crawl out again. It was always a deeply exciting moment when it did, and worth every minute of the long waiting —

  First the glassy surface of the river would be broken by a barely visible ripple, which would presently resolve itself into two small bumps that could have been bubbles or fragments of debris floating down on the current; except that they remained stationary. They were the mugger’s eyes, scanning every inch of the shore to check that the coast was clear. Provided we made no movement, those two specks would presently be joined by two more; the creature’s nostrils. Then very slowly all four would begin to draw in to the shore until at last the mugger grounded in the shallows, at exactly the angle that a log or a piece of driftwood would do, and waddling forward on his four stumpy feet, dragging that wicked-looking tail behind him, would settle down on the warm sand to take a nap in the sun. He is dark when he comes ashore: the dark grey of wet slate. But as the hot sun dries him the river mud on his horny scales turns pale, until he becomes almost invisible against the silver sandbank on which he lies, and if you did not know about muggers and were drifting down an Indian river in a barge or a sailing-boat for the first time, you would never notice him. Or if you did, you would take him for a stranded log that had been in the river for a very long time.

  Nowadays both muggers and gharials have become so scarce that I am told that they will soon be an Endangered Species and are already protected in certain parts of India where rivers run through game reserves. Which is fine as far as gharials are concerned. But I have to confess that I have never felt anything but loathing for muggers ever since a day when I watched Kashmera and some local assistants slit open the stomach of a newly-skinned one and discover insi
de it, together with a gruesome collection of bones and bits, five unbroken glass bangles, so small that their previous owner could only have been a child and young enough for her murderer to have gulped down her entire arm without breaking the bangles.

  Bets and I saw a good many muggers shot, and I remember one of them in particular: a small mugger not much larger than myself, that Tacklow shot on a sandbank upstream from Okhla. Mother wanted to take a photograph of us with it and made us sit down behind it; but just as she clicked the shutter it suddenly came to life and whipping round with a sound that I can only describe as somewhere between a bark and a growl, snapped at Bets and only just missed taking a nice bit out of her arm. The creatures are not at all easy to kill, and at least seven muggers out of ten will flip back into the water with one convulsive and purely reflex-action sweep of their powerful tails the instant they are hit. And what’s more, they survive. Their armour-plated suits are almost bullet-proof, and the shikaris say that there are only two places where a shot from a rifle can kill them: in the neck, or through the spine where it goes through the thickest part of the tail. The one that nearly took a bite out of Bets had merely been stunned, and as Bets fell backwards with a yell of alarm, head over heels, Kashmera leapt forward and dispatched it with a spear-thrust through its head.

  After that we were very careful to make quite sure that a mugger was really dead before we got too close to it. I still have a handbag, an attaché case and a make-up box made from the skins of young muggers that I saw shot at Okhla, and Mother has a dressing-case and a trunk made out of large ones; all of them made up by the tanneries at Cawnpore. They still look nice, but are far too heavy to be of much use — especially the trunk, which weighs a ton even when empty and now sits in the attic taking up valuable space. I suppose one day we shall have to cease feeling nostalgic about them and throw them away, for they are of no further use and not even a museum would want them. Not that they were ever of much use, for the skin of the Indian crocodile is too thick and too heavily plated to make up well. It’s the African and American alligators who make up nicely into shoes and bags and other expensive accessories.