by M. M. Kaye
* ‘Seven-brothers’; though the British insisted on calling them ‘seven-sisters’, because they hop around in groups of seven, chattering non-stop like a clutch of excitable schoolgirls.
Chapter 16
The barrow and the camp abide,
The sunlight and the sward.
Kipling, ‘Sussex’
Anglo-India’s favourite way of taking a holiday, particularly the Christmas holiday, was to spend it out in camp and shooting for the pot. Luckily for us we were often allowed to accompany our parents and their friends to these camps, where we could choose between following the guns or being left to our own devices. We usually elected to go with the guns, riding either in the back of a bullock-drawn country cart or in a lorry which must have been the first of its kind in the Punjab, with Kashmera and the other shikaris who would tell us tales of tiger and duck and partridge shoots that had taken place long before we were born.
Kashmera’s favourite tale, and one that we heard often, concerned Sir Charles (whose shikari he had been for many years) and a leopard which had broken cover during a partridge shoot. One of the three or four guns who had been walking up partridge of an evening across a stony plain dotted with patches of high grass had, in the excitement of the moment, lost his head and blazed off at the leopard with both barrels of his shotgun at a range of only a few yards, causing the wounded animal to go to ground in one of the dense patches of grass and kikar trees.
Since there happened to be a village close by, the thought of leaving a wounded leopard holed up near it, and likely to attack anyone who passed, was not one that Sir Charles was prepared to contemplate; for leopards are notoriously bad-tempered at the best of times and a wounded one is as dangerous and unpredictable as a stick of dynamite in the hands of a two-year-old. Fortunately Kashmera had been carrying Sir Charles’s rifle in addition to his own iron-tipped lathi, and the two of them cautiously entered the patch of head-high grass; Kashmera, an expert tracker, leading and Sir Charles, rifle at the ready, guarding his back —
They followed the splashes of blood with infinite caution, and with frequent pauses to listen, for while they moved their ears were filled with the noise of their own progress through the dry, rustling grass. But soon it became difficult to see because night falls swiftly in the East; the sun had almost vanished below the horizon, and in the fast-fading light it was not easy to make out the blood spots. A warning growl from a little distance away made Sir Charles bring his rifle up to his shoulder and both men stood rigid; but it was not repeated, and presently they began to move forward again; one slow step at a time, and very cautiously, towards the place from where the growl had seemed to come — ahead and to their right. But just then, said Kashmera, the last rim of the sun dropped below the world’s edge, and the breeze that comes with twilight awoke and blew across the plains. And after that they could hear nothing more because of the ‘voices of the grass’ all about them —
At this point they would have left that dangerous place and returned to it at first light next morning. But even as they began to retreat, walking backwards with rifle and lathi at the ready, the leopard charged and sprang — Not from the direction that the growl had come from, but from behind: for with the cunning of its kind it had taken advantage of the breeze, and under cover of the rustling grass had made a swift, stealthy circuit and attacked from an unexpected direction.
It buried its teeth and the claws of both forepaws in Sir Charles’s arm and, clinging there, attempted to rip open his stomach with its hind claws: a feat that it would certainly have accomplished had its victim been a smaller and less powerfully-built man — or a less resolute one! But Sir Charles Cleveland, as has already been pointed out, was a huge man, and most of that hugeness was solid muscle. He kept his feet. And his wits too, for he realized that he must not allow those ripping hind claws to dig into his side and his stomach, and that with about eighty pounds of raging, snarling fury suspended from one arm it would be impossible to bring the heavy rifle to bear on it one-handed. So he dropped the rifle and concentrated grimly on swinging his arm from side to side in order to keep those lethal hind claws clear of his body. Imagine the strength it must have taken to do that! He did not wholly succeed, for the hind claws ripped through his clothes and drew blood, but did not go too deep.
Kashmera always swore that his Sahib kept the leopard swinging for a full five minutes, during which time he himself tried first to attack it with his lathi and the skinning-knife he always carried, and then — diving in under that frenzied pendulum to snatch up the rifle — to put a bullet through it. But the light was fading fast and he was terrified of killing the Sahib instead of the leopard who was being jerked to and fro without ceasing. In the end he took a chance, and pushing the muzzle against its body as it swung past, pulled the trigger; and by good fortune the bullet smashed its spine and killed it. But that was not the end of the story…
There followed a nightmare fight to save Sir Charles’s life. He had been appallingly mauled and blood was pouring from his wounds. The nearest hospital (which was in fact only a small dispensary run by an elderly Indian pharmacist) was miles away, and the only transport available was a bullock cart. The other members of the shooting-party — who had been given strict orders to stay outside the limits of the grass, but on hearing the uproar had rushed in to help and, like Kashmera, been unable to fire a shot for fear of killing their friend — put a tourniquet on the arm, and having filled the wounds with permanganate crystals (the only disinfectant which everyone in those days carried when out shooting or in camp), made a rough-and-ready hammock out of their coats and carried the wounded man to the village where the cart waited to take them back to their camp.
Here, at the Talukaar’s* suggestion, he was transferred to a palanquin with a team of strong villagers to carry it; that being a quicker and more comfortable method of travelling than by bullock cart. But even so, and in spite of changing bearers every twenty minutes, the miles crawled past and it seemed, said Kashmera, impossible that the Sahib could live to reach a doctor. It was almost midnight before they arrived, and the elderly pharmacist, after one horrified look at his injuries, declared that he could do nothing for him apart from washing his wounds and applying clean bandages, and that this was a hospital case. A tonga was procured and Sir Charles taken a further few miles along a rough country-made road to the first town where there was a small hospital and an operating theatre. But it was morning by the time they got there, and the doctor declared that his wound had turned septic and that the only hope of saving his life was to amputate his arm before the poison spread too far and killed him. It would have to be done at once.
Sir Charles had lost a great deal of blood, and besides being in considerable pain and only semi-conscious, was running a high fever. But the doctor’s pronouncement jerked him back into full consciousness and he declared in the strongest possible terms that he would see the misbegotten son-of-a-sawbones in Jehannum before he allowed him or anyone else to chop off his arm! In the end, since he would not listen to reason, the doctor shrugged and gave in, and (thankfully, I imagine) stitched him up while arrangements were made to forward him to the nearest British-run hospital — probably the Hindu Rao in Delhi — and sent him off with the parting observation that by the time he reached it, if he were still alive there would be no point in operating, since it would be much too late to amputate; but if he wished to commit suicide, that was entirely his own affair.
Well, he got there alive. And the English medicos told him flatly what their Indian colleagues had already said: that his only hope had been in amputation, but that it was now too late for that and he had better resign himself to death. Sir Charles, however, was even tougher than he looked and he proved them all wrong. The poison and the fever raged in his blood, but as his friends and the hospital staff waited for the inevitable end, he fought back. And inch by inch it retreated; descending slowly through his body until at last it reached his right foot which, so he told me himself, turned
dark purple, swelled up like a balloon and hurt like hell — ‘as though it were being stuffed through a red-hot mangle’ was the way he described it; which gave me some interesting thoughts about Hell. Then quite suddenly it stopped hurting, returned to its proper size, and he was well again.
He had fought and defeated the poison in his blood as decisively as he had defeated the leopard; whose body, incidentally, had been recovered and skinned, and the head and fore-part stuffed and set up in a lifelike manner by the famous taxidermists, Van Ingams. The hind-quarters having been badly peppered by Number 4 shot and disfigured by a hole made by the heavy rifle bullet that had blasted away part of the lower spine, it had only been possible to set up the front half of the creature, and this was done so that it looked just as though it were alive and springing out from the cover of that tall grass. The large glass case that contained it was the one set up in the hall of the house he lived in in Simla, and I always hated having to walk through that hall during the months of the monsoon when the days were dark with rain, for in the shadows the snarling creature looked horribly alive.
That story was only one of many shikar stories that Kashmera told us. But we never got tired of hearing it, even though we must have heard it any number of times —- and from a variety of different people, including Tacklow and Sir Charles himself who once showed us his scarred arm, as knotted and misshapen as the twisted bough of some ancient oak tree. We could see clearly where the leopard’s clenched teeth had torn out a great mouthful of flesh and muscle when it fell back dead, and the deep pits its teeth and talons had driven into his arm. And once, bathing in the Jumna, we saw the long, silvery scars where the leopard’s hind claws had raked his chest and belly as it strove to rip him up. All the various versions we heard of this story differed from each other in minor ways. But since the one we heard most often was Kashmera’s, we came to know it so well that if he changed so much as a word we would correct him, and I have therefore given his version plus a footnote from Tacklow who told me, years later, that Sir Charles’s version of the poison finally reaching his foot was correct, except for one thing: it did not happen in a matter of days or even months. It took years. The poison would seem to be defeated, only to break out again and affect some other part of his body. His left foot was the last part to be affected; and the last bit of that to be truly painful was his big toe! After exiting from that the poison never troubled him again.
Now why should I remember that it was his left foot — and his left big toe? — and not be able to remember which arm the leopard got its teeth into, when I actually saw the scars on that arm? It was only when I came to write this story down that I realized the years have taken that memory away from me, even though I can still see Kashmera acting out the whole story in dramatic detail to two small, pop-eyed girls in short khaki dresses and pint-sized solar topis, riding home from camp in the back of a plodding bullock cart.
The Christmas shooting-camps were the greatest fun. On one occasion we made camp in a mango grove near the famous battlefield of Panipat, which lies some twenty miles to the north of Delhi. Three of the bloodiest and most momentous battles in all the long and violent history of India were fought there.
In the first of these an invader from the North, Zahir-ud-Din Mohammed Barber — ‘Barber the Tiger’ — first of the Great Moguls — defeated the vastly larger army of Sultan Ibriam Lodi, last of the Lodi dynasty whose tombs make New Delhi’s Lodi Golf Course among the most charming in the world. Thirty years later, on the same spot, the army of Barber’s grandson, Akbar the Great, soundly defeated the forces of a rival claimant, one Hemu. And just over two centuries later a third Battle of Panipat was fought between another invader from the North, the Afghan ruler of Khandahar, Ahmed Shah Durrani, whose victory over the combined Mahratta forces that opposed him signalled the final collapse of the tottering Mogul Empire and the end of the Confederacy of the Mahratta Princes…
Every inch of the level plain must in its time have been drenched in blood, and I listened enthralled while Tacklow told me the story of those violent days. Walking me over the historic plain, he showed me a brick-built plinth that marked the site of the battlefield and pointed out exactly where the opposing armies had taken up their positions, and how in each one of the three battles, though the defending army had greatly outnumbered their attackers (and in the case of the last Battle of Panipat, possessed far more guns), they had been defeated by superior generalship.
But it was from the people who actually lived there, in particular the owner of the shooting rights and the land on which our camp was pitched, and from various members of his family, that I learned a great many gruesome details about those homeric contests; the tale of which had obviously been handed down from father to son and mother to daughter in the old families of Panipat whose ancestors had seen the conquerors come and go and must have suffered sorely at the hands of both victors and vanquished.
From them I heard the tale of how the wounded and dying Hemu was dragged into the presence of the young Akbar who, at the bidding of his guardian, one Bairam Khan, finished him off with a tulwar.* And of how, after the last Battle of Panipat — which ended with the rout of the Mahrattas and the death of most of the Hindu leaders — Shah Durrani’s pursuing Afghans gave no quarter to either prisoners or wounded, but decapitated all who fell into their hands; piling up more than two hundred thousand severed heads in great mounds throughout their camps. And that was only the Hindu dead! There must have been heavy losses among the Muslims as well. All those dead men …! Horses too, and probably elephants as well. All that spilt blood … What on earth must the place have smelt like by next day? How did they know who was who, or discover which of the defeated commanders had been killed and which ones had escaped? There were all sorts of things I wanted to know, and some of the answers I received from the landowner and his family were hair-raising.
I don’t believe that adults ever realize quite how much their children learn about facts that doting parents imagine they have been successfully shielded from. They do not fully appreciate how easily the nastiest things slide off the backs of the young, who have a disconcerting habit of accepting the seamy and sordid with perfect equanimity and dismissing it as unimportant. Being the fortunate possessor of a retentive and photographic memory, I did not forget the tales I was told of the terrible deeds that had taken place on the plains of Panipat. But I was far more horrified by the sight of a pi-dog who had snatched a still-born lamb that had been left lying out in a nearby field, and ran with it through our camp, pursued by a yapping pack of other pi-dogs who snatched and tore at the gory remains that dragged on the ground. That wasn’t a story. That was real; and I can see it still. But those piles of severed heads, and worse horrors, were only stories; and though I did not doubt that they were true, they remained on a par with Jack the Giant Killer and ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman; be he alive or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!’.
The Slaters and their children were among the guests at the Panipat camp, and so the presence of Bargie and Tony was enough to make it a memorable one for both Bets and myself — though apart from those tales of the great battles and the incident of the pi-dog, the things I remember best are the sugar-cane and an evening visit to the local temple. The sugar-cane was being harvested, and while the guns were walking up partridge and quail across the uncultivated land, I stopped to pass the time of day with the Talukdar’s field-workers, who were cutting and stacking the tall canes and loading them into bullock carts, and was presented with an entire cane which one of the women workers peeled and cut up into manageable lengths for me. No child who has not experienced the pleasures of chewing the juice out of those deliciously sweet pieces of cane, and spitting out the pith with a careless disregard for where it falls, has really lived!
I can’t remember who took me into the temple, except that it was an elderly Indian who had some connection with it. Not a priest, because I would have remembered the clothes, and me
mory holds a clear picture of a burly, grey-haired man wearing a small gold-embroidered cap, and with a thick woollen shawl wrapped about his shoulders — for even in the plains the night can be very chilly in December. I remember a lot of oil lamps and the blaze of a fire that lit up a small, dusty square crowded with stalls selling sweetmeats and hot food and brightly coloured clay figurines. There was a big peepul tree growing out of the centre of a brick platform on which more people sat and talked and smoked huquas in the firelight, and the surrounding shops and houses were blotched and chequered with leaping black shadows against a moonless sky in which fireworks made streaks and splashes and showers of varicoloured light.
I remember too that there was some argument over whether or not I should be allowed into the temple, but the man in the shawl, who was obviously a person of authority, said there was no harm, and together we climbed a flight of steps and went in under a stone archway decked with tinsel and paper flowers and innumerable chirags that flickered and glowed from every possible niche in the carved stone. Chirags are always lit in time of festival and there was one being celebrated that night, though I don’t remember what it was. Certainly not one of the major ones. This was only a modest affair and probably in honour of some minor and strictly local deity. I remember the temple, like the square outside, as a patchwork of shadows and shimmering, smoke-filled, golden light that smelt of jasmine and incense and fading marigolds. There was a fire here too that fizzed and crackled as a priest fed it with oil and crumbs of incense and another priest chanted mantras. I remember how cold the stone felt to my feet — I had of course left my shoes outside — and how the oil lamps and the fire made the tinsel decorations glitter. One of the priests put a tilak, a scarlet mark, on my forehead, and I remember leaving as an offering a whole silver four-anna piece! — an enormous sum to me in those days, when my pocket-money was one anna a week.
