by M. M. Kaye
How Bets and I loved those trolley trips! They were always the high-spot of the visit: the cool night air blowing through our hair and the vast, dearly-loved plains of India spread out all around us, black on silver, empty and wild and wonderful. Kala-hirren,* chital and wild boar would start up from among the shadows and race away across the plains, and now and again a roosting peacock would fly out of a kikar tree with an indignant and undignified squawk and a fluster of feathers, or a huge owl would sail past on silent wings. And sometimes if we were lucky we would catch a glimpse of a leopard. The night air smelt of flowers and hot, parched earth, and in some places, very faintly, of wood smoke and dung fires; though we rarely saw a gleam of lamp-light.
The distance was probably not more than five miles and our bungalow, when we reached it, was always the same one: a big, high-roomed house with a thatched roof, surrounded by a deep verandah and lit by oil lamps. It stood back from the Canal bank in a garden that was little more than a wide lawn of parched and brittle grass, separated from the road by a line of shade trees and a tall hedge of scarlet poinsettias that was always alive with huge black-and-red butterflies. The head-works of the Canal, with its sluice-gates and weir, were very like the one at Okhla, only far larger and longer. For this was not the Jumna River. This was the Ganges, Mother Gunga herself, the enormous, holy river which, rising in the white wastes of Tibet, washes away sin, and yearly carries to the sea the ashes of countless thousands of devout Hindus whose bodies have been cremated on her banks or carried to them to be cast into her waters. Here, unlike Okhla, the river and the weir were over a mile wide, and when the wind sent the silver sand whirling, or a heat haze shimmered in the air, you could not see the far bank and might well have been standing on the shores of some vast inland sea.
The sandbanks changed with every monsoon, and one year a bank that had not been there on any previous visit appeared in the river about two hundred yards out from the shore. Mrs Perrin decided to take us all over for a picnic tea on it, and after that we were rowed across every evening in a big, flat-bottomed wooden boat and in the course of a few days we turned the entire island into a maze of sandcastles; adding new streets and houses, towers, canals, lakes and fortifications every day, until we had built a whole city there. That was a wonderful year! But when we returned the following one, the rains and the currents and the vagaries of the great river had swept the whole island away and the river ran high and unimpeded from bank to bank.
It was during this visit that we rescued a young seagull that had broken its wing. We saw it standing forlornly on the stones below the weir, and having caught it without much difficulty, took it to a local Indian doctor who was a friend of ours and whom we called ‘Hakim-Sahib’. He set it most beautifully in tiny home-made splints and narrow bandages, and told us that we must keep the bird from using its wing for at least a week until the bone had set, and to feed it on chilwa. So we took it back to the bungalow where we spread sand all over one of the bathrooms, filled two enamel basins with water and kept Gully (I’m afraid our names for our birds and animals were painfully unoriginal) shut up there while we went out fishing for chilwa.
For a day or two all went well. Gully caught and ate the chilwa that were turned loose in the basins with the greatest enthusiasm. But then, without warning, a spell of unseasonable weather blew in from the south and we awoke one morning to find the world awash with rain and mist and the river totally devoid of fish. Apparently chilwa do not fancy cold and rainy weather, and they and every other species of fish in the river seemed to have gone for good. And though Chote and Prem, Mr Dass’s children (Ram Dass was a Canal officer), said that they had only gone down to feed on the bottom of the river, we were disinclined to believe them and were in despair, for Gully flatly refused to eat any other form of food.
He turned his beak up at slivers of raw mud-fish procured for him in the local bazaar by the Perrins’ kansamah, and obviously considered that anything that did not move was not edible. He moped and pined and got hungrier and hungrier while Bets and I grew daily more desperate. At long last, and soaked to the bone by driving rain, we managed to catch a smallish fish in the water below the closed sluice-gates. It was too small to provide a meal for a human and much too big for a young seagull; but at least it was a live fish and we hoped it might cheer Gully up just to see it swimming around in his basin, and give him an appetite for the assortment of scraps that he had hitherto rejected. Well, it cheered him up all right. He gave a loud squawk and the next moment he had pounced on it and was trying to swallow it.
He got it about half-way down his gullet, the fish fighting every inch of the way, before it stuck fast and he could neither get it up nor down. I still don’t know why he didn’t choke to death. He was in a bad way by the time I got a grip of the fish’s slippery tail and managed to pull it out and throw it back in the basin where, believe it or not, it revived. But as soon as he could breathe again Gully lay on his side and played dead while Bets wept and I tore off in the rain to fetch Hakim-Sahib, who dosed him with a few drops of Tacklow’s brandy. (Tacklow himself had returned to Delhi as soon as he had seen us settled in.) The brandy worked wonders and got Gully through the night, and the next day the sun was shining and the chilwa were back and he stuffed himself with them. A few days later Hakim-Sahib removed the bandages and the splint and said the wing had mended, so we took him down to the weir and put him down very carefully on the spot where we had found him, and presently he fluffed himself up and took off. We had hoped that he might come back to us of his own accord. But he never did. The ungrateful bird joined up with a rowdy crowd of gulls, and left with them when they headed down river.
It was during the first of these yearly visits to Narora that I nearly lost my favourite toy and chiefest treasure. Roller-bear was my first (and last) teddy-bear, and I have no idea who gave him to me or when, or whether he was a Christmas or a birthday present. I only remember that I seemed to have had him for ever, that I loved him dearly and that he owned me and not the other way about. He was quite a small bear, white, and owing to the fact that I refused to move anywhere without him, the bran with which he was stuffed had begun to leak out so that he had lost his stoutness and become endearingly flabby. Naturally he accompanied me on my first visit to Narora, and it was here that one day I pretended that he had run away and climbed a tree to hide from me. I put him carefully up among the branches and walked away, making a show of searching for him and calling out to him that all was forgiven and would he please come back. And then something distracted me and I ran off and forgot him — until bedtime came and I realized with horror that I had abandoned him up that tree!
The scene that followed was heartrending, but Mother was unmoved by my sobs. No, I certainly could not go out searching all the trees along the canal-bank road in the dark! And nor could any of the servants. Roller-bear would be perfectly safe up a tree and hidden by leaves. I must wait until the morning, and that was that. I didn’t sleep a wink that night, imagining owls or monkeys discovering poor Roller-bear and tearing him to pieces. Or the child of some Canal worker spotting him and taking him away. I was up at first light, and having woken Bets, we both dressed in a frantic hurry, and letting ourselves out by the back door of the bathroom, ran off to the rescue. The only trouble was that I couldn’t remember which tree of the many trees that shaded the road I had hidden him in. They all looked exactly alike and it took us a long time to find him — even with the assistance of a large assortment of sympathetic helpers who had come to look for us as soon as we were missed.
I was in a state of tear-sodden panic by the time Roller-bear was discovered, and I vowed that I would never forget him again. And I never have. But alas, a year or two later, hurried out of the train at Simla by impatient grown-ups, I took my eyes off him and he was left behind. And this time we did not find him again; though my grief was such that a large reward was offered for his return and I prayed every night that whoever had him now would hear of it and bring him back. In
the end, having at last resigned myself to the sad fact that I had lost him for good, I changed that prayer, and for years afterwards prayed instead that God would please let whoever had found him love him and take good care of him and see to it that he was tucked up warmly every night. That was the only comfort that I had, and even Moko never displaced dear Roller-bear in my affections.
Some years later, discovering that I had still not forgotten him and still blamed myself bitterly for failing him, Mother at last managed to find another white bear, which she gave me for my birthday — and whom I hated on sight. Poor Mum! She had gone to enormous trouble to find that bear, for though the shops were full of bears of every shade of brown, white bears were as rare as oysters in July. But she should have known that Roller-bear was not replaceable: particularly not by a large, stout, straw-stuffed and vulgarly glossy interloper. Nothing except his colour in any way suggested my dear departed Roller-bear, and I can only suppose that I lost this unwelcome replacement at the first opportunity, since apart from my first shocked sight of it lying smugly in the large cardboard box which I had just unpacked, I don’t remember anything more about it, and I certainly never played with the creature.
Our third visit to Narora was made memorable by Mrs Perrin’s day-long battle to land a mahseer; those great pink and silver fish that are frequently referred to as ‘the salmon of the Indian rivers’.
Mrs Perrin, whose favourite pastime was fishing, combined business with pleasure by personally catching the fish-course for her household, and on this particular morning she went down to the river bank before breakfast and was almost immediately into a fish. Mahseer, like salmon, are fighting fish, and this one took her line out as though he had been a torpedo, or a marlin! Bets and I watched the battle, fascinated, for a good hour and then, as neither combatant showed any signs of tiring, went back to the bungalow for breakfast.
Returning some time later we discovered Mrs Perrin (supported by an enthralled audience of Canal workers, coolies, villagers, the local shikari, a number of fishermen and the odd jani-wallah,* all vociferously offering advice and encouragement while she hung grimly onto her arching salmon-rod), still reeling in the line or watching it go screaming out across the river. Tacklow, always a dedicated fisherman, was riveted by the contest, and not in any way surprised when his hopeful offer to take over the rod for a bit and give her a rest was tersely refused, since nothing would have induced him to hand over that rod had it been his fish on the line! He therefore settled down to watch. But as the morning advanced the mahseer stopped fighting and went down into deep water on the far side of a sunken sandbank in the middle of the river and at the extreme limit of the line, where it sat and sulked. There was no way of shifting it, for the bank obviously ran straight in both directions, while the weir, with the Canal head lying at right angles to it, lay less than a quarter of a mile downstream. It was stalemate.
All that Mrs Perrin could do was to hold on until the fish felt sufficiently rested to come out of its bolt-hole and resume hostilities: which it did at longer and longer intervals as the day wore on. Tacklow suggested that the main current must have worn out a deep overhang on the far side of the underwater bank, providing a shelter in which the mahseer could hold out for hours, and if that were so, the only way of dislodging it would be to go out in a boat and play it from the other side. But Mrs Perrin would have none of it. She was going to stand her ground. Lunch-time came round and a picnic meal was brought down to the riverside for the grown-ups, but Bets and I, who by then had become a bit bored by the whole business, elected to return to the bungalow and eat our lunch with the Perrins’ small daughters. The meal remains memorable because the servants had hastily laid it out on the sideboard before rushing off with the picnic baskets to join the throng by the river, leaving us to help ourselves; and since I had not encountered mayonnaise before, I thought it must be custard and poured it lavishly all over my stewed fruit.
By tea-time the fish had still not been landed and most of the spectators had lost interest and drifted away to deal with their own affairs: Mother presumably to sketch in some more paintable spot and Tacklow and Mr Perrin to take their customary evening walk. Bets and I arrived back to find that there was no one on the bank but the intrepid Mrs Perrin and one or two idlers, and as the sky began to turn gold and green with the sunset she belatedly threw in her hand. Deciding that Tacklow could have been right, she called up a stalwart young man who had been squatting on his hunkers watching the proceedings for the past hour or so, and asked him to row her out in one of the flat-bottomed river-boats that were moored nearby. Bets and I immediately clamoured to come too, and the four of us set out across the river; the young man rowing and Mrs Perrin standing up amidships, rod in hand and reeling in as she went.
Tacklow had been right. Somewhere well below the deceptively smooth surface of the great river the currents had scoured out a deep channel, and the fish had only to sink below its overhanging rim and face upstream and nothing could shift him. But once out in mid-stream and above the hidden channel Mrs Perrin could play him again; and he was exhausted by the day-long struggle. Nevertheless he put up a good fight before admitting defeat, and by the time he did so and allowed himself to be drawn alongside and scooped into the boat, Bets and I were completely on his side. I thought he deserved to get away and hoped that Mrs Perrin would throw him back; but then I am not a fisherman. Instead she knocked him on the head and returned in triumph with the captive of her rod and reel. I believe the grown-ups ate him for lunch on the following day; and if so it was lucky for me that I don’t eat fish because I would certainly have jibbed at eating that one!
The poor fellow turned out to be a good deal smaller than he had looked from the flashing glimpses we had had of him as he swirled and leapt at the end of the line. A fairly modest size for one of his species, judging from the snapshot that Mother took of Mrs Perrin holding her trophy on the following morning. But despite the evidence of that snap, in memory he still seems enormous: a huge, almost mythical fish that took a whole day to capture.
Back once more in Delhi we got our first look at what the twentieth century had in store in the way of mass entertainment. The Cinemascope!
Bill had already been taken to see this modern wonder during our brief stay in England — Bets and I had been considered much too young — but the treat had proved a failure, because the film that Mother plainly found riveting, and had wrongly supposed would appeal to her six-year-old son, contained shots of lions, rhinos and charging elephants, with a lengthy sequence involving a python or a black mamba, or some species of large snake. Turning to ask Bill if he was enjoying it, she was horrified to find that he had vanished, and a hasty search revealed that he had been so scared by this reptile that he had gone to ground under his seat and was crouching there with his eyes tight shut. But despite this inauspicious introduction to the joys of canned entertainment, Mother must have agreed with Kipling that small girls have stronger nerves than small boys (he wrote some verses about how Shakespeare got the material for his plays which contain the following lines: ‘How at Bankside, a boy drowning kittens Winced at the business; whereupon his sister — Lady Macbeth aged seven —thrust ‘em under, Sombrely scornful’). At all events, she took a chance on it and allowed Punj-ayah to escort us to a brand-new cinema on or near the Chandi Chowk.
I don’t think she can have realized that she was in fact committing herself to allowing us to go there once a week for the remainder of the season. But that was how it turned out, for the cinema was showing a serial that featured one of the very earliest stars of what is now referred to as the Silent Screen. Her name was Pearl White and the serial, which ran for weeks and weeks, was called Lost Island. Having seen the first episode it was, of course, out of the question that we should miss the next one; and then the one after that; and that, and that … In the end we saw them all, and the whole thing made such an indelible impression on our minds that we can both remember the tune and most of the words of the title
song played at the beginning and end of every performance on one of those wind-up gramophones with a horn like an outsize arum lily: ‘O sweet girl of Lost Island I’m longing for you, Won’t you come back to my land where hearts beat true? …’ and so on. I remember it started with the eruption of a volcano — the lost island getting lost perhaps? — and the frantic exodus of hundreds of silently screaming extras fleeing from the special-effects fireworks. The heroic Miss White (played as a tot by some forerunner of Shirley Temple) finished up every episode in dire straits, hanging by a rope over a snake-pit or about to be sacrificed to some ferocious Eastern Idol, and we had to wait until the matinée next Thursday or Tuesday or whatever, to see if she was going to be rescued in the nick of time. She always was, though that did nothing to allay our anxiety on the next occasion when crocodiles were advancing upon her or the man-eating lion was preparing to spring. For how could we be sure that the square-jawed and long-suffering hero wouldn’t oversleep this time, or break a leg or something, and arrive on the scene too late? The suspense was terrible!
That cinema, as far as I recall, was a shocking flea-pit constructed out of several rickety shops or warehouses, hastily knocked into one and furnished with rows of seats, a screen, a projection-room and a piano. And that gramophone, of course. The front was quite impressive; well plastered with lurid posters. But there were always a good many non-paying customers in the form of rats who ran to and fro along the rafters overhead and the odd nesting pigeon and its mate whose coos and flapping accompanied the pianist and/or gramophone throughout the performance. However, these were trifles and we enjoyed the show enormously. As did Punj-ayah, regardless of the fact that, since she could not read the subtitles, she had no idea what was going on up there and we had to explain it to her as it went along. I suspect it made her a movie-addict for life.
