by M. M. Kaye
I suppose we must have seen other films, but the only other one that I remember was one that we saw in Simla in a cinema that had started up above the roller-skating rink. I don’t remember its title, but I do remember the name of the star. It was Annette Kellerman. She was a forerunner of the much later talking-and-Technicolor swimming stars such as Esther Williams, and a champion swimmer off as well as on the screen. The film was about a mermaid who fell in love with a human — or vice versa — and I remember it vividly as a sort of dream-cum-nightmare, because I happened to be running a high temperature at the time and was feeling fairly peculiar. I would not admit this for fear that Mother would insist on taking me home and I’d miss seeing the rest of it; even though the story seemed to repeat itself over and over again in a meaningless manner and sometimes the mermaids on the screen were real and swimming towards me and sometimes they grew so hazy that I could barely see them at all.
Eventually, perhaps in the interval, Mother spotted that all was not well, and despite my tears and protests took me home in a rickshaw and put me to bed. I have a dim recollection of her taking my temperature and rushing to the telephone to call a doctor, and after that nothing much else for several days. Which was not surprising: for the year was 1918 and I and several million others had fallen victim to the virulent influenza epidemic that swept the world in the wake of the war; a result, it was widely believed, of the hundreds of thousands of corpses rotting on the battlefields of France and Flanders. It was to claim the lives of far more people than the total casualty figures of the entire 1914-18 war, and India was one of the worst sufferers. Bets caught it a few days later and there is a snapshot of the two of us, convalescent but still confined to our beds at The Rookery, clutching Moko and Teddy and staring wanly at the camera.
There had already been one children’s play that year, staged as usual by Mrs Strettle and her dancing-class. It was called The Lost Colour and it concerned the smallest colour in the rainbow, Tiny Tint (pink, and if memory serves, played by a girl called Iris Gillian) being kidnapped by some bad character and rescued by the Rainbow King, one Gerry Ross, a pretty creature a few years my senior who possessed a head of lovely copper-coloured curls and wore a gold tunic to match. The curtain rose on the sleeping rainbow composed of members of the dancing-class in order of size, two of each colour (Bets and I were respectively small and large yellow), who to the strains of the Viceregal orchestra’s arrangement of Sinding’s ‘Rustle of Spring’, woke up, yawning and stretching, got to their feet and danced in a dreamy manner before rushing all over the stage in alarm as the lights dimmed, sheets of tin were energetically clashed in the wings, and lightning flashed all over the place to indicate that a thunderstorm had blown up. Under cover of all this uproar, the members of the dancing-class nipped into the wings and collected long silk scarves, each in her own colour, and as the storm died out and the lights came up we did a dance with the scarves, waving them in time to the music — the rainbow coming out after the storm. ‘How charming!’ sighed all the proud mamas in the audience.
I rather think that Tiny Tint must have been shanghaied during the storm, for the next act was a wood on Earth where Bargie, looking as pretty as paint as a wood nymph, did a solo dance followed by a pas de deux with the Rainbow King; after which Gerry staged a fight with the villain and rescued Tiny Tint. I imagine there must have been a smattering of dialogue, but I don’t remember any. Only a lot of dancing and prancing, scarf-waving and mime; and even after all these years I have only to hear the opening bars of ‘Rustle of Spring’ and I am back again on the dusty little stage of Simla’s Gaiety Theatre, dressed in a skimpy yellow silk tunic with a gold girdle (bazaar tinsel, no doubt), bare-footed and with a gold filet in my hair — and fancying myself no end.
A second play, staged in the early autumn, was a peculiar one-act version of Peter Pan that coincided with the arrival of the flu epidemic in Simla. This potted playlet was preceded by a lot of dancing — to which Bets and I contributed yet another minuet! This filled the first half of the programme and in the second half, Gerry Ross played Peter and Bargie played Wendy, while Bets and I were a couple of non-speaking, pyjama-clad Lost Boys. Nana had been eliminated from the script, together with Mr Darling, Captain Hook and the entire Never-Never Land, but Mrs Darling was still present and correct, played by the pretty daughter of the Governor of the Punjab, Una O’Dwyer, who sang a charming Irish lullaby, ‘Husheen’, to send us all to sleep before the arrival of Tinkerbell and Peter. Though what half-a-dozen Lost Boys were doing in the Darlings’ nursery is anyone’s guess!
No one did any flying and the play ended with Peter, Wendy, Tinkerbell and the Boys going into another dance routine. Curtain. I still remember the words and music of ‘Husheen’, but that’s about all — which is not surprising, considering that the killer epidemic had broken loose in Simla, and was striking down people left and right and playing havoc with the show. One by one the juvenile cast went down with it, and Bets, among the last to be smitten, ended up dancing several other performers’ dances in the first half of the show and acting several other people’s parts in the play as each one fell ill. The ranks of the non-speaking Lost Boys were reduced daily and Bets took over playing Michael, and then John, and finally Tinkerbell, before collapsing in her turn. I still can’t think why the grown-ups didn’t cancel the whole thing. It is possible, of course, that the full seriousness of the epidemic had not yet been recognized and even our parents had no idea what had hit them. They may even have thought that it was just as well to keep us all busy and interested — and on our feet. If so, they could have been right; for though some of the British children only just pulled through, I don’t think any of them died. But it was quite otherwise with the children in the crowded bazaars and close-packed, insanitary houses below the Mall, and their parents and grandparents. Yet what we had seen in Simla was only the beginning of the horrors to come…
In the late autumn of that year, after we had moved back to Delhi, Tacklow and Mother accompanied Sir Charles and a few of his friends on what was to have been a ten-day trip down the Ganges by boat from either Gurmuktaser or Gujrowla, to the head of the Ganges Canal — our beloved Narora. It was not the first time they had spent a short leave in this fashion, but on this occasion the object of the trip was to shoot mugger and gharial for their skins, since Sir Charles, anticipating retirement, had been thinking up ways of supplementing his pension while enabling him to keep one foot in India, and had come to an agreement with a tannery in Cawnpore to supply them with skins to be made up into crocodile-leather suitcases, trunks, shoes, women’s handbags and so on, to their mutual profit. This scheme was doomed to prove a disastrous flop for a reason that I have already mentioned: the unsuitability of Indian crocodiles’ skins for such purposes. However, Sir Charles’s retirement was still some way off, and this ten-day trip down the Ganges was merely intended to be a trial run.
His party planned to embark on one of the big, open, wooden-built river-boats that are steered by a single oar; the servants and various hired assistants following some way behind in a second and even larger and slower one, bringing the tents, food and luggage, and picking up en route any muggers that had been shot by those in the first boat — whose occupants would mark them by a yellow flag fixed to a stake that had been driven into the sand near the creature’s head. Towards evening Sir Charles and his lot would pick a suitable spot in which to camp for the night and wait there until the second boat hove in sight with the tents and equipment. After which they would go off to shoot duck and partridge for the pot, while the camp was set up and meals prepared, and Kashmera and his henchmen got down to skinning the crocodiles and then pegging out and salting the skins. These would later be rubbed with ashes and dispatched by runner to the nearest railway station to be sent to Cawnpore to be tanned; or that, at any rate, was the plan. But it did not work out like that, and within three days of setting out the entire party arrived back in Delhi again.
It was years before I di
scovered the reason for this hasty return. And then only because I happened to come across an envelope containing a few snapshots that I had never seen before and which had certainly not appeared in any of the photograph-albums that Mother kept up to date with such care. The snapshots showed a single short stretch of sand on the banks of the Ganges, taken on that abortive trip. It was strewn with rotting corpses.
Hindus cremate their dead, but in times of pestilence or famine, when thousands die, cremation becomes impossible for the poor as wood becomes scarce and its price soars. This year, with people dying like flies in a black frost, the poor could not afford to cremate all of their kin who perished in the great epidemic, so they simply consigned the bodies to the river.
Mother said that no one in the boats had realized, until they actually set off down the river, what it would be like, because the banks near the town were kept clear of corpses and none of the local authorities had warned them. When they got further downstream and saw the numbers of the stranded dead they were horrified, but thought that these must be people who had lived and died in the town and that there would be none further on in the open country away from the towns and villages. But the further they went the worse it became.
At every bend in the river the sandbanks showed more and more bodies in every stage of decay. There were so many of them that even the vultures and carrion crows were satiated and stood around too gorged to fly. Worst of all — worse than the stench and the sight of the legions of dead — were the pariah dogs, those cringing, masterless pi-dogs that haunt every town and village in India and are such cowardly creatures that normally one had only to flap a hand at them to make them turn and run, tail between legs and yelping with alarm. This year, gorged and made bold by feasting on human flesh, they formed themselves into packs that attacked, snarling and without provocation, and made the dark hours hideous, barking and howling and quarrelling over the dead. No one slept that night, and the next day, since they could not take the heavy boats back up river against the current (the plan had been to abandon the boats at Narora from where teams of coolies would have pulled the empty hulks back up the Ganges in the manner of the Volga boatmen, taking many days to make the journey), they went on foot to the nearest village, where they hired bullock carts to take them across country to the nearest railway station and so back to Delhi.
Tacklow told me that the river had been alive with muggers; more of them than any of the party had ever seen before; and that Sir Charles had shot several. But when the skins reached Cawnpore they were found to be green and spongy and could not be tanned; and the same was true of every crocodile shot in any of India’s rivers during the time that the flu epidemic raged through the land.
That cold weather we did not visit Okhla even once, and nor would Punj-ayah allow us to play on the sands of the Jumna on the far side of the Kudsia Bagh, because (though I did not know this at the time) Mother was afraid that the Jumna too might be full of corpses. She did her best to prevent us from learning about the appalling tragedy that was taking place in India — and, for that matter, in most of the rest of the world — for fear that it might upset us. In the same way, we, who had known about it from the start through our numerous Indian friends, playmates and acquaintances, had never mentioned it to her because we were afraid it might upset her! But then I don’t think she ever realized that the servants and shopkeepers, the children of her Indian friends with whom we played and squabbled and laughed, and every other person whom we met and passed the time of day with in the streets and bazaars of Delhi and Simla, talked freely to us or in our hearing on a score of subjects that no Western adult of that period would have dreamed of mentioning in the presence of young children.
Neither birth nor death, nor poverty, sickness, disaster or crime, held any mystery for me. It was not that I was ever indifferent to it — how could I be? Such things would always have the power to shock me or make me shudder, or reduce me to fury or tears or both. But one learned very young to accept the beauty and wonder of that most beautiful and wonderful of lands, and with it the ugliness and cruelty that was an integral part of it. For is not Shiva the Creator — ‘Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow’ — also the Destroyer? And is not his consort, lovely Parbati, also Kali the Drinker-of-Blood and Sitala — Mata — the Smallpox?
* Black-buck.
* Passer-by.
Chapter 19
And we won’t go home ’til it’s over,
Over there!
George M. Cohan
(popular song of the First World War)
Bets and I must have been among the very first people in India to hear that the Great War, the First World War, was over.
We had been playing in the cosmos jungle below The Rookery one sunny autumn morning while Tacklow, who for once had not set off for the office, sat at work in his study and Mother busied herself packing trunks and suitcases in the upper rooms of the house, in preparation for our annual move to Delhi. It was November, but the weather was as clear and hot and glittering as an English June, and though the tall stems and feathery foliage of the cosmos were already turning dry and brittle, there was still a lavish sprinkling of pink and white blossoms over our heads. The windless air was full of pollen dust, and without the surf-song of the pines, all the familiar noises of Simla drifted up from the town and the bazaars that lay spread out far below us; muted by distance but still clearly audible in the stillness. Above us in The Rookery every door and window stood wide, and the big clock in the hall had just begun to strike eleven when we heard someone run out of the house and down the stone steps into the porch, and out onto the gravel drive. And suddenly the warm, sleepy silence of the morning was shattered by the deafening clangour of the bronze Burmese gong that hung in the hall and was normally sounded, discreetly, to summon us to meals.
It was not being sounded discreetly now. The din was so violent and so unexpected that we were stopped in our tracks (we had been crawling along one of our carefully constructed paths through the cosmos stalks), and regardless of the fact that we might be giving away the whereabouts of our secret tunnels, both jumped to our feet and rushed out headlong to discover what on earth was happening. I think we both expected to find the house on fire or some similar disaster. But it was, astonishingly, Tacklow who was creating this appalling din. He had unhooked the gong and was marching up and down in front of the house, banging on it like some demented drummer-boy.
Mother came tearing out onto the top verandah to lean over the rail and shout down to him, demanding to know if he had gone out of his mind, and everyone else in the place came swarming out from the back of the house, the kitchen, the go-downs and the servants’ quarters, convinced that they were being summoned to help put out a fire or, at the very least, attack a gang of robbers. I can still see their startled faces which must have mirrored the shock on my own, when they discovered that the ‘Burra-Sahib’ had apparently gone mad and was grinning from ear to ear as he woke the echoes of Jakko with the help of the dinner-gong. But as the last, unheard stroke of eleven sounded on the grandfather clock in the hall, we saw a white puff of smoke and a bright flash from Summer Hill on the far side of Simla; so far away that the crash of the gun must have taken a full four seconds to reach us. A minute later the bells of Christ Church began to peal, hooters started to blare and whistles to blow, while the crew of the noonday gun that was fired once a day to tell all Simla that it was exactly twelve o’clock and they could knock off for lunch, broke abruptly with tradition and embarked on a joyous twenty-one-gun salute … The war was over! At last, after more than four hideous years of slaughter, it was all over. An Armistice had been signed; and I was badly shaken to see, for the first time in my life, that even as he laughed and banged that Burmese gong, there were tears running down my father’s face.
Tacklow had known for many hours that an Armistice had been signed and would come into force at eleven o’clock that morning. He had been the first person in India to know, for the news came
in cipher. He had decoded it and, late on the previous evening, informed the Viceroy, who presumably informed the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab. But since the order was that the news must not be made public until the following day, and in every part of the Empire at precisely the same time — each part keeping strictly to its own time — Tacklow had not even dropped a hint to Mother. I remember her being extremely annoyed about this and insisting that even if the Viceroy had told him not to breathe a word to anyone before the eleven o’clock deadline, he could at least have told his own wife! (If she really did think so, she didn’t know her husband nearly as well as I knew my father!) ‘I bet Lord Chelmsford told his wife!’ said Mother indignantly.
By afternoon all Simla was en fěte, decked out with coloured bunting and strings of coloured flags and launched on two days of rejoicing and non-stop tamashas.* Services of Thanksgiving were held in the churches and there was a Victory Parade of all troops on the Ridge. A feu de joie crackled up and down the lines of khaki-clad men, bands played and there were endless side-shows in the form of Kuttack and other regional dances of India, which intrigued me far more than the military parade. Someone gave Bets and me a flag each, and Mother took a snapshot of us waving our Union Jacks. Then it was all over. And after that the grown-ups took to talking interminably of ‘going home’ and indulging in excited speculation on their chances of getting a passage on a homeward-bound steamer.
