by M. M. Kaye
I had reached the dignity of double figures earlier that year and was now ten years old. Bets and I had got up early on the morning of my birthday and walked up and down our end of the top verandah, discussing the implications of maturity in whispers so as not to wake our still sleeping parents. Now that I had reached it, ten suddenly seemed to me an awesome number, and I was sobered by the thought that I would never be in single figures again. I remember that we talked of the future and speculated, gloomily, that it would not be long now before either I was sent away to some school in Bombay or Calcutta, or that Punj-ayah was replaced by an English governess. For at that time the Great War still seemed set to go on for ever, and I don’t think either of us seriously visualized what would happen to us when it ended. I remember too that our conversation was brought to a close by the familiar crash and clatter of a troop of monkeys chasing each other along the tin roof over our heads, which woke our parents. And also that my presents that year were a wristwatch from Tacklow — which made me feel older than ever — and a morocco-bound copy of Daily Light from Mother which I still have (it is disintegrating rapidly but I hope it will see me out).
That had been in August. Then, less than three months after Tacklow had run out of the house banging our Burmese gong, my whole view of the future changed as swiftly and dramatically as the coloured chips of glass in a kaleidoscope change patterns at a single twist of the wrist. One minute everything had been blue and gold and brilliant, and then, suddenly, it was all dark purple, grey and forbidding, and I was full of foreboding…
‘Home’! Yes, I remembered Freshfields. Forres too. And Ramnee. And the farm at Streatley and Aunt Lizzie’s house at Bedford. I hadn’t thought much of any of them, and it had been wonderful to come back to India again. Why did everyone call England ‘home’? This was home, and I wanted no other: certainly not that grey, drizzly and definitely chilly place which I had been fortunate enough to escape from once and would not care if I never saw again. Oh yes, of course I knew that we’d all have to go back there one day: I wasn’t stupid. But I had quite simply not bothered to think about it. When one is young and completely happy, and all is going well, one doesn’t bother to think much about the future unless one is gripped by an ambition to do something special — discover El Dorado or fly an aeroplane, or become a great actor or a great dancer. My ambition was simple. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in India.
Now that the Armistice had been signed, everyone who had had to spend the war years in India, leaving children and relatives back in Britain, could not wait to return. But passages were few and far between, and people had to wait their turn. The wounded and convalescent, all British soldiers who had been in action, senior civilians who could ‘pull rank’, and so on, had first claim. The rest had to wait; and since our priority was a low one, there was little prospect of our getting passages for some time to come.
Buoyed up by this discovery, and by the fact that the normal amount of goods and chattels were, as always, stowed away in packing-cases and left in a storehouse in Simla to await our return, we left for the plains as light-heartedly as ever; and back once more in Delhi found nothing changed. The Kudsia Bagh was still as beautiful, Okhla as alluring, and the Christmas camp and the annual visit to the Perrins at Narora were as enjoyable as ever. The only blot on our lovely landscape was the absence of Bargie and Tony, whose parents were spending the winter in Calcutta. Bets and I missed them a lot. But we had many other friends, and even if the old Anglo-Indian community began to show gaps as family after family left for Bombay to take ship to England, at least our Indian friends were not leaving; lucky things! Moni and Veena and Lakshmi, Rehana and Karan, Neelum, Vita and Shafi would all be staying. So that was all right!
It was during this cold weather that Bets and I had our first sight of the new city the British were adding to the seven cities of Delhi which in the course of the long centuries had risen in turn on this particular stretch of plain.
I knew about this latest Delhi because Tacklow had told me how at the great Durbar of 1911, held for King George V and Queen Mary, the new King-Emperor had announced that plans had been approved for the construction of a modern, eighth Delhi on the open plain a few miles to the north of the present city. And of how their majesties had proceeded with due pomp and ceremony to lay a pair of suitably engraved foundation stones on the proposed site. But either the architects or the Public Works Department had skimped their work, for the chosen spot turned out to be entirely unsuitable. Apparently it was apt to turn into a bog whenever the Jumna overflowed its banks — which it did whenever the monsoon was a particularly heavy one. An alternative site was hastily selected on higher ground, some ten or twelve miles distant on the opposite side of the city and on a barren, rock-strewn plain that was crossed by the Ridge. The foundation stones were hurriedly dug up under cover of darkness, to be transported and re-erected by night on the new site where they would be discovered in situ next morning … A miracle, no less! — the intelligent stones, disliking the prospect of getting their feet wet every time the Jumna burst its banks, had removed themselves to a safer and more auspicious location! Or that (it was hoped) was how it would appear to superstitious people and the more credulous and simple-minded peasantry. Maybe it did. If so, it shows that they preferred to believe that even a slab of Indian marble (or sandstone or whatever) had more sense than a committee of bureaucratic British planners.
The 1914 war had put a temporary stop to building activities on this newest Delhi. But with the Armistice work had begun again, and that winter Mother drove us all out to the aerodrome — at that time no more than a flat, dusty expanse of earth flanked by an ugly galvanized-iron hangar and a few makeshift sheds — to see the arrival of the very first plane to fly from England to India: a flight that had taken a number of days and endless stops for refuelling, but was regarded at the time as a marvellous feat. The plane, a De Havilland, had been piloted by one of the First World War flying aces, ‘Biffy’ Bourton; who on arrival promptly fell in love with Bargie’s mother and eventually married her. The pilot of the next plane to do this trip, which arrived shortly afterwards, was another ex-Royal Flying Corps officer, one Harley Alec-Tweedie who fell heavily for my mother, but fortunately for all of us ended up as no more than a valued friend of the whole family.
I remember watching Tacklow walk off across that vast, dusty expanse of ground one afternoon to talk to Harley, and the next thing we knew he was clambering up into the cockpit, wearing a borrowed flying-helmet and goggles, and they had taken off. Mother nearly had hysterics, which didn’t surprise me, because those early ‘flying machines’ looked like children’s toys. They had open cockpits, out of which I suppose one could easily have fallen if not strapped in, and conveyed the impression of being made out of a few sheets of cardboard and a ball of string. The single propeller had to be swung over by hand to start the engine, and as I never could fathom how they became airborne or managed to stay up once they were, I watched the gyrations of that fragile bit of nonsense containing my courageous but foolhardy Tacklow with my heart almost literally in my mouth, expecting it to disintegrate at any moment. However, it returned him safely and I have a snapshot of him, taken by Mother, looking rather smug and pleased with himself in his borrowed flying outfit.
It was on this same afternoon that Mother decided to take us back by a different route so that we could see how New Delhi was progressing. And as we drove towards it I remember seeing, a mile or so away and against the black rain-clouds of a distant storm moving across the enormous and almost featureless plain, a perfect triple rainbow. I had seen double ones before, but never three of these glorious, ephemeral arches, the palest of which was sharply clear and almost as bright as a normal rainbow. It seemed that we were going to drive right under them; but they retreated before us with the retreating storm, and when we reached the top of the low, stony ridge known as Raisina Hill, on which Sir Edwin Lutyens planned to build a splendid Viceroy’s House, the ground all around us
was wet and glistening from the rain that had passed across it, and the newly-washed air was so clear that one could see for miles.
Mother stopped the car on the crest of a long slope that would one day be a wide road sweeping down from the open space in front of the Viceroy’s House, to pass between an imposing pair of Secretariat Buildings before merging into a long, level avenue that for a brief span of time would be known as King’s Way and is now the Rajpath — which means the same thing. And looking about me I saw, sprawled all around me on the wet and glistening earth, the foundations of the present capital of India, New Delhi, which was then no more than a crude map on the ground; all trenches and substructures with here and there the beginnings of a wall.
It was hard to believe, that evening, that this would one day be a great city housing well over a million people. Or that anything more than camel-thorn and cactus bushes could ever flourish on that harsh and stony earth. I thought I had never seen a more desolate spot, and I could not understand how anyone could want to live here instead of among the trees and gardens and orchards of Shahjehanpore — the Old Delhi that the Emperor Shahjehan had rebuilt and beautified on the bank of the Jumna. From this vantage-point, and in that clear, rain-washed air, I could see its close-packed rooftops, red sandstone fort, marble domes and soaring minarets, rising out of a green foam of trees and bordered on the far side by the silver ribbon of the Jumna. And see too the scattered ruins of those other Delhis; the ancient city where the Khutab Minar stands, Siri and Jahānpanāh; Tuglakabad and Indarpat; and Firozabad, which covers both Shahjehanpore and the ruined traces of the city of Shere Shah…
Tacklow must have known what I was thinking. Or else he must have been thinking the same thing, for he recited some verses that I had never heard before and which so caught my imagination that I looked them up later and learned them by heart. It was a poem about a King who started to build a magnificent palace, and in doing so came across the traces of a former city that someone else had built many centuries earlier, and saw, carved on the ancient stones, ‘After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!’. In the end the King is forced to abandon the work he has begun, and the last verse says…
I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves and my sheers.
All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
Only I cut on the timber — only I carved on the stone:
‘After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!’
The poem is called ‘The Palace’ and when I asked Tacklow who had written it he said, ‘Kipling.’ I ought to have known that. It is a poem I cherish because it can give me back, exact in every detail, one special fragment of time: the brief interval I spent on the crest of Raisina Hill, looking out across the minimal foundations of what would one day be New Delhi, at the ruins of six previous Delhis that lay strewn across the plain — and at the seventh that I knew so well and thought of as ‘home’, but whose time, like the days of my childhood in India, was very nearly over…
That last sad fact was still not real to me; though it was soon to become so. A few days later we set off as gaily as in other years to visit Agra, which we found as enchanting as ever. True, Mother discouraged us from acquiring yet another alabaster model of the Taj apiece, on the grounds that when we left for England we were going to have to cut down on luggage and the models took up too much room. But though we settled for pin-boxes instead, we didn’t take her warning very seriously, and our optimism received a boost from Miss Hotz who, when we waved goodbye to her and to Laurie’s Hotel, called out as usual: ‘See you again soon!’ So there was nothing to worry about yet.
The blow fell with shocking suddenness. When spring came and the Government of India returned with other migrants to the hills, only one member of our family would be returning with them: Tacklow would be going back to Simla again. But without Mother, Bets or myself, for whom three berths had been allotted on the S.S. ‘Ormond’, sailing from Bombay to Tilbury Docks in England.
Tacklow had not asked for leave for himself so that he could accompany us, because with everyone clamouring to go, someone had to stay behind. And he felt strongly that since he had not been able to fight in the war, the least he could do was to stay at his post and give others, who had, a chance to go to the head of the queue — along with mothers who had been parted for years from their children, and children who had been away from their native land too long and should be going to school there.
I heard the news with horror. It was bad enough to learn that I might never again see Simla or our many friends there, to whom we had so gaily waved goodbye never dreaming that we would not all meet again when the next hot weather came round. Or that for all I knew I could have paid my last visit to Agra and might never travel by moonlight on the rail-trolley to Narora again. But to have to leave Tacklow behind, perhaps for years, was such an appalling prospect that I refused to face it and merely shut my mind against it. It hadn’t happened yet and perhaps it would never happen, and I took to repeating one of the copy-book maxims that other children’s governesses were so fond of quoting: ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?’
One faint consolation was the news that the Slaters would be returning to England on the same ship, so at least I should have Bargie’s company. And in the meantime I was still here. Still living in our own familiar rooms in dear Curzon House. Still awakened every morning by the peacocks in the Kudsia Bagh and the parrots in the big peepul tree that grew in the compound where the servants’ quarters were. Still able to hear by twilight, in the lovely, late, dusty evenings, the romantic strains of those nostalgic sugary waltzes drifting through the shadows from the wide lawn of the Old Delhi Club that had once, in the days before the Mutiny, been Ludlow Castle…
While Mother saw to the collecting, sorting and packing of the many things we would have to take with us, Bets and I set about making our own collection of necessities, which were in no way similar. From every one of our special places in and around Delhi we took a souvenir; an amulet that we could look at and touch whenever we felt homesick for India. A leaf from the avenue of eucalyptus trees in the Kudsia Bagh. Another from the bamboos that had once hidden the stairway to our hideaway on the roof of the ruined gateway. A flake of sandstone and a scrap of marble from the surrounding parapet. Other leaves from the squirrel trees, the peepul behind Curzon House, the lemon, sweet lime and orange trees in the Roshanara Gardens, and neem leaves and rose petals from the cemetery where Nicholson lies buried. We took a sliver of stone from the Kashmir Gate and a piece of bark from a tree in which we used to sit for hours in the back garden of Curzon House; a fallen feather shed by a parrot, a peacock, a jay, a sat-bhai and a dove. A pinch of silver sand from the Jumna, and another, together with the dried and crumpled egg-shell of a river turtle, from Okhla. Red gravel from the Curzon House drive, a pebble from the Ridge, and any number of flowers and grasses, carefully dried — wild ones, picked out on the plains among the ruins of the seven cities. The little dusty yellow balls that are the blossoms of the kikar tree, purple and red bougainvillaea, orange trumpet-flowers, petals from roses, canna lilies, jasmine and Lady of the Night, a stick of incense and a tiny bottle of ’itr;* a little packet of dust gathered from the Maidan that lies between the Red Fort and the Jumna Masjid, and a twig from the tree that used to grow through the Cloth Shop near the Clock Tower in the Chandi Chowk, together with many other bits and pieces, some of which, such as a fragment of sandalwood and a lucky blue bead, were given to us by friends in the city or in one or other of Delhi’s public gardens (it was the old chowkidar of Kudsia Begum’s gateway who gave us that stick of incense). Kashmera’s contribution was a little string of scarlet and black jungle seeds, while another friend, Devika (whose family was once described to me by a member of our dancing-class as being ‘rich as creases’), donated a miniature paan† box no bigger than a four-anna piece, made of beaten silver and beautifully decorated. It contained small pieces of areca-nu
t and a pinch of powdered lime, and I have it still, though I lost its contents many years ago.
These and scores of similar souvenirs were carefully stowed away in a glossy cardboard box that had once held a dozen tablets of Erasmic Soap (and was itself a treasured object), and neither Bets nor I would have parted with that assorted collection of dust, sand, pebbles, feathers and dried flowers for all the diamonds in Tiffany’s! That Erasmic Soap box and its precious contents left India with us, and during the lean years that followed it became a kind of talisman — a hawa-dilli, we call it — a ‘heart-lifter’. For whenever we felt homesick or lost or forgotten, we had only to open it and the past was there in our hands. We could touch it and hold it and say: ‘Do you remember … ?’ And of course we remembered. We knew exactly where every single item had come from, and singly or collectively they proved to be strong magic against despair and depression. In time the flowers, leaves and grasses crumbled and the paper disintegrated until, to an incurious eye, the contents would have looked like a boxful of old, dried breadcrumbs. But it still held the scent of India and continued to lift our hearts. I would certainly have had it to this day if it had not been for that warehouse fire; but all that survives of our hawa-dilli is ‘Vika’s little silver box, which I had removed only because the metal was helping to crush the more perishable objects in our cardboard treasure-chest.
One thing I learned during our last few days in Delhi was that Time, which can so often move as slowly as a slug crossing a dusty road, can also move with the swiftness of cloud shadows on a windy day. Until then, a week had seemed a very long time to wait for anything one wanted, while a month ahead was something far out of sight. As for a year — well, one might as well say ‘never’ and be done with it! But those last days in Delhi rushed past with appalling speed, and on one of them, paying a goodbye visit to Okhla, we witnessed something I have never seen before or since, and which no one was able to explain to me.
