by M. M. Kaye
It was a dark, overcast day, heavy with thunder, and the air seemed to crackle with electricity. There was no lightning and no rain; though it must have been pouring somewhere further north, for the Jumna had risen dangerously close to flood-level and all the sluices, both on the canal and the river, had been opened. Downstream the water appeared to be boiling with fish. Myriads of chilwa were fighting their way up the fish-ladders, leaping like miniature salmon, and beyond the roaring sluices the river was alive with turtles. Hundreds of them. I presume they were catching chilwa, but they looked to me as though they were merely coming up for air, turning over so that for a brief moment you saw the pale plates of their bellies show white against the churning mud-coloured water, then diving, and doing it again. Up, over, down. Up, over, down. It was the weirdest sight and it made the wild water look as though it were alive, for there were big fish there too among the turtles. Mahseer and catfish, jumping, swirling, turning…
Raucous clouds of gulls, chalk-white against that black, forbidding sky, were swooping and diving as they competed with the kites and crows for the swarming chilwa, and we could not venture onto the weir because the river was already level with the top of the stout wooden barrier that was normally sufficient to hold it in check, and beginning to lap over it. Here and there a plank had given way before the strain and was letting a smooth, head-high spate of water surge through and pour down the stony slope below, and all the sandbanks had vanished, while below the weir the Jumna ran unimpeded from bank to bank with only frothing patches of white water to show where the stone groins lay submerged. Upstream of the canal and the river sluices the tall silk-cotton trees were in flower. The ground below them was littered with their fallen scarlet blossoms, and I took one back with me to add it to the other souvenirs in the treasure-box.
It was a strange afternoon. A rather ominous one, because Okhla suddenly seemed to have turned into a totally unfamiliar place which I did not recognize at all. It was like one of those dreams in which you know that you are in a certain well-known spot even though it bears no resemblance to it, and for some unknown reason, curiously reminiscent of the day I saw the raw beginnings of New Delhi rising out of the ‘spent and unconsidered earth’, and sensed uneasily the approach of a future that was destined to destroy much that I had loved and thought of as indestructible, and to put an end to an enchanted childhood.
Morning after morning, as the date of our departure drew nearer, we would set out with Punj-ayah on a tour of Delhi to say goodbye to all our friends; returning with tear-stained cheeks and loaded with a weird selection of parting-presents that included a stuffed baby gharial that smelt like nothing on earth (and was immediately confiscated and disposed of by Mother), scores of glass bangles and endless paper packages containing a varied selection of halwa, jellabies, roast chunna, paan and dried fruit, and a whole Noah’s Ark of brightly painted toy animals: elephants, camels, tigers, parrots and peacocks, in papier-mâché, carved wood, brass and stone. All of this gubbins (with the exception of the stuffed gharial) was, we hoped, to go with us; and it was only when our boxes were unpacked in England that we discovered that Mother had left them behind to be distributed among the children in the servants’ compound.
Tacklow and Abdul Karim* would be accompanying us as far as Bombay, but we had to say a tearful farewell to Punj-ayah in Delhi, to the entire staff of Curzon House, and a host of other friends who came to the station to see us off. Dear Buckie, Sir Charles, the Diwan-Sahib and the Khan Sahib, Nazir and Ameera, and ‘Vika and her family, a number of buddies from the Dancing Class, and many of Mother’s friends as well as ours, were on the platform to say goodbye and wish us good luck and a safe return.
A safe return …! If only I could have been sure of that! If only I had known for certain that I would be able to come back again one day. But how could I be, when I had recently learned that I was unlikely to leave school until I was seventeen? Seven years! Seven whole years! It was a lifetime. Only three years less than the whole of my present life-span, which seemed to me for ever. Besides, Tacklow had already told me that now that the war was over his job was bound to end and very soon he would be retired on a Lieutenant-Colonel’s pension — there being little or no chance of promotion for an Army man who had seen no active service during the war years. If that were so, then he himself would be leaving India for good long before my schooldays were over.
I very seldom cried in public, for I knew that it was one of the things that one should not do, whatever the provocation. But I was in floods of tears as the train pulled out of Delhi and I leaned from the carriage window and waved and waved; and for the next few miles or so, as we puffed and chugged and rattled past a score of dear, familiar places on the plains beyond the walled city, I could barely see for crying. I was leaving them all behind: the Janta Mantar, the walls of Shere Shah’s Delhi, the Purana Kila — its gateways glowing copper-coloured in the late afternoon sunlight. Humayun’s beautiful red-and-white tomb and the heavenly blue of the Persian tiles on the dome of the Nil Burge — the tomb of one Fahim Khan, of whom nothing seems to be known except his name. The Pepper-pot Bridge and the road to Okhla; the suttee monuments by the Meerut road and, far away across the plain, the Khutab Minar and the crumbling ruins of the once great citadel of Tuglakabad…
I don’t remember much about that three-day journey across India to Bombay, except that I spent most of it staring out of one or other of the carriage windows, watching India glide past me and striving to imprint every yard of it on my memory. Chugging across the enormous empty spaces of the Central Provinces and the borders of Rajasthan, I played a game with myself, one that Bets and I always played on long train journeys. The game was to see how many times you could count to sixty before you saw a fellow human (as soon as you saw one you stopped and began to count again). I remember that the average time between one sighting and the next turned out to be over twenty times: more than twenty minutes! This must have worked out at roughly twelve miles — fourteen at most, I imagine — as I am told that the trains of that day would not have travelled at more than thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. Nowadays I suppose the count would be nearer one human every fifteen seconds. But in 1919 there had not yet been a population explosion on the scale of that in later years, and though herds of black-buck and families of wild pig, chital and monkeys were a common sight, there were still enormous tracts of India in which wild animals outnumbered humans by a hundred to one.
As the train rattled southward I saw an occasional wolf, and when the line crossed a river or skirted a jheel there were always great flocks of water-birds, while every half-mile seemed to have its pair of sarus cranes; the big, blue, crested cranes which mate for life. Every village and hamlet was surrounded by a circle of cultivated fields and croplands; patches of bright green against the parched, lion-coloured plains. And however barren and uninhabited the country, wherever a low line of hills thrust up from the plain you could see that once upon a time, very long ago, there had been a fortress on the heights — or a hunting lodge or a lookout. For the ruins were still there, silhouetted against that enormous sky.
Once, looking out of the carriage window in the very early morning in the middle of nowhere, I saw on the crest of such a ridge a lone pavilion; a little chatri, its slender pillars and graceful dome dark against the yellow dawn: the last lonely remnant of some forgotten city. And to me at that moment the sight of the little ruined chatri seemed the personification of India and History and all Romance. It still does; for I have never forgotten it. But on that particular morning it was also a reminder of all that I was leaving behind; and watching it grow smaller and smaller as the train raced on, I knew that even if I was fortunate enough to come back again one day, nothing was ever going to be the same. Because I could only come back as a grown-up.
I made another daunting discovery when we reached Bombay. It was there that I learned for the first time that in comparison with the parents of many of our friends and acquaintances, mine were prett
y badly off. I had never thought about it before; and if I had I would probably have supposed that Tacklow’s pay was roughly the same as theirs, if not more. I knew we had to be careful, and that was about all. But arriving in Bombay my hopelessly unworldly father directed the driver of the fitton-ghari we had all piled into to take us to the Taj Mahal Hotel; presumably because it was the only one he had heard of! I remember Mother asking anxiously if he was sure we could afford it, and Tacklow replying that he meant to go in and ask what they charged for their cheapest rooms, and if it was more than we could afford, he would ask them to recommend some cheaper hotel — there were sure to be others. To which Mother replied firmly that she had no intention of allowing the Deputy Chief Censor to be seen dickering over the price of rooms with the hotel clerks, and that if anyone had to do it she would. She made the ghari-driver stop in a side-street near the hotel and, leaving us sitting in it, went off alone to cope with the situation; returning triumphantly to say that she had tackled the Manager and beaten him down to a reasonable price for two single rooms on the top floor, into each of which they had agreed to put a second bed for no extra charge. I remember feeling desperately embarrassed that she should have had to do such a thing — it seemed terrible to me then. I knew that we weren’t rich, but I had no idea that we had to watch every penny — in this case every anna — and I was shaken by the discovery.
That brief interlude in Bombay, during which Tacklow, Bets and I in our hired phaeton-ghari, and Abdul Karim in a luggage-laden tonga, lurked in a side street near the Taj Mahal Hotel while Mother was finding out if we could possibly afford to spend a night there, and bargaining for the cheapest possible rate, taught me something that I never forgot: that far more than three-quarters of the men of my race who spent their lives in Indian service were not overpaid and pampered ‘Burra-Sahibs’ lording it over ‘the natives’, but were really people like Tacklow who worked themselves to the bone to serve, to the best of their ability, a country and a people whom they had come to love so much that they were willing to pay the heavy price that was exacted for that service. And just how heavy it was became apparent to me a bare twenty-four hours later, when I said goodbye to my father and saw, with a terrible contraction of the heart, that he, like me, was in tears.
He had not seen his only son for six years, and now he did not know how long it would be before he saw his little daughters again — and children grow up, and grow away, so very quickly. Poor Tacklow! I remember clinging to him like a frenzied octopus as we said our farewells in a cramped cabin on the S. S. ‘Ormond’, striving to express without words how much I loved him; and when the ship’s hooter blew to warn all visitors to go ashore and he had to leave, watching him walk down the gangplank and turn to wave to us from the crowded dockside.
He was not a tall man and it was a family joke that he claimed to be half an inch taller than Mother. But though his heart was enormous his lack of inches, combined with his total refusal, under any circumstances, to shove himself forward, went against him now; for within minutes he was swallowed up in a mass of taller husbands, fathers and friends who stood waving on the dock and I lost sight of him — for two long years: an eternity when one is a child … The steamer began to draw slowly away, and as the rubbish-strewn harbour water widened between ship and shore the people on the dock seemed to shrink and dwindle until they were barely more than a blur of tiny dots. And presently the ‘Ormond’ was steaming out of the lovely, island-strewn harbour which some fifteenth-century Portuguese adventurer had named Bomm-baie — ‘Beautiful Bay’ — heading for the open sea.
Mother went down to the cabin to unpack and Bets and I mopped our eyes and blew our noses, and turning from the deck rail made our way to the stern of the ship from where we could watch the towers and domes of Bombay, the green outline of Malabar Hill and the rocky islet of Elephanta, grow smaller and smaller; all gold and gleaming in the low afternoon sunlight. And as the coast of India faded into the haze, we made a solemn vow never, ever, to desert her. Never to let England replace her in our affections. Never, even if we were not able to return, to forget her, but to remember her always with love. We were deadly serious about it, and we repeated it aloud in Hindustani in case any of her many gods and godlings should happen to be listening and could bear witness. Then we shook hands on it, waved goodbye to her as she vanished, and went off, a little comforted, to look for Bargie and Tony and forgather with our friends.
I remember quite a lot about that voyage; starting with lifeboat drill, which was taken as seriously as we had taken our solemn vow. The Great War had not been over all that long, and as ships’ companies were very much alive to the danger of floating mines, boat-drill was held with boring frequency. Which was perhaps just as well, since at least one passenger-ship on her way home was sunk by a mine that had drifted far off course. I remember the flying-fishes and the dolphins, and a school of whales basking and spouting on a calm day near the mouth of the Gulf of Aden — and how horrid the ‘children’s meals’ were. Particularly the eggs, which tasted strongly of some form of preservative. The milk too. I was a skinny child and I grew a lot skinnier on the voyage owing to my reluctance to eat the food provided for the young.
There were a good many of our friends and contemporaries on board, and since we had all been well and truly infected with the Amateur Dramatic bug during the war years, we put on a children’s song-and-dance show for our long-suffering elders, in which Bets and I sang and danced to ‘Madam, will you walk?’ and Bargie brought the house down singing ‘I’m Gilbert the Filbert, the Kernel of the Nuts’, decked out in white tie and tails which she must have borrowed from some schoolboy of her own age among the passengers. She also made a sizable dent in the heart of one of the ship’s officers, who fell madly in love with her and was for ever inviting her to his cabin to look at his photograph-albums or drink tea or whatever. (I do hope he was a bachelor.) Admittedly, he was extremely good-looking; but in my opinion far too old to carry on like that. Why, he could easily have been as much as thirty!
I could not blame him, for I too thought Bargie must be the most beautiful thing since Helen of Troy. Now rising fourteen, and, by Indian standards a woman grown, she had the violet eyes, the ebony hair and perfect features of a famous film-star as yet unborn, Elizabeth Taylor, when that gorgeous creature was at the height of her beauty. But though Bargie was beautiful she was by no means dumb, and on the rare occasions when her love-sick officer managed to persuade her to accept one of his invitations, she insisted on taking me along with her. Not until much later did I realize how he must have detested the skinny, ten-year-old chaperone who kept a close and beady eye upon him while cheerfully scoffing the lion’s share of the chocolates, lemon squash, ice cream and sugared cakes he provided for the purpose of luring the lovely Slater-child into his cabin.
Port Said, which I had last seen the year before the Great War, seemed quite unchanged and astonishingly familiar. The white-painted Victorian-style hotel on the sands. The rows of bathing-huts and deck chairs. The brilliant blue of scores of jellyfish stranded and melting in the hot sun above the high-tide mark. The gully-gully men who addressed every white woman as ‘Missis Queen Victoria’ and who produced adorable, cheeping, day-old chicks from our ears or the crown of our hats or hair ribbons. The round wooden boxes of Turkish Delight which we bought at Simon Artz, and lunch in the big, white dining-room of the hotel that looked out on the sands and the sea…
To all home-bound Anglo-Indians, the East was only left behind when they entered the Mediterranean. After that there was no longer any need to protect themselves from a savage sun with a solar topi, and for this reason it had become a tradition to throw these emblems of servitude overboard while the ship was still within sight of Port Said. A legend had grown up that if your topi sank you would never return, but if it floated you were sure to go back. So those who had hated their time in India, and had no wish to set foot in it again, would cheat by weighting their topis with a soda-water bottle or a handful o
f annas wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, or anything else heavy and expendable, and cheer when it sank. The rest would watch with bated breath and feel relieved or depressed according to whether theirs floated or sank. But Bets and I (who by this time knew every lascar on the ship by name and had taken the precaution of asking them for advice) did not fling our topis into the wake, but dropped them very carefully, holding them as though they were bowls of water. And Glory, Glory, Alleluia! they floated! We watched them bobbing away in the glitter of the Mediterranean sunlight, and felt as though a weight had been lifted from our shoulders. We would come back!
Bargie and Tony had also dropped their topis overboard, but though unweighted, both sank almost immediately, so perhaps there was something in that old Anglo-Indian legend after all, for neither of them ever returned to India.
According to Mother, we went ashore at several other places in the course of that voyage; among them Aden, Malta and Marseilles. But if so I don’t remember doing so. I only remember Port Said and, towards the end of the voyage, a truly horrendous storm in the Bay of Biscay. It was so violent that the Captain of the ‘Ormond’ had to turn the ship about so that she went with it instead of fighting it. We were apparently blown many miles off course, and we learned later that the storm had been responsible for an appalling number of wrecks on the coasts of half-a-dozen countries, including England. We had run into the fringes of it shortly after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, and Mother and most of the adult passengers had made for the privacy of their cabins and collapsed with seasickness. But a handful of children, including Bargie, Tony, Bets and myself, who were not in the least affected by seasickness (a failing that I, for one, have been fatally prone to ever since!), had a whale of a time tobogganing down the drenched and tilting decks on tea-trays that we had filched from a pile outside one of the galleys.
