Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  Thrilled by the prospect of making her fortune, she had acquired enough baubles, bangles and beads and other pretties to fill several outsize packing cases. And I, foreseeing hours wasted sitting about under the hot tin roofs of the Customs shed while ham-handed coolie-log undid the careful work of expert Chinese packers, had written to Charles (can’t remember what his surname was!) enclosing details of all the junk, plus the prices paid, and inquiring if he could see to it that we did not have to have the stuff unpacked, because no way – no way – could it be repacked properly. We ourselves couldn’t do it! Charles had risen to the occasion and the young man he had sent down to the docks to help us couldn’t have been more helpful. He had gone through the lists and noted that this type of goods was not listed as dutiable, nor were there any of the proscribed items on the list that Customs officers hand to you in large type, and reel off if you don’t seem to have taken it in.

  The Customs officers, by this time exhausted by going through doubtful luggage and no doubt longing to get shot of the whole ship-load so that they could get a coffee-break, were preparing to chalk an ‘OK’ hieroglyphic on all those packing-cases of Mother’s, when Tacklow suddenly drove up to the fact that this nice man who had met us in the Customs shed and been so helpful was not merely a boyfriend of Moll’s, but a representative of the Head of Customs and Excise in Calcutta, and as such was apparently engaged in pulling illegal strings on our behalf. Up with this he would not put!

  I think I have mentioned elsewhere that my darling Pa had a horror of the slightest dishonesty. ‘Word of an Englishman’ and all that. All very laudable. But it could, at times, be irritating, and this was one of them …

  Tacklow had noticed that among the things that had to be declared was silk. Presumably in quantity, since clothing – even Bets’s lovely trousseau underwear, and the wonderful dress-lengths of Tribute silk – had been glanced at and replaced with a total lack of interest. Even Tacklow seemed to think that things like Mother’s scanties and his silk ties need not come under the heading of ‘Silk’ with a capital S. But when he discovered that the packing cases, on the word of this stranger from the Customs HQ, had been passed without being opened, he recalled that among the objects in them were at least a dozen four-sided hanging lampshades of carved blackwood, each panel being removable so that they packed flat and every panel (at a guess, probably four inches by seven inches) of stretched silk painted with designs of birds or sprays of flowers.

  My parent, who ought to have known better, tried to explain this to the overworked Indian official who was dealing with our stuff, and merely succeeded in muddling the unfortunate man, who obviously had no idea what kind of silk the Sahib was going on about, and in the end demanded to be shown it. This meant opening a packing case – the wrong one of course. By the time a sample lantern was finally unearthed, the floor a sea of tissue paper and straw, and the silly little squares of silk with their flight of painted storks or whatever declared ‘not dutiable’, everyone was thoroughly out of temper, and the young man from Head Office said crossly: ‘Why on earth did you bother to get me down here to help you get the boxes through Customs? You must have known what your father is like! Is he always like this?’

  I said, ‘Unfortunately, yes,’ and apologized for getting the young man out of bed for nothing. It was all my fault really. I ought to have explained that I had written to Charles about the packing cases. As it was, I had only managed to give Tacklow the impression that I was pulling rank in order to put a fast one over the Customs! Oh dear –!

  William Henry, Bets’s fiancé, had been on the dock to meet us, and Bets says that Mother hissed in her ear that if she, Bets, found that she had changed her mind about him, she (Mother!) would get her out of it somehow. I think WHP must have felt much the same, for he had brought a squad of friends with him to break the ice and make conversation. However, fortunately we knew most of them, so all went well. They took us out to Tollygunge for lunch and saw us off on the Night Mail that evening.

  It was heavenly to be back again in India. It was, and always is, like coming home. The familiar smells and sounds; the sights and the faces; the fireflies dancing in the canebreaks as darkness fell, and the yellow dawn sky reflecting itself between the little white water-lilies that spangle the ditches alongside the track. There were the familiar names of stations, telling us we had left Bengal and Bihar behind us and were clattering northward across the United Provinces to Delhi. Benares and Allahabad, Cawnpore and Agra, and so many more in between; all of them familiar since childhood. I remembered a story of Kipling’s called ‘William the Conqueror’ in which an engaged Anglo-Indian girl is on the train to Lucknow, where she will be spending Christmas and getting married: ‘the large open names of the home towns were good to listen to. Umballa, Ludianah, Phillour, Jullundur, they rang like the coming marriage bells in her ears.’ We too would be spending Christmas in Delhi, and I wondered if the familiar names of the towns that we were passing through were sounding wedding-bells to Bets? She and William Henry were still a little stiff with each other, which was not surprising after nearly two years of separation.

  Kadera and Mahdoo2 were waiting on the platform to garland us when the train pulled into Delhi Central in the late afternoon, and we received an affecting welcome. But it was nothing like the one that awaited Mother when we arrived at 8b Atul Rahman Lane, Old Delhi, the whitewashed bungalow that Tacklow had arranged to rent for the season. Our monkey, Angie – ‘Angelina Sugar-peas’ – who doted on Mother and had not seen her for what, to a monkey, must have amounted to a lifetime, had been sitting on the ground at the foot of the pole on which Kadera had set up her house in the waste ground behind the bungalow, and she stood up on her hind legs at the sight of a stranger as Mother rounded the house. Then – even though the distance between them was all of two hundred yards – she gave a shriek of joy and, racing forward to the limit of her chain, leapt up and down screaming and yelling with excitement, and, when Mother reached her, leapt into her arms and clung to her, both arms tight round her neck in a strangling embrace, crooning and hugging her, rubbing her cheek against Mother’s, which was wet with tears. I think we all shed a few. Tacklow denied that he had, but he and Kadera and old Mahdoo did a lot of nose-blowing.

  I knew from past experience that elephants do not forget. But I didn’t know that monkeys didn’t either. Kadera said that he and Mahdoo had both told her that Mother was coming back, but that she hadn’t seemed to take much interest, and they were both as touched as we were at this funny little animal’s faithfulness and devotion.

  3

  On a Clear Day …

  Chapter 15

  That season was almost as much fun as our last one in Delhi had been. It was wonderful to find that so many of my old friends were still around: ‘Aud’ Wrench in particular. She and I and a few others were co-opted to decorate the IDG1 ballroom for Christmas as a medieval hall. Bets and I contributed several vast tapestries, using the technique that I had invented when Judy Birdwood and I did the scenery for Faust in Simla.2

  We bought yards and yards of coarse sacking in the bazaar and got the darzi to sew it together in enormous squares, which we spread on the dry ground and painted with typical tapestry scenes: stylized trees and forests and castles, hunting parties with hounds in pursuit of deer, and elegant medieval ladies in flowery robes and tall, pointed headdresses. When finished, there was only one place high and wide enough to try them out on, and that was the flat roof of our bungalow. So we lugged them up there, anchored them with heavy stones, and poured bucketfuls of dirty paint water over them. Once again, it worked splendidly, particularly when they were hung on the walls of the ballroom; though I would have said that that huge, Georgian-style room was the last place in the world to try to convert into a baronial hall – somewhere between AD 1100 and 1200.

  One of the first things that Mother did after settling into the house and making it look comfortable and charming and, unmistakably, her house was to set aside a room
for all the Chinese bric-à-brac. And, having opened all those packing cases and arranged the contents to their best advantage, pin up, with the permission of the IDG and Old Delhi Club Committees, a small handwritten notice advertising the fact that they were for sale between such-and-such an hour on the following days.

  The result exceeded her wildest expectations, and if only she or Tacklow had possessed a grain of hard-headed business sense she could probably have made a small fortune during the next few years. For her stock sold at what seemed like bargain prices to Delhi; though on the advice of some more commercially minded friends like Buckie, she charged three or four times what she had paid for them, plus the packing and carriage. But it was December and Christmas was looming, and people in search of pretty and inexpensive presents descended on the bungalow like locusts, so that before she knew where she was, she had sold the lot – with one exception. Tacklow’s contribution to her shop were the little spoons made out of the shells he had collected on Pei-tai-ho beach. A few of these were the only things that remained unsold when the shop was compelled to close down because there was nothing left to sell!

  If Mother had been a businesswoman she would have made some arrangement for more of everything to be sent to Delhi. But she never even thought of doing so, and, though delighted by the run-away success of her shop, couldn’t be bothered to follow it up. To do so, she argued, would give her no time for painting; and she was doing rather well with her sketches.

  I wasn’t doing badly with my pictures either. I sold a series of them to the Illustrated Times of India, plus most of the handful that I showed at a successful exhibition that Mother gave at Maidens’ Hotel.

  I saw a lot less of Bets during that season, for she spent most of the time that William Henry was not in his office in his company. They dined and danced together, played tennis and golf, picnicked and went to the ‘flicks’ (which was the thirties name for the cinema). Their wedding date had been arranged long ago, and they did not change it. But now that William Henry would not have to waste half his leave in travelling out alone to Peking (and the rest of it getting back to Delhi via a passenger steamer to Calcutta, in what could easily have been bad weather) they were to be married in Kashmir and spend their honeymoon in that idyllic spot, the Lolab Valley.

  The season ended as usual with the Bachelors’ Ball at the Old Delhi Club. And as the mercury in the thermometer that hung in our verandah began to rise ominously, and dust-devils danced like whirling dervishes across the ‘badlands’ on either side of the road to Karnel, we left for Kashmir. Kadera, Mahdoo and Angie with their respective luggage, plus some of ours, went by the Frontier Express to Rawalpindi, and from there by bus to Srinagar, Mother driving her family up in the car. We arrived to find our boat waiting for us at the Dāl Gate with Kadera’s party already on board, together with a crew of four men armed with long poles, who pushed out the boat, there and then, to our old ghat3 at Chota Nageem.4

  It had been wonderful to be back again in Delhi. But it was even better to be back in Kashmir. It was as if I had been away for several years instead of only two, and I remember the bliss of smelling again the special scent that all houseboats have, an incense compounded of lake water and water-weeds, the pinewood of which the boats are made and the smoke from the wood-burning stoves that are the only form of heating during the long winters when all the valley is deep in snow. The manji and his family had dressed in their best to greet us; his lovely wife ‘Ashoo’,5 whom I had painted so often, had put on all her silver jewellery in honour of the occasion; and there on the bank to welcome us back was old Ahamdoo Siraj. It was wonderful to be back. The men whom the manji had hired to take the houseboat out to Chota Nageem – which is an arm of the larger and deeper Lake Nageem – poled us along the beautiful, familiar waterways and when, just before sundown, we reached our old mooring under the giant chenar, we found our little island white with wild cherry blossom and the young grass full of the little red and white striped tulips that are such a feature of Kashmir in springtime. I could have wept from sheer happiness.

  * * *

  We had managed to get our original houseboat, the ‘Sunflower’, back that year, and Tacklow acquired a cat, not by the usual method of the cat adopting Tacklow, but deliberately, from choice. He had wanted a Siamese cat ever since he had seen a pair of them that belonged to one of the keepers at London’s zoo, and heard tales about their behaviour. This was long before Siamese cats began to turn up by the thousand in England. And now he had the offer of a half-Siamese one from a couple of women living in a houseboat on the Jhelum, who owned a pair of them. Both females.

  They had meant to find a torn and breed from them, but as anyone who knows anything about these cats will be aware, they are almost impossible to live with when on heat. And there was no proper husband available for them in Kashmir. Their immodest yowls called up every tomcat within miles of their owners’ boat, and the noise got too much for the proprietors, who, after a third sleepless night and a pailful of complaints from the neighbours, lost all patience with them and let them out. The cats spent a happy night on the tiles and returned smug and satisfied. And pregnant of course. Husbands unknown.

  The two ladies told Tacklow that there was always a chance that one kitten from a mixed mating (but only one) would be a proper Siamese, and that he should have it, as they could not keep it themselves. When the time came for the kittens’ arrival, the ladies sent for Tacklow in case he would like to be present. He would, and he told me that he wouldn’t have missed it for a fortune. Nor would he have believed it if he hadn’t seen it …

  The cats were sisters, but one was much larger than the other, and the kittens began arriving at almost the same minute. It was, he said, practically a dead heat. The big cat produced four kittens, and called it a day. But the little cat continued to have them, and when she got to five, and it was clear that there were more on the way, her owners had a brainwave and, removing the next one the moment it was born, gave it to the big cat, who accepted it happily, licked off the neat sac of membrane that kittens arrive in, ate the afterbirth and cleaned the kitten up, licking it all over from nose to tail, and got it started sucking with the others.

  The little cat went on giving birth, and ended up with seven of them in her basket. None in either litter took after their mothers. They were all unmistakably Kashmiri Alley-Cat, except one, which though coal-black all over, showed signs of being sleek-furred instead of furry.

  About half an hour later, when all was clean and tidy and all the kittens were sucking away peacefully, the little cat took a closer look at her lot, and quite plainly, according to Tacklow, counted them and found she was missing one. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven – where’s the eighth? I know there were eight!’ Whereupon she left her basket, stalked across the room to her sister’s, looked that lot over, slapped the big cat across the nose with her paw, and, picking up one of the kittens – presumably the right one – carried it back in triumph to her own basket.

  Tacklow was enthralled: ‘I must have one of her kittens,’ he said, ‘and don’t let anyone ever tell you that cats can’t count!’ He waited until they were a bit older, and then chose the all-black one, because its mother could count, and because it was Siamese in everything but colour. Shape, fur, tail, ears and eyes – turquoise blue slant eyes like its mother’s. This was the only ‘Kaye cat’ that was not called ‘Chips’. Tacklow called it the ‘Lizel Kaz’, which was Kaye language for Little Cat, and he adored it. The adoration was mutual, for the Lizel Kaz followed him everywhere, went for long walks with him and sat on his desk when he was writing. She came when he whistled, growled over bones, and fetched sticks or balls that were thrown for her, just like a dog. She also became a bosom friend of Angelina’s. The two of them would share Angie’s hut – the Kaz purring while Angie picked over her short, sleek fur, monkey-fashion, in search of fleas.

  Mother did a lot of sketching that spring and summer, and Bets and I did a good many of our combined po
rtraits – Bets drawing the sitter and I colouring them in with coloured pencils. They were rather effective; and certainly original. Something between a pastel portrait and a miniature on ivory. We only had one dissatisfied customer, who threw the finished portrait at us and flounced out in a rage. She was a rich globe-trotting widow of uncertain age, who had obviously been good looking in her youth and become pathologically vain.

  Apart from this poor woman, who had to be written off as a dead loss, we did rather well financially with our new-style portraits; but ended up having to move our houseboat, bag, baggage and Angie, back to the Moons’ ghat on the river, to cut down on the to-ing and fro-ing.

  Bets had bought the material for her wedding dress in Peking, yards and yards of pearl-white Chinese satin. And within a day or two after our arrival in Kashmir she had decided on the colour, and I the design, of her bridesmaids’ dresses. This had been the result of remembering our first ever visit to Gulmarg. I was never again to see Gulmarg in the early spring while snow still lay thick on the Outer Circular Road and between the pine trees in the surrounding forest. But I never forgot the sight of acres of pale mauve alpine primulas spread out by the hundred thousand on the short cropped winter grass of the marg. Nor had Bets forgotten them. On taking a look into the future, she had said confidently: ‘That’s the colour I’m going to have for my bridesmaids.’ And she did. This was the year that a dress material known, somewhat inelegantly, as ‘elephant crêpe’ appeared upon the fashion scene, and among the various patterns of materials that Bets sent for to Calcutta, to Whiteaway and Laidlows or the Army and Navy Stores, there was an exact match of the lilac-mauve of the primulas.

  I designed those bridesmaids’ dresses, and their hats, in that crêpe, and a nice, plump lady called Mrs Cliffe, who was a whizz of a dressmaker, made the lot, including Bets’s wedding dress. The pale yellow centres of the primulas were echoed by a primrose-yellow rose on the bridesmaids’ hats and matching yellow roses on the muffs that they carried, while the pale emerald-green of the primulas’ stalks and leaves was repeated in the long velvet ribbons on the muffs.