Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  We needn’t have worried. It can’t have been more than two or three hours later that we were woken up by a crash of thunder, and almost on its heels a blinding flash of lightning, and then all Niagara Falls seemed to descend on our rooftop. Mother and I were out of bed and paddling in a lake within seconds. I heard her screaming something through the uproar, and was only able to translate it because the same thought had occurred to me: the chik. Together we groped for the rope catches that held it, and with the aid of our torches freed it and felt it unroll and fall with a wump into the two or three inches of water with which the roof was awash.

  If it had been just an ordinary split-cane chik it would have given us little protection, but as luck would have it, it was a lined one, and the stout cotton cloth with which it was lined was thick enough to keep the lashing rain from soaking our beds and most of our belongings. We were also fortunate in that the wind was blowing away from the enclosure, for had it been blowing in the opposite direction nothing could have saved us from being drenched. As it was, though our hair and our nightgowns were soaked in the minute or two it took to release the chik, our beds escaped a wetting by inches and we pushed them back into the enclosure as far as they would go. Having removed our nightgowns and wrung them out, we scrubbed ourselves dry with face-towels and crawled back into bed, starkers.

  Fortunately, it was one of those freak storms that blow up without warning out of nowhere, and only last for a very short time. Our hosts, a storey below, slept through it all, and the coolness that it left in its wake was so pleasant that Mother and I fell asleep again almost at once. We woke to another day of heat and blazing sunlight, and the incredible sight of eight small white balls of fur racing around on the roof!

  I couldn’t believe my eyes for a moment or two, because only last night I would have sworn they were all as dead as that proverbial mutton. Not a heartbeat or a twitch or the faintest sign of life. I should have remembered that cats have nine lives. This lot had obviously only shed one of them, and still had eight in their paws. It was a most cheering sight.

  But though we were plus eight kittens we were minus the various items of clothing that we had washed and pinned on to the rolled-up chik. The gale that had propelled that brief and furious storm across the country had torn them away and scattered them all over the landscape, and though we retrieved the larger items, such as my cotton frock and Mother’s dress and petticoat, which could be seen from a long way off, stranded among the thorny twigs of the occasional kikar tree, the smaller items, bust-bodices and panties, probably ended up in the next county and were seen no more.

  The storm that had cooled the air had also laid the dust for miles around, so the rest of the journey made up for the previous day’s purgatory as the land became higher, wetter and greener, until in the end the road became a tunnel of shade through avenues of jacaranda and flame trees.

  Bangalore was looking its best and living up to its reputation as one of the most delightful stations in the Deccan, and we were both sorry to leave it, after a short visit during which Mother painted several pictures. Before we left she unloaded the majority of the kittens on to their bespoke owners. The remainder were promised to people already in ‘Ooty’,1 the favourite hill-station of South India, where we too were bound by way of Mysore where we were to stay with a great friend of Mother’s, a Muslim lady whose husband held an important post in the Government of the princely state of Mysore.

  We stayed with the Begum and her husband for a few days and were shown all the sights of Mysore and given a tremendous party by our kind hosts, at which Mother mentioned to a group of the guests that we would be driving to Ootacamund in a day or two. Being asked if she was familiar with that road, she admitted that she knew nothing about it, but that it couldn’t be worse than the one to Bangalore! ‘Oh, couldn’t it!’ retorted one of the guests, and all of them laughed. Which made Mother inquire apprehensively what was so funny about that? Well, practically everything, they said …

  For one thing, the road would take us straight across the Mysore Ditch, a wide strip of virgin jungle which was more or less a nature reserve, since on it only the ruler of Mysore (or by his permission any friend or special guest) was allowed to shoot. ‘And you’ve chosen a bad day to drive through it,’ they told her, because a friend of the Maharajah’s had been given permission to shoot a tiger there on the very next day, which meant that what with beaters and the noise of rifle-fire and general kerfuffle, the tiger population, together with the rest of the animals and birds who resided in the ‘Ditch’, would be thoroughly stirred up and on the move. In fact we were likely to see a good deal more livestock than usual. However, it was not the tigers that were a problem, but the elephants. But we wouldn’t have to worry about them until we came to the first black milestone.

  ‘Black milestone?’ echoed Mother hollowly. ‘Why black milestones?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t they tell you about them?’ replied a chorus of guests. ‘That means you are in elephant country.’

  ‘But why black?’ quavered Mother.

  That, she was told, was because the wild elephants in the Ditch, having taken a dislike to the white ones, had uprooted them as fast as they were set up; until in the end the exasperated PWD had decided to try black ones lettered with white, which worked a treat. ‘As soon as you see a black milestone, you’ll know you’re in elephant territory. So watch out!’ warned one of our fellow guests gleefully.

  ‘But why? What for?’ asked Mother.

  ‘For elephants, of course,’ they told her. ‘If you see any on the road, stop at once. And if they start walking towards you, get out of the car and hide – there are a lot of culverts on that strip, and with luck there’ll be one you can get into.’

  ‘Oh, nuts!’ said Mother, suddenly deciding that they were pulling her leg. ‘I’m not going to let you scare me. Why would an elephant want to attack me?’

  ‘Well,’ said these Job’s comforters, ‘only to mention a recent case, there was a chap – he’s a dentist in Ooty – who stopped when he saw a single wild tusker standing by the side of the road browsing on a tree that overhung it. He waited a bit, but he was in a hurry, and there was plenty of room behind the elephant for his car to pass. Besides, the creature was not even looking his way and was being so leisurely about nibbling leaves, that the dentist got the impression that it was going to be a long time before it moved off. So he decided to take a chance. He released the brake and drove forward as cautiously as he could, and when he was near enough (the tusker still not having paid any attention to him) he put his foot on the accelerator and whipped past at a high speed. But that solid-looking, leisurely lump had also got into top gear. It too could move like a streak of light, and as the car shot past it put out its trunk, and in the chap’s own words, “ripped off the roof of my car as neatly as if it were picking a lily-pad”.’ The victim had streaked away, lidless, and hadn’t paused to draw breath until he was well out of range of the last black milestone.

  The guests had endless stories of encounters with elephants in the Ditch, but I shall only tell one more, because I think it’s funny, though it can’t have been in the least funny for its victims. A party of holiday-makers, en route for a cool summer break in Ooty, saw a group of elephants on the road ahead of them, and obeying the rules, stopped at once. Only when the creatures began to move towards them did they hastily abandon their car and take refuge in a convenient culvert, from where they watched the group move slowly up the road until it reached the car. Apparently this particular herd had never seen a car at close quarters before, for they surrounded it, touching it cautiously with the tips of their trunks, removing various objects from inside it and, finding these not edible, tossing them aside.

  All might have gone well if one of them had not touched something that was exceedingly hot and caused it to retreat sharply with a squeal of alarm. The entire party backed off for a moment, eyeing this strange thing that had just bitten one of them. They might at that point have decided tha
t discretion was the better part of valour, but for the curiosity of one of the female elephants who chose that moment to stretch out her trunk and touch the horn.

  Horns in those days were intended to be good and loud, and this one gave an excellent account of itself. It was too much for the elephants. This strange thing could not only bite if one touched it, it could also yell defiance. Accepting the challenge they charged as one, and tore it to bits. Kicking and squealing, they got angrier and angrier when they got the bonnet off and burned themselves savagely on the over-heated engine.

  Fortunately, they had forgotten the humans who had scuttled out of it and were crouched in hiding watching, horrified, the destruction of their car, not daring to creep out until some time after the herd had abandoned their battered enemy and moved off into the jungle. The trembling refugees were picked up by a bus not long afterwards, and taken on to the next outpost of civilization.

  Mother continued to believe that these stories, together with the black milestones, were an elaborate leg-pull, a belief strengthened by the fact that on checking up, she discovered that there was always a good deal of traffic on that road, including buses that ran at intervals of an hour and served both the forest and Dâk bungalows as well as the occasional small village. So that when we started out on the last leg of our journey to Ooty we were both in the best of spirits.

  For a long way our road ran through typically South Indian scenery, and it was almost mid-morning by the time we left the lush greenery and flat cultivated fields of village India and began to twist and turn up the low slopes that would eventually take us to the cool blue heights of the Nilgiri Hills.

  We were driving up a short steep slope towards the crest of a low ridge when I became aware of movement higher up on the slope and immediately ahead of us. I was trying to make out what it was when Mother, looking to her right, gave a gasp of horror and said: ‘There’s a black milestone!’ in almost the same moment that I said: ‘There’s a tiger!’ Mother, still staring to her right, not only did not hear what I said, but had begun to slow down as we came out on a straight stretch of road on which, directly in front of us, a tiger was crossing.

  I have yet to see a live one in any zoo that looked as magnificent as this one. It not only looked enormous, but its colouring was brilliant – bright golden red, chalk white and ebony black. It strolled across the road, not making the least effort to hurry, and merely turned its head and gave us a cold stare, as though to say: ‘Gatecrashers, I presume!’ before walking haughtily and unhurriedly into the jungle.

  I have never felt so small. Or so scared. That creature looked quite large enough to turn our tiny Baby Austin over with one swipe of its paw; and as Mother slowed, I began frantically winding up the windows on my side and imploring her to ‘hurry, hurry!’ The tiger (who had made no attempt to hurry) averted its gaze and removed itself into the scrub. But I was afraid that it might change its mind and come back and attack us, and continued to urge Mother to step on it and to wind up her window. Mother obediently stepped on the accelerator and asked me what was I getting into such a panic for? One black milestone didn’t necessarily mean there were elephants nearby. ‘Not elephants,’ I said. ‘That tiger.’ ‘What tiger?’ said Mother.

  Believe it or not, she hadn’t even seen the tiger! It had crossed the road right in front of us, so close that we could have almost reached out and touched it, but she had been so hypnotized by the sight of that black milestone that she had slowed down, still staring at it. She had been quite sure that the whole story of the milestones was a leg-pull, and, seeing one, had been so startled at finding it was true that she couldn’t focus on anything else.

  * * *

  I am thankful to say that we saw no more tigers, and not a single elephant on the rest of our drive through the Mysore Ditch. Later on Mother was invited by His Highness of Mysore to attend a keddah, which is an elephant drive in which a herd of wild elephants will be located and driven very slowly and cautiously, so that they do not become scared and break back, by men on the backs of tame elephants, through the jungles of the Mysore Ditch towards an enormous enclosure somewhere in the forest, where they are trapped and led away to be tamed and turned into working elephants. Kipling has written a wonderful description of a keddah in a story called ‘Toomai of the Elephants’, which is one of the tales in The Jungle Book. You should read it – if you haven’t already done so.

  I would have given anything to be invited to watch a keddah, but alas, only a very few white people get the chance, and I wasn’t as lucky as Mother. However, she took a lot of photographs, and described it all to me, which I suppose was the next best thing to seeing one myself. Nowadays, when engines and electricity have almost eliminated man and animal power, and the once-great forests of the world are falling with frightening speed to the assaults of chain-saws, I don’t suppose there can be all that much need for working elephants, except for use on ceremonial occasions, and very soon, if it has not happened already, the world will have witnessed its last keddah. However, I did have one more jungle experience during that summer in Ootacamund.

  A syndicate had been formed to run a series of ‘walks’ through the Mysore Ditch on elephants’ backs. You either spent the previous night in a nearby forest bungalow, or got up in the small hours in order to reach the starting point by first light. Sitting in rough-and-ready howdahs on the back of pad-elephants, parties of four to six sightseers would start off at a word from the mahout, who would be sitting on his animal’s neck with a knee tucked under each of the leathery fan-like ears, and away they would go, to drift silently through the fringe of the Mysore Ditch and see, in their natural habitat, the birds and beasts who inhabited that long strip of almost virgin jungle.

  Those who were lucky might even see a tiger or a panther, though these Lords of the Jungle were apt to retire to some remoter spot for the day. The curious thing about those elephant-back walkabouts was that the other denizens of the jungle never appeared to notice any difference in smell or appearance between a tame elephant and a wild one, and never seemed to spot the clusters of humans on their backs. You would have thought that a mahout and half a dozen assorted sightseers would, between them, have given off the odd whiff of danger, and that the scent of the elephant lines would have clung about the tame ones. But apparently not. Your elephant drifted happily through the jungle, and not a bird or a mammal turned its head to look. I never saw another tiger (to tell the truth, I didn’t want to. Twice was enough – it is very scary indeed to be in the presence of a wild tiger stalking through his own territory, take it from me). But I did see a leopard walking through the rustling grass as though he owned the place, a whole herd of bad-tempered wild buffalo, several kinds of deer, some of whom stopped and stared – not at us but at the leopard, who ignored them – and several nilgai, the big, blue bulls of the Indian forests. Monkeys of course, and any number of birds: peacocks by the score, and the beautiful and brilliantly feathered jungle-cocks, tree-creepers, woodpeckers, the black, long-tailed king-crows, and a dozen other species of bird life.

  * * *

  Bets and her baby, Richard, were in Ooty for the hot weather, as were many other people we had known in Hyderabad, and Mother spent most of her time sketching. Myself, I didn’t find Ooty very paintable. It looked more like one of the midland counties of England, green and misty, with rolling downlands and a distant fringe of blue hills. I think that is why, when the Raj ended, so many people to whom this spelt instant retirement chose to spend their later years there. Ooty, to them, was the ‘blue remembered hills’ of the Housman poem and they thought – most of them wrongly – that it would always be like home to them.

  I suppose it is because I didn’t take to the place that I have almost no recollection of it. I can’t even see it in my mind’s eye, and all that remains of it is a memory of long avenues of eucalyptus, that decorative tree that Australians call ‘wattle’ and that legend says was brought to Ooty some time before the nineteenth century by a home-sick Ozz
ie who thought it might flourish there. Too right. It took to Ooty with enthusiasm, and it is sad to hear that India has been cutting down those beautiful blue-gum trees left and right. I am told that soon there will be none left.

  The only thing I remember about Ooty is leaving it briefly to attend a party in Mysore. I’m quite sure Mother must have been asked too, because the invitation came from Larla Begum, and I am equally certain that Mother would have attended if she possibly could. But for some fairly pressing reason she was unable to accept. So I went by myself; and spent a fantastic few days in Mysore. For the Begum had asked us down to attend the festivities connected with the marriage of the Heir Apparent, a joyous event for which the old Maharajah, His Highness Sir Sri Krishnaraja Wadiyar Bahadur of Mysore, was throwing a truly magnificent party.

  I had attended a good number of Indian weddings before, but never anything to compare with this one. All Mysore was en fête. Its palaces, temples and public buildings, and many of the private houses, were outlined in fairy-lights which were switched on as soon as darkness fell, so that night after night during the few days of celebration the city glittered like the diamond mines in Walt Disney’s Snow White. I did not attend any of the special functions or dinners at which the old Maharajah was present, for His Highness was an orthodox Hindu. His caste did not permit him to eat with Europeans, though when it came to kingship and the good of his state he was broadminded enough to appoint a Muslim friend and fellow student of his boyhood as his Chief Minister. However, I was never made aware of being left out of anything and I remember every day as being planned out ahead and full of interest.

  My first day began with a visit to the elephant lines, where the elephants who would be walking in the wedding processions were ‘having their make-up put on’ – literally! It was an enchanting sight, for the great creatures seemed to know exactly what was going on, and would hold out their trunks to make it easier for their make-up men to paint elaborate patterns on them. What’s more, they appeared to appreciate the whole thing, and I was only sorry that no one gave them a full-length looking glass before which they could admire themselves.