Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  The only trouble was caused by an endearing baby elephant, recently born in the lines, who was obviously becoming a spoilt brat, adored by both humans and elephants. He was deliberately naughty, and getting away with it every time. Well, not every time. When he knocked over yet another pot of paint, one of his elders and betters, losing patience, caught him by his little tail, hauled him close, and slapped him hard. Whereupon he bolted, squealing, to his Mum, who made a fuss of him, and then – most unexpectedly – gave him a good slap herself. At which all the mahouts laughed. I could have spent hours watching them.

  I was taken to endless parties, one with the bridegroom’s sisters, where for the first time I met Shri, the youngest sister, I believe, whom I was later to know well. She can’t have been more than ten or eleven at the time, but she was an enchanting child and, I was to discover, very much better educated than I was.

  Then there was another party after which the guests were taken to a wing of the palace where, in a series of gorgeously decorated rooms, the wedding presents were displayed. You’ve never seen such a collection of dazzling jewellery and bits of expensive bric-à-brac: though had I been asked to choose one item for myself I would have picked a sari. There must have been dozens of these, because I remember a whole very long table being given up to saris alone, every one of them a triumph of the weaver’s art, and one of them designed by a genius. It’s the only one of all those hundreds of glittering wedding presents that I can still remember quite clearly.

  It was a Benares sari of silver gauze, hand-woven from every shade of silver you can imagine, from the brightest to the dullest, in a design of ostrich feathers. The silver changed colour as the light moved on it, and in some lights the feathers looked almost real, and as if they would move if a breeze blew on them. It was a fantastic piece of imaginative craftsmanship – and oh, how I coveted it!

  There were any number of parties on the night of the wedding, and the Begum told me that it would be taken as a great compliment by the host and hostess of the one I would be attending if I wore Indian dress for the occasion. When I said that I was sorry, but I hadn’t got such a thing, she laughed and said that needn’t bother me, because she and the girls would be only too pleased to lend me anything I needed, which they did. Between them they produced endless gorgeous saris and bodices and any number of slippers and sandals and made-to-order-in-Paris high-heeled shoes for me to choose from, and we all had an uproarious time trying them all on and deciding which one we liked best. I tried on so many that I can’t remember which we finally chose, but I do remember fancying myself no end in the winning number, and feeling exactly like Cinderella must have done before she arrived at that ball. The Begum’s ayah and the one that had been temporarily put in charge of me for the duration of my visit smoothed my hair flat with some coconut oil and pulled it back from my ears into a knot of black silk that looked as though it was real hair, once the join between that and my own was concealed by a little wreath of jasmine flowers. They painted my eyes with kohl – most becoming! – and when they had finished making up my face, one of them added a tilak, a red caste mark between the eyebrows, as a final touch. And when I arrived at the party everyone pretended they didn’t recognize me.

  With the news that the shadi had been concluded and the procession was on its way, we all crowded out under the arches of the main entrance to the palace to watch it arrive. It was a really wonderful show against a night sky that was bright with fireworks, shower upon shower of gold and silver, bright pink, blue and viridian stars. The head of the procession took some time to reach us, headed by a double rank of men in gold-embroidered, bright-sashed uniforms and turbans, carrying flaming torches. Between them marched bands and prancing, wonderfully caparisoned horses, followed by more squads of marchers: men blowing on flutes, and priests and holy men in saffron-yellow and bright orange robes, the occasional elephant, painted all over with brilliant designs and draped in heavy, gold-embroidered housings – bearing, I presume, various senior officials of state or members of the family in gold or silver howdahs. It was difficult to make out faces in the flare of smoke from the torches.

  And then at last the largest of all the elephants, wearing the most magnificent of housings heavily fringed with gold, and carrying on his back in a gold howdah the bridal couple. The procession halted under the marble porch, and, over, the heads of the torch-bearers, as the elephant sank ponderously to its knees and a couple of palace servants hurried forward with a gold-plated ladder, I saw the bride. A slight, bowed figure, wrapped in a gold sari which was pulled so far forward that one could not catch a glimpse of her face, stood up and was handed down the ladder, and stepped back to allow her splendidly clad bridegroom to descend.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said the Begum on a deep sigh of thankfulness and satisfaction, as the groom and his bride disappeared into the palace. ‘Now that that’s settled, he can start looking about him for some really pretty little girl whom he can fall in love with!’

  ‘Larla!’ – I have seldom been more shocked, for I was still a child of Victorian parents, who had lived through the twilight of the Edwardian age. And though I knew that the aristocracy of that age had acquired a reputation for being incredibly ‘fast’ and immoral, this was not so of the middle classes. They remained prim, and believed strongly in faithfulness, true love and romance. Or at least, I did! The casualness, as well as the obvious relief in the Begum’s remark horrified me.

  ‘You are shocked,’ said the Begum, and patted me consolingly on the arm. ‘But why? – when you know very well that our marriages are arranged. And if even ordinary people arrange the marriages of their sons and daughters, how much more important must it be for members of ruling houses to see that the wives of their sons will make suitable mothers of future kings and princes?’

  Well, of course I’d known that. But what with all the glamour and fuss that surrounded this particular wedding, I had been picturing some delicious princess hiding behind that concealing golden sari, and seeing the whole affair as a great romance. The Begum’s heartfelt comment had brought me back to earth with a bump, and I could only hope that his bride would turn out to be pretty and witty and charming enough to make him fall in love with her, and that she would fall in love with him. After all, there had been plenty of precedents in the chronicles of princely India. The princess Pudmini was one example. It was written that she was the ‘fairest flesh on earth’, and her beauty had led to a war almost as famous and quite as murderous as that of the Siege of Troy.

  * * *

  It must have been some time during that season at Ooty that I returned to Hyderabad, this time as paying guest of a friend in the military cantonment of Secunderabad, which lies only a few miles to the north of Hyderabad city, while I fulfilled a commission to mural the walls of the main room of the Secunderabad Club. I don’t remember how long I stayed there, only that it must have been the best part of a month, since there was a lot of wall space to fill. I have recently been fascinated to discover that those murals have been cherished and are in a truly marvellous state of preservation. The mother of one of my fans recently visited Secunderabad, and was allowed to take some snapshots of the murals, which her daughter sent on to me. They have come out beautifully, despite the fact that my medium was no more than good old Indian whitewash, coloured with little packets of powdered dye that I bought in the bazaar of Hyderabad city, some time in the late 1930s – I can’t work it out nearer than that I’m afraid, though I think it must have been January or February of 1938. I also found time to dance and sing in a charity concert in the Club, and to fall madly in love with a professional heart-breaker named Clive someone-or-other.

  I was, for the first time, completely bowled over. I convinced myself that here was the man I had been waiting for, and to heck with Prince Charming and Mr Right and the ‘I’ll be ready in five minutes! – no, make it three!’ chap. The fact that he didn’t fulfil a single one of the requirements I had mentally listed as absolutely necessary in my ‘some-
day-he’ll-come-along’ dreamboat (correction – one; he was in an Indian Service, Indian Army) was neither here nor there. I was besotted, and wouldn’t have cared if he’d been a stoker on one of the ferry-boats that ran between Fishguard and Cork. However, he turned out to be yet another Don Juan of the type that women of all ages fall for in droves – heaven knows why, for he wasn’t anything much to look at. Good old sex appeal, I suppose. It has a lot to answer for! And he didn’t really like girls. He preferred older women; preferably married ones. (Well, I can see the point of that!) So although I couldn’t pretend to be married, I pretended to be at least five years older than I was, heaven help me. It did me no good. He was temporarily without some adoring female, having been banished from his unit and sent off to the other end of India in the hope of putting an end to a liaison with the wife of his commanding officer before it became an open scandal. Or so he told me. I merely happened to be a useful stop-gap until another attractive married woman came along; which wasn’t long.

  I remember being heartbroken when I took the stage to do my cabaret turn at the Club and saw that his seat was empty (and that, worse still, so was that of a gay grass-widow who had begun to show an interest in him). I had designed my costume with particular care and was sure that I would look ravishing in it: all for his sake. And instead of being one of an enthusiastic audience who gave me a terrific hand, the only one whose praise and admiration I coveted had sneaked out as the house-lights went down and had seized the opportunity to take the next Mrs something-or-other for a smooch in the Club garden.

  I recognized that this meant curtains for me. And sure enough it did. He dropped me like a cigarette stub and didn’t even bother to put his heel on me and grind me into the dust. I don’t know how I managed to get through the rest of the evening, only that it was worse, far worse, than that dance at the Srinagar Residency,2 and that I cried my eyes out when I got back to bed, and nursed a sore heart and a terrible inferiority complex for months afterwards. How cross Tacklow would have been with me!

  Mother, having given a successful exhibition of her watercolours, had returned to Kashmir, accompanied by Kadera and Shao-de, and I packed up my paints and said a fond farewell to my friends, taking myself and my broken heart back to Srinagar to join her.

  7

  Ranikhet

  Chapter 26

  Judging from leaders in the press and the news bulletins on All India Radio, Europe appeared to be indulging in non-stop turmoil during the final years of the thirties. There was a civil war raging in Spain, marches and demonstrations by Brown Shirts in Germany, Black Shirts in Italy and London, and Red Flag wavers all over the place.

  Edward VIII had abdicated after a reign of three hundred and something days, which had largely been spent in quarrelling. ‘Ultimatums’ and ‘Demands’ (usually ‘final’ ones) flew to and fro. Germany annexed Austria, which created a temporary panic that led to the British Navy being hastily mobilized and seems to have alerted everyone to the dangers of the situation, causing Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, to fly to Munich for a personal talk with Herr Hitler.

  Chamberlain was not alone in believing that the piece of paper he brought back with him from Munich on that autumn afternoon (and which sold the Czechs down the river) would indeed guarantee us ‘peace in our time’ – if not, as he seemed to think, ‘with honour’. The vast majority of us persuaded ourselves that we had avoided war by a whisker, and felt greatly cheered and enormously relieved in consequence; while too many people began to regard the MP for the Epping Division for Essex, Winston Churchill, as a warmonger, because he put no faith in Chamberlain’s piece of paper. Having had a terrible fright, the rest of us relaxed and got on with our lives.

  Brother Bill, together with umpteen other British officers of the Indian Army, took home leave, and he and Joy, who was expecting her first baby (already referred to as ‘Timothy’) sailed for England and her parents’ home on the Isle of Wight, so that the Huttons could meet their son-in-law and introduce him to their friends and neighbours.

  Mother was staying in Kashmir as a paying guest of old Mrs Wall, who had given her a small flat that was reached by a covered wooden bridge, and which Mother had managed to turn into a most decorative little home for herself. It had been built over stables which were now storerooms, and the view from its windows was charming even on wet days. Kadera had quarters within call, and all in all it could not have been a more attractive, comfortable and convenient place to live in. But Mother was still suffering from the effect that Tacklow’s sudden death had had on her, and she continued to be dissatisfied with any place she was in, convinced that if she went somewhere else she would feel happier.

  I couldn’t have imagined a nicer place for her to live in, and when letter after letter arrived from her whingeing about the flat and everything to do with it, I sat down and wrote her a tough lecture, listing every one of the many advantages of her present perch, and rubbing in that ‘for goodness sake, darling, can’t you see that one day, these will be the “Good Old Days” … And what wouldn’t we give to be back in them?’ I was afraid, after I’d posted that letter, that I had overdone it and that it might only upset her. But, thank heaven, it worked. She actually took it in, and for the first time for many moons sat down and counted her blessings instead of dwelling solely on the drawbacks and the black patches of widowhood.

  I had expected to be a paying guest at Mrs Wall’s myself that year, but Bets wrote to say that her husband had been told that he would be transferred to the Lucknow branch of his firm in April, and that she and her two-year-old, Richard, were to spend the hot weather in Ranikhet, a small summer station among the mountains beyond Naini Tal. So couldn’t I please spend the summer there too, instead of in Kashmir? She never knew, wrote Bets, where she would find herself posted next, and we might not have a chance of seeing each other again for ages.

  Well, why not? Mother was comfortably settled in with Ma Wall for the summer, and there was no reason why I too should not spend the hot weather in the mountains beyond Naini Tal, where Mother had spent her first hot weather in India, and where Bill, her first baby, had been born.

  Bets and her own two-year-old would be paying guests of a friend of ours, an Indian Army wife who as Connie Tallon had been a bridesmaid at Bets’s wedding. She had rented a house in Ranikhet for the season and was better known at that time as ‘Bogeen’ – presumably because her home town was Dublin. Since Bogeen’s sister had come out to India to spend the summer with her, there was no question of my being able to join Bets in the same bungalow. So I wrote and booked myself a room in a hotel before the available accommodation began to fill up.

  * * *

  I don’t remember how I came to be staying in Government House in Lucknow towards the end of April that year.1 Perhaps because it was the best place for taking off for Kathgodarm, which was as far as you could get by train if you were heading for Ranikhet. Tacklow and Mother had been great friends of the then Governor of the United Provinces, Sir Henry Haigh, and his wife, so I presume Mother must have written to Lady Haigh to ask if they would put me up for a few days on my way north, and see me safely off to Kathgodarm. In the event, Lady Haigh had already left for the Governor’s summer residence, for the hot weather was beginning to make itself felt. She liked to leave for the Government House in Naini Tal well before Sir Harry, so that she could open it up and see that everything was ready for him, and could not endure the searing temperatures that were already reaching uncomfortable heights in Lucknow. She left a charming note of apology for her desertion, assuring me that Harry would enjoy having someone to talk to, and that he and ‘the boys’ – the ADCs I presume – would look after me and see me on my way, and that I must come to Naini Tal later on when the garden was at its best, and stay for at least a week or two.

  There were no other guests at Government House. This surprised me, though it should not have done, since the period of breathless heat before the monsoon breaks is no time to go visiti
ng. I had a suite of rooms whose french windows opened on to a deep, shady verandah that looked out across wide lawns to wilting flower-beds in which only zinnias and canna lilies flourished. Bougainvillaea was almost the only flower that revelled in the heat, and it fell in cascades of crimson, purple or white from the edge of the verandah above me.

  I saw little or nothing of Sir Harry or his secretary, or of ‘the boys’, who were presumably kept busy with the sorting and packing of the piles of paperwork that would accompany Sir Harry to the hills. The grandiose, pillared house appeared to be empty, and it was very quiet, the only sound from outside being the creaking of a waterwheel that kept the lawns from drying up, and the maddening cry of the brain-fever bird, so called because its cry says: ‘Brain fever! Brain fever! Brain fever!’ on an ascending scale. When it reaches the top it starts all over again from the bottom. Inside the house there was only the equally monotonous sound of the big, white ceiling-fans, swishing round and round in the hot stillness.

  A house-servant in a spotless outfit of white, scarlet and gold would appear on silent feet half-way through the morning, bearing a frosted glass of nimbu-pani (literal translation: lemon-water) on a silver tray – a delicious drink which in Britain is called lemon squash and in general comes out of a bottle and in no way resembles its Indian original, which is made from fresh limes and lemons, sugared in the glass and topped up with ice-cold water or soda-water. Real nimbu-pani doesn’t seem to exist outside India. Another and equally splendidly dressed retainer would warn me when I should go to the anteroom in which guests assembled to wait for His Excellency the Governor – or Their Excellencies if both were in residence – to join them for a pre-lunch drink, before leading them into the dining-room.