by M. M. Kaye
Sandy had brought his own car, and the Vice-Consulate one, complete with chauffeur, to take Kadera and the luggage. And off we went through tidy streets and rows of whitewashed houses with wide verandahs, each in its own square of garden shaded with flame trees and bushes of bougainvillaea and hibiscus. It looked like a typical colonial town, except for the tall blocks of offices and all the towering modern machinery that goes with a refinery. We saw a club house, complete with tennis courts and a swimming-pool, a hospital, shops – and then suddenly the desert.
Miles and miles of nothing but sand. No roads, no landmarks. Nothing to guide one. This must have been the kind of landscape that Shelley visualized when he wrote in one of his sonnets: ‘boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away’. They did indeed. I remember remarking to Sandy that at least there could be no traffic accidents in a countryside as flat as a pancake in every direction, and with enough room for about a couple of hundred tanks to drive in line if they felt like it.
‘You’d be surprised!’ retorted Sandy. ‘But then you don’t know the Iranians.’ He went on to tell me that there were more car crashes on the desert routes than there were on Calcutta’s main street, Chowringi, any day of the week. When I protested, he explained that the local population all drove at top speed and with no regard for road rules (he said there weren’t any) or, of course, speed limits. Every driver considered that with enormous stretches of desert to choose from, the other fellow could get out of the way.
They all, said Sandy, drove like Mr Toad, ‘poop-pooping!’ on their horns while keeping a foot well down on the accelerator. It appeared to be a matter of personal honour not to give way to the other driver – even when it became clear that unless one of them did, they were indubitably booked for an almighty smash in which (depending on the size of the vehicles involved) anything between two and twenty passengers were bound to be killed and the rest badly injured.
Even when a driver did lose his nerve at the last moment, the move was just as likely to spell death and destruction, because with unrestricted space to manoeuvre in, one never knew in which direction the loser would decide to swerve. And then of course there was always the chance that both drivers would lose their nerve simultaneously, which could lead to a horrendous pile-up. But since in either or any case there was always the consoling thought that since one’s fate is tied about one’s neck from birth, and Allah has decreed that ‘what is written is written’, the whole affair was ordained from the beginning and so could not possibly have been avoided.
Sandy told us many tales of the reigning Shahanshah, Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had risen from being an officer in a Persian Cossack regiment to become Prime Minister of Iran, and from there, when the absentee ruler of the country had been deposed by the National Assembly, had been elected to take over the throne. Sandy was of the opinion that Reza Shah was just what the country needed, but that it would be interesting to see how long he would last the course. Because he had already trodden heavily on the toes of the Mulvies. ‘The trouble with that chap,’ said Sandy, ‘is that he’s as tough as old boots and does exactly as he pleases.’
Apparently the Imam of the largest mosque in Tehran had been criticizing the Shah’s behaviour for some time past, under the mistaken impression that even the Shahanshah would not dare take action against a holy man. Reza had ignored the initial attacks, but when they became more and more insulting, he drove into Tehran, unaccompanied and armed only with a whip, and, marching into the mosque, dragged the Imam out into the middle of the courtyard, and flogged him, threw the victim down the outer steps and drove off – no one raising a finger to help or hinder.
Chapter 30
I can’t remember how long it took us to drive across the desert from Abadan to Khorramshah,1 though I must have made that journey many times. I only remember the relief of seeing greenness and trees and water again after those miles of greyish-brown sand. Sandy’s house and the large and more pretentious house in which the British Consul lived were on the far side of the river as one approached Khorramshah from the direction of Abadan.
The house, when we reached it, was a sprawling and vaguely unattractive building, faintly suggestive of a Dâk bungalow, with the same flat roofs, high, whitewashed rooms and french windows opening on to stone-paved verandahs. The furniture was of the usual Army-quarters pattern, and there was very little of it. In fact one might have been back in any cantonment house in India. Except for one thing. Here every room sported a hideous matting ‘dado’ that covered the lower four feet of the wall and was fastened to it by thin batons of wood in a criss-cross pattern, topped by a single thicker length of wood which managed to suggest a picture-rail that had slipped too far down the wall. I could see at once why Sandy had sent out that urgent SOS, urging us to come and make the Vice-Consul’s house fit to live in. But when I said so, adding that we could make a start by stripping off those hideous matting splash-boards, Sandy shook his head sadly and said, ‘No such luck.’
It seems that this was the first thing he himself had tried to do when he had first seen the house. Only to discover (as I did when I tried it) that those hideous splash-board things had a purpose. They were there to disguise the far more hideous stains of salt, leaching up from the ground: the Persians had never heard of such things as damp courses (nor had the British for that matter, not until fairly late in the day) and the sand in this part of the Persian desert was full of salt. That was why it was so hard to grow anything in it, except along the river banks.
Later I removed a bit of splash-board to make certain I couldn’t disguise it some better way. But the salt stains were beyond hope, all crusted and peeling, as though the walls had caught some terrible disease. Sandy said the surface had been scraped off many times and repainted, but sooner or later the salt won. Even the matting that hid the stains had to be replaced at fairly frequent intervals; but so far, it had proved to be better than anything else that had been tried. So we abandoned that, and gave our attention to the rest of the house. And I have to say, with pride, that Mother and I did wonders with it.
Almost nothing was available in that unalluring segment of the earth, and we had to make do with what little there was. We went down to the workshop where the furniture was made, and, sticking firmly to the idea of something simple, designed a sofa in three sections which, put together, made a large, curved and very comfortable piece of furniture on which five people could sit with plenty of room to spare, and six could sit without feeling squashed – very useful for parties. The chairs were made to match, and upholsterers were set to work to cover them with a heavy, white knobbly-surfaced material which was hand-woven locally, washed like a rag and was very cheap. An equally cheap form of carpeting was produced, I was interested to discover, by the prisoners in a local gaol.
Shaggy white sheepskin rugs were also obtainable locally, and since the only wall paint available in the bazaar was whitewash, we had a really lovely white drawing-room. I covered one door, the one that led to the hall and the dining-room, with a single slab of three-ply, and then muralled it with a Chinese-style picture of birds on a branch of a flowering cherry tree. And Mother had cushion covers made out of some remnants of the heavy white satin that we bought on one of our expeditions to Basrah, in the famous covered bazaar. The curtains were made of the same knobbly white material as the sofa and chair covers, and Syrie Maugham herself would not have been ashamed to own it.
The dining-room presented a more difficult problem, for facing the windward side of the house it got the full force of the monsoon rains, and here the salt stains came well above the wickerwork splash-board that was supposed to hide them. They crept above it in a series of odd-shaped streaks and blotches that were impossible to hide, since they leaked through any amount of over-painting. But looking at them one day, I suddenly saw the obvious answer, and instead of trying to hide them I turned them into rocks and tree-trunks and birds in the Chinese manner. It worked beautifully. So well, in fact, that I was to use the
same trick again and again on the walls of Army quarters.
My bedroom too, ‘tho’ I says it me’self’, was a triumph. The PWD office, who were in charge of painting and looking after official property, only stocked whitewash for walls, white enamel for woodwork, and aluminium paint for things like lamp-posts. Period. But they also provided the Consulates with such necessities as ink. Red ink, added to a pailful of whitewash, produced a charming shade of apple-blossom pink, with which I covered the walls and ceiling – plus the usual wickerwork splash-board of course.
The ceiling, for some reason, had been criss-crossed with flat wood batons, which I painted with the aluminium paint, and having also painted a large sheet of brown packing-paper with it, I cut out aluminium stars and stuck one in the centre of each square. The effect was charmingly frivolous, and somehow suggestive of Columbine and Pierrot. So, remembering a small black and white poster I had seen and admired in my art student days, I did a suitably pastel-coloured mural in the space over the fireplace, depicting a coy, pink-skirted Columbine being serenaded by a colourful Harlequin in a flowery setting of blue-green, decorative trees and daisy-spangled grass.
All the rest of the woodwork – dressing-table, chairs, bedstead, windows – was painted with aluminium, and to set it off I made two little artificial Chinese-style blossom trees, one to stand at each end of the long, low bookcases against the wall on either side of my bed. The tree-trunks and boughs were dead twigs selected from bushes in the garden, stuck into small pots and also painted with aluminium, and the pink petals and buds were modelled out of fresh bread, stuck on to the twigs with glue from a glue-pot on Sandy’s office desk.
Bread makes a marvellous modelling material if squeezed between your fingers until it’s the right consistency. And if you wait until your flower or whatever is dry, it takes watercolour paint beautifully. Best of all, it lasts a surprisingly long time, hardening into something that could almost be china – and if you’ve got any colourless nail varnish (I hadn’t, worse luck) it will last for years.
Sandy was delighted with his house when we’d finished with it. And so was the PWD, because since the whitewash, ink, aluminium and white paint were all items that came out of stock, the expense was minimal, for Mother and I had done nearly all the painting ourselves. We struck at doing the ceilings, but did everything else, and the bill for the country-made curtains, covers and druggets was astonishingly modest. So were the satin ones that we bought in the covered bazaar in Basrah. Those last were the only furnishings we did not obtain locally. No one would believe that the Consulate funds had not been heavily drawn on when Sandy gave a large party to celebrate the metamorphosis of what had been, let’s face it, an essentially hideous house. Even the husbands approved, while as for their womenfolk, they ‘ooh-ed’ and ‘ah-ed’ and refused to believe that this was not the result of official privilege, and a bottomless purse provided by the Foreign Office for the decoration of their overseas Consulates.
Several of them appeared to take it as a personal grievance, and one woman in particular informed me acidly that it was all very well for people like us, who had the use of the Consular launch and could go shopping in Basrah whenever we liked and didn’t have to worry about bills, whereas ordinary people such as herself … etc., etc. When she had quite finished, I told her exactly what the decoration of my bedroom had cost, item by item, including the covered bazaar curtain-material. At which she merely said crossly that she couldn’t have done any of it because in the first place she never would have thought of it, and in the second, if she had thought of it, she couldn’t possibly have done the mural; adding bitterly that I was merely lucky in that I could draw and paint: ‘Because most of us can’t, you know!’
The complaint about the use of the Consular launch and our supposedly frequent visits to Basrah was anything but true, for Sandy got the use of the launch only when the Consul did not need it, and then one way only, Basrah to Khorramshah. Never vice versa. This meant that we only visited Basrah on those occasions when for some official reason or other the Consul had gone up by launch but would not need it to come back in for some time, so that it would have been returning empty. This did not happen very often. This was just as well, since the city of Basrah lies in Iraq, several miles beyond the borders of Iran where, in those days, the Iranian officials who manned the border post demanded that any European crossing into Iraq should be provided with no less than seven photographs of themselves, in addition to filling in a lengthy form on which you had to give your surname and all your given names, date of birth, place of birth, etc., etc., plus the same for your parents, and, believe it or not, your grandparents.
The whole business of crossing the frontier merely to spend a few hours in Basrah (though Sandy generally had some business with the British Consul there) was a lengthy and humiliating one. Our passports and our pack of seven photographs were handed over to an Iranian guard, who would keep us waiting for some time. Sandy would hand over the passports, one at a time, and the guard would take them without a word, stare at our faces and compare them with the ones in the passport before putting out a hand for the next. Finally the packs of photographs were handed over and the forms to be filled in were given to us. While we struggled with these, the senior official (who sat throughout in a chair in the wooden hut that did duty for a border post, his feet on the table) went through the passports examining the photographs one by one and commenting on them to the couple of assistant border-guards, who would look at them over his shoulder and laugh loudly whenever he laughed.
When the senior official felt he had wasted enough of his valuable time on us, he would take up our passports and throw them out of the open door of the hut on to the ground, from where, as the guard made no move, our chauffeur would descend from the car and pick them up. After which we were allowed to cross the border into Iraq, where the Iraqi officials glanced at our passports, stamped them, and handing them back waved us politely through.
On a later visit we were accompanied by a Frenchman, a friend of Sandy’s who had business interests in those parts, and who showed us (too late to be of much use to us, I’m afraid) how to shorten these ridiculous shenanigans considerably. He wrote his surname and his Christian names in the correct slot, but drew a long diagonal line across the rest of the form. The border officer bristled at once and demanded the reason for this action, and the Frenchman said in a hushed voice: ‘Illegitimate!’ At which the Boss and his assistants visibly melted, and murmuring ‘Ah, M’sieur, but how sad!’ they patted him consolingly on the back and passed him through with no more fuss.
Basrah, what little I saw of it, remains in my memory as a pleasant town full of mosques and shade trees, busy streets and, in the suburbs, familiar East-of-Suez-style houses with flat roofs and whitewashed walls, and gardens full of poinsettias, canna lilies and bougainvillaea. It was the vast covered bazaar that drew us there, and Mother and I could have spent hours in it if our time had not been dictated by how long the car journey from Khorramshah had taken us this time, the hour the Consular launch would be leaving, and how soon Sandy could get through his official business and all three of us could escape after the inevitable luncheon party with friends or acquaintances. Any spare time that these restrictions left us we spent in the covered bazaar under the eagle eye – and wing – of one of the Consulate’s Iraqi clerks, a jewel of a man who acted as a guide, interpreter and chief haggler.
There must be covered bazaars in many Eastern cities and I have seen a few of them myself, but none that held such fascination for me as the one in Basrah. The stalls that lined its winding ways made it into an ancient and far more attractive version of a modern shopping mall. It also had the advantage of looking like something out of the Arabian Nights, since most of it was covered with awnings of tattered canvas which let the sun shine through in a hundred brilliant shapes that patched the goods, and the shifting stream of turbaned or bourkha’d customers, with blobs and lozenges of gold.
Here and there a tear in t
he swagged ceiling-cloth would let in a long streak of sunlight, full of dancing motes that showed the atmosphere of the bazaar to be full of a hazy mist compounded of equal parts of the smoke of innumerable hookahs, dust, incense-sticks and fumes from the coffee-shops and purveyors of cakes and sweetmeats. The smell of the covered bazaar is not easily forgotten, an entirely individual mixture of the foul and the fragrant, for there were stenches as well as delicious scents, and one put up with the former for the sake of the latter.
Mother and I never stayed long enough to explore the bazaar, for we saw no point in wasting time on the stalls and shops which displayed goods that we knew we could not afford – carpets for instance, or jewellery. There were incredible glittering displays of the goldsmith’s craft, earrings and necklaces, bracelets and brooches, chains and wrist-watches, ropes and handfuls of pearls from the Gulf, emeralds from the emerald mines of Swat, rubies from Ceylon – the island now known as Sri Lanka – and diamonds from Golconda.
We looked, but we did not buy. Our interest lay entirely with the cloth shops, for we needed materials for the furnishing of Sandy’s house, and all the curtains and cushions and covers in it came from the covered bazaar. We also bought what we could for ourselves, because the material that made such an Aladdin’s Cave out of every silk shop included offcuts from all the great Paris dress-shops. The head designers of such houses designed their own material and had it made up in limited lengths. Anything left over would not have been used again by the fashion-house that had ordered it, nor would they have allowed it to be sold locally. It was offloaded instead on to Arab traders in the Middle East, and one of the places where it ended up, to be re-sold at rock-bottom prices, was the covered bazaar in Basrah.
