Enchanted Evening (39 page)

Better still, as we drew up in front of it, there was a large, family-sized car standing in the forecourt, its very British-looking owner, who had obviously been paying his bill in the office, just about to leave. Mother stuck her head out and hailed him, and he came over to us looking more than slightly surprised at finding a couple of dusty, crumpled and exhausted Englishwomen in such a place at this hour of night. Mother asked if he could direct us to the nearest Dâk bungalow, and when he said there wasn't one nearer than fifty miles, she said: ‘Oh,
no
–!' in such a tone of despair that he asked her what on earth we were doing there, and on hearing a potted version of our saga, said we had better come back with him to his house for the night. It turned out that he knew Sandy, and was the local District Commissioner, or something of the sort, and he took Mother in his car and left me to follow in the Beetle. This was easy enough, for he left a trail of dust that could probably be seen for miles in daylight, and looked like the Biblical ‘pillar of fire' in my headlights.

The house had probably been built in the early years of the previous century by some affluent member of the East India Company. It stood in an acre or two of what appeared to be totally barren and very stony ground, and depended on oil lamps for illumination, as we had done throughout Tonk State. The brilliant show of electricity that had impressed us at the petrol station did not extend to the house.

Our rescuer's wife had only been waiting for the return of her husband to sit down to supper, and though plainly taken aback by the arrival of unexpected house-guests, she rose nobly to the occasion and insisted on us sharing their meal while a room was prepared for us by the servants. This, she explained with many apologies, would have to be on a covered section of the roof, because there were no other rooms available at present. Mother assured her that we were not fussy, for we had been facing the prospect of spending the night in or under the car, and a
barra-durri
on a rooftop would be luxury.

We had left the car under the porch, and since Shao-de and her kittens made no sound, we left them alone until we had finished a light supper – all we needed was sleep, not food! – and when the bearer came down to announce that was all was
‘te ah',
or Indian ‘ready', we collected what little we would need for the night, and while Shao-de, who had abandoned the basket and been lying along the top of one of the suitcases, refused to move and was carried up by Mother, I followed with the kittens. It was only after climbing the first set of stairs and finding that the second set, which were much narrower and led up to the roof in a tight curve, were a bit difficult to negotiate with a large oval basket in my arms, that I put down the basket and decided to carry the kittens up two at a time in my hands. And picking up the first one I got a nasty shock. The tiny creature was dead.

Its minute and almost weightless body lay across my palm exactly as Shao-de had done on the stone floor of that railway waiting-room, like a miniature tigerskin rug, limp, boneless and completely devoid of any sign of life. I picked up another, and that one too hung like a tiny scrap of lifeless fur from my hand. There was no reaction from any of them, and I can still remember the feel of those limp and apparently boneless scraps of fur as I carried them up and laid them out in a row on the flat stone roof. ‘I'm afraid they're all dead,' I told Mother. ‘
All
of them?' she asked wretchedly. ‘I'm afraid so.' ‘Oh well,' said Mother, ‘it can't be helped. We did our best…' She lifted one of the limp little scraps of fur and stroked it with one finger before replacing it, and said that she could only be thankful that she hadn't lost Shao-de as well, as she couldn't have borne that.

A pair of
nawar
beds, both fitted with mosquito nets, had been brought up and put in a section of the roof between two massive chimney-stacks joined by a brick wall and roofed, in order to make an open-sided
barra-durri
from which the original owner and his family and friends could sit and watch the sun go down, or eat their supper by moonlight. We had also been provided with a properly fitted out Victorian washstand, complete with china soap dish, basin and all the doings including jugs and cans of water. A bathroom had been put at our disposal on the floor below, and we had been given kerosene lamps and matches, and since Mother and I never travelled without a torch apiece, we couldn't have been better provided for. When Shao-de, ignoring that sad little row of white fur rugs and the plates of cat food, milk and water that had been provided for her, wriggled under the mosquito net and ensconced herself at the foot of Mother's bed, I returned her babies to their basket, and pushed it under the washstand.

There was a rolled up
chik
spanning the front of the
barra-durri,
probably for a curtain that could be let down when holding
purdah
parties, and Mother and I rinsed out our sweat-soaked clothes and pinned them to it, knowing they would dry within minutes. Having done that, we said our prayers (we had much to be thankful for!), fell into our beds and were asleep in seconds. It had been a long, long day, and I hoped that we wouldn't oversleep too badly.

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 that 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.