Golden Afternoon (18 page)

I was to see ‘Pindi and the GOC's house on several occasions during the next decade, and find it unchanged. Well over half a century later and more than thirty years after the territory it stood in had become Pakistan, I was invited to lunch there by the then President of that country, General Zia-ul-Haq, and though there had been a number of alterations, the entrance porch and the long verandah, even the masses of bougainvillaea, were so familiar that for a moment I was back in the past, still in my teens and being greeted by a couple of smiling young ADCs and a gorgeously uniformed
chupprassi
, who opened the door of the Hudson with a flourish … ‘
Time, you old gipsy man/Will you not stay …?
'

Apart from those fragments of memory, only one other thing remains to remind me of that first stay in Rawalpindi, a song that still crops up with reasonable frequency on radio programmes. It was new then, and we heard it for the first time in Jenners, a European-owned music shop that sold everything from pianos and sheet music to gramophones and the latest 78s. We already owned a gramophone, one of the portable, wind-up variety that were popular in those days. But if either Bets or I had wanted a new record we would have had to buy it ourselves out of our excessively modest allowances and I doubt very much if we could have run to even a few gramophone needles. Bill, however, was at the time sentimentally interested in one of the Jenn sisters, which probably accounted for the amount of money he spent on records. Vera and Dolly Jenn were pretty young things who counted their admirers by the dozen, and half the young bloods of ‘Pindi used to drop into Jenners on the chance of catching a glimpse of one or other of them stocking up the latest 78s.

One of them, at least, was there that morning, and though I don't remember if she was the one Bill had his eye on, I do remember that we stayed in the shop for the best part of an hour, listening to the latest batch of records, and that among them was ‘My Blue Heaven' — a charming melody that made such an impression on Tacklow that he bought it on the spot.

I like to think that a reference in the lyric to ‘just Mollie and me' had something to do with his fondness for this particular tune, which eventually became ‘my' tune in the same way that over thirty years previously ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do' had been Mother's. All her beaux including Tacklow, had in the past sung that song to her and during the next few years most of mine were to sing ‘My Blue Heaven' to me. In the meantime, we played that record, or sang the song, so often during the rest of our journey that to this day when some popular singer of ‘old time' songs on radio or television embarks on it, I am instantly back again in that long-ago morning in Rawalpindi, listening to it for the first time.

The majority of travellers bound for Kashmir turn off the Grand Trunk Road at Rawalpindi and make for the mountains and the little hill-station of Murree, from where, on a clear day, you can see the Kashmir snows. But we went forward on the Grand Trunk, for we had been invited to stay for a few days with an admired friend of Tacklow's, the archaeologist Sir John Marshal, who was engaged in excavating the ruins of one of India's most historic cities, Taxila, once the capital city of a small kingdom whose territory covered an area of land between the Indus and the river that is now called the Jhelum, but that was once known as the Hydaspes — a name that was to go down in history as one of the great battles that were fought and won by the superb generalship of that ‘young god of the world's morning', Alexander of Macedon.

I knew very little about Taxila beyond the fact that its king had played host to Alexander, and that it rated a mention in one of the Buddhist scriptures, the
Jatakas
— the ‘Birth Tales', which the Lama, that charming character in Rudyard Kipling's novel
Kim
, tells to Kim and the priests of the Temple of the Thirthankas in Benares. But I knew a good deal about Alexander, since both Tacklow and Alum Din, who had been a Pathan and Tacklow's bearer, had told me stories about him. All Pathans have a fund of stories about the legendary ‘Sikandar Dulkan', and to this day there are tribes who claim that their fair skins and pale eyes are a legacy of the Greek governors Alexander the Great left behind him to govern his Empire. Not surprisingly, Alexander had become one of my childhood heroes — along with such dashing characters as Rupert of the Rhine, Robin Hood and the hero of the
Ramayana
— and I wanted to see Taxila because of its associations with those early tales.

Now that carbon-dating has arrived on the scene I suppose we know when Taxila was first built. But all we knew about it in the 1920s was
that 326 years before the birth of Christ it was there, and flourishing, when Alexander and his Greeks appeared before its gates and were given an enthusiastic welcome by its King — who seems to have been on bad terms with the rulers of several neighbouring states. I imagine he hoped this all-powerful invader and his army would, if treated kindly, be willing to eliminate them for him by way of thanks.

The upshot was the Battle of Hydaspes, which has gone down in history as one of the finest examples of Alexander's generalship. Both Tacklow's and Alum Din's descriptions of it, though differing here and there in detail, agreed in principle; and my interest in Taxila was enormously heightened by the fact that these narrow trenches cut into the dry, dusty earth, along which Sir John guided us, were roads and lanes along which Alexander and his men must have walked, and these mudbrick walls were the actual walls of rooms and banqueting halls in which he and his Greeks would have slept or eaten, listened to speeches or planned future conquests.

I don't remember the name of Taxila's ruler, but I do remember the name of his enemy, because it reminded me of ‘porous plasters' — the old-fashioned kind that doctors used to prescribe when I had a bad cough: strong-smelling grey sludge, heated and then spread on a square of lint and clapped on my shrinking chest. His name was Porus, but though Tacklow pronounced that as Poh-rus, I could read by then, so I knew how porous plasters should be pronounced. And also that a ‘po' was an unmentionable object.

Tacklow and Alum Din could both tell a story so well that you felt you could actually
see
what they were describing; which is why I can still visualize the opening scene of the Battle of Hydaspes.

Porus's long front line consisted of at least 200 war-elephants, and at first it seemed as though he was going to win a bloodless victory. For when Alexander's cavalry attempted to cross the ford, their horses refused to face the elephants lined up on the other side, and the initial assault ended in a wild confusion of furious shouting men, trumpeting elephants, flashing hooves and rearing, splashing, screaming horses.

But Alexander was more than a leader of men, he was a brilliant tactician. Undeterred by that first rebuff, he pulled back his army and set about finding another place where he could cross the Jhelum — or the Hydaspes if you insist. He found one after several weeks, some sixteen miles upstream of the ford, and, with the aid of a small island in a sharp
bend of the river, got his army across, attacked Porus's flank and won a resounding victory after a fiercely fought battle with appalling loss of life — only a fraction of them Greek — and the capture or destruction of all those unfortunate elephants. Porus, who had reportedly fought like a tiger and sustained any number of wounds, was taken prisoner, but treated with such generosity that he became an ally of his ex-enemy; when, later, Alexander's army, grown homesick and battle-weary, refused to move any further into the unknown land and he was forced to turn back, he appointed Porus to be his Viceroy over that part of his conquests which lay between the Jhelum and the northern bank of the Hyphasis — the river that we now know as the Beas.

Nowadays the excavations at Taxila cover so much ground that it is hard to believe that there can be anything left to look for, but in the closing years of the 1920s there was comparatively little to see, for the digging had presumably stopped during the war years and, as far as I can remember, the museum consisted of only one or at the most two small and rather poky rooms in the modest house where the Marshal family lived, instead of the spacious building that has replaced it. But buried treasure has always held a potent spell, and I remember being fascinated by the necklaces and brooches fashioned from beads or beaten gold and copper wire, the coins, seals and fragments of pottery, displayed in glass cases, and the maze of narrow streets and roofless rooms that Sir John guided us through, explaining as he went so that the city seemed to come alive again as he talked.

It was a memorable two days. We left with regret after an early breakfast and drove on in the sparkling, dew-washed morning up the straight white corridor of the Grand Trunk Road; the newly risen sun at our backs and the shadows of the sal trees and the scarlet-blossomed silk-cotton trees stretching long and blue ahead of us. There can have been few more pleasant things to do in that post-war world, when the horror and destruction of the ‘Great' War was less than ten years behind us, and the twentieth century was still young, than to drive along the more northerly stretch of the Grand Trunk on a spring morning. Even now, when it carries a river of petrol-driven traffic that fouls the air with fumes, it can be beautiful, for many years later — forty years after the land through which we were travelling had become Pakistan — a sad errand took me down that same road on another spring morning. But despite that sadness, and the racket and dust of the streams of traffic, the Grand Trunk was
still beautiful, the flowering shrubs still starred with blossom and the dâk trees ablaze with scarlet.

The Moguls, too, had liked to spend the worst of the hot weathers by the lakes of Kashmir, on the shores of which they had built some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, and the route they preferred to take was the one that we were taking that year, by a side road which branches off the Grand Trunk at the little wayside town of Hasan Abdul and leads towards Abbottabad and the high hills. We stopped in Hasan Abdul to fill up with petrol — which, in those pre-petrol-pump days, was sloshed straight from a can into the car's petrol tank with the aid of a tin funnel — and while Mother and Abdul kept an eye on these proceedings, Bets, Tacklow and I went off to see the tomb of Lalla Rookh — the lovely lady whose name will always be linked with the Vale of Kashmir.

In those days her modest tomb stood on a bare hillside, well outside the town and in a little walled garden in which there were a few jasmine and rose bushes — the small, sweetly scented roses that Omar Khayyam wrote of — several fruit trees and a single dark cypress. I have an original watercolour sketch of that little walled garden, painted by a Major Edward Molyneux over ninety years ago and reproduced in a book on Kashmir by Francis Younghusband.
^*
That little sketch shows that except for the height of the trees in the garden, Lalla Rookh's tomb cannot have altered very much since it was first built; for on that spring morning in 1928 it looked exactly as it had to Molyneux when he painted it in the closing years of the previous century.

But I would not advise any present-day tourist to go in search of it, because Hasan Abdul is no longer that small wayside town; even less is it like the quiet little village where Ash-Ashok, the hero of one of my India novels, riding across country from ‘Pindi to Attock, stopped at twilight to let his horse rest and graze while he ate his evening meal on a grassy hillside overlooking Lalla Rookh's tomb.

The little town is now a thriving, bustling place, full of shops, garages and petrol pumps, that has spread out across the once open country at its back. The tomb itself is still there. But the garden wall with its beautifully proportioned gate and charming little domed corner towers has gone and the garden is now a mere matter of gravel paths and a few neat flowerbeds
thinly sown with marigolds and zinnias, strongly reminiscent of a public garden in one of the less attractive seaside towns in England. Both the charm and the romance have left it.

But both were present on that spring morning near the end of the twenties, and the road to Abbottabad was one of the prettiest in the Punjab. Even that sedate publication
Murray's Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma and Ceylon
said that although the road to Kashmir via Murree was the most important, the one via Abbottabad ‘though 35 miles longer, is more picturesque and has easier gradients'. I don't remember the gradients being much better, but it was certainly more picturesque, and compared with the Grand Trunk there was very little traffic on it; less and less as the fruit blossom, mango groves, cane-brakes, banana palms and orchards of limes and oranges gave place to fir and pine. With every mile the air became noticeably cooler as we climbed up and up into the forest-clad foothills that smelt as Simla used to — of pine-needles, maidenhair fern and woodsmoke. For the thrifty plains do not burn wood; their fuel is dung-cakes made from the droppings of cattle, carefully collected and patted into large, flat pancakes that are pressed on to the walls of the houses to be dried by the sun. The scent of dung fires is as potent a reminder of the plains as woodsmoke is of the hills.

We must have stopped somewhere for lunch, probably in Abbottabad. But I don't remember anything about that small hill-station, which was then the headquarters of a brigade of Gurkhas and Mountain Artillery, and a popular summer resort for the wives and families of men stationed in that part of the Punjab. I was to know it well later on when Bill's battery was stationed there, but my mind is a blank as far as my first sight of it is concerned. Nothing about it left any impression at all, yet I can remember a large part of our journey there from Hasan Abdul, and almost every yard of the steep, zig-zag road through the bazaar at Mansehra, a hill village some twenty-five miles further on which we reached at about sunset, and in whose Dâk-bungalow we spent the night.