Golden Afternoon (19 page)

Down on the plains the late March weather had been warm verging on hot, and we had been wearing cotton dresses, but Mansehra (according to Mother's red guidebook) was just over 3,500 feet above sea-level and its Dâk-bungalow stood on the crest of a bare ridge strewn with enormous lichen-covered boulders, its back to the village and facing a long, unpopulated valley that stretched away below it, ringed by mountains whose
peaks were still white with snow and, as the sun dipped behind the horizon, it was suddenly very cold.

Dusk does not linger in eastern countries as it does in the west, and twilight was barely a breath between daylight and the dark: one minute the snows glowed pink and gold and apricot, and almost the next minute they were coldly blue against a darkening sky in which the first stars twinkled like hoar-frost. The night wind arose and began to blow through the long verandah of the isolated bungalow, bringing with it a lovely fragrance — which surprised me because there were few trees on the ridge and those were still leafless, and what little grass there was on the bare hillside was brown and parched. It was plain that spring had still not reached Mansehra, yet the night wind smelled of flowers. It was a small puzzle, and Bets and I abandoned it and went inside to hunt out a few winter woollies from the suitcases that Abdul Karim had directed the Dâk-bungalow servants to unload and stack in our bedroom.

In those days there was no electricity in such places, but there were hurricane ‘
butties
' a-plenty, and by their light we bathed in tin tubs filled with piping-hot water, heated in kerosene tins over pine-log fires which made the water smell deliciously of woodsmoke. Later we ate the usual four-course Dâk-bungalow dinner of soup (Brown Windsor or Mulligatawny),
murgi
(chicken, curried or roast), followed by something that the
khansama
called ‘
broon custel
' and finishing up with a savoury that was usually sardines on toast, or cheese straws. This menu seldom varied, though ‘mutton cutlet' (invariably goat) was sometimes substituted for chicken — and for my part, much preferred, as I never really grew resigned to seeing, and worse still, hearing, some unfortunate hen being chased shrieking around the back premises to be caught and killed, vocal to the last; to appear on the menu a scant hour and a half later, either over-cooked or curried. At least the portions of stewed or roast goat were purchased in the bazaar and not noisily slain on the premises.

I still have, in one of my many photograph albums, kept as a cherished memento of countless Dâk-bungalow style meals, the menu of the very last meal I was to eat on Indian soil as the curtain fell on the Raj and we sailed away from a city that was about to become the major port of a brand-new country, Pakistan. The menu is hand-written by the
khansama
and, either in honour of the occasion or as an affectionate gesture towards the departing
Sahib-log
, it was a strictly British meal, starting with onion soup and including such colonial favourites as ‘Cottage Pie and Cabbag',
followed, for the pudding course, by: ‘Blanc Monge and Mallon'. The only thing absent on this one is that popular vegetable usually rendered in English by a majority of
khansamas
as ‘russel-pups', which the initiated will instantly recognize as brussels sprouts. Dear Dâk-bungalows — how I miss you!

After breakfast next morning, while Abdul Karim and his platoon of helpers were loading up the cars, Bets and I went for a walk down the hillside below the house. The sunshine of yesterday had vanished, and it was one of those cold, colourless days when the sky looks like polished pewter and even though there are no shadows, everything, near or far, appears in sharp focus. The mountains that ringed the valley seemed much further away than they had seemed in the sunset, and as decoratively artificial as a stage-setting, as though they had been cut from cardboard in several shades of grey and pasted, layer by layer, on the flat pewter sky, then carefully embellished in poster-paint with chalk-white snow-peaks.

I can still see that view as if it was a picture, one like Hobbema's
Avenue
or Constable's
Haywain
that you can instantly visualize if someone speaks of it. I cannot explain why it fascinates me so — except that it still means spring to me. True, there were no colours in it; only endless shades of grey, the odd touch of black, that startling white and, under the huge wind- and water-worn boulders that littered the hillside, small splashes of green. For I had been wrong in thinking that spring had not yet reached Mansehra, and I knew now why the night wind had smelled so sweet. Sheltering under every boulder, protected from the wind and the wintry gales, were patches of white violets, hundreds and hundreds of them, smelling of paradise.

I imagine that everyone will know how it is when something suddenly lifts your heart, and for no explained reason makes life seem lovely and the world a nicer place — the sight of something, or someone; a waft of scent or a bar of music; a line from a poem; a ‘rainbow and a cuckoo's song'. It must happen to everyone at some time or another, and the white violets on the black hillside at Mansehra did it for me. I picked a bunch of them for Mother, and I pressed one or two in my sketchbook, where they turned brown and eventually disintegrated. But they, and Mansehra, are fixed in my memory for good.

The thing I chiefly remember about our drive next day was that the weather turned nasty on us, and so did the road, which twisted and turned
with such wild abandon that I became horridly carsick (shades of my youth and my first car ride down the hill road from Simla to Kalka!) and we had to stop while I decanted my breakfast over the edge of the road. I was filled up with brandy and changed places with Tacklow, who always sat in the front seat by Mother. I'm not sure which of these two prescriptions did the trick; perhaps it was a combination of the two. But I can recommend it to the carsick. By the time we arrived at Domel, where the two main routes to Kashmir, the one from Rawalpindi and the other from Abbottabad, meet, and the Kishenganga river merges with the Jhelum, I was feeling a bit hollow but otherwise OK.

There is a toll to pay before one crosses the bridge at Domel, and a customs post where all travellers must have their baggage checked — and on occasions searched. There is also, we belatedly discovered, a toll on animals and birds, and when a whispered warning of this was hurriedly conveyed to me by Abdul Karim, I took the precaution of transferring Pozlo from his travelling cage to the small, flannel-lined Lipton's Tea tin which he treated as a nest when the weather was chilly, and successfully smuggled him past the customs — thus saving a toll of annas four — or it may have been eight. Not a gigantic sum, but as we had failed to look up the rules relating to birds, we did not care to risk having him confiscated.

The
khansama
at Mansehra had provided us with a picnic lunch we had meant to eat by the roadside, but as the day had turned wet and cold we ate it instead on the verandah of the Dâk-bungalow at Garie, before driving on to arrive late in the wet darkness of a rainy evening at the little Dâk-bungalow that stands on a steep hillside above the Kashmir road at Uri. Here, after dining by the light of a couple of flickering oil-lamps, we fell asleep lulled by the muted roar of the Jhelum river racing high and furious through the narrow gorge below, and awoke in the thin sunshine of a March morning to find that here, as under the gaunt boulders that littered the bleak ridge at Mansehra, spring had arrived before us; for the window of our bedroom looked out across a verandah on to a blaze of pink blossom, an almond tree in full bloom in the narrow strip of garden above the Domel -Srinagar road.

That almond tree was as lovely and as unforgettable a sight as the white violets, and it has always remained in my memory as a fitting introduction to the valley of Kashmir. Perhaps because, like the violets, it was so unexpected — coming as it did after the previous day's driving through non-stop drizzle and clinging mists that blotted out everything
beyond a range of fifty yards, the ghastly carsickness and that unappetizing picnic eaten on the verandah of the least attractive of Kashmir's Dâk-bungalows. But whatever the reason, it still stands out in my memory, together with the violets at Mansehra and the frangipani tree seen by moonlight on the Kalka–Simla road,
^*
as something very special — like one of the Seven Wonders of the World. That almond tree is not there any more; nor, I gather, is the Dâk-bungalow, and perhaps Uri, too, has been blown out of existence. In the fighting that followed Independence and the partition of India into two separate countries, Pakistani and Indian troops fought each other among the Kashmir mountains, and, according to various newspaper accounts at the time, Uri was shelled and the fighting around it was particularly fierce.

It is sad to think of that charming little village reduced to rubble and the almond tree smashed by shell-fire; but as far as I am concerned it is still there, exactly as it was when I first saw it, its blossoms looking like a milky way of rose-pink stars in the early morning sunlight. Only when I am dead will it cease to be real.

The sunlight of the early morning did not last. We left it behind us when we drove away from Uri, singing ‘My Blue Heaven' and ‘I've Fallen in Love with a Voice', and the steep sides of the gorge closed in on us; the enormous rock-faces soaring upwards on either hand, their tops lost in the mists, bare as the back of one's hand or spiked here and there with tall deodars, pine and fir trees and dripping with maidenhair fern and a thousand little waterfalls. Here and there the water washed across the winding road to pour out of gaps in the low stone walls that edged it, and plummet down the steep hillsides to join the raging mill-race of the Jhelum as it rampaged down the narrow gorge several hundred feet below, whirling down thousands of baulks of timber, thrown into it by logging camps many miles up-stream, to stock timber-yards in the Punjab. Mother kept on pointing out bits of scenery that she assured me were really spectacular if only the mist would lift and the drizzle stop; but it didn't, so I had to take her word for it. Even the gorge at Rampur, which I was sure of recognizing from Molyneux's painting in Younghusband's
Kashmir
, was shrouded in mist, and there was nothing visible of the famous limestone cliffs, and only the occasional glimpse of the deodar forests. About the only thing we could see clearly was the power station, where
the Jhelum has been harnessed to generate electrical power for houses, houseboats and hotels throughout the valley, as well as for the irrigation of millions of acres in the plains of the Punjab. Useful, admittedly. Very useful. But hardly lovely to look at.

The mountains dwindled in size and became hills, and the hills in turn drew back from the road, taking the mist with them, the valley opened out in front of us, and soon we were driving through the streets of Barramulla, the town that stands sentinel at the entrance to the valley.

I have described in
The Sun in the Morning
the culture shock that the sight of my native land dealt me on the day when, as a dismayed and deeply apprehensive ten-year-old, I followed Mother and Bets down the gang-plank of the passenger ship that had brought us from Bombay — then one of the most beautiful cities in India — into the depressing squalor of London's Tilbury Docks and the miles of mean streets, grimy commercial buildings and sea of smoky chimneys that stretched between the docks and Charing Cross station. And this was the country that my parents called ‘Home'! It had been a traumatic experience, and here it was repeating itself all over again.
This
was the fabled ‘Vale of Kashmir'!

I had read Moore's
Lalla Rookh
and Younghusband's
Kashmir
, admired Molyneux's delightful watercolours and Mother's amateur efforts at copying them, seen endless snapshots in other people's albums as well as the ones Mother kept so carefully, and in general heard a great deal about the spectacular beauties of that favoured country — starting with the famous tale of the Mogul Emperor Jehangir, son of Akbar, greatest of the Great Moguls, who built the most beautiful of the Kashmir gardens, Nishat Bagh, and so loved the country that when he lay dying and those who watched around his bed asked if there was anything he desired, he is reported to have said ‘Kashmir … only Kashmir!'

Well, here I was in this fabled valley and, save for the day of my arrival at Tilbury Docks, I have never been more disappointed. Frankly, I thought the place was perfectly hideous. Here there was no trace of spring, only the leavings of winter — gaunt, leafless trees, great patches of dirty snow that had slid off the roofs of houses, or been shovelled to one side to clear a pathway, and now lay blackened with mud and soot and pitted with small dark holes where icicles which had formed at the edges of overhanging roofs had dripped on it from above. The houses themselves were built on the same pattern as Swiss chalets, though here there was none of the decoration and spick-and-spanness of the Swiss prototypes,
or of the colour. There was, in fact, no colour anywhere, unless one counts mud as a colour. There was plenty of that — muddy streets, muddy fields and mud-coloured houses. The river which had raged through the gorges behind us was placid here, a wide, sluggish stream reflecting the overcast sky and leafless willows, and the wet thatch of the country-boats that were tied up to the muddy banks. Even the people appeared mud-coloured: their clothes in drab shades of brown to dingy black, men, women and children alike wearing the knee-length smock-like garment which is known as a
phiran
over Isabella-coloured
shalwa
— the loose, full cotton Mohammedan trousers that are worn with a drawstring. None of them looked as though they or their clothes had had a wash in months. It would have been difficult to tell which were men and which women if it had not been for their headgear, the women covering their heads with shawls and the men with a turban, and, in general, only the men wearing shoes.