Golden Afternoon (21 page)

The beauty of the place did not hit me all at once, but crept up on me gradually, while I wasn't looking. The weather improved and the wind lost its cutting edge, and one day the clouds lifted and we looked out from the verandah of that damp, unfriendly house, across a sea of almond trees that were fast breaking into blossom, to the bright ribbon of the Jhelum river curving through the valley, and behind it, against a cloudless sky the colour of an aquamarine, the long line of the mountains on the far side of the valley, the opal tints of the foothills merging into the dazzling white of snow-peaks and snow-fields, glittering like a long, crumpled swathe of the best white satin.

Months later, sitting on the roof of a houseboat anchored on the shores of the Dāl, watching the daily magic of the sunset on those treeless hills that I had thought so dauntingly stark and barren, and seeing them catch the dying light and glow apricot and gold, rose-pink and rose-madder, crimson and lilac and purple, streaked and shadowed with pure ultramarine in the gullies and crevasses, I remember saying: ‘I can't think how the same thing that I'm looking at now could possibly have looked so ugly to me when I first saw it.'

‘I
did
tell you,' said Tacklow, mildly.

‘You told me to wait and see. You didn't explain,' I retorted.

‘You probably wouldn't have believed me,' said Tacklow. ‘It's always better to see for yourself.'

I could have replied that I would always believe anything he told me,
and perhaps, in view of what was to happen soon, it would be better if I had, because I have an idea that he would have put me straight on the ramifications of that one and the advisability of making up one's own mind.

One result of Abdul Karim's difference of opinion with the two resident retainers was that his decision to retire and hand over to a younger man was reinforced. He had no intention of staying on any longer than was absolutely necessary in a household where he was not the boss. And here we were guests and not owners. The upshot of this was that Tacklow and Mother went off one morning to Nedou's Hotel, Abdul Karim having insisted that candidates for the post should not be interviewed at the house, where they could be got at by the doctor's two servants (who would, he said, demand a cut of the nominee's wages and ‘make trouble for him').

At the hotel, with the permission of old Willy Nedou, the Swiss proprietor, whom my parents already knew from their previous visit, they interviewed a number of candidates, with the advice of Abdul Karim who, it transpired, had previously whittled the hopeful candidates down from a dozen or so to two or three, for the look of the thing, but had quite obviously chosen the winner in advance.

His favourite nominee turned out to be a mere youth, a tall, gangling young Kashmiri named Kaderalone, who cannot have been much older than seventeen or eighteen and was not, at first sight, in the least prepossessing, for he was as thin as a rake and his hollow-cheeked face was pitted all over by the marks left by smallpox. He had no previous experience of service with the
Sahib-log
, and no references except Abdul's recommendation.

But since that alone was worth a dozen laudatory ‘chits', he was taken on the strength of it. For although few, if any, employers would have engaged an emaciated, shabbily dressed and totally untrained Kashmiri, with no knowledge of English, Tacklow, like Abdul, did not judge by externals, and both saw something in the young man that went deeper than his mere outward appearance. And rightly; for Kadera was one of the best things that ever happened to us. He was like my introduction to his country all over again, for I remember being horrified by my first sight of this shabby, gaunt and appallingly pockmarked young scarecrow. I thought he had one of the most off-putting faces imaginable; yet I think
of it now as one of the nicest and kindest faces I ever knew. Dear Kadera — what a lot we owed you!

Abdul packed his scanty baggage, which consisted of the inevitable
bistra
, a tin trunk and bundle containing foodstuff for his journey, and after enjoying a last invigorating set-to with the house-owner's staff (a contest which his command of invective enabled him to win easily) he bade us an emotional farewell and, commending us to the mercy of Allah, left to resume his temporarily interrupted ‘retirement'. We all piled into the car and, with Mother at the wheel, drove the old man to the bus station in the city to see him off, and to wave goodbye, assuring him, more for our own comfort than his, that we would surely meet again — to which the old man had replied, philosophically: ‘
Inshallah
' (God willing). Abdul was obviously not sorry to see the last of Kashmir. But it was a sad moment for Bets and me, because he was the very last of our old servants, and the one who had travelled with us to Bombay when as children we left India bound for England and boarding-school. Now he had gone too, and we both realized that this time it really
was
‘goodbye'.

Those early days in Kashmir remain in my mind as a whirl of activity and an explosion of beauty. Spring arrived in the valley with unbelievable swiftness and in the manner which is described in that much-loved children's book,
The Secret Garden
— with an almost audible flourish of silver trumpets. Suddenly the almond orchards were ablaze with blossom and the fields were yellow with mustard, while every inch of common-land was carpeted with millions and millions of tiny Japanese dwarf irises, a carpet of fragile flowers on which you could not take a single step without crushing at least half a dozen. The whole valley was sweet with their scent.

My memory is like the title of Christopher Isherwood's tale of Berlin,
I Am a Camera
, for it works almost entirely by sight. If I remember something, I can see it as though it was film being run again before my mind's eye. And not a silent film in black and white either, but a top-quality video in sound and colour. It is obviously something I was born with, which I have always taken for granted and imagined that everyone must have. That everyone hasn't is something that I have discovered only recently, which makes me even more grateful for this wonderful bonus. Yet the fact that I can visualize clearly and in great detail anything that I can remember does not mean that there are not scores of things that I
must have forgotten. Well, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that there must be a limit to what one's brain can hold; and unfortunately mine is far from being an outsize one. But that first spring in Kashmir is something that no one could possibly forget. It was like watching a series of spectacular transformation scenes played out on a stage in some fabulous pantomime, as day by day — almost hour by hour — that ugly duckling of a valley turned into a glorious swan.

Perhaps it had something to do with the light and the fact that the air is — or was then — so clear and pure, like cut crystal compared to the dusty atmosphere of the plains. The light is reflected not only off the wide curves of the river and the many lakes, but off the hundreds of unseen miles of snow on the mountain ranges that ring the valley. Whatever the reason, it is the colour of Kashmir that makes it so special, and which causes countless prosaic visitors to rush out and buy a paintbox and sketchbook and try their hand at getting it on to paper. And can you blame them?

It wasn't just the acres of almond blossom, a froth of pink against that dazzling backdrop of snow-peaks, or the soft green haze that was creeping across the mud-coloured valley as the leaf buds of a dozen different shades of green began to unfurl on poplars, willows, larch trees, Persian lilac and chenar, but the new grass and the new green things that sprang up to cover every inch of earth. The bedraggled floating islands were towed away and new reeds, rushes and water-lily pads transformed the placid levels of the lakes.

In those days, and for almost a decade after the beautiful little country was annexed by India and ceased to be an independent princely state, it was the custom in the valley to roof a house with shell-shaped tiles, each one hand-cut from pine-wood and overlapping the one below. These wooden tiles lasted for years, weathering to a pale, warm grey and in time collecting dust and grass seeds, which sprouted into green coverlets. These, in turn, eventually became solid enough to provide a root-hold for other seeds, deposited there in bird droppings, so that in spring many of the houses wore a roof of scarlet or pink-and-white striped tulips or mauve irises.

There was, I remember, somewhere on the right-hand side of the road to Bijbehara, a little whitewashed and somewhat ramshackle wooden temple, vaguely reminiscent of Thailand, whose roof in the springtime was a gorgeous splash of mauve from the dwarf irises that grew so thickly
upon it that one could scarcely see any green leaves. It stood on the edge of a vast expanse of rice-fields, which at that season mirrored the snow-peaks and the sky (for the rice was not yet more than a few inches high), and when its roof was in flower it made such a charming picture that no would-be painter who passed that way in spring could possibly resist trying to capture it in paint.

Mother did so most successfully on several occasions. But none of her watercolours of it are still in the family; she sold them all, which was lovely for her but sad for us. I only painted it once, in poster-colour on a very small piece of black paper. And because there was no colour photography in those days, and I wanted to keep a reminder of it, I never put it into an exhibition — not even when I was really strapped for money — which is why I still have it to this day. It hangs on the wall of my bedroom as a reminder of how beautiful Kashmir was, ‘once upon a time'.

The bare, rocky slope of the Takht acquired an overdress of emerald green grass, violets and the little striped wild tulips that Western garden centres call ‘Kaufmannia' and sell for exorbitant sums per bulb, and every tree seemed to be alive with nesting bulbuls and golden orioles. Gupkar Road ran up towards a gap where the lower slope of the Takht dwindled down to meet the road, and rose again, on the far side, to become part of the mountain barrier that ended at the Dāl lake. At the mouth of the gap, standing high above the road and overlooking it from a ledge of rock that had been made into a garden, stood a large, modern house where a Mr and Mrs Wakefield lived. I don't remember exactly what Mr Wakefield's job was, but he was in the service of H. H. the Maharajah, not the Raj — Personal Adviser to His Highness, or something like that. His wife was Helen Keelan's
^*
aunt, whose two sons, Alan and John, I had met on and off in the days when we were all at school and who by now were both, like my brother Bill, subalterns in the Indian Army. There was also a daughter, Ruth, who was one of the prettiest girls I have ever met — like a Raphael Madonna, or one of Michelangelo's angels.

The view from their house was out of this world, for, standing as it did on a low spur of the Takht, it could see both ways — across the fruit orchards and the Jhelum river to the snow-peaks of the Pir Panjal. Or, from the other side, to the Dāl lake and the lakes beyond it, across a wide
sweep of orchards and gardens and the scattered roofs of one or two houses, to where, high up along the flank of a mountain, lay the ruins of what is known as the Peri-Mahal, the Fairies' Palace, with behind it the massed chenar trees that hide the gardens of Nishat Bagh and Shalimar. Most of the houses — what little you could see of them between the blossoming fruit trees — were of the usual Kashmiri pattern and roofed with wooden tiles. But one had verandahs and a corrugated tin roof that had once been painted pillar-box red, but had faded to a deep rose colour. And it was from the Wakefields' garden that, looking down at it, we first saw the house that we named the ‘Red House', and eventually rented.

There was, in those days, an
Octroi
-post at the gap, and though as far as I can remember pedestrians paid no charge, all wheeled traffic and various dutiable goods — livestock among them — paid some small charge, or should have paid it. Pozlo did not, because although we always took him out for a walk with us, he passed the
Octroi
-post sitting snugly in my coat pocket and was only let out once we were out of sight in the almond avenue, after which he rode on someone's shoulder, Tacklow's for choice.

That almond avenue had to be seen to be believed, and should by rights have been listed as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. In those days the metalled road stopped at the gap, and after that it was just an unmade road that skirted the foot of the mountains and led on round the lake to Harwan and the trout hatchery, through several small villages and past the famous Mogul gardens. This was an area of smallholdings, cornfields and orchards, and to one side of the road — the right if one approached it from the Gupkar Road — someone, very long ago, had planted a double avenue of almond trees. I imagine that once it had been intended to lead to a house. But if so the house had vanished long ago, for the avenue led nowhere. It merely ran parallel to the road for a couple of hundred yards and then stopped.

To walk through it was a marvellous experience, especially when the petals began to fall and lay thickly underfoot, for then one was literally walking through a scented tunnel of pink blossom — overhead, on either side, and underfoot — and through the lattice-work of flowers one caught glimpses of blue lakes and white snow-peaks. It was magical, and while it lasted we used to walk through it and back again at least once every day. But ‘Beauty vanishes; beauty passes; however rare — rare it be.' And, like all beautiful things, it passed. There would come a night of wind and
rain, and next day the trees were stripped of blossom and there was a brown carpet underfoot in place of the pink one that had been there only a day before. A year or two later the ancient trees were hacked down to widen the road; for His Highness had decided to build a new palace within a mile of the gap, a large, modern, and not particularly attractive building which is now, sad to say, a tourist hotel.