Golden Afternoon (30 page)

I think, though I am not certain, that it was either this same Maharajah or his father, H. H. Ranbir Singh Sahib, who, wishing to marry a girl who for some reason was not considered by his Council of State to be of sufficiently high rank to be the Senior Maharani of Kashmir, got around this tricky social question of precedence by espousing a chenar tree, to which he was married with all the pomp and ceremony that attends an Indian wedding, and which was known thereafter as Her Highness the Senior Rani of Jummu and Kashmir. Protocol being satisfied, he then married the lady of his choice, who duly became the junior wife of the ruler.

The third tale, which is my favourite, once again concerned the ‘Old Maharajah'. I heard it first from a member of the Council of State at one of the Skeens' luncheon parties at Ganderbal and again, many years later, on a BBC radio programme, told by an English judge, one Sir Grimwood Mears, who had recently married in his old age a dear friend of mine, Margaret Tempest, who must be well known to millions of children as the illustrator of the
Grey Rabbit
books.

Sir Grimwood had been sent out to India as a judge for a few years, in the course of which he had made the acquaintance of the old Maharajah. The two men had become great friends, so much so that when Grimwood's
tour of duty overseas ended, he travelled up to Kashmir in order to say goodbye to his friend. The old man, who had ascended the
gudee
(throne) in 1885 and reigned for almost forty years, was nearing his eightieth birthday and appeared to be in excellent health. But when Grimwood said confidently that he looked forward to meeting him again in the future, His Highness shook his head and said, no, he did not think they would meet again, but that he had a request to make that he hoped Grimwood would grant: ‘I do not think that it will be long now before you hear that I have died' said His Highness, ‘so now I would like you to do me a last favour.' Sir Grimwood told him that he had only to ask, and His Highness said, ‘I would ask you, on the first anniversary of my death, to go to the Shalimar Gardens, where you and I have picnicked on many occasions, and sprinkle some rose-petals on the water in remembrance of me.
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Will you do that?'

Grimwood protested that His Highness was still hale and hearty and would certainly live for many more years, but that of course he would promise. Whereupon the old man embraced him and they parted, Grimwood to return to England and continue his professional career. Not long afterwards, he heard the sad news that his old friend was dead, and a year later he arrived in Srinagar on the day before the anniversary — though it had not been easy, back in the 1920s, to arrange a sufficiently long holiday to allow for a return trip to India and back again for in those days one travelled by ship. An average voyage by P & O from London to Bombay took over two weeks, and from Bombay to Kashmir a further four days, and there had been times when Grimwood was tempted not to make the long and tedious journey. But a promise was a promise. So he had arranged it, telling no one but his wife and making arrangements for someone to stand in for him.

On the day following his arrival, allowing himself time to get to Shalimar at the hour the old Maharajah had mentioned, he took a taxi and was driven out around the lake. Once there, telling the taxi-driver to wait, he walked up the path alongside the water-channels where the fountains were playing and, reaching the spot where, in the old days, he had picnicked with the late ruler, he stopped and took off his hat and stood looking down at the water and thinking of the old man. It had been his intention to pick a handful of petals from one of the many rose trees but,
as he turned away to do so, a gorgeously uniformed palace official stepped out quietly from behind the shelter of a group of bushes and, coming up to him, bowed and proffered a silver bowl full of rose-petals … ‘His Highness knew that you would not fail him,' said the official.

Grimwood left Kashmir on the following day to begin the long journey back to England; and some forty years later, long after India had achieved Independence, he told that tale on the radio, as an illustration of the friendship, liking and trust that had existed between so many British and Indians in the days of Empire. This liking was what made possible the very existence of the Raj, since without it, the Raj could not have lasted a year, if that. The British have been accused again and again of following a policy of Divide and Rule. But those who squawk that parrot cry have not bothered to take a look at India's history and discover that until the coming of the Raj, that vast subcontinent, though technically under the rule of the Great Moguls, was divided into scores of independent sovereign states, all of which spent much of their time making war on each other.

Nor have they registered the fact that a good many of these states were Muslim, and that most of the Punjab was ruled over by Sikhs. It was the British who by conquering the country for their own ends — which were trade and profit! — welded it into a cohesive whole. But their task was only made possible because they liked the people of India and that liking was returned by many — perhaps because we are all, basically, Aryans. I don't know. But I do know that, for the vast majority, the liking was mutual, which was perhaps our tragedy. I have yet to meet an ex-Indian Army officer who was not deeply devoted to his regiment and to the men who served with him or under him, or who did not grow attached to the country and look back on his years of service there with deep affection.

— Ulwar sabre and Tonk
jezail
—

Tonk. That name is still an ominous one to me. As for the
jezails
— those long-barrelled, muzzle-loading muskets that were in general use among the Frontier tribes when Tacklow was a young man (and which I last saw in use long after the partition and independence of India, carried slung across the shoulder of an elderly Pathan tribesman who was buying walnuts in Torkham bazaar, a scant fifty yards from the Afghan border), they were still in evidence in Tonk when we went to live there in the winter of 1928. For Tonk was in many ways a piece of the ancient India that was still living in the past.

Most of my seasons in Kashmir remain crystal clear in my memory. Yet for some reason I cannot remember how we came to spend that particular cold weather in Tonk. I know that Tacklow had made that antique state his headquarters for some months, so that from it he could more easily visit a number of neighbouring ones, and that in the course of his stay there he had come to know its aged ruler well. Moreover, the old Nawab (the ruling house of Tonk was Muslim) had taken a great fancy to him, and had requested permission from the Government of India to engage Sir Cecil Kaye as President of Tonk's Council of State as soon as the work that he had been called back to India to do had been completed. What I am not sure about is
when
that offer had been made to Tacklow. Or, I am ashamed to say, when his work on those treaties was completed.

All that I can remember is that by invitation of the Nawab, Tacklow was in residence in one of the guest-houses in Tonk, but not yet working for the state, when Mother, Bets and I, together with Sandy Napier (who was spending a short leave in our company) and accompanied by Mahdoo and Kadera, joined him in the winter of 1928.

At a guess, I imagine that the Nawab's offer of employment must have
looked like a lifeline to Tacklow. The work he had come out to do would have been almost finished, and he would have had no desire to join the ranks of those who, having spent their working lives in India, found that they could not face the prospect of retiring on a small pension to end their days in the rain and cold of England, so opted instead for a bungalow in some hill-station, or a houseboat in Kashmir, in the land (and the climate) that from long association had become home to them. If he were to stay on in India it could only be because there was still work there for him to do. And now he had been offered it by an old man whom he had come to like and to respect. But would Daisy like being buried in a medieval state, well off the beaten track? Or the girls?

Tacklow was well aware that all three of his women-folk would rather live in India than anywhere else in the world, and were dreading having to return to England and housework and the search for paid employment, which it had not occurred to their parents to fit them for. At least they were all three doing well out here with their paintings. But his daughters were not going to find husbands in Tonk. Or much social life either, since the little-known state was not even on the railway or a made road. Nor was there any electricity, which meant, among other things, no electric lights, ceiling-fans, ice-boxes or artificial means of heating or cooling. No running water or telephones either, and very little in the way of entertainment. No Viceregal balls or garden parties. No race meetings, Club dances (no Club!) or European-style shops. And certainly no art exhibitions. He had asked for time to consider the Nawab's offer, and looking back on those days I have come to think that our first stay in Tonk was really only a sort of trial-run, a visit, at the Nawab's invitation, so that we could see what we would be letting ourselves in for if Tacklow took on a full-time job there. Whatever the truth, for my part I couldn't have been more delighted because it meant, among other things, that I would be seeing a new part of the beloved country.

When Tacklow had first gone there I had been interested enough to look up the history of the state, and been charmed to discover that it had been created by the ruler of one of the more powerful and war-like Hindu states who, in India's turbulent past, had presented it as a reward to one of his
condottiere
generals — a Muslim soldier-of-fortune who had won a number of spectacular battles for him, and ended up ruling over a by no means inconsiderable portion of Rajputana with the title of Nawab of Tonk.

The history of the princely states had fascinated me ever since Tacklow had introduced me, as a twelve-year-old, to the first volume of Kipling's
Letters of Marque
, which is an account of the young Kipling's rovings as a youthful newspaper reporter in the ‘Country of the Kings'. And since both Rudyard and Tacklow had made mention of Todd's
Rajasthan
, I had managed to get all four volumes of that fascinating work out of a local library in the course of a school holiday and, having read all of them at breakneck speed, become hooked on Todd
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for life. Though I took a poor view of his dedication to King George the Fourth — the one-time fat and scandalous ‘Prinny'. Todd was obviously riveted by the history and annals of Mewar and the Maharajahs and Ranis of the fabulous Country of the Kings, and could no more resist chronicling their doings than I could resist reading his books.

If Todd could have come back from the grave he would have felt perfectly at home in Tonk, for it was the old Rajasthan, preserved like a fly in amber. A piece of the past, left behind by the receding tide of the Mogul Empire, rather in the manner of some ancient deep-sea shell that has been stranded on the shore by a neap tide. Very little of it spoke of the twentieth century and a great deal of the past. It lay well off the beaten track, and its nearest railway station was Sawai Madhopur, itself a small town where few trains stopped and you had to change trains to get any line that would take you to Delhi or Agra.

The Nawab had sent a couple of cars to meet us at the station, though this was more a polite gesture of greeting than for transport, since Tacklow had informed him that Mother and Sandy would both be driving their own cars, which they had brought from Delhi on the same train. However, we were grateful for the gesture, since it helped lighten our loads and also acted as a guide — one of the Tonk cars going ahead while the other followed in case of accidents which, judging from the state of the
kutcha
(unmade) road, must have occurred only too frequently.

The road from Sawai Madhopur to Tonk wound through miles of barren, waterless and apparently largely uninhabited land, scored all over by dried-up river-beds and stony water-courses which, in the season of the monsoon, would become subject to flash floods and turn into raging
torrents. A land dotted with small, stony hills and sprinkled with camel-thorn, cactus and an occasional kikar-tree whose thin, prickly foliage cast little or no shade. It was not exactly a hospitable country, and I remember that the comments of Mahdoo and Kadera, hill-men both, were far from complimentary. Sandy, too, did not think much of it. But it did not seem hostile to me, for I had always had a particular fondness for the plains: the sense of space and enormous skies — and the silence …

When I think of Tonk, the things that I remember return in disconnected fragments. Sometimes it is a melody that comes back. A dance tune, ‘Just Imagine', that I used to play over and over again on our wind-up gramophone. Sometimes my first sight of the little city, the palace and the bazaar, viewed from the
howdah
of an elephant that the Nawab sent on our very first morning to take us on an exploration of the town. Sometimes it's a new moon, the signal of the end of Ramadan, hanging like a thread of silver in the green of an evening sky; or a row of earthenware
gurrahs
— water-jars — suspended by their narrow necks in the full glare of the blazing sun, from a rope stretched between two kikar -trees. For people still used the old way of cooling their water: by evaporation.

Having a totally un-scientific brain myself, as well as a hopelessly un-mathematical one, I have never understood why this should have worked. I can only say that one of the first things I learned in Tonk is that it
does
. If you fill your water-jar with the available tepid water, and then hang it up somewhere in the open where there is no shade, sufficient water will seep through the porous earthenware to keep the surface damp, and the hot sunlight will do its best to dry that damp. The resulting evaporation does not, as one might suppose, help to warm up the water inside, but chills it. This still sounds pure spinach to me, but it works like a charm and the egghead in your family, aged seven, will almost certainly be able to explain to you
why
it does.