Golden Afternoon (31 page)

Our guest-house was on top of one of the many small, conical hills that abound in Rajputana, and above it, on a slightly higher one, was the No. 1 state guest-house, where VIPs on tour put up, and where the Nawab's senior wife, ‘the Begum' (as opposed to ‘So-and-so Begum') occasionally threw a
zenana
party for the inmates of the women's quarters in the palace. There was another and similar house, where a Major and Mrs Meade lived, and somewhere on the fringes memory suggests a couple called Ferguson — May Ferguson? But I don't remember where
they fit in, or if Mr Ferguson was the AGG from Ajmer that winter. Anyway, that concluded the Raj's section of Tonk. All else was as it must have been in the days when the first Nawab was presented with the territory, built himself a palace and seated himself on the throne.

Our house was the usual flat-roofed, whitewashed bungalow surrounded by a wide verandah with steps leading down from it on to a path that was strewn with
kunkar
— a dark, reddish, sharp-edged species of charcoal that covered all the nearby paths and was said to discourage snakes from entering the bungalows. And so it should, for it was hard and harsh enough to make it very uncomfortable to walk on in anything but stout leather shoes. Not that it was entirely successful as a discourager of snakes: in the early days of Tacklow's tenancy there was a hot night when Tacklow, wearing, he told me, nothing but a towel tied sarong-fashion round his waist, entered his bathroom with the intention of taking a cold dip in the tin tub (modern sanitation had not yet reached Tonk) and found a snake there.

Afterwards he always insisted that it was the backwardness of Tonk and the fact that there was no electricity that saved his life. Because had he been able, by pressing a switch, to flood the room with light from a bulb near the ceiling, he would not have seen the cobra until it was too late. As it was, he was alerted to its presence by the fact that he was carrying an oil lamp — a ‘hurricane
butti
' — and its flaring wick, shining from much lower down, threw the enormously enlarged shadow of the menacing cobra on the wall behind it, as it swayed ominously to and fro, preparing to strike. Tacklow says he stood very still and called softly to Abdul Karim (who in the absence of Kadera — left with us in Kashmir — had returned to serve him on the strict understanding that the service was only temporary), who loaded Tacklow's shotgun and, entering cautiously behind him through a crack of the door, shot the creature's head off.

There was only one way by which it could have entered the bathroom — through the sluice which carried the bathwater away. How it had managed to cross the
kunkar
was a mystery. Abdul Karim said that it had been ‘put there by an enemy' — most probably, in his opinion, the caretaker who had been in charge of the bungalow before Tacklow's arrival and who, according to Abdul, had hoped to be offered a place as the Sahib's bearer himself. Tacklow said that personally he did not see how eliminating the Sahib would help to improve his prospects of
becoming that Sahib's bearer. To which Abdul merely replied darkly that on any normal occasion it would have been he himself who would have entered the
gussel-khana
first.

I used the cobra incident many years later in
Shadow of the Moon
. The very next day Tacklow had a double layer of wire netting fixed over the outer ends of all the bathroom sluices, after which we never saw another snake. Though one day one of the junior Begums was bitten by a cobra, and was treated by the Nawab's senior
hakim
in a fashion that was purely medieval …

A rat was caught (did they, I wonder, keep a supply of them, just in case?) and, after a deep cut had been made on the unfortunate Begum's arm, just above the double puncture marks, the rat was cut open and tied over the wound. This, we were told, was a sovereign remedy for snake-bite. And certainly that Begum lived. Though she very nearly died — not from snake-bite but from blood-poisoning. For it was during the hot weather, when snakes like to slither into cool places like bathrooms, and the corpse of the rat had gone bad in the heat.

I remember being shocked to the core by the fact that such ‘witchdoctor' forms of medicine could possibly have lasted into the enlightened twentieth century, but our doctor laughed and said that behind every instance of such treatments there was sound common sense. The freshly killed rat was the ancient equivalent of a poultice, and acted in the same way — the heat drew off poison. The theory was sound, but it had been left on long enough to go bad, the fault of the hot weather. Interesting.

The Meades offered to give Bets and me riding lessons; an offer which Bets accepted with enthusiasm and I with reluctance. Bets took to it like the proverbial duck to water. But I found that I was as allergic to horses as ever. Or possibly it was the horses that were allergic to me. I struggled with the wretched creatures for a while, probably in the hope that I might suddenly become a superb rider and thereby catch the eye of some dashing cavalry man. But it was no good: I could manage the plodding little hill-ponies — the Kashmiri
tats
— all right, but I was still afraid of proper horses; the animal provided for me sensed this immediately and, despising me as a poor specimen of humanity, treated me with the utmost disdain, refusing to move until it felt like doing so, and just standing insultingly stock-still with one hip negligently thrown out in the manner of a bored fashion model. If I wanted to turn left, it turned right, and if I wanted it
to trot it either broke into a canter or took off for the horizon as though shot from a catapult. Bets continued to ride, but after a few days of this I gave up the whole idea once and for all.

However I did learn to drive a car. Tonk was a marvellous place to do that in, for there was hardly any traffic. The Nawab owned an enormous selection of cars — you could say he collected them — but they seldom left the royal garages. A few of the purdah cars could be seen towards sundown, taking the
zenana
ladies for a drive along the dusty, unmetalled roads to ‘eat the evening air', or members of the court and the local nobility and gentry out to shoot duck and teal on the lake or the river, or partridge and black-buck in the open country. Sometimes one would meet a lorry or a rickety bus taking innumerable passengers and their goods and chattels to some market. But such petrol-propelled traffic as there was was only to be met with in or near Tonk City and its outskirts, and once beyond that the road stretched away to left and right across the empty land, to Sirohi on one side and Sawai Madhopur on the other. Any activity on the roads was apt to be confined to the early morning and the evening, when the air was cooler and the rocks and the little hills threw shadows on the plain; and that was mostly ox-carts or horse-drawn vehicles,
tongas
or
eccers
, the occasional cyclist, and now and again a plodding group of pedestrians from one or other of the small farming communities on the plain.

It was a perfect place to be a learner driver. No traffic, and long, straight roads that seemed to stretch out before one for miles and miles. If there was anyone on the road you could see them from about a mile away, and all you had to do was to start tooting your horn as loudly as possible, whereupon, in the time-honoured manner of India, anyone walking, riding or cycling on the right-hand side of the road would decide that the left-hand side was safer, and vice versa. There would be a rush to change sides, which frequently led to confusion and collision in the middle of the road. But by the time you arrived at the spot, they would have sorted themselves out again, and you tooted gratefully and trundled on.

Driving in such circumstances was a piece of cake. But I was never any good in built-up areas, where there were no rules of the road (there still aren't) and not only was it ‘every man for himself and last across the road is a chicken' but the crowded streets contained swarms of livestock and children, playing or pecking around between the feet of pedestrians and the hooves of horses, as well as sacred Brahmini bulls and t***l
occasional cows to be avoided. I stuck to the empty highways and avoided the town as much as possible, and was fortunate enough to escape running over anything — not even a pi-dog puppy or a hen.

The Nawab proved to be a charmer, and I was not surprised that Tacklow had become so fond of the old man. We, too, became fond of him. He had a curiously pear-shaped head, adorned with a neat turban, and was small, merry and stout, though his tubbiness was partly due to the fact that the
achans
that he habitually wore — those straight, three-quarter-length coats that button down the front and are almost a uniform for middle- and upper-class India — were made of padded silk. I imagine he wore thin white cotton ones during the hot weather, since if he didn't he would have died from heatstroke, but I don't remember ever seeing him in anything but padded silk ones, and I have a vivid recollection of the day on which he arrived at our house wearing a particularly attractive one in dove-coloured silk, scattered all over with a pattern of small flowers.

It was one of the prettiest materials I had seen for a long time, and Mother, forgetting years of experience in the customs of the East, exclaimed in involuntary admiration at the sight of it. Whereupon, despite the fact that it happened to be an unusually cold day, His Highness instantly stripped off the alluring coat — displaying the skimpiest of Aertex vests tucked into a regulation pair of white-cotton jodhpurs — and gallantly presented it to my deeply embarrassed parent. Nothing would induce him to take it back, and he was instructing one of his ADCs to return immediately to the palace and fetch a replacement when Tacklow saved the day by nipping into the bedroom and reappearing with one of Mother's hand-knitted cardigans in a fetching shade of green. This in turn was presented to His Highness, who was enchanted with it, and wore it frequently during the rest of the cold weather.

Mother was equally enchanted with the coat, which she wore for many years, either as a dressing-gown or as a housecoat. When the padded lining wore out, she relined it herself with silk; and I am not at all sure that it isn't still in existence somewhere, probably shut away in one of her many boxes that are sitting in the cellar and which Bets and I have still not got around to sorting through — and I suspect never will. In which case, since things last so much longer than people, it may well turn out to be one of the very last mementoes of a dear old man of whom we were all very fond. And the last, faint echo of something that happened
very long ago on a sun-drenched morning in one of the one-time princely states of Rajasthan whose hereditary powers and revenues were stripped from them years ago by the daughter of a commoner.

At some time during the early days of Tacklow's stay in Tonk, the Nawab had unexpectedly turned up at the house in the cool of the early morning and, finding Tacklow at the breakfast table, had been invited to join him. This had proved a great success and the Nawab had fallen into the habit of coming to breakfast every Sunday morning. It had also become his practice to choose the menu, and by the time Mother, Bets and I arrived in Tonk, this meal had not only achieved banquet status, but had become just as formalized as the lavish Victorian breakfasts that my Kaye grandfather insisted on having served at Upton House.
^*
The only difference was the weirdness of the old Nawab's selection. The meal consisted of no fewer than five courses, the first being porridge, which Tacklow had happened to be eating at that first breakfast, and which His Highness had taken a fancy to — though (like me) he preferred it with sugar instead of salt. Then came tinned salmon, followed by mutton chops, chicken pilau, fried eggs accompanied by tinned sausages (beef ones — pork being unclean food for both Muslims and Hindus), tinned apricots with blancmange made with tinned milk and, to wind up with, hot buttered toast and Oxford marmalade!

Both coffee and tea were served with this gargantuan meal — Mother and Bets preferred tea and Tacklow and I coffee. The Nawab, however, having tried Rose's Lime Juice Cordial with soda, and approved of it, stuck to that. There was not, as at breakfast in Upton House, any question of choice: the Nawab ate his way through every course with undiminished enthusiasm, and expected us to do the same. We had to have a bit of everything, and Sundays became a day on which we skipped lunch! But I look back on those breakfasts with great affection, because that old man was such very good company, and because the meals were always accompanied by a great deal of laughter. And because Mahdoo was a king of cooks whose inventive sauces could make even tinned beef sausages taste delicious. I remember the Nawab telling us once, in a conspiratorial whisper just as he was leaving, how much he looked forward to Sundays. We looked forward to them too. They were the high spot of our week.

His Highness did not come unattended to these Sunday ‘brunches', so we always laid for two or three extra guests. Sometimes it would be one of his sons or grandsons, and sometimes a member of his Council of State, but the one who came most often was his favourite son, the eleven-year-old ‘Nanhi-Mirza'. The name was, I believe, a title given to the heir-apparent and indicated that if the heir, the Sahibzada Saadat Ali Khan, had no son, he would be succeeded by his youngest brother even though there would still be two older ones. The boy was always known as ‘Nunni-Mir', or ‘Nunni', and Mr Meade had been appointed his guardian and English tutor. He was a nice boy; the Meades were very fond of him and the old Nawab doted upon him. But I gathered from the Tonk gossips — notably the Tikka-Sahib who was, I think, from Bhopal — that should Nunni ever succeed out of his turn, the question of his legitimacy would certainly be raised. I never really sorted out the relationships between members of that enormous royal family, since the Nawab was said to have fathered 100 children. Or so his subjects boasted, and I have no doubt it was true. The old man himself professed not to be certain: he said he had lost count.