Golden Afternoon (32 page)

Tonk could be distinctly chilly in mid-winter, and I remember a day when the air was cold enough for Tacklow to have unearthed a suit of brown Harris tweed. It happened to be a Sunday and the Nawab, who as usual was having breakfast with us, was fascinated by the material; he kept on leaning across to sniff at it — I believe the smell of it pleased him even more than the texture — and he was charmed to hear that the material was said to be handwoven in the cottages of crofters in the Isle of Harris in the Hebrides, and that the natural dye and peat-smoke were supposed to give it that pleasant smell. He wanted to know if Tacklow could get him a bolt of the tweed in exactly the same colour as the suit he was wearing. Tacklow wrote off to the Scotch House in London, enclosing a pattern, and in due course the bolt of Harris tweed arrived and was ceremoniously presented to the Nawab, who was simply delighted with it. Some time later, Tacklow inquired when we were going to see him wearing a coat of it, and the old man chuckled and said that he did not think we would ever see
that
. Tacklow, surprised, wanted to know why ever not, and His Highness, rolling about with mirth, said that he had had the material made into two suits of pyjamas.

Well, I suppose they were beautifully warm in the cold weather. But just imagine how
scratchy
they must have been! Unless, of course, he had
them lined with silk, in which case it would have been a lot like going to sleep in a Turkish bath.

Harris tweed was not the only thing of ours that he coveted. We had acquired a seven-seater Hudson that was large enough for the whole family (including Kadera and Mahdoo and an enormous amount of luggage) to travel in. One look at this impressive vehicle and His Highness lost his heart to it. He walked round and round it, patting it, opening and shutting the doors, stepping in and out of it and trying all the seats in turn, like Goldilocks trying the Three Bears' chairs and beds, and finally getting his driver to put the hood up and down (it was an open tourer, much in vogue in the twenties). I could see Mother getting distinctly nervous and I knew she was visualizing Tacklow making a present of it to the Nawab: she was fond of the Hudson, and knew that the seven-seater models were going out of fashion and were few and far between, so that her chances of getting a replacement were slim.

The old man tore himself away from it at last and only about an hour later, when he was about to take his leave, did he ask Mother if she would consider selling it to him. He was prepared, he said, to pay her twice the price she (or rather, Tacklow!) had paid for it — or three times, if twice was not sufficient compensation for its loss. He wouldn't even
consider
Mother's suggestion that we try ordering a brand-new seven-seater car from the makers on his behalf, which would do him much better, since our car had already clocked up a good deal of mileage
^*
— not to mention wear and tear on the tyres and the chassis. No, a new one was not what he wanted. The one he wanted was
this
one, and no other. So did Mother; and since she was not to be persuaded, His Highness left sorrowfully, giving the Hudson a final pat as he passed.

‘Oh dear — !' said Tacklow, ‘I'm afraid you'll have to let him have it.'

‘No, I
shan't
!' retorted Mother, adding bitterly that she knew Tacklow too well to think that he would dream of accepting the Nawab's terms. In which she was right of course, for the rules against officials of the Raj accepting gifts other than perishable ones such as fruit, sweetmeats and flowers were very strict, though they were broken only too often. But not by my darling papa, who having been born honest was stuck with it. He simply did not know how to be anything else.

He wouldn't think of selling anything to his friend the Nawab, who
was also his employer, at a profit. That would not only be taking advantage of the old man, but would be seen by the entire population of Tonk, and certainly all the members of His Highness's enormous family, as a slick piece of bribery. So since Mother refused to part with the Hudson there was no more to be said. His Highness continued to take breakfast with us every Sunday, and each time he would ask to see the Hudson and give its bonnet an affectionate pat, as though to remind it (and us) that he hadn't forgotten it.

The whole thing began to wear Mother down, but as she knew perfectly well that we couldn't afford to part with the Hudson at its market price, and that we needed a car of that size in order to be able, when occasion demanded, to transport the lot of us — four Kayes (five if and when Bill was with us), Kadera and Mahdoo, plus our combined luggage which included Pozlo's outsize cage — she remained firm and refused to part with the car. Even when it began to look as though the weekly breakfast parties, which had been such sociable occasions, were now more in the nature of an excuse for the Nawab to take a fond look at the far from attractive object that he had fallen in love with. However, in the end a solution was found — possibly by the young Nunni-Mir, who shared his grandfather's passion for cars …

If it was only a question of size, surely it would be better for Mother to have
two
cars at her disposal rather than one seven-seater? (After all, her three children could all drive, and two normal-sized cars would take eight people comfortably and ten with a slight squash.) H. H.'s garages were literally stuffed with cars, all of them kept in A
I
-plus condition by an army of chauffeurs and their assistants, and Mother was invited to come to the palace to have a conducted tour of the garages, pick out any two cars she liked from the collection, and to do a straight swap: the seven-seater Hudson in exchange for any two other cars. Even Tacklow could hardly find fault with that.

Mother duly inspected the incredible array of cars, and heroically resisting the only chance she was ever likely to have to own a gorgeous Rolls Royce and/or a Bentley, selected a second-hand Wolseley and a small Morris Oxford. She drove the Wolseley and either Bets or I, or Bill whenever he spent a leave with us, drove the Morris Oxford. The Nawab's head chauffeur drove the Hudson away to the palace, the Nawab sitting happily in state in the centre of the back seat, smiling like the Cheshire Cat. Everyone was happy.

Bill and three of his Frontier Force friends, Phil Edwards, Campbell Harris and ‘Wee Andrew' Skeen, son of General Sir Andrew and Lady Maggie, arrived to spend Christmas with us, and one of the ministers took them out very early one morning, long before it was light, to sit up for a leopard that had been preying on the goats and cattle of a small village out in the
mufussal
and terrorizing the villagers, who complained that it took their animals by daylight and in full sight of them, showing no fear of man or of firearms. They were afraid it was a demon, for though the headman and the local
shikari
had both made several attempts to shoot it, their bullets had had no effect upon it. The possibility that both the headman and the
shikari
might be rotten shots had apparently not occurred to them. What
had
was that it might turn on them and become a man-eater; and hearing that there were some young sahibs holidaying in Tonk they hoped that they would be good enough to get rid of this demon for them.

A goat would be staked out as bait at a spot where there were trees in which
machans
could be built, so that the sahibs could sit up there to await the arrival of the leopard which, being fearless, would arrive with the dawning. And perhaps the bullets of the
Angrezi-log
would have more effect than their own … Thus the headman, Bill and friends, the minister and his
shikari
, all duly sat up in the
machans
— rough and ready platforms up among the branches that can be easily reached by any leopard, since those beautiful spotted cats are expert tree climbers — a fact that Bill confessed later that he kept on thinking about, for this was his very first taste of
shikar
. However, all went well, for the leopard had obviously come to despise the villagers whose goats and cattle provided it with such plentiful meals. Drawn by the tethered and very vocal goat, it strolled up, well after first light, to inspect this possible breakfast, and Bill shot it.

The entire party, plus corpse of leopard, turned up at the house, very pleased with themselves; and Mother photographed Bill and the ‘demon' on the
kunkar
-covered drive in front of the house. If I can find a copy of that snapshot, it will be included in this book. But please, no letters from irate and virtuous ‘animal rights' protesters. Just think first. Count twenty, slowly and then stop and consider. In those days — and until the very end of the Raj — the tiger and the leopard, the elephant, the black-buck and the white rhino, and indeed every species of animal — even the great bow-head whale — were in no danger of extinction. There
were any number of them, and far, far fewer humans. It is only of late that the appalling population explosion of one species,
ours
, has led to every peasant who can afford one reaching for his gun and axe and a box of matches, in order to kill everything that eats his crops or preys on his livestock, and to chop down or set on fire the jungle that was its natural habitat. Did I say something of the sort in the first volume of my autobiography? Oh well, it bears repeating.

The main thing I remember about Christmas Day was that a
fu
-
fu
band from the town (hired for our benefit by one of the ministers) appeared before the bungalow in the dawn, to serenade us on our festival day. A very kindly thought, and much appreciated — though personally, jerked out of sleep by the incredible din that any
fu
-
fu
band can produce without even trying, I was not as grateful as I should have been. The band was accompanied by a few
nautch
-girls, who danced for us in the little
bara-durri
— the audience hall (see snapshot) that was attached to the house. One of the girls — she could not have been more than fourteen or fifteen — was a
very
pretty thing indeed, but the others were elderly and fat, and not in the least like my romantic idea of an Indian dancing girl. There was also, as an added attraction, a dancing bear and its bear-leader, which successfully ruined the whole show for me.

I had seen dancing bears before (there have always been too many of them in India), but only as a child, and Punj-ayah had never allowed us to go too near them. This one was the first I had ever approached. It was a sad and ragged bear, whose fur was matted and thick with dust, and as I came close to it I saw with horror that the lead chain, one end of which was held in its owner's hand, hung from an iron ring that had been thrust through a hole pierced through its nose, and that the hole was raw and bleeding. The bear reared up at a signal, and tottered about on its hind legs in time to the beat of a drum, and when it tried to stop its owner jerked angrily on the chain and the poor thing screamed and put its forepaws over its sore nose. I shrieked at the bear-leader, using every bad word that I could think of, and tore off up the path to the house in floods of tears to fetch Tacklow and beg him to
do
something — buy the bear, or have its owner arrested, or fined, or, preferably, beaten until he screamed as the poor bear had screamed. But to do
something
.

The bewildered bear-leader found himself on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing from the sahib that he probably never forgot, and Tacklow (who really should have been a vet or an animal trainer) sent for warm
water and swabs, a bottle of Dettol and a pot of some soothing ointment, and while the bear's owner stared in astonishment, set about bathing the poor creature's nose, patting it dry and smoothing on ointment, all of which the bear accepted in the spirit in which it was done, without attempting to snap or even wince away from this strange but kindly hand. It just stood there as though it had known Tacklow all its life, and knew that this human could be trusted — probably the only one it was ever to meet that could, poor creature. I remember that Tacklow talked to the bear the entire time, and that it actually appeared to be listening.

Turning his attention again upon the bear's astounded owner (plus, by this time, a large and interested audience), Tacklow demanded to know if he had never heard the tale of the cruel bear-owner, and launched into a lurid tale concerning a man who in the days when Raja Jaichand was King of Benares made his living by travelling the country with a monkey and a bear that he had captured in the forest and taught, by means of great cruelty, to dance and do tricks. Then one day, while the captive creatures moaned and wept because they had been given nothing to drink for many hours and were parched with thirst, their owner settled down to sleep away the hot hours of the day in the shade of a mango tope without noticing that on the far side of a tree to which he had chained his animals there was a small pile of stones and branches that was a shrine of the Jungle Mother, Banaspati Mâî. The goddess, too, was asleep, for it was the hottest time of the day, but the moans of the bear and the weeping of the monkey woke her, and when she heard their tale and learned that they had been given neither food nor drink since the previous day, she enlisted the help of Hanuman, the monkey god, who called upon his people to rescue and avenge their brother, while she herself did the same for the bear. The
bandar-log
(the monkey-people) stole the keys from the sleeping man and, having released the suffering creatures, took their erstwhile owner captive in their place, chaining him and dragging him away into the forest, where they and the bear-folk treated him as he had treated their brothers, making him dance and do tricks for their amusement and biting or clawing him when he stumbled or fell or did not instantly obey them. They denied him food and drink for days at a time until his tongue turned black and he could not speak or scream for the dryness in his throat, and became mad with thirst. And always the bears and the
bandar-log
sat around in their hundreds, watching him and ordering him to dance for them — not as men dance, but as the
bandar-log
dance, on
all fours, just as he had made his monkeys and the bear dance on their hind legs, burning them with hot irons when they tired. And so for many years they kept him prisoner, and only when at last he became too old and feeble to dance for them did they turn him loose to die of hunger in the forest …