Golden Afternoon (35 page)

It was the custom for Delhi hostesses to give large dinner parties prior to the Viceregal Ball, and although I don't remember who my hostess was, I do remember that her house was in Old Delhi, not far from Maiden's Hotel and the Kudsia Bagh, that there were two unexpected guests who had arrived in Delhi only that day — I think relations — and
since there were not enough dining-room chairs to go round, an extra two were hastily brought down from the bedrooms or wherever, and that I, as the most junior member of the party, was given one of them, a cane-bottomed chair of local manufacture.

I enjoyed that dinner party. My partner was a young man I knew, and the one on the other side was a cheerful and chatty type, and the conversation flowed like Tennyson's brook. It was only when the meal was over and our hostess rose, signalling that the ladies would now remove themselves to drink coffee in the drawing-room and queue up for the dressing-tables and the bathrooms on the upper floor, that disaster struck.

Turning from left to right and back again, to talk to one or other of the fellow guests I was seated between, I had not noticed (it had not occurred to me to even think of it), that those glittering little daisies had worked their way through the holes in the basketwork seat of my chair. It was only when I attempted to rise, and found that I couldn't, that I realized what had happened. And by that time it was too late, for one of those gallant young men had sprung forward and helpfully jerked my chair away. There was a rending noise, and I stood up. But with a large, blank, daisyless patch on my behind and between sixty or seventy glittering daisies strewn all over the carpet. One of life's darker moments.

Mother shrieked in horror and my hostess in sympathy, while
khitmatgars
and guests scrabbled around picking up the twinkling pieces of the fallen flowers. But it was no good; the dress was a total write-off and there was no way I could go on to the Viceregal Ball wearing that ruin, since apart from that daisyless patch on its seat, the
crěpe de Chine
had been ripped in several places, giving the assembled company a private view of my petticoat and camiknickers. There was nothing for it but to streak for home and change into another dress. One of my fellow guests nobly offered to run me back to my tent on the race course and I accepted the offer thankfully; once there, I changed hurriedly into the green-satin-and-dyed-mosquito-netting confection that had already received an Hon. Mensh. in the social columns — and which anyway, suited me a lot better than those daisies — and we arrived, late and panting, well after the remainder of our party, but otherwise in good shape.

That was my first look at the finished and furnished Viceroy House and I thought it an enormous improvement on the old Viceregal Lodge in Old Delhi. It was the most magnificent building; something out of a
fairy-tale, with its sweeping stairway of white marble — open to the sky. Its huge corridors lined with uniformed men of the Viceroy's Bodyguard of tall splendid Sikhs, all of whom in their towering turbans looked to be at least seven or eight feet high. There were not only flowers in the Mogul gardens, but in every room and all the long corridors, reflecting themselves, together with the dancing guests, in the black marble walls of the great ballroom, which had been polished until they resembled sheets of black looking-glass. I could see myself in them waltzing to the strains of ‘Always' or ‘Alice Blue Gown' and laughing because life was such tremendous fun — in spite of the ruination of my first expensive evening dress, and having to arrive late at the ball. Tacklow used to be fond of quoting a verse from
The Ingoldsby Legends
, Barham's translation of Horace's ‘
Eheu fugaces, … Postume, Postume!
' ‘Years glide away, and are lost to me, lost to me!' except that they are not lost to me. That ball in the new Viceroy's House is still, with much else, a glittering fragment that remains clear and bright in my memory.

It was in that same cold weather season that one of the many practical jokes, with which Sir Edwin Lutyens had booby-trapped his Viceroy's palace, went off with startling success on the occasion of the first New Delhi Viceregal garden party. Sir Edwin had decorated each corner of the roofs of the two wings of the house with enormous shallow bowls of red sandstone on short stems, each one standing in a marble, or possibly sandstone saucer. The bowls were in fact fountains which, when turned on, filled up with water which brimmed over and fell in a silver veil into the saucers below, from where it was recycled to fill the bowls again, or else rerouted to water the gardens. I had seen them tried out on a hot still day the year before, and thought how very pretty they looked, and what an original and brilliant idea they were.

Brilliant, my Aunt Fanny! I don't believe for a moment that the old boy didn't know exactly what would happen, and probably regretted not being there to laugh his head off when it did. For half-way through that particular garden party, a light breeze got up …

Well, I don't need to describe what happened, you can visualize it for yourself. All those pretty, frilly, diaphanous silks and muslin confections, those fabulous embroidered saris and the elegant wide-brimmed hats, the crisp, starched muslin turbans, the top-hats, and the gaudy uniforms of the ADCs on the stretch of garden nearest the house, scattering like leaves in an autumn gale, and stampeding for cover.

Mother, Bets and I spent a lovely three weeks in New Delhi. But back in Tonk, tragedy had struck darling Tacklow. He had put Pozlo back into his cage after his usual evening walk, but for once forgot to put the cover over it, which he normally did after sunset, since Pozlo preferred to sleep in the dark. Just at that moment one of the Nawab's relatives had dropped in to pay an informal call on him, and Tacklow merely closed the cage door and hurried out to greet his visitor. The caller did not stay very long, and having seen him into his car, and watched it leave, Tacklow came back into the drawing-room and was about to call for the lamps to be lit when he heard a sudden frantic squawk from Pozlo, and hurrying into the dining-room (where the doors, like all those in the bungalow, were set wide, for the weather was beginning to warm up) saw that there was a wild cat clawing at the cage and that Pozlo was lying on the floor of it. The cat streaked out of the room but Pozlo was dead … He had gone to sleep as always, with his head tucked between his wings, on the perch nearest the top of his cage, and by a sad stroke of bad luck, too near the bars of his cage. The sun had gone down and dusk was gathering in the rooms, and he had not heard the cat, which had clawed at him with a taloned paw. It was sheer chance that one of those talons had pierced the back of Pozlo's fluffy little head, and killed him instantly — he had only had time for that one squawk as he died.

It is almost impossible not to grow fond of an animal or a bird that obviously dotes upon you, and Pozlo had made it plain from the start where his heart and devotion belonged. No one could have resisted such patent adoration, and Tacklow became devoted to that endearing little bunch of green feathers. When he had had to leave us in Kashmir and go down to Rajputana, he had insisted on taking Pozlo with him — ‘to keep me company'. And Pozlo had done just that. And now he was gone.

Tacklow was devastated. I really think he could not have been as shocked and bereft if it had been one of his children who had been killed. At first he couldn't believe it, and tried to revive the little bird with brandy, and when he realized that there was nothing he could do, he fetched his gun, went out to look for the wild cat which had retreated to the rock-strewn waste land behind the kitchen quarters, and shot it. Even though he liked cats. He cried for Pozlo as, more than forty years later, I too was to cry bitterly over the death of an even smaller piece of fluff
and feathers — a little budgerigar named Hamlet whom I had adopted practically from the egg, and who, after a few years of devoted companionship, I had to have put down, because he had acquired a cancerous growth that was killing him painfully. I remembered Tacklow that day, and I knew how he must have felt: except that it had been much worse for him, for he must have been so lonely and Pozlo had been such an adoring companion — spending most of the working day perched on his shoulder, snuggled up close to the curve of his neck, from which vantage point he would reach up occasionally to nibble lovingly at Tacklow's ear, or growl reprovingly and inquire, when anyone else came into the room, ‘
Now
what?' (a phrase I am afraid he had picked up in his early days from me, when I was busy and did not welcome interruption).

In spite of being born and spending the first years of my life in India, I still had no idea what a hot weather in the plains can be like — let alone a hot weather in the plains of Rajputana. It was something that I was about to find out from personal experience; for though Tacklow's contract was exceedingly generous on the matter of leave (to all intents and purposes allowing him, as far as I could see, to take as much as he liked, whenever he felt like it), certain matters connected with the state
and
needing his attention had cropped up, and until they were sorted out and settled, it was impossible for him to leave Tonk. And as Mother would not go without him, and we could not go without her, we all stayed on well into the hot-weather months.

It was an experience that I would be called upon to endure many times in the future, and one that I never got used to. But this was not only the first time, but quite the worst, largely due to the fact that there was no electricity in Tonk. Therefore no fans, no fridge (they hadn't been invented yet), no ice. And in place of sixty-watt bulbs, there were only kerosene lamps and the occasional Petromax, both of which hissed and flared and generated enough heat to make the hot rooms a great deal hotter.

Outside, the sun blazed down out of a cloudless sky that was not blue, as it is during the months of the cold weather, but a curious washed-out steel-grey; and during most of the day, between an hour after the sun rose and an hour before it set, the land seemed completely deserted. No humans, no animals, no birds. The only thing that moved was the landscape, the earth itself, that danced and jigged and quivered in the heat-haze, and an occasional dust-devil that, snatched up by some wandering breath of air, whirled across the stony ground and died again. Even the nights were not black, but a thin, washed-out grey, and every now and again one would see the horizon begin to darken threateningly and know that another dust-storm was about to blot out the scorching land.

We sat the heat out for weeks in Tonk, and then the
Lou
began to blow, and life became bearable.

The
Lou
is a hot wind that blows across Rajputana in the months before the monsoon breaks and, but for the
kus-kus tatties
, it would merely add to the discomforts of hot weather. But Mother Nature has thoughtfully provided a weapon against it. The
kus-kus
, whose roots, woven into a curtain and hung in any open doorway where there is a through draught and kept soaked with water, cool the hot air with dangerous efficiency. Dangerous because unlike a modern air conditioner you cannot control its temperature; when the thermometer in your verandah is registering a hundred and fifteen degrees in the shade, the inside rooms can easily drop to a mere sixty or seventy — which can lead to a severe chill on the liver, if you don't watch it.

We fell into the hot-weather routine that entails spending every day in the dimness of a closed and shuttered house which, when the
Lou
is blowing, can be beautifully cool. Too cool in fact for the Residency doctor, whose HQ was, as far as I remember, Ajmer, but who visited us at intervals and insisted that we wear cummerbunds to protect us from getting chills on the liver. As soon as the sun neared the horizon and the shadows began to stretch out long and blue on the hot dust, we would emerge like troglodytes into the last of the daylight, to walk or drive and make the most of the cooler evening air. Every door and window in the house was then opened wide, and our beds were carried out to the
bara-durri
, where, under our mosquito-nets, we would spend the night in comparative coolness. But at the first blink of dawn we would wake and hurry indoors; and before the sun rose every door and window would be closed again and every split-cane
chik
(blind) on the verandah unrolled to its fullest extent, in an attempt to keep as much as we could of the night's coolness trapped indoors.

In the late spring of 1929, in order, I imagine, that Tacklow could make himself familiar with the affairs of Tonk, he returned to Simla, taking us with him. So Bets and I, who had been living for this day, saw again the small hill town in which we had both been born, and where we had spent so many happy summers of our childhood.

This time we did not, as in the old days, take the little train that puffs and chugs its way laboriously up the interminable twists and turns of the railway track that links Kalka, on the fringes of the burning plains, with
the cool summer capital of the Raj, but drove up instead in the two cars, which we had arranged to leave in a couple of garages below the Cecil Hotel in Simla — the rule still held that no cars except those of the Viceroy and the Commander-in-Chief were allowed in the summer capital.

Every foot of that road was dear and familiar, and I drove up it with a lump in my throat and mentally singing Alleluias at the top of my voice. The road on which Emily Eden, Kipling, Henry and John Lawrence, and many a Governor-General of the East India Company (and, later, Viceroy of the Raj) and my own grandfather and father in their youth had travelled on, in
tongas
or palanquins, in the days before the railway was built, still, for the most part, ran parallel to the track, rising up slowly from the hot lands, along bare hillsides where nothing grew but sun-scorched grass and tall clumps of candelabra cactus. Kipling, who travelled on that road many times, has described it in a number of his stories and verses, and it has not changed much since his day; or mine.