Golden Afternoon (42 page)

I don't remember for certain what it was that pushed the harassed household to the breaking point, but at a guess it was probably an incident that old Mrs Bevan-Petman described to me with considerable bitterness, and which after a lapse of several years still rankled: the sight of a large dog-monkey sitting on the bough of a pine tree crooning to itself as it carefully pulled to pieces a satin and lace petticoat that she had bought only an hour before at a sale of embroidery by the pupils of a Mission School in Kalimpong, and had left for not more than five minutes on one of the verandah tables, still wrapped. I bet that was the final straw, and I can just see Mrs B.-P. running screaming to her husband demanding vengeance. She was not a patient lady. Anyway, whatever the cause, it was sufficient to send her husband reaching for his gun …

Bevan-Petman senior was known to be one of the best shots in India. But until now, however severe the provocation, he had never even considered shooting one of the
bandar-log
, for the simple reason that a great many Hindu citizens of India regarded them as sacred — or at least semi-sacred — by reason of being under the special protection of Hanuman. But by this time, he had had it. If the opposition wanted war they should have it, and from then on he shot monkeys. With, I may say, the approval of his servants; particularly his Muslim head
mali
, who, given any encouragement, would have started shooting them long ago.

The
bandar-log
took a little time to realize that they were up against serious opposition, but as their casualties mounted the message finally got across, and their raids on the Bevan-Petman estate got fewer and
farther between until, at long last (I believe it took a full year) they ceased altogether, and there came a time when for several months at a stretch not a single member of the tribe was either seen or heard on the premises. The B.-P.s congratulated themselves on their victory and were a trifle scornful towards fellow-sufferers who flinched from copying their tactics. But they congratulated themselves too soon.

One day, and without any warning, an army of monkeys descended
en masse
from the forested hillside that lay beyond the Bevan-Petmans' domain, and attacked the house. It was, insisted my host, a carefully thought-out exercise, for they had obviously encircled the place before launching their attack. ‘They came at me from every direction, screaming, grunting and shrieking defiance. It was terrifying,' he said, and the humans took to their heels and rushed for the house, though not in time to prevent a number of monkeys getting in through doors and french windows that had been left open. Mrs B.-P., the bearer and the head
mali
could all handle a shotgun, and they and Mr B. -P. ran from window to window, firing, while the rest of the household snatched any weapon they could and laid about them with polo-sticks, squash racquets, walking sticks and anything else that came to hand. Mr B.-P. described it as being exactly like a Tom Mix cowboy film, in which the Indians attack some lonely farmhouse, and that it should have been uproariously funny — if it hadn't been so frightening.

He said the creatures kept it up for what seemed like ages, but was probably not more than the inside of an hour, and then they called it off as suddenly as they had started it. One minute they were still fighting to get in at the windows, shrieking, biting and clawing, and the next they had vanished into the forest. Their casualties had been heavy, and later that day the victors buried the vanquished in a mass grave in the orchard. And from that day on, no monkey had been known to come within several hundred yards of the Bevan-Petmans' grounds. Personally, I think the whole story is a very scary one. There is something very frightening about animals having the same kind of brains as humans — and using them in the same way. I wasn't sorry to leave that house.

Anyone who wants to know more about Simla's
bandar-log
, and their temple on the crest of Jacko, can find it in a book by Raja Bhasin, entitled
Simla, the Summer Capital of British India
, which contains dozens of stories about that once fabled little town.

We left Simla a few days after my twenty-first birthday, to drive to Kashmir; Mother at the wheel of the big car, with Tacklow and most of the luggage aboard, and Bets and I taking turns to drive the small one, with Kadera to keep an eye on us. I don't remember much about that journey, except that the monsoon rains had been heavy that year, particularly in the north, and the floods were out in the Kashmir valley, though not too badly to hold us up.

That journey was to become so familiar and, much as it often scared me, so dear, that sometimes still, on nights when I cannot sleep, I drive along that road in my imagination, having first decided which one I will take, for there are three ways into the delectable valley. The one by Abbottabad, which I have already described; the one via Murree, and the last via Sialkot and Jammu and the Banihal Pass, which I still think is the best one to approach it by. Because, after you have zig-zagged up that treeless mountainside, with its interminable hairpin bends — and its frequent horrific reminders, in the way of wreckage strewn across the barren slopes far below you, of what can happen if you take them too fast, or if your brakes fail — and when you have negotiated the long dark, dripping tunnel at the top, you suddenly come out on to a wonderful panoramic view of the valley spread out at your feet, far, far below you, green and blossoming and beautiful, ringed with snow-peaks and looking, after the bleakness on the far side of the tunnel, like a skylark's view of Eden.

I don't remember which route we took that year, but I'm pretty certain that it can't have been via the Banihal, because driving up that fearsome road would have scared me stiff and I couldn't possibly
not
have remembered it! But I remember that old Ahamdoo Siraj had not failed us, and the houseboat he had hired for us was ready and waiting, half-way between Gagribal Point and the Dāl Gate, which is the place where the
Jhelum river flows into the Dāl through a water gate that can be opened or closed according to need. The houseboat he had rented for us was the H. B.
Carlton
, which was, at that time, one of the larger boats on the lakes. It seemed enormous to me, and I couldn't see how on earth it was going to negotiate the narrow waterways and canals that led out to Chota Nageem, where Ahamdoo had arranged a more permanent mooring for us.

Bill had managed to get a few days' leave in which to come up and meet us, and we found him waiting at the Dāl Gate, where we all piled into shikarras and were rowed across to the H. B.
Carlton
.

We had been afraid that Bill would have brought his fiancée along to meet us, for the fuss and bother of arrival after a long tiring day was hardly the setting that any prospective in-law would have chosen for a first meeting. Fortunately, however, he had not been able to see her himself, for she had been out when he arrived unexpectedly early — several hours earlier than we had — and called briefly at her parents' boat. He had left a message saying that he would be along later in the evening to take her out to dine and dance, and now he bathed and changed into his dinner-jacket, and having asked the
manji
to call up a
shikarra
and arrange for a
tonga
, apologized to Mother for having to go out on our first evening together, and was rowed away to the Dāl Gate.

The next few minutes remain fixed in my memory because it taught me a sharp lesson about making judgements. Bill had looked far from cheerful, and I wondered if Mother, who was never very quick on the uptake, had noticed it. She was leaning out of the window watching him go, looking as all those thousands of women must have looked, back in the dark days of the 1914–18 war, as they watched the troop-trains that were carrying their men away to the battlefields of France and Flanders pull out of a railway station. She had seen so little of him as a child or a schoolboy or a cadet; and even less of him as a soldier. Now she was going to lose him to an unknown girl. It cannot have been a happy moment for her. But all she said as she watched him leave was ‘I do hope she'll like us.' Not ‘I hope we'll like her,' you notice.

Mother and I had never got on very well. Bill, her adored firstborn and her only son, was her pride and joy, while Bets, as the baby of the family, was her darling and her pet. I came somewhere in the middle and as far as she was concerned didn't count for very much — which had never worried me because I came first with Tacklow, first of his children
I mean. Mother came first with him. I must have been about sixteen or seventeen when it first dawned on me that my mother, instead of being a fount of wisdom (as, in the manner of most children, I had imagined her to be) was in fact a rather silly woman. For example, she confessed one day that she had not wanted another baby while Bill was still so small, and that she had done everything she could think of to get rid of me — ‘The sort of things all your married girlfriends seem to know about and advise you to do,' said Mother blithely; adding with a distinct tinge of irritation that she had done everything they advised, but none of it had worked.

What a thing to tell me of all people! Yet she would have been horrified if anyone had accused her of being tactless or unkind in telling that tale to the least-loved of her brood, when all she thought she was doing was having a grown-up talk with a daughter who was now old enough to realize babies were not discovered under gooseberry bushes or brought by storks. There was no malice in Mother. She just didn't think — or not very often. Yet seeing her face as she watched Bill leaving us, and hearing her express the hope that his girl would like us, I was proud of her; for I know that if I'd been in her shoes I wouldn't have been able to say that! It also made me realize that that sort of thinking cancelled out any amount of silliness, as well as explaining why Tacklow was still so much in love with her after all these years.

But in the event she didn't have to worry for long, for in considerably less than half an hour a
shikarra
bumped alongside and Bill catapulted in through the dining-room windows, beaming from ear-to-ear in the manner of the Cheshire Cat, and bursting with good news. It seemed that he had arrived at his fiancée's houseboat, clutching the small velvet box that contained the engagement ring, only to be fended off before he had had a chance to present it. For Bertha had fallen in love with somebody else and no longer wished to marry Bill. She had been incoherent with apologies, and Bill, torn between relief and embarrassment, had apparently managed to blurt out something about hoping that she would be happy and that they could remain friends, before hastily removing himself.

Tacklow was asked to take charge of the ring again until such time as Bill could flog it, which he subsequently did, at a loss, as no one who has ever been in the same position will be surprised to learn. Mother shed a few relieved tears and Bill celebrated by going solo to the Nedou's Hotel dance where, inevitably, he met yet another, ‘absolutely smashing girl'.
‘The trouble with me,' confessed Bill at breakfast next morning, ‘is that I fall in love with every girl I meet, and I don't know what to do about it!' ‘Keep off the drink,' advised Tacklow drily. But except on that one inexplicable occasion, drink was not, and never would be, a problem with Bill, for the simple reason that he could not hold it. A blessing in disguise if ever there was one.

The matter of his nuptials having been settled to everyone's satisfaction, Bill returned in good spirits to his battery, and the H. B.
Carlton
, which was to be our temporary home for the next few weeks, was poled out to the
ghat
that Ahamdoo had hired for us a mile or so away, not far from the Nageem Bagh lake.

One of the great charms of living on a houseboat in Kashmir used to be that you could move your home, plus your entire family and its belongings, from place to place as the whim took you — always provided that you had made sure that there would be a
ghat
available for you to tie up to at your journey's end. No one can really appreciate the charm of Srinagar and its chain of lakes until they have sat at ease on the flat roof of their boat and watched the world go by as a team of stout Kashmiris (or if their boat is small enough, their
manji
and one or two of his relations) pole them through green willow-bordered waterways, spangled with lily-pads and the brilliant, flashing jewel colours of kingfishers, to emerge into bright sunlight and find themselves moving grandly through the main street of one of the outlying suburbs, for here, as in Venice, many of the streets are replaced by canals. I had passed this way often in a
shikarra
but never before from the vantage-point of a houseboat roof, and it was like watching a play from a seat in the front of a dress circle.

Every houseboat has a ‘cookboat' in which the
manji
(who usually doubles as the cook) lives with his family, and has his own ‘working'
shikarra
in which the staff can go shopping and generally fetch or carry. This last is a strictly utility craft and does not boast padded seats or a canopy, as the ‘taxi'
shikarras
do, and when a houseboat is on the move, it is trailed behind the cookboat which follows behind the houseboat. So we made a stately procession as we moved to the rhythmic chant of the men who were poling us. These poles are enormously long and must be exceedingly heavy, but they handle them with the ease of long practice, dropping them into the water at the front of the houseboat, and walking back along the duckboards pushing them, until by the time they reach
the end of the boat there is only a scant yard of wood left above the water for them to push with their shoulders, before hauling the great, dripping poles out and walking forward, trailing them, to repeat the process.

Our floating home glided us past an ancient mosque, shaded by chenar trees and fronted by a wide flight of stone steps that ended in the water; past a little Hindu temple whose tall, pointed roof glittered blindingly in the bright sunlight, because it had recently been retiled with plates of tin taken from the sides of kerosene tins, which may sound unromantic, but in fact looked wonderful. An excellent lunch was served as usual, in the middle of all this, but Mother, who had been making pencil sketches all morning, became aware that there was some slight hitch in the proceedings and a certain amount of whispering in the pantry between courses. She asked if anything was wrong. No, no, said the
manji
— it was nothing. A slight inconvenience only. His wife was in labour, that was all. They had not expected it for another week, it was a pity that it happened today, but there was nothing for the Lady-Sahib to worry about.