Golden Afternoon (43 page)

Mother was appalled. The very idea of that unfortunate girl having a baby in the overcrowded cookboat, with no privacy at all, and while it was being poled by hired coolies, and her husband and his brother were cooking a three-course meal for us, and various members of her family were falling over each other helping to wash dishes —! The boat must be pulled into the bank and moored at once and the coolies sent home and no more cooking must be done until the baby arrived and it was certain that all was well with its mother. We could easily stay here until then, and send for coolies at a later date.

It was the
manji
's turn to be horrified. He wouldn't dream of stopping the boat for such a trivial reason. It would be
shuram ki bhat
^*
and his wife would be terribly upset to think that she was the cause of it. What would people say? He was plainly shocked to the core, and Mother had to give in, though she spent an anxious day and night. We arrived safely at our moorings, having been served tea
en route
at the normal time, and dinner (four courses) on the dot. There was no further word from the cookboat but Mother did not sleep well, wondering if she should send for the nearest woman doctor. She need not have worried. The morning dawned cloudless and bright, and the first thing we saw when we looked
anxiously at the cookboat was an enchanting baby boy, roughly the size of a small cottage loaf, sitting propped up on the prow of the cookboat, wrapped in a gaily coloured blanket, wearing a red and gold cap on his head and looking as chipper as a cricket.

Our
ghat
turned out to be on a spur of land that was almost an island, on which the rich Indian who owned it had started to build a two-storey house where he and his family could spend the summer months. But when it was almost finished, something must have happened to make him change his mind, for he abandoned it, and rented out the land as a
ghat
instead. The unfinished house acquired the reputation of being haunted, though no one knew why. The only reason why we never entered it was because the sun, rain and snow of many years had played havoc with it and made it too dangerous a place to go wandering around in. Willows, poplars, weeds and wild roses had grown up around it, and there were several large chenar trees and an ancient wild cherry that must have been there long before the house was built.

The mooring itself was on a quiet backwater known as Chota Nageem (small Nageem), separated from the larger lake of that name only by the Nageem Bagh Bridge and the main road that leaves Srinagar to circle the Dāl and touch, in doing so, no fewer than four of the gardens with which the Great Moguls gilded the lily that is — that was — Kashmir. And since the entire island was included in the fee that was paid for our
ghat
, we found ourselves in possession of enough space to accommodate at least three more houseboats. Which was our good fortune, because the only drawback to having one's houseboat moored at Nageem itself was that even at that date it had become much too popular, and by now was getting grossly overcrowded. There were places where cookboats were moored parallel to and far too near their houseboats, which led to a certain amount of friction between the holidaying occupiers. One of them, goaded into action, sent a crisply worded letter of complaint to his next-door neighbour, pointing out that her
masalchi
had taken to flinging the dirty water in which he had been washing her dishes straight into his drawing-room windows, and that this practice must now cease. Since he signed his letter ‘Russell of Liverpool', the lady on the receiving end leapt to the conclusion that he was being frivolous and, unaware that he was in fact Lord Russell of Liverpool, signed her apology ‘Mary Magdalen of Jerusalem'. He was not amused.

Nageem was a deservedly popular spot, for though it is quite a small lake and cannot compare in size with the Dāl, Nasim or Gagribal, it is the deepest of all the lakes (local opinion insists that it is bottomless) and, being fed by underground springs, is also the cleanest and clearest, which made it an excellent place for swimmers. It also boasted a large bathing boat (only one, at that date!), which was moored well out on the lake opposite the Club, and furnished with changing rooms, a bar, and diving boards from which, for a small sum, one could bathe, dive, or just sit around talking and sipping gimlets, a popular local drink with the Raj, consisting of gin, Rose's lime juice and ice. But the overcrowding that was due to its popularity was not the only drawback to acquiring a
ghat
on Nageem. A worse one was the almost total lack of privacy.

No conversation was private, and a disgusted young American friend of ours, globe-trotting through India, complained that he had been told that the immoral goings-on of the holidaying British in Kashmir were beyond belief, but that in his opinion anyone who had the ‘noive' to be immoral on a houseboat deserved a gold medal for Courage Beyond Call of Duty. He had a point there, for it is impossible to move in a houseboat without rocking it gently, and creakingly, at every step. In addition to which, no word spoken in a normal voice went unheard.

The same went for the wooden-built huts, hotels and guest-houses of Gulmarg, which had given rise to endless stories. The best known of these concerns a middle-aged Major on leave who, arriving at a late hour of night at Nedou's Hotel in Gulmarg, was given a notoriously draughty single room, untenanted for the past week and the last-but-one of a row. His journey up from the plains having been a particularly exhausting one, he went straight to bed — and to sleep. Only to be rudely awakened (the phrase can be taken literally) by the arrival of an amorous couple in the end room who, it soon became clear, had no idea that the next-door room was no longer unoccupied.

The unfortunate Major found himself forced to listen to a good deal of scampering and scuffling, punctuated by maidenly squeaks or guffaws of manly laughter and occasional protests that suggested that the pair were attempting to take each other's clothes off. Presently the unwilling listener was regaled with the sound of a crisp slap and a male voice inquiring roguishly, ‘Whose little bottom is this?' followed by a flurry of squeaks and giggles, the sound of a second slap and a breathless soprano voice demanding, ‘And whose little bottom is
this
?'

At this point the Major's patience snapped, and he sat up in bed and said loudly, ‘Oh, for Pete's sake make up your minds whose it is, and let me get some sleep!' A frozen silence descended on the next-door room and was not broken again. By the time the Major surfaced and came out to have his breakfast next morning, the couple in the end room had not waited to be identified, but had ‘folded their tents like the Arab, and silently stolen away'.

There are several versions of this story, which leads me to suppose that a similar occurrence happened fairly frequently, probably every time that a casual visitor, unacquainted with the acoustic hazards of the wooden walls of Gulmarg's rooms, arrived in that enchanting resort unexpectedly. The last time that Bets and I visited this much-loved haunt of our youth — it was more than sixteen years after the British too had packed their belongings and silently stolen away — we had booked rooms at Nedou's Hotel and were charmed to discover that the single-plank pine wall that separated our bathrooms was not only thin enough to allow us to chat to each other while we were in our baths, but there was actually a knot hole in it large enough for me to hand my cake of soap through it to Bets when she discovered that she had not been supplied with one of her own.

But on looking back across the years, I think the best description of the flimsiness of the partitions that divided visitor from visitor in the pine-built huts of Gulmarg and the houseboats of Srinagar was voiced by a precious young man, newly arrived from England and experiencing the drawbacks of life in Kashmir for the first time: ‘But my dears, I
assure
you! I can hear the people in the next room changing their
minds
!'

One learned to live with it. It certainly made life more interesting and was quite possibly the main reason why, ever since the families of the
Sahib-log
first took to escaping to the hills to avoid the hot weathers, the hill-stations they favoured acquired a reputation for being hot-beds of scandal. Kipling certainly played a large part in this legend with the publication of his
Plain Tales from the Hills
, a widely read collection of short stories based on Simla scandals and dedicated to ‘the wittiest woman in India' — a title eagerly claimed by at least a dozen would-be Mrs Hauksbees, though it was almost certainly meant as a compliment to his mother, the pretty, witty Alice Kipling, who before her marriage had been one of the beautiful MacDonald sisters.

The view of Raj society as a suburban forerunner of the scandalous goings-on that made the blue-blooded denizens of Kenya's Happy Valley
set so notorious is still, after all these years, a widely held one — particularly among writers who were not even born when the British quit India. Personally, I don't believe it was nearly as bad as they make out; in contrast with what is considered to be normal behaviour in the present day it was, of course, laughably fusty and sedate. But even at its worst it had one redeeming feature: its scandals nearly always turned out to have a comic side to them, at least from the onlooker's viewpoint, though I don't suppose that those directly involved found them so wildly funny.

We once missed being eye-witnesses to a famous piece of drama by a matter of yards — four or five hundred at most, the distance that separated our secluded mooring from the scene of the action on Nageem. But we heard all about it at first hand from friends at Nageem who, metaphorically speaking, had seats in the front row of the stalls; and also second-hand from any number of others who were nowhere near Nageem but had passed on the story in convulsions of laughter …

It concerned an attractive and light-minded lady whose houseboat was moored at Nageem and whose husband was spending ten days of his leave fishing on the Bringi, a trout stream some ten or twenty miles from Srinagar. Finding all that time at her disposal, his wife rashly resumed a romance that had had to be put on the shelf when her husband arrived up on a month's leave. She should have known better, since not even a water-beetle, let alone an illicit lover, could stir among the close-packed ranks of houseboats around Nageem without someone noticing, and commenting on it. Word of the resumed relations with her Don Juan seeped out to other fishermen on the Bringi and, inevitably, since men are worse gossips than women, reached the ears of her husband, who returned with all speed to Srinagar two days before he was expected.

According to the cognoscenti, who are always with us (and endorsed on this occasion by the enthralled occupants of at least half the other boats on Nageem), the lady and her admirer had been celebrating their last-but-one evening together by dining
à deux
on her boat before going on to dance at the Club, when her husband suddenly appeared on the scene. Ignoring both of them, he marched straight across the dining-room and, without speaking a word, disappeared briefly into the bedroom section of the houseboat, to reappear with his service revolver in his hand.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, the sliding windows on the lake side were wide open, for it was a warm evening; and the Don ‘stood not
upon the order of his going'. Though unsuitably attired for aquatics, he did not hesitate. He dived straight out of the window into the lake and swam off into the sunset, encouraged by a revolver shot which missed him by inches but brought at least half of the houseboat population of Nageem rushing to the windows or up to the roofs of their boats. They must have had an excellent view of the ensuing drama, for the irate husband, hitherto invisible to the majority of his audience, ran up to the roof of his own boat from where, only slightly impeded by his hysterical wife, who was clutching his arm and shrieking ‘
No! No! No!
' at the top of her voice, he proceeded to scare the daylights out of his onlookers, as well as the lover and the lady, by driving the former to swim under water and, every time the poor chump's breath gave out and his head showed, carefully placing a shot just near enough to force him to dive again.

History does not relate the end of their story. It just stops there, like so many Raj stories. To follow it up would have been considered bad taste and an infringement of privacy, mere vulgar curiosity, in fact. As far as the Raj was concerned scandals, particularly of the domestic variety, were more likely to draw shrieks of laughter than raised eyebrows, while the more notorious of its erring ladies acquired colourful nicknames such as the ‘Charpoy Cobra', ‘Bed-and-Breakfast', the ‘Passionate Haystack' and the ‘Subaltern's Guide to Knowledge', by which they were known from one end of the subcontinent to the other. All very reprehensible, I suppose, yet it had one redeeming feature. There was seldom any real spite or viciousness in the gossip and scandal-mongering; something I discovered to be one of the great differences to which I had to adjust when the Raj ended and I was back once more in my native land. Here there was no trace of humour in the whispers of the tale-bearers whom I was to encounter; only plenty of envy and malice, and a lot of real cattiness. Perhaps it was the loss of Empire that had soured the once tolerant and easy-going islanders so thoroughly. Or perhaps they had used up all their reserves of good temper in surviving those long, agonizing years of war, with its terrible toll of death and destruction. I don't know.

We had been delighted with the size of our island and the privacy it gave us. But we were not to remain in sole possession of it for more than a few days, for shortly after our arrival we met and offered mooring space to the Andersons, a honeymoon couple who became lifelong friends. Andy — Ronald Anderson (I believe his old friends used to call him ‘Ronnie' but he was always Andy to us) — was a Sapper Captain, based in Peshawar, and since neither he nor his bride had taken kindly to the lack of privacy on Nageem, we took pity on them and invited them to share our nearby but more spacious
ghat
in Chota Nageem. A day or two later, while collecting our mail at the Post Office on the Bund in Srinagar, we were hailed by an old friend, Colonel Henslow, whom we had last met when he was bear-leading the young Duke of Northumberland a year or so before. Now here he was again, and once more acting as guide, mentor and family friend to another, though far less exalted member of the peerage, a Michael Something.