Golden Afternoon (51 page)

Keeping well to one side of it, and greatly daring, he had peered inside. But all he could see was the darkness and the glint of the water — and the unmistakable gleam of the creature's eyes. It was enough; and scrambling hastily back up the steep side of the bank, he tore back to the village, shouting the news, and returned with a small crowd of people at his back, including the village
shikari
who said this was a sahib's work, and sent off a runner in pursuit. The boats pulled into the shore and Mike and I and Kashmera, plus the excited messenger, walked back up the sands to our most recent camping ground, and a further mile up-stream to the cave, now surrounded by villagers armed with sticks and
lathis
, prepared to prevent the mugger from emerging, though this was something I don't think anyone could possibly have prevented if the creature had had the strength to do so, because the entrance was obviously somewhere well below the water-level and this was merely the top end, in which he could breathe, and keep his larder until it was sufficiently rotten to suit his taste.

He was breathing now, but with appalling difficulty and in great pain. Though I never thought I could possibly feel sorry for a mugger, I was sorry for this one as it lay in the dark, emitting agonizing groans with every breath it was struggling to draw.

Mike had brought a small pocket torch with him which we strapped on to the barrel of his rifle with that sticky elasticated bandage material from Mother's first aid box. Watching him climb down to the lowest edge of that overhanging bank, I was scared stiff that the mugger would rush forward to attack him and that if he stepped back he would go straight down into deep water with the creature on top of him, for he had little or no room in which to take avoiding action, and only two options. He could either leap to one side — providing he didn't slip in doing so — or go straight back into the river. I didn't like the idea of either.

Nor did the other spectators, Kashmera least of all. He kept on exhorting me to tell the Sahib that he must be careful. ‘Tell him that a mugger is always very dangerous until it's dead, and this one is not dead yet! Tell him that he must be ready to move sideways very quickly.
Not
back.' Mike moved cautiously to face the cave mouth and, bending down to peer inside, flicked on the torch for a brief moment and stepped aside hastily. It was a whopper, and right back in the cave, and he would have to shoot him there and could only hope to goodness that the bullet didn't
ricochet off a rock or something solid in the back of the cave, and get him — Mike — on its way out. An observation that did nothing towards soothing my nerves! But there was nothing else for it and, crouching down again, he got his rifle up to his shoulder, switched on the little torch again, fired, and almost in the same second, jumped sideways to the left of the cave mouth.

The crash of the shot in that confined space was incredibly loud, and though the bullet hit it between the eyes, the creature's reflexes were still enough to make it rush forward and collapse just inside the mouth of the cave, where Mike gave one more shot just to be on the safe side. It was as well that it lurched forward, for otherwise I don't believe we should ever have got it out of that noisome cave. Certainly none of the villagers would have faced crawling inside in order to drag out the corpse. But as it was, it was easy enough to put a rope round its neck and haul it out and along that stretch of high bank until we reached a shelving beach once more.

The creature was not as large as it had looked when alive, but it was a fair size all the same, and sure enough, when its stomach was cut open that evening (after the skin had been removed and rubbed with salt, and rolled up in a piece of sacking ready to be dispatched to the Cawnpore tanneries) it was found to contain the forearm of its last victim, together with several small and unbroken glass bracelets. These and the bone, we learned later, were, together with a good many other grisly relics, collected and burned as the ritual demands, so that the ashes of the deceased could be consigned to the river.

Kashmera found the whole episode enthralling. He said that in all his years as a
shikari
, and the many times he had accompanied Cleveland-Sahib on his shooting trips down the Ganges, he had only once before come across a mugger's cave. And that had only been because a particularly heavy monsoon had brought down great chunks of bank and exposed it. And never before had he heard of anyone shooting a mugger in its lair. I imagine he lived on that story for the rest of his life.

I can't remember whether it was after this or before it that we camped for two days in a grove of silk-cotton trees near a little village called Puth, in the hope, which proved a vain one, of seeing butterflies. This was because just once in all their Ganges trips, my parents and their party had tied up there and found that a particular creeper that grew there was in full bloom. Tacklow said he was not aware of having seen it before (he
was no botanist!) but that it had a small and rather undistinguished white flower with a strong and very sweet scent, and that it climbed all over the surrounding bushes, almost smothering them, and was smothered in turn by hundreds of thousands of butterflies. Not just Monarchs, which have a habit of swarming in that manner, but butterflies of every size, kind and description, drawn by the heavy scent and gorging themselves on the honey. He knew a lot about butterflies and had once collected them. But this was the only time he had ever seen them in such numbers, and so hypnotized by the scent and drugged by honey that they made no attempt to avoid the humans who stared at them and put out a finger to touch them, or the birds which gorged on them.

The villagers had told him that this always happened once every year, during the flowering time of the creeper, but that one never knew when it would be. And Tacklow told me that ever afterwards they had tried to arrange to visit Puth at the time the creeper would be in flower, but had never managed to get it right again. Either they were far too early, or just too late! And since the men all had pressing work awaiting them in their respective offices when the all-too-short holidays were over, and could not loaf down the Ganges like we were doing, there had never been any question of staying on for a few days in the hope of seeing a creeper come into flower. Yet every year after the ‘butterfly year', Tacklow had hoped against hope to hit the right date again, until a dire year when they found that some of the villagers had ploughed up an acre or so of the ground where the creeper had grown and sown it with Indian corn.

Mother had taken a snapshot of the butterflies, but nothing had come out but a blur that might have been anything — or nothing. Many years later, hundreds of miles to the north-west of the great subcontinent, when Bets and I saw the same sort of sight — thousands of Monarch butterflies (we used to call them ‘potato butterflies' because they could always be found fluttering about the potato creeper in our garden in Simla) smothering the lantana bushes on the banks of the Chenab river, within sight of the Kashmir snows, and I took at least half-a-dozen colour transparencies of that fantastic sight, the result was the same. A blur of colour that could have been anything. For even though by then I had a far more sophisticated camera with a much better lens, it had not been quick enough to freeze or make sense of the vast cloud of fluttery, shimmery butterfly wings.

If Tacklow hadn't promised to be back in Tonk by a certain date I
think he might have stayed another day or two hoping for the creepers to flower. But he could not wait any longer, and nor could he identify that particular creeper among the many that grew along the river-bank and in the open country behind it — or on the rough ground that had once been a cornfield.

The only large town that we passed on that trip was Benares. It is one of the most sacred towns in all India and, seen from the river, one of the oldest and most beautiful. I don't know where the name ‘Benares' came from, probably from some fifteenth- or sixteenth-century British adventurer's mispronunciation of ‘Varenese' which was its old name, and is again now. Holy men of all persuasions flock there, as do men and women who wish to obtain merit or petition the Gods for a particular favour — a male child, or a cure for sickness. And very many — those who can afford it — come there to die, for the most flourishing industry of the town is death. Ceaselessly, by day and night, the smoke from the funeral pyres rises like incense in some medieval cathedral as the bodies of the dead who have come there or been brought there to die are burned among the
chattris
(umbrellas) near the river's edge, so that when the fires die down the ashes will be consigned to Mother Gunga who will carry them to the sea.

The air can never be free of smoke, which draws a thin, gauzy veil over the high, cliff-like wall of ancient domes and towers and temples, peepul trees and palaces, that rises above it; and the long flights of stone steps that lead down to the burning-
ghats
at the water's edge are, from sunrise to sunset, as crowded as Jacob's Ladder with pilgrims or mourners ascending or descending.

I am told that the time to see Benares is in very early morning, when the pyres of the previous day have burned out and the next ones have yet to be built and lit, and the wide sweep of those ancient stone stairs can be seen, uncluttered by the bee-swarms of humanity. Well, we couldn't break camp in time to reach it by sunrise, and it was nearly midday by the time the current took us slowly down past that beautiful frieze of domes and temple-tops and the lovely white marble palace of His Highness the Maharajah of Benares. By that time humanity had taken over with a vengeance, and not only the steps but the river for at least thirty feet out from the shore was black with people bathing, and uncomfortably full of boats of every size and shape, of which ours was only one among many.

The left bank, opposite the town is — or was in those days — surprisingly empty. Apart from a scattering of reed-built huts and a few more solid buildings that looked as if they had been started but left unfinished, it seemed to have been ignored by the housing trade. The sandy shallows on that side, and much of the surface of the river, were full of strings of faded marigold flowers which are by tradition used to adorn the dead as well as to garland honoured guests and holy men, and other VIPs. Odd, when they have been used for so many centuries as funeral flowers.

I remember regretting yet again that I hadn't had the sense to take a paintbox with me. But my admiration for the spectacular town was ruined by the horrid discovery that what I had taken to be just another, though more venturesome swimmer, dog-paddling down on the current, was in fact a partially burned corpse. And that the lifelike movements that had given it an illusion of keeping itself afloat were caused by scavenging fish and river-turtles tugging at it as it was carried down-stream.

It was not that I hadn't known about such things, because I had since my early years of childhood. The holy books of Hinduism direct that bodies should be burned and their ashes consigned to the nearest river, preferably the Ganges. But wood is expensive, and since very many of the poor cannot possibly afford the expense of priests and a pyre, it is considered permissible — particularly in times of war, plague or famine, when there are many corpses to be disposed of — to place a live coal in the mouth of the deceased before consigning it to the river. This one had probably been slipped into the water on the quiet from somewhere a longish way up-stream, and left to the mercy of the current. It should not have horrified me, but it did. And though it had never occurred to me that I might one day attempt to write a book, the seeds of a novelist, to whom all is grist to the mill, must have been there. Because years later, when I was at work on my first India novel,
Shadow of the Moon
, I remembered that corpse and described it going down-river, tugged this way and that by scavenging fish and turtles, so that it looked alive.

Throughout that lovely journey Mike had behaved like an angel. He was enjoying every minute, and it showed. Tacklow had been asked by the old Nawab if he would please shoot a tiger that had been taking too heavy a toll of the herds of the villagers of Pirawa, a small hamlet near the border of his state. He had also suggested that we should use the
occasion to lay on a camp for the Christmas holiday and ask anyone we wished to join it. His heir and some of his relations had expressed a wish to be present, and he himself would give the orders to lay on a camp for the occasion, and see to all the details of the shoot. Tacklow had accepted with pleasure, and we had already asked my brother Bill and one of his friends, Campbell Harris. And now Mike, having heard of it, badgered my parents to let him come too, on the grounds that he had never been on a tiger shoot before — and might never get such an opportunity again, since tiger shoots were not in everyone's gift, and were apt to be reserved for the senior ranks of the ‘Heaven-born' or visiting bigwigs and brass-hats.

I don't think Tacklow thought much of the idea, since Mike and I had been living in each other's pockets for a good many weeks on end now; what with the Nageem Bagh Navy, the NBN reunion and Mike's twenty-first birthday celebration in Peshawar, our stay at Lahore and then in Delhi, followed by this Ganges trip, Tacklow thought it was high time we took a break from each other's company. However, it became impossible to refuse, and after all, it only meant another ten days at most. Mike was wildly excited at the prospect, and could talk of nothing else during our final days on the river. The whole trip had been an enormous success — and then, on the day that we were due to reach Narora, where our trip ended, Mike sprained his ankle.

I don't remember how he managed to do it. Presumably by putting his foot into some old rat-hole that had been enlarged by a snake or a mongoose for a temporary home. All I do remember is that while the tents were being set up at our last-but-one campsite, Tacklow, Colonel Henslow and Mike had gone off to shoot partridge, or anything else that was suitable for the pot, and Bets, Mother and I had not accompanied them. We had stayed on the campsite to watch the birds coming home to roost in the trees overhead, and to admire what looked like being a really spectacular sunset; and saw Mike, looking pale grey under his tan, hopping painfully to the camp with one arm round Tacklow and the other round Colonel Henslow.