Golden Afternoon (56 page)

The latter were merely gaudy, while the former could be magical — as here. The white flowers were small and silver, and barely noticeable among the mass of large pointed leaves, roughly the size and shape of mango or avocado leaves, and cut from green foil that glittered in the torchlight and turned to every possible shade of that colour as they rustled past us. The men who carried them wore dark coats and green muslin turbans, which made them completely invisible and created the illusion
that Birnam Wood was on the move again, marching on Bhopal instead of Dunsinane.

I must have been told where they were going, and with what purpose. But if so I have no recollection of it. Only the picture remains; to become like one of those jewelled fragments in the rag-bag of offcuts thrown out daily by the costume department from the lovely costumes that Raymond Hughes designed for the film of my novel
The Far Pavilions
.

Considering that this was my first experience of a royal wedding in India, my recollections are remarkably few. Among them was a morning visit that Mother and I paid to the Senior Begum and her ladies. We arrived just as the Senior Begum was about to choose the jewels that she would wear for the wedding ceremony.

I don't think that we of the West have any
idea
of the riches that India used to take for granted. Not even Elizabeth II — or Elizabeth Taylor! — could match the state jewels of the richer princely states. Tonk was, as we had recently been reminded, a comparatively minor state; yet the selection of jewels that the Senior Begum's women had thought fit to bring with them staggered me. You've no idea what a picture it made. The old lady, who can't have been all that old (but then I was at the age when anyone over twenty-five was middle-aged) was sitting on a pile of brightly coloured cushions on a low platform under a roof that was all arches, supported by slender pillars. The room gave on to a balcony from which one could look out across the city through elaborately carved marble screens, for this was part of the
zenana
quarters, from where the occupants could look out unseen, but no one could look in.

The Begum was wearing a warm colour — probably orange or red — and her women passed by her in procession, each one showing her a piece of jewellery, displayed in a conventional velvet case that was presumably made by some modern jeweller, since most of the jewellery predated the boxes by at least a century. The contents of those boxes left me gasping, and I remember being deeply impressed by the casualness with which the old lady treated them. They all seemed to be fabulous, and I could not understand how she could dismiss so many with a careless flick of her hand after barely glancing at them.

Now and again she would lift a finger, lean forward, and look more carefully at some particularly gorgeous trinket before waving it away. She must have looked at and discarded at least twenty or thirty items before making her choice. I can't remember what it was, or even what colour
she finally decided upon — only that it wasn't the one I would have chosen! I put in a strong plea for that one, and though she wavered for a bit, she eventually decided against it on the grounds that its beauty and superlative workmanship could only be appreciated at close range. Besides, the jewels did not glitter and so would have little or no impact when half shrouded in the gauze sari she intended to wear, which anyway, was the wrong colour.

I saw her point. If you had not been standing close to her you could well have believed that my choice was the real thing, and not jewellery at all. Because the set consisted of a necklace and bracelets that had been fashioned by some master craftsman to look as though they were garlands of jasmine blossom. The leaves had been carved from emeralds and the flowers were pearls — every one of them pear shaped and most beautifully matched — and except for the buds, at the centre of each flower was a yellow diamond. The things were a work of art, and I have never seen anything remotely like them again. Nor can I make a guess at what they must be worth now. But I could see why the Begum did not choose them, and she was right of course. In a country that uses garlands of fresh flowers not only every day, but every hour and minute of every day as a gesture of greeting or farewell, adorns the bride and groom and their many relations and friends with wreaths of roses and jasmine for the heads of its women, and drapes the biers of the dead with strings of marigold flowers, a necklace and bracelets of jewels made to imitate the real thing would, except at close range, be taken as just that.

On the day of the wedding two or three members of the bride's family took Mother, Bets and me to see the bride being dressed for the great occasion. Their house, like the one that the ladies from Tonk were staying in, was one of the old buildings in the city, and the only thing I remember about it is that it had no electricity and appeared to consist of a rabbit-warren of small, ill-lit rooms and long dark corridors, and that it smelt faintly of sandalwood and faded flowers, and strongly of damp and the slow centuries. The room in which we ended up, by contrast with all the others we had passed, was enormous, but I can give no description of it, because despite its size and its high ceiling it was lit by a solitary oil-lamp and the light from a single narrow window.

The room was also crowded with chattering women, some of whom we had already met, though it was difficult to recognize anyone in that gloomy dungeon. What with the inadequate lighting, the excited, giggling
mob of girls and crones, all in their wedding finery and clashing with jewels, it was impossible to see if there was any furniture in the room or not.

As for the bride, all we saw of her was a bundle of red and gold gauze, crouched on its knees, head in hands and bent almost double, surrounded by a ring of waiting-women who were engaged in brushing and combing her hair, prior to smoothing it with scented oil and braiding it with jewels and jasmine buds. At present it fell to the floor in a silky black curtain that prevented us from getting so much as a glimpse of her face, even if she hadn't hidden it in her hands. I suspected that she was not only shy but was trying to hide the fact that she was crying, and I was grateful when Mother hissed in my ear that it was high time we left, adding indignantly that it was a shame to expect the poor child to meet strange foreigners at a time like this — she was after all, only
ten
.

We made our excuses and withdrew, and later in the day we saw the bride again, at the marriage ceremony; still a bowed, shrinking figure, draped in a splendid gold-embroidered sari and decked with necklaces, rings, bracelets and brooches of rubies and table-cut diamonds. We still couldn't see her face, or that of her bridegroom either, for the features of both were veiled behind a deep fringe made from strings of jasmine buds or pearls — I can't remember which of them wore what, but I
think
Nunni wore the pearls. I do remember thinking that his brocaded coat was far too tight and that he needed to lose weight, and also that if it wasn't for his outsize turban with its magnificent jewelled aigrette, and the drooping posture of his bride, he would have looked the shorter of the two.

I can still see them quite clearly, sitting side by side on a raised platform and under a fringed canopy in a courtyard of the bride's home, facing a crowd of wedding guests, most of whom were comfortably sitting cross-legged on the ground, while Tacklow and his family, and about a dozen more
Sahib-log
, were perched uncomfortably on small gilt chairs. And that's it. I don't even remember when all the uproar that followed began, whether it started while we were all still in Bhopal, or only after the Tonk contingent, accompanied now by the bride and a selection of her ladies and serving-women, got back to base. The latter, almost certainly, for Nunni would have seen little of his bride during the journey, since purdah rules are always more strictly kept when travelling. Anyway, whenever it broke, it was quite a bombshell.

The child-bride that twelve-year-old Nunni thought he had married turned out to be one of her aunts instead. A twenty-six-year-old one, at that!

Well, you can imagine the uproar and the coming and going between Nunni's family and the Bhopal girl's people. The latter were totally unrepentant. Their defence was that the Tonk lot must have known that no daughter of the house, not yet in her teens, could possibly be married while an older and close relative of the family remained unwed …

‘Yes, of course we
said
we would give you our youngest daughter,' they admitted. ‘For if we had not, your son might have refused to accept a wife more than twice his age, and created much difficulty for us all. But knowing that you would discover that there was still an older relative whose
shadi
had not yet been made, we were sure that you would recognize our predicament and know that it must be the aunt and not her young niece who would be the bride.'

That was the Bhopal family's case. But it did not wash. They had been careful to conceal the existence of the aunt, and all the agreements between the two families had made it quite clear that it was the ten-year-old who was to be the bride. As for Nunni, he had taken an instant and violent dislike to the unfortunate woman. He said she was exactly like a bossy nurse he had once hated, and also that she chewed onions, and if there was one thing he couldn't bear it was people who chewed onions! In short, he couldn't stand her at any price.

She returned to her family, and everyone was cross. For though the bride-price was eventually repaid and the gifts returned, the whole business had been an expensive waste of money and both sides were out of pocket and feeling very sour about it. All those parties! All that food and drink! All the new clothes and present-giving, the distribution of money and sweets, and the hiring of that special train — all wasted! No wonder the phoney bride had kept her face hidden and made herself look as small as possible — and no wonder her family had kept the room in which we had first seen her as near dark as makes no matter.

We had all been made fools of, and I was still young enough to be horrified by the discovery that grown-ups could lie and cheat and scheme and do each other down. But when our old friend from the early Simla days, the Diwan-Sahib, came down to stay with us for a few days, and I poured out the whole shocking story to him, he roared with laughter. It was plain, he said, that I still had plenty to learn about his country. And
he assured me that any ‘upper-class' Indian wedding (especially the ones involving royalty) that did not include a basinful of lies, trickery and nonsense-work would be unique. They
all
tried it on. ‘Let me tell you,' he said, ‘a story that my grandfather told me when I was a boy …' And he told me the tale of a little prince and his two half-sisters who, escorted by a solitary Englishman and accompanied by a vast cavalcade of servants and soldiery, horses, carts and guns, and scores of elephants, were taken to their respective weddings on a journey of many weeks, and of the chicanery and double-dealing that they met with by the way and on their arrival.

His story certainly made the recent goings-on in Bhopal seem mild by contrast, and I ended, as he had, by laughing and thought no more about it. But over a quarter of a century later, at a regimental dance in Ireland, a fellow guest, another army wife, told me that she had just heard that I had been born in India and had written a book about it (my first historical novel,
Shadow of the Moon
, had only recently been published) and she wondered if I would be interested in reading a diary that had been written well back in the last century by a member of her family who had served as an officer in the East India Company's Bengal Army. The diary, she explained, was not the original, but only a copy; one of the several that had been made for different members of her family. So if I'd like to read hers, she would be charmed to lend it to me. I said I'd love to, and the diary duly arrived at my army quarters. And believe it or not, the man who wrote it was the ‘solitary Englishman' who had been charged with escorting that cumbersome wedding party that the Diwan-Sahib had told me about all those years ago, sitting in the
barra-durri
in front of our house in Tonk —!

Back in Tonk, Bets and I acquired a new pet, a baby brown monkey presented to us by one of the local
shikaris
, who told us that he had found it clinging to its dead mother in a nearby patch of scrub and jungle in which he had been shooting. (I suspect that he had shot the mother by mistake.) The tiny creature could not have been more than two or three days old, but already every hair on her skinny little body was covered with the eggs of fleas or lice, and our first task was to shave her — which we did with a razor borrowed from Tacklow. After which we gave her a bath in warm water to which we had added a spoonful of disinfectant, fed her with the aid of a rag dipped in milk, which she sucked with enthusiasm, and attempted to put her to bed in a wooden box which Kadera had supplied, complete with bars and a door. The baby, which we had named Angelina, and instantly shortened to ‘Angie', would have none of it. Nature had taught her to cling like a limpet to her mother, and we were the next best thing. It was like trying to rid yourself of a particularly adhesive bit of flypaper, and when Mother tried to help us out by removing her, she ended up with Angie's skinny little arms and legs clasped tightly round her neck.

It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. For the first time in our family history, we had acquired a pet who didn't instantly attach itself to Tacklow. Despite the fact that either I or Bets carried her around with us all day, fed her and allowed her to cling to one of our fingers through the bars of her box until she fell asleep (and woe betide us if we tried to free ourselves before she did), she made up her mind that Mother belonged to her, and that she belonged to Mother. Bets and I were merely ‘staff', as were the rest of the servants, though she had her favourites, and Kadera definitely came top.