Golden Afternoon (57 page)

She was all eyes when she first came to us, eyes and hands (four of those) with a scrap of furry skin and bone to hold them together, and as
soon as she outgrew the habit of spending her days clinging to one of us and began to explore, we discovered that we had to find some method of controlling her destructive instincts. It was Kadera who solved the problem. He fastened Angie's box to a wooden platform nailed on to the top of a tall pole which he set up in the shade of one of the trees in the compound. A light metal ring of a circumference that allowed it to move easily up and down the pole was joined by a fine steel chain, roughly four or five yards long, to a small leather belt (originally a watch-strap!) fastened around Angie's small body. This enabled her to skiddle up and down the pole, taking the light ring and the lighter chain with her, and gave her a large circle of territory on the ground, and liberty to lie at the base of the pole, lie out on the platform or take shelter in the box, or, if she felt like it, sit on some of the lower branches of the tree.

Angie learned to use her harness in no time at all. She was as bright as a button, and the most endearing and loving of pets. I wouldn't, though, recommend anyone to acquire a monkey unless they are prepared to keep a close eye on it when it gets loose in the house, for the damage that an inquisitive creature with four hands can do in the space of two minutes has to be seen to be believed.

I don't remember which month Ramadan fell in that year, but at a guess it must have been in or around April, for the hot weather was just beginning to hint at the burning days to come when it ended, and the senior Begum invited Mother, Bets and me to the feast that celebrates its end. We accepted with pleasure, and as a gesture of thanks for the invitation, Bets and I decided to keep the last day of the fast ourselves.

Traditionally, the fast begins before daybreak and cannot be broken until darkness falls, thus allowing the faithful to eat or drink in moderation during the night hours. But while it is light they must not let a morsel of food or a drop of water pass their lips, which comes hard on those who keep it when Ramadan falls in the hot weather.

That day, in the dark hour before dawn, Kadera, himself a devout Muslim, woke Bets and me with a breakfast of tea, boiled eggs, chapattis and fruit, and when we had finished and he had taken the trays away, we tiptoed out on to the verandah, careful not to wake our sleeping parents, and up the flight of stone steps that led to the flat roof, to watch the stars fade as the dawn crept up in the east and the sky turned from indigo to green, to silver-grey, to primrose yellow, when the birds awoke and launched into their familiar dawn chorus. The weather was not yet hot
enough to drive us indoors the minute the sun rose, or to make us shut every door and window in an attempt to trap the cool night air for as long as possible. But it was still hot enough, with the dry baking heat of Rajputana, to make us begin to hanker for a drink long before the morning was half over, and though hunger proved to be no problem, the lack of the normal set meals made the day seem intolerably long.

The party was to be held in the No. 1 Guest House, a white flat-topped building very like our own and looking down on us from the top of a little pointed hill just behind our house. We climbed up to it as the sun was setting and found ourselves engulfed in a scented swirl of women in ravishing saris and jingling, glittering jewellery, all of them talking at once. The Guest House, like our own, consisted of a single large high-ceilinged reception room, with bedrooms and bathrooms leading off it on either side and a dining-room on the third side. The whole was surrounded by a pillared verandah that could be enclosed by
chiks
which, when unrolled, made it suitable for purdah parties such as this. Since, in Eastern lands, the interval between the moment that the last rim of the sun disappears and that when darkness falls is a very short one, by the time we arrived, our hostess's serving-women were already rolling up
chiks
, for the sun had vanished and in the gathering dusk the faces of those in purdah could no longer be spied on by prying eyes.

The Begums were anxious, for dust and heat-haze had formed a cloud that lay like a veil of brown gauze above the line of the horizon, which might hide the moon for several hours; in the past it had been no unusual thing for a pall of clouds to hide it from sight for several days. But, fortunately, science had found a way of coping with that. All over Southern India, priests still leant from the minarets of their mosques to scan the skies for the first glimpse of the new moon, and nowadays, the moment it was sighted, the news would not only be cried to crowds immediately gathered below, but flashed by means of telegraph wires to all parts of the country. Even if the skies were overcast, the remotest hamlets could receive the news by means of primitive signals such as rockets, bonfires or gunfire, passed on over many miles.

In case the new moon was not sighted that night, it had been arranged that one of the ancient Tonk cannons should be fired as soon as the news reached the city. But in the event, no signal was needed, for as the dusk deepened that dusty gossamer veil began to shred away, leaving a clear lake of duck-egg green sky in which there floated a thin silver crescent.

It was barely more than a thread of silver, but at least half of the guests spotted it in the same instant, and the peacock scream of excited feminine voices drowned out the now unnecessary boom of the cannon and a clamour of gongs and conches from the house-tops and mosques of Tonk. Half a minute later the verandah of the Guest House had emptied like magic, as the Begums and their guests and their ladies turned and ran for the central reception room, which tonight had been cleared of furniture and contained instead a splendid buffet laid out on a long banquet table, every inch of which was invisible under a load of silver dishes piled full of delicious Indian food of every description.

The way those gorgeously clad women fell upon it remains one of my pleasantest memories of Tonk. One would have thought, seeing them, that they had all been starved for the entire month instead of only the light hours of each day, as they ran through the line of french windows, laughing, pushing, jostling, and grabbing at the food as though they were a crowd of unruly kids. Bets and I, catching the fever, ran with the best of them, though it was the drinks that we made for, for we both had uncomfortably dry mouths, and I remember draining at least two tall glasses of some fruit juice or other before I turned my attention to the food. It was a lovely party, and when we had all finished stuffing ourselves, and licked our fingers clean, we returned to the verandah again and watched a display of fireworks going up into the sky from somewhere in the unseen city, and listened to a pretty girl singing songs to the accompaniment of sitar and tabla, played by two older companions.

The nights remained cool for a little longer, making it unnecessary for us to move our beds out of doors. But every day saw the quicksilver in the thermometers in Tacklow's office and out on the verandah creep up a little higher, until one afternoon the first of the dust-storms arrived to warn us that the hot weather was well on its way.

At first it was just a slight darkening of the sky and, not being used to such visitations, I don't think we would have taken much notice of it. But the servants knew better. When they began to close the doors and windows Mother inquired why, and had her attention drawn to the curious brownish stain that was reaching upwards into the blue of the sky along the horizon. ‘It is only the dust-wind,' said the Tonk men carelessly explaining that since it could at times come very quickly, depending on the wind, it was as well to be prepared. They stuffed newspaper under
the gaps below the french windows and the doors, and Kadera put an indignant Angie into her bedtime box and brought her into the house.

The storm took some time to reach us, but when it did, it came with an awesome rush. The brown stain in the sky grew darker and darker until we had to send for lamps, and presently the first of the wind reached us and began to whine through the cracks and crevices under the doors and round the windows. By the time the storm reached us it was a whirling, seething wall of darkness that one moment was a hundred yards away and the next second had hit us so that we were in the centre of a whirlpool of dust and sand and flying debris. In spite of the paper that the servants had wedged under the doors the air was so full of gritty dust that we tied handkerchiefs over our noses. By the time it passed — which seemed an age but was probably not nearly as long as I think — it had left a thin layer of dust over everything, a grey, gritty coating that covered every inch of every single thing in the entire house, giving the interior the look of something that has lain on the sea-floor for long enough to collect a layer of sediment. It took days to get rid of it.

That year we put off leaving for the hills for as long as possible, because Tacklow could not come with us. We had to make a guess at the probable day of the monsoon's arrival, and leave a good ten days before that, because the roads between Tonk and Delhi in places were mere cart-tracks that wound between patches of cactus, thorn-bushes and palms, and came out on to wide stretches of sand leading to the banks of unbridged rivers that could only be crossed by fords. The fords, used daily by cattle and casual wayfarers, were easy enough to cross in the dry season when the rivers were seldom more than two or three feet deep at their deepest. But when the monsoon broke, these same innocent-seeming streams, fed as they were by numerous little sidestreams, could become brown, roaring torrents in a matter of minutes.

We could not risk that, though we left it as late as possible and would probably have kept putting it off if Tacklow had not been required to go to Delhi for a few days on state business. Since he would only be staying there for two or three nights, it was decided that we too would break our journey at Delhi, and a telegram was sent off booking rooms for the four of us at the IDG Club. I can't say that I wasn't delighted to know that I was seeing the back of Tonk for the rest of the summer, even though it meant not seeing darling Tacklow again until some time in October. I
had been lying awake for the best part of the cruelly hot nights of late, longing and longing to be cool again, and picturing the Dāl lake with its lotus lilies, and the Outer Circular Road at Gulmarg, with its view of the snow-peaks, its forests of deodars and pines, and the scent of pine-needles and waterfalls. It was difficult to believe at times that two such places as Kashmir and Tonk could exist in the same country.

We left as early in the morning as we could manage, having said our goodbyes on the previous day, Mother driving the big car with Tacklow sitting beside her, and Kadera and Mahdoo plus assorted luggage in the back. Bets and I, who were taking turns driving, followed in the baby Austin, with the rest of the luggage. And Angie accompanied the procession, sitting proudly on Mother's lap and pretending to drive, her skinny little hands on the wheel, and copying all the motions. Whenever we passed other monkeys — either brown monkeys or the grey, black-faced langurs, both species of which can be seen in large numbers all over India — she would drop her chauffeur-airs-and-graces, to look out of the open windows and hurl boasts or insults at them. Only when tired of pretending to drive the car would she leave Mother's lap and climb into the back seat to take a nap on Kadera's knee.

The IDG seemed very quiet and deserted now that most of its members and nearly all their womenfolk had left for the hills, as the Government of India made its annual migration to Simla in order to escape the rigours of the hot weather and the discomfort of the monsoon. As far as I can remember, only one memsahib had not joined the rush, her husband's job being one that tied him to Delhi. And, much to our delight, it was our dear friend ‘Ooloo' Riley who had flatly refused to be shunted off to the hills, insisting that if Alan could stick it out in the plains then so could she.

Ooloo was, as ever, in terrific form, and Bets and I fell on her neck with shouts of joy. Her rooms were next to ours, which were in a double line of Club quarters facing each other across narrow grass lawns planted with gold-mohur trees, and a wide gravelled drive that led to the Club's dining-room. The trees were in flower and formed an avenue of shade and brilliant colour, and since our rooms were on the shady side of the drive they were degrees cooler than the ones at Tonk. And how marvellous it was to see electric ceiling-fans again — one in every room! I felt as though I had almost forgotten that there
was
such a thing as electricity, and was discovering its blessing for the first time.

We didn't see much of Tacklow, who I imagine spent most of his time arguing with
vakils
in stuffy offices in Connaught Place, and after only a night or two in Delhi he went back to Tonk by train — or, to be accurate, as far as Sawai Madhopur by train, where a car from Tonk met him. I have no recollection at all as to where Mother went, or why. I only know that it was something arranged at the eleventh hour between Tacklow and her and Ooloo Riley, who promised to keep an eye on us while she was away, and that Kadera remained with us to see that we were OK.

Left on our own — except for that couple of baby-sitters, Ooloo and Kadera — Bets celebrated the occasion by falling ill on the very first day of our independence. At first it seemed as though she had merely caught a slight chill — probably as a result of our last day in Tonk, during which the thermometers in the verandah and the
barra-durri
had been registering some horrific figure, while the main room of the house, in which Bets and I had insisted on doing her packing, was downright chilly from the icy stream of air that the
Lou
was blowing through the
kus-kus tatties
.

She had not been feeling too bright for the last day or two, but had not complained. It was only after Mother and Tacklow had both gone that she began to feel really ill. Luckily one of the resident club members, whom we knew well, was a doctor, and took a look at Bets and gave her a quick going-over. He told her to drink a lot of soft drinks and stay in bed for a day or two: ‘No need to bother your Mother.' So we didn't, even though Bets had begun to look very pallid and sallow. But by the next day her skin was no longer sallow, but yellow — and a good bright yellow at that! Even the whites of her eyes were yellow. I had never seen anything like it before, and I was horrified. Ooloo and the doctor, however, took it fairly lightly. Bets had merely acquired a bad go of jaundice which, they told me, was a very common illness in India, and I was probably right about the
kus-kus tatties
.