Golden Afternoon (58 page)

Ooloo and I went shopping to Connaught Circus that evening, and bought a couple of pale blue muslin nightdresses and a yard or two of blue ribbon with which to ‘tie up her bonny brown hair', because Bets's nightdresses were all pale pink and Ooloo said that pale blue was the only possible colour to wear with a yellow skin. And how right she was: all the others made Bets look yellower than ever, and pink was the worst of the lot. I don't remember how long she was on the sick-list, or how long Mother was away. Only that it seemed a very long time, and
that just before it ended the monsoon broke, which was a marvellous relief after the grinding heat of the previous weeks. Suddenly everything seemed green again, and Bets revived in the coolness with surprising speed.

The only snag about the monsoon was that it flooded out the holes and burrows that for months past had been home to a large variety of creepy-crawlies, ranging from snakes to ants and including a particularly alarming specimen known as a ‘jerrymunderlum', which
must
be an invented name, though I never heard it called anything else. It was a bright red creepy-crawly, about the size of a scorpion, and like scorpions it varied in size from quite small to large. It strongly suggested a cross between a scorpion and a miniature lobster, with a touch of spider thrown in. A real horror, and one that I don't remember coming across in my childhood. It flourished in Rajputana, and the first one I ever saw was in Jaipur. They must be hot-weather creatures, for I can't remember seeing them anywhere in the north, or in places where the winters are cold, and I had not expected to come across the beastly creatures in Delhi. But then I had never been to Delhi in the hot weather before.

I have always been terrified of spiders, and I was almost as terrified by these little horrors. There had been plenty of them in Tonk once the hot weather arrived, and whenever I saw one I would leap on to a chair and scream for Kadera, who would arrive looking resigned and more than a little scornful and deal with the enemy by picking it up in his duster and flicking it out of the nearest door — where, nine times out of ten, it would instantly be snapped up by some hungry bird. After which he would lecture me severely for making such a silly fuss over a harmless creature that neither bit nor stung, and tell me that I ought to be ashamed of myself. Well, I was of course. But that didn't stop me from leaping on to the nearest chair and yelling for help whenever I spotted a jerrymunderlum scuttling across the floor.

A day or two after the monsoon broke, while I was reading a book from the Club's library in the sitting-room of our quarters, the great-grandfather of all jerrymunderlums climbed up the back of the book and looked at me over the top of the page. I don't know how it got there without my knowing it, but there it was, peering at me and twitching its lobster-style whiskers, and I hurled the book from me with a piercing shriek that must have rivalled the Last Trump and brought Bets tottering out of the bedroom and Kadera at a run from the far end of the verandah.

The jerrymunderlum had gone to ground somewhere under the sofa, and Kadera, apprised of the reason for the uproar, stood and roared with laughter for at least a minute before launching into the now familiar lecture on the harmlessness of the poor creature and the
shurram
(shame) that I brought upon myself by behaving in this childish manner … etc., etc. Bets, who disliked jerrymunderlums almost as much as I did (but not to the point of being scared silly by them), retreated prudently to the comparative safety of her bed, while I continued to stand cravenly on my chair and Kadera hunted the creature under the sofa, muttering scornfully all the while about
garib kiras
and
bey-whakoof Missybabas
.

When at last the humble insect emerged from its hiding-place and scuttled out into the open, Kadera as usual dropped his duster neatly over it and, having picked up both, was on his way to the door to throw his ‘harmless' captive out when he gave a loud yelp of pain and dropped it as though it had stung him. Well, it hadn't actually done that. But it had bitten him right through the folds of cloth, hard enough to draw blood, and I regret to say that at this point it was the turn of the foolish Missybaba to laugh her head off.

It proved to be quite a hearty nip, especially given the thickness of that cotton
jharan
(duster) which Kadera always carried slung over one shoulder. I dabbed it with disinfectant and put a plaster on it, just to be on the safe side, and after that Kadera treated those ‘harmless' creatures with the respect that he accorded to scorpions, and stamped on them on sight. Fortunately their territory did not seem to range any further north than Delhi, and the one that bit Kadera was the only one that I remember seeing as far north as that.

Mother returned from wherever she had been staying and received a rapturous welcome from Angie (who had been moping around in her pitch behind the bungalow making sad hooting little noises to herself), and as Bets had stopped being a striking shade of gamboge, with the doctor's permission we set off for Kashmir.

The arrival of the monsoon made our journey to Kashmir a mixture of lashing rain, varied by brilliant intervals when the black ceiling of rain-clouds drew back to disclose a clear sky and a glittering, clean-washed world in which a myriad ponds and pools and puddles flashed like heliographs in the sunlight. We reached Rawalpindi, where we had booked for a night at Flashman's Hotel, in one of the bright intervals, and were
disconcerted to find several messages from friends, including an urgent telegram from Ken Hadow, awaiting us at the hotel's reception desk, all of them urging us not to attempt to take the Murree road to Srinagar, because of the danger of landslides.

There were two other routes into the valley: one via Abbottabad and the other via Sialkot and the Banihal Pass. But since the Abbottabad one merged with the main Murree-Srinagar road at Domel and became one and the same for the remaining 109 miles of the journey, the chances were that there would be as many landslides on the last stretch as there were on the first. As for the Banihal route, well, for a start that entailed turning round, going back to Jhelum, and recrossing the bridge there. Which was something that Mother was not prepared to face a second time. She had arrived in Jhelum as a bride, and had crossed that bridge scores of times, pushing her baby son in his perambulator for an evening walk. But she had never before seen the Jhelum in flood, and it was a daunting sight. We had none of us liked the look of it.

The bridge, at that time probably one of the longest in India, since the river here is fully a mile wide, stands, in normal times, high above its surface, the tall stone piers splitting the smooth current far below the level of the road that carries all the two-way traffic of the Grand Trunk. During the dry season when the rivers run low, a full third of the bridge looks down on silver sandbanks or shallow water. But that day there were no sandbanks and no piers, and the iron girders of the bridge seemed to float on the surface of a brown, furious torrent that at first sight appeared to have no banks, and was in the process of turning into an inland sea. The racing, foam-streaked current was full of the debris of ruined villages whose mud-walled, thatched-roofed houses had been swept away by the flood and, together with the drowned bodies of cattle, whole trees and clumps of pampas grass torn from the bank, had piled up against the iron gridwork of the bridge, the road-surface of which would seem to be under water.

Mother had braked sharply at the sight of it. But the bridge guard had assured her that it was still safe to cross, though not for much longer, since the water was still rising. It only needed another tree-trunk the size of the last to add itself to the log-jam of flotsam and jetsam that had already piled up against it, and the pressure might become too great and a span of the bridge give way. He urged the Lady-Sahib to go while the going was good, and Mother took a deep breath and went.

It was a horrific crossing, made all the more alarming by the roar of the river as it fought its way through the impressive barrier of assorted litter which it was busy building against itself on the up-stream side of the bridge. Well, we made it. But you can understand why, having done so, Mother was not anxious to drive back to Jhelum and cross that bridge again — always supposing it was still standing — in order to brave the Banihal Pass.

In the end we decided to wait an extra night in Rawalpindi to see if things improved; a decision reinforced by meeting a fellow driver, recently arrived from Srinagar, who gave us a hair-raising description of having to reverse for nearly a mile along a stretch of road that was a mere ledge on the side of a cliff, some forty or fifty feet above the raging torrent of the Jhelum, until he found a place safe enough to allow a Kashmir-bound car to pass him — all traffic coming up from the plains having the right-of-way over those coming down, and both sections of road being equally perilous.

The following day, however, remained fine and sunny, and though clouds still hid the top of the mountain ranges and the news was still of bad conditions on the road, several intrepid drivers who, like ourselves, had been held up by the weather, decided to risk it and set off for the hills. Mother, consoling herself with the thought that the man who claimed to have driven backwards along a mile of edgeless road had at least succeeded in getting safely back to ‘Pindi — and daunted, I suspect, by the size of our hotel bill — decided to follow their example.

We left ‘Pindi basking in bright sunlight that stayed with us until just below Sunny Bank, two miles below the hill-station of Murree, where we plunged abruptly into a dense wall of mist and drizzle that reduced visibility to a matter of a few feet and forced Mother to switch on the car's headlights and slow down to a crawl. Murree is built on a hilltop, and once clear of its outlying fringes and driving down the winding road that dips down into the valley far below it, we were clear of the mist and the blanket of cotton-wool clouds that had blotted out everything around us and were in a rain-washed, sunless world under a lowering sky the colour of grey granite.

I don't remember if we met or passed any other traffic on our way up to Murree or down on the road between Murree and Kohala — which is on the frontier of Kashmir, where one pays a toll to cross the Jhelum river by a suspension bridge which spanned, that day, a turgid brown
torrent that was almost as frightening as the one we had crossed earlier. But I do remember that the drivers of a number of cars and buses that were waiting on the weather, at both the British-India and the Kashmir sides of the river, were unanimous in warning us that the road ahead was in a terrible state, and that if the Dâk-bungalow had not turned out to be so full of stranded travellers (the
khansama
had informed us that by now the
Sahib-log
were sleeping two to a bed and in rows on the floor of the dining-room and the verandah, and that he could not provide shelter for anyone else — ‘not even a mouse!'), Mother would undoubtedly have stayed there for at least that night.

However, she could not only see for herself that the
khansama
spoke the truth, but also see that the cars which had left ‘Pindi less than an hour or two before us were not among the many that were parked here. Unless their drivers had lost their nerve and decided to stop at Murree, they had pressed on and were still ahead of us on the road. Inquiries at the toll gate supported the latter supposition, so Mother chanced it and drove on.

The road was in a reasonably good state, and we had no trouble until we arrived at Domel, where two rivers, the Jhelum and the Kishanganga, meet, and visitors to Kashmir pay another toll and have their baggage inspected. Here we ran into trouble, though not on account of our luggage. Angie, who up to now had behaved impeccably and been charming to one and all, took a sudden dislike to one of the customs men who came over to warn Mother about the perilous state of the road ahead and got a sharp nip for his pains.

Even at the best of times the roads into Kashmir can be terrifying. They had frightened me stiff on previous visits: in too many places they were cut out of the rocky sides of deep gorges, at the bottom of which, even in dry seasons, the penned-up waters of the Jhelum swirled and foamed as they raced down to the plains carrying with them the logs from the lumber camps far away in the forests.

The sheer drop between the edge of the road and the angry river varied from twenty to 300 feet, and the road wound and jack-knifed, so that driving up it (and worse still, down!) often gave the impression that one was about to drive straight into thin air. I love Kashmir dearly. It was and is one of my favourite places. Yet in that sad day — still mercifully a good many years in the future — when I was leaving it because the Raj had ended and India had achieved her independence, I could still think,
‘Well, thank goodness I shall never have to drive along this petrifying road again!' It seemed to me the only good thing in all that sorrowful time.

But this was the first time I had driven along it in a high flood year, and all those pessimists at Kohala and Domel, who had advised us to turn back, or at least stay put, had been right; we should have paid attention to them. It was ‘one-way only' for most of the way, belatedly enforced in order to stop anyone else having to reverse along that nightmare of a road with its hairpin bends and overhanging rocks. This held us up at frequent intervals, and gave the more fainthearted a chance to turn round and make for the nearest Dâk-bungalow — as several of those who had left ‘Pindi ahead of us that morning had chosen to do. But Mother was nothing if not obstinate, and she refused to be beaten. As soon as she was given the signal to go, she went.

The road gangs were out, doing their best to clear a way for cars, and with their help we got over the first two or three bad patches fairly easily and began to think that this was not going to be as bad as we had feared. Until suddenly, turning a corner, the road vanished and we were faced with a vast, steep smear of mud and rocks and uprooted trees. The landslip had sliced off the entire mountainside in one enormous swoop, road and all, and deposited it in the river far below us. What's more, it was still falling. A slow-moving stream of liquid mud, full of stones and uprooted trees, was oozing steadily down the sheer mountainside, to slide over what had once been the road and drop straight down to form a dam at the foot of the gorge below; a dam that the swollen river was making short work of.