Golden Afternoon (9 page)

He had wanted to go while he still had many Indian friends, and before those friendships soured. Like many Anglo-Indians,
^*
he had supposed that the invaluable help that India had given the Allies during nearly five murderous years of war must, with victory, be rewarded by an immediate move toward Dominion Status, at the very least. When that did not happen he foresaw serious trouble ahead, and the breaking of many old ties.

He was right. For as the prospect of self-government and freedom from Imperial rule receded, hostility toward the Raj increased. I became aware of its effect among many of my one-time friends. Not among the ordinary people, the servants and shopkeepers, villagers, artisans and the poor, or among the princes, the hereditary rulers of semi-independent states; but among Indians of our own social level, the well-educated middle and upper-middle classes who sent their children to convent schools and colleges, and who stood to gain the most from Independence. Or thought that they would. The ordinary people were as friendly as ever, and the royals continued to be as regally pleasant as they had always been. But with several of the families I had known, the ease and companionship which I had enjoyed as a child, and had confidently expected to find waiting for me, had become tinged with reserve, and I became conscious
of a barrier that had not been there before: an almost undetectable one, for Indians have beautiful manners. But a barrier just the same.

They were as charming as ever, but I was no longer one of them; it was as though I had once been ‘family' and was now only a guest. To all appearances a welcome one — except in only one case, where the family concerned, having joined the Congress Party, made it woundingly plain that they no longer wished to have any close contacts with ‘the enemy'. In particular, not with the daughter of a one-time Director of Central Intelligence.

‘You can't blame them, you know,' said Tacklow, comforting me. ‘If they are seen to be too friendly with you, their fellow Congressmen might suspect them of double-dealing. You have to put yourself in their place.'

He did his best to explain away that hurtful unhappy episode. Without much success, for I have never really got over it, and although it happened so very many years ago, the scar is still there. Even now, looking back on it, I can still remember the pain and shock — and the shaming embarrassment. We had all been such friends! I suppose part of the trouble was the inferiority complex I have already referred to.

It made me notice, too, and become painfully conscious of the fact that although the mothers of various Indian girls I had known seemed happy enough to let me remain on friendly terms with their daughters, it was a different matter when it came to their sons. Friendship between their darling boys and
Angrezi
girls, with whom they had played and laughed and squabbled in childhood, was not to be encouraged. Not now that they had left childhood behind them and become young men and women. Politics, religion and caste had become important, and the old careless, casteless, happy-go-lucky relationships were not to be recovered. It was not possible to be unaware of this; or unhurt by it.

Nowadays, when I read books about the Raj written by people who were not even born in those days, yet who like to make out that the British memsahibs despised Indian women and either patronized or snubbed them, I remember the times when I was made acutely aware that the boot was on the other foot, and that it was
I
who was not considered to be the equal of some well-bred and high-caste lady who not only would not socialize with the British, but would not allow her menfolk to enter the living-rooms of her house wearing western clothes, insisting that before doing so they must change into traditional Hindu
dress, and who, if she could not avoid taking the hand of a European, would first cover her own with a fold of her sari.

These were the exceptions rather than the rule. But there were still enough of them to make me tread very carefully. And everyone was aware that among the ranks of the ruling princes there was at least one Maharajah, the ruler of no small state, who on any occasion on which
Angrezis
might be present, made a point of wearing specially made thin silk gloves, for fear that he might have to shake hands with one. I cannot think of any
Angrezi
who would have wished to take that particular hand, since his reputation for cruelty was of the blackest, and rumour credited him with several murders, including that of a wife or two; the law that prevented a ruling prince being prosecuted in any public court saved him again and again from being hauled before a judge. It was only when he flew into a rage with one of his horses which had either failed to win a race, or performed unsatisfactorily on a polo field — I forget which — and, calling for a can of petrol, flung the contents over the unfortunate animal and set a match to it, that the Government of India, which had been reluctant to prosecute him when it was a human life that was in question, suddenly came over all British, decided that His Highness had gone too far, and had him deposed.

There may have been a time when I was unaware of the existence and the rules of caste (one could hardly have been a child in India and
not
known them). But, if so, I don't remember it, and I suppose I can't have been much affected by them because, when last there, I had been regarded as being below the age of caste. But now it was different. Now I was a grown-up. And far from feeling myself superior to the natives of the country — as every trendy author from Forster onwards insists was the almost universal
Sahib-log
's attitude — I realized that it was I, as an
Angrezi
, who was the second-class citizen; and I was, and still am, deeply grateful for the kindness and good manners of the many Indians of all faiths, castes and classes who never made me feel an interloper. For their sakes I can forgive the very few who did. But because of the disproportionate pain and embarrassment inflicted by those few, I withdrew into my shell and became wary of making overtures for fear of being snubbed. And lost, in consequence, that carefree feeling of ease and belonging and comradeship that had pervaded the years of my childhood.

I felt that loss keenly. But it was only with Indians of my own class
that I felt I must now watch my step. With the servants, bazaar-folk and villagers — the ‘populace' — the old ease was still there, probably because the masses were still sublimely uninterested in politics and, unlike the middle and upper-middle classes, had not yet (outside his home patch) heard much, if anything, about Gandhi. If only I had not forgotten how to speak fluent Hindustani, I think that with them I could have picked up the threads of my life exactly where I had been forced to drop them when, over nine years before, I sailed tearfully away from Bombay.

As it was, my command of the language was now practically nil. It was a grave disadvantage, for although the majority of the Indian friends who came from the same social stratum as myself spoke fluent English, the ordinary working-class folk in the bazaars and villages did not. And I was soon to discover that I could no longer chatter freely with them, even though there were still so many of them in Shah Jehan's Delhi and its outskirts whom I remembered with affection, and who had not forgotten either me or my sister Bets. Although I learned soon enough to translate what they were saying and to make myself understood, it was never again with the ease and familiarity of those early years, when I could gossip and crack jokes with them. That comfortable degree of familiarity never returned, for the gift of tongues that Tacklow possessed, and which I had once hoped that I had inherited, was denied me. Nor have I transmitted it to my grandchildren. It has been left to Bets to hand it on, by way of her younger son, to no fewer than three of her granddaughters.

For the reasons that I have given, my memories of my first season as a grown-up in Imperial Delhi are not entirely happy ones. Many of the British companions of my childhood, who had left India similarly bound for boarding-schools when the ‘Great War' ended, had not returned. Some never would; and of those who did, only one or two had been close friends. As for the very few Indian ones who still lived in Delhi, and with whom I could no longer talk without thinking in their own tongue, I felt, for the first time, as though I did not belong in their country by right. Yet the land itself, particularly Old Delhi, was kind to me and never let me down. It had changed very little, and just to walk around it again and visit all our old haunts was a deep and satisfying delight.

Curzon House, which had been home to me for so many cold weather seasons during my childhood, had now become the Swiss Hotel. But its old name remained on the wrought iron of the gates, while the gardens,
and the Kaye Battery marking the site of the siege battery commanded by my kinsman, Edward Kaye of the Bengal Artillery, during the attack on Delhi in the early autumn of the Black Year, were still as I remembered them — as was our favourite playground, the Kudsia Bagh. But our secret hideaway on the ruined gateway had been unkindly exposed. The bamboos and the flowering creepers which had previously concealed it had been ruthlessly uprooted, or else equally ruthlessly pruned, and the magic had gone. So, too, had the gap in the hedge through which Bets and I used to crawl in order to play with the Indian children who lived in those beautiful ‘John Company' style houses between Maiden's Hotel and the Kudsia Bagh. As for our old friend and ally, the
chowkidar
who used to occupy one of the ground rooms in the ruined gateway that was once the main entrance to the Begum Kudsia's palace, there was no sign of him and no one could tell us where he had gone; or when. There had been no
chowkidar
for many monsoons, they said; who could tell how many? When we asked if he were still alive, they only shrugged and gave India's time-honoured reply: ‘Who knows?' Yet superficially, at least, very little had changed.

The Old Delhi Club still functioned, and the band still played dance music on the lawn of an evening; only now it was: ‘Avalon', ‘Always' and ‘Miss Annabelle Lee' instead of ‘Long, Long Trail' and the ‘Merry Widow Waltz'. As many butterflies as ever still lilted through the hot, sun-chequered shadows of the old cemetery, and the peacocks still cried at dusk and dawn. And though our old
chowkidar
had gone, the parrots and the blue-jays and hoopoes had not, while the
galaries
— the little striped-back Indian chipmunks that we used to call ‘tree-rats' and for whom we used to save up our toast crusts and cake crumbs when we were children — still whisked up and down the trunks of the peepul trees exactly as their great-great-grandparents used to do in the days when Punj-ayah would take us for our morning walks through the Kudsia Bagh to feed the birds and squirrels.

Best of all, that first year, one of my parents' old friends, Monty Ashley-Phillips, who, while Bets and I were in boarding-school in England, had shared their bungalow in Rajpore Road, had arranged to take us all out to a shooting-camp over the Christmas holidays. So once again we donned the familiar camp uniform of khaki shirt, breeches and topi that were obligatory wear for such occasions, drove for miles along the Grand Trunk Road, crossed the Jumna by country-boat, and then jolted and
bumped for more miles along a rutted cart-track towards the little village of Hassanpore, on the outskirts of which our camp had been pitched in the shade of a mango tope.

There must have been other guests, for as far as I remember the party numbered four or five guns in addition to Mother, Bets and myself, who did not shoot and were merely spectators. Everything that was shot went into the pot. Duck, teal, partridge, quail and snipe, an occasional black-buck and, understudying for the traditional Christmas turkey, a plump peahen. The camp's
khansama
(cook) would look over the day's bag to take his pick, and anything that was left over would be distributed among the local villagers.

Game was plentiful and the days were blue and gold and windless, and it would have been a halcyon period if it had not been for the temperature. But the starry nights were bitterly cold, and I still remember, with a shudder, our first night under canvas, and the way the cold struck upwards from the ground through the thin mattress of my camp-bed, making me feel as though I were lying on a block of ice. It took me quite a time to realize that some of the blankets,
resais
(padded quilts) and coats that I had piled on top of me would do a lot more good if I put them underneath me instead; and it was only after I had crawled out, shivering, into the darkness to grope for and light a hurricane-lamp and reorganize my bedding that I unfroze enough to get some sleep. But, apart from that, every day was magic, and it was as if I had never been away.

Tacklow's work was concerned with the princely states of Rajputana; that vast expanse of sun-scorched country that Kipling called ‘the Cockpit of India', and which nowadays is once again known by its own name of Rajasthan — the Country of the Kings — though technically there are no more kings, for twenty-four years after Independence, Mrs Gandhi abolished them and only the afterglow of their glory and their legendary deeds remain. But back in the twenties, as rulers of semi-independent sovereign states, they still wielded a good deal of power, and one of the first states on Tacklow's agenda was Gwalior, whose late Maharajah, old Madhav Rao Scindia, had been a personal friend of his — as was its then Resident, Mr Crump, who had invited Tacklow to stay with him and to ‘bring Daisy and the girls'.

The Residency at Gwalior must have been one of the most splendid in India, second only to the absurdly grandiose one in Hyderabad, Deccan, and possessing, in a land where water is precious, that luxury of Indian luxuries, a swimming-pool. Mr Crump was the nicest of hosts, and we were wined and dined at the palace and taken to see all the sights of the state, which included riding up to Gwalior Fort on one of His Highness's elephants. The fort is everything that a medieval fort should be: it dominates the country for miles around, for it is built on the crest of a soaring outcrop of rock that juts up out of the plain to tower above Gwalior city, lying close-packed in its shadow below.