Heat and Dust (12 page)

"One thing to be said in Dhung's favour," said Major Minnies, "he
was
a fool. It's worse when they're not. Like our Friend. When they are so well endowed by nature with looks, brains, personality, everything: and
then
to see them go to pot ... What is it, dear lady ? You're leaving us?"

"To your brandy and cigars. "

The three men were on their feet, watching her walk across the moonlit lawn. She went into the house but not into the drawing-room. where the servants were bringing her coffee; She went up on the terrace and leaned thoughtfully on the parapet. She could see the three men still at table down below. Probably now that she had gone they were talking more freely-about the Nawab and his mysterious misdeeds. She felt strange, strange. She looked beyond the little tableau in her garden of three Englishmen in dinner jackets blowing smoke from their cigars while the servants hovered around them with decanters: she had a moonlight view of the Saunders' house, then the spire of the little church and the graves in the cemetery, and beyond that the flat landscape she knew so well, those miles of dun earth that led to Khatm.

* * * *

12June. I
keep getting letters from Chid. I was surprised on receiving the first one as I did not think he was the type to look back and remember people. The letter started off not with a personal salutation but in black letters:
Jai Shiva ShanJcar! Hari Om!
He wrote: "It is the light around our body that controlls our mind. A pure true un-harmfull mind is a place of perfect HAPPINESS. So it is the perfect PURE TRUE and UN-harmfull mind - that is Heaven.” It went on like that for most of the letter except that somewhere in the middle he wrote "We are here in Y Dharmsala. A Pure place except the priest who tries to cheat and rob us." And at the end there was another line: "I forgott my drinking mug send care Y Sri Krishna Maharaj Temple Dharmsala by
registered
post express. "

His subsequent letters conformed to the same pattern: a lot of philosophy with somewhere in the middle a couple of factual lines (usually to do with being "cheated and robbed") and at the end a request. They are interesting documents and I am keeping them, with Olivia's letters, on my little desk. They make strange company together. Olivia's handwriting is clear and graceful, even though she seems to have written very fast just as the thoughts and feelings came to her. Her letters are all addressed to Marcia, but really they sound as if she is communing with herself, they are so intensely personal. Chid's letters are absolutely impersonal. And he always writes on those impersonal post office forms which seem to constitute, along with stained and illegible postcards, the bulk of the mail that crosses from one end of India to the other. They always look as if they have been travelling great distances and passed through many hands, absorbing many stains and smells along the way. Olivia's letters - more than fifty years old -look as if they had been written yesterday. It is true, the ink is faint but this may have been the quality she used to blend with the delicate lilac colour and scent of her stationery. The scent still seems to linger. Chid's crumpled letters, on the other hand; appear soaked in all the characteristic odours of India, in spices, urine, and betel.-

Inder Lal is always eager to hear Chid's letters. He comes up to my room in the evenings so that I can read them out to him. He likes all that philosophy. He tells me that Chid's is a very old soul which has passed through many incarnations. Most of them have been in India and that is why Chid has come back in this birth. But what Inder Lal doesn't understand is why l have come. He doesn't think I was Indian in any previous birth, so why should I come in this one?

I try to find an explanation for him. I tell him that many of us are tired of the materialism of the West, and even if we have no particular attraction towards the spiritual message of the-East, we come here in the hope of finding a simpler and more natural way of life. This explanation hurts him. He feels it to be a mockery. He says why should people who have everything -motor cars, refrigerators - come here to such a place where there is nothing? He says he often feels ashamed before me because of· the way he is living. When I try to protest, he works himself up more, He says he is perfectly well aware that, by Western standards, his house as well as his food and his way of eating it would be considered primitive, inadequate - indeed,. he himself would be considered so because of his unscientific mind and ignorance of the modem world. Yes he knows very well that he is lagging far behind in all these respects and on that account I am well entitled to laugh at him. Why shouldn't I laugh! he cries, not giving me a chance to say anything - he himself often feels like laughing when he looks around him and sees the conditions in which people are living and the superstitions in their minds. Who would not laugh, he says, pointing out of the window where one of the town's beggars happens to be passing, a teenage boy who cannot stand upright but drags the crippled underpart of his body behind him in the dust - who would not laugh, asks Inder Lal, to see a sight like that?

At such times I remember Karim and Kitty. I had gone to see them in London just before coming out to India. Karim is the Nawab's nephew and heir, and Kitty, his wife, is also of some Indian royal (or rather, ex-royal) house. When I phoned Karim and told him I was going to India to do some research into the history of Khatm, he asked me round to their flat in Knightsbridge. He himself opened the door:

"Hi there," he said. He was an extremely handsome young man, dressed in the height of London boutique fashion. I kept wondering whether he resembled the Nawab at all. Probably not, as Karim is very slender, almost slight, with delicate features and long curly hair; whereas the Nawab in his prime is said to have been a well set-up man with a strong, rather hawk-like face.

Karim ushered me into a room full of people. At first I thought it was a party but afterwards realised that they had just dropped in. They were Karim and Kitty's set. Most of them were sitting on the floor which was strewn with cushions, bolsters, and rugs. Everything was Indian, including most of the people there. They had a tape playing of sarod music - no one was listening but it made a good background to their talk which was carried on in high-pitched, rather bird-like voices. Kitty was curled up on a red and gold sofa which had once been a swing and was fixed to the ceiling by long golden chains. She too was dressed in smart London casual clothes - pants and a silk shirt - and wore them as gracefully as a sari: this may have been the effect of her very slender limbs, waist, and neck, combined with hips of a surprising voluptuousness. She too said "Hi there," and then she waved her hand vaguely around the room, murmuring "Take a pew."

I never did make out who they all were and whether they were all living in London or were just visiting. I had an impression that they commuted rather freely and sometimes I didn't know whether they were talking about something that had happened in Bombay or in London. They seemed to be engaged in a lot of selling and spoke knowingly about which family treasures could be safely carried out of India in one's hand baggage and which had to be got over by other means.

The only English people there besides myself were a couple called Keith and Doreen. They looked larger, stronger, coarser than the other people in the room and were listening eagerly - even, it seemed to me, greedily - to the conversation about family treasures. They told me that they were designers and were about to go into the manufacture of boutique clothes made exclusively of Indian materials. They were starting a partnership with Kitty and Karim: Karim would, be helping them with their contacts and Kitty was to come in on the creative side. She was, they said, very creative.

Karim had curled up on a cushion at my feet. He looked up at me with his beautiful eyes and said "You must tell us about your research." When I said that I was especially interested in his uncle, the previous Nawab, he said "Wasn't he a naughty boy?" Everyone laughed; they said that there had been a lot of naughty boys in those days. They began to tell stories. They all seemed to have relatives who had been involved in scandals in London hotels, had been deposed for some frightful misdemeanour, had squandered away family fortunes, had died of drink, drugs, or poison administered by illegitimate brothers. They spoke of these matters with nostalgia: "Say what you like," concluded one of them, "those days had their own charm."

From there they passed on to a discussion of present days which had no charm at all. India was of course home but was becoming so impossible to live in that they had to stay mostly abroad. Yet all of them were eager to serve India and would have done so if it had not been for the intransigent attitude of the present government. They had many bad experiences to relate on this score. One girl told how her family had tried to turn their palace into a hotel. It was in a beautiful picturesque area with many items of tourist interest all around, and some foreign investors had been very interested in the venture. But the Government of India wanted licences for everything and then refused to issue the licences. For instance, the palace was old, it had been built in the nineteenth century and, naturally, to make it convenient for modern tourists all sorts of modern sanitary fittings would have had to be imported. You could hardly, she said, expect a modern tourist to sit on a thunderbox! But try and explain that simple point to a Secretary of the Government of India who knows only one word which is no. In the end the foreign investors had got discouraged and had gone elsewhere. Now the palace was just lying there deserted with the roof caving in, so that the family had had no alternative but to get all their stuff out for auction abroad. There had been some priceless things - including a golden chariot in which the Lord Krishna was taken out in procession once a year - and they
had
fetched a good price: but of course, as everyone knew, there were so many middlemen to be paid off - the dealers and the auctioneers and the people who arranged for the thing to go out of India.

Karim told me that he had also had to get rid of most of the treasures in the palace at Khatm. If they had been left there, they would have been ruined by white ants and fungus. There had been a large collection of miniature paintings, but no one had cared about it; it had never been catalogued and was kept wrapped in sheets in underground chambers. Now fortunately most of it had been sold to foreign buyers, though. Karim had kept some pictures - not so much for their value as for family associations.

"Come, I will show you." He jumped up, gracefully unwinding his long legs, and led me into another room. This one seemed like a charming, rather exotic sitting room, full of rugs and painted furniture, but Karim said it was just the filthy little old den where he and Kitty liked to come and relax. It was here - framed in gold on the red wallpaper of Kitty and Karim's den - that I had my first sight of the palace at Khatm. It looked different from the way it does now, but this may have been due to the stylisation of the artist. Everything was jewelled: the flowers in the garden, the drops of water in the fountain.

The pictures showed princes and princesses engaged - in various pleasurable pursuits. The princes looked like Karim, the princesses like Kitty. They all wore a great deal of jewellery. Karim told me that most of the family jewellery had disappeared long ago - as a matter of fact, he said, smiling, it was the Nawab I was interested in who had been largely responsible for its disappearance. He had always needed money and hadn't cared how he laid his hands on it. He had led rather a riotous life - there had been all sorts of scandals even (perhaps I had heard?) with an Englishwoman in India, the wife of an I.C.S. officer.

" Yes," I said and passed on to the next picture. This, Karim explained, was the founder of their line, Amanullah Khan (he who had taken refuge with Baba Firdaus). He looked respectable enough in the picture - in a flowered gown, a pink turban, a long moustache, and smoking a hookah: but, Karim said, it showed him at the end of his life when he had been confirmed in his conquests by treaty with the East India Company. Before that he had lived mostly in the saddle, with few possessions beyond his sword and a band of followers as rough as himself.

"Oh he was a character!" said Karim, speaking of Amanullah Khan with the same admiration as the Nawab had always done. "He was very short and squat and had bandy legs from always sitting on a horse. Everyone was terrified of him on account of his frightful temper. He got very quarrelsome while drinking and once, when one of his drinking companions contradicted something he'd said, he got so angry he took his sword and cut off the poor guy's arm. Just like that, with one stroke.
Wow.
There are lots of stories about him and people still sing songs about him - folk songs and such. The family's been there since 1817 which is when we became the Nawabs, and if I ever care to stand for Parliament, they'd return me like a shot. Sometimes I think I would like to - after all, one
is
Indian and wants to serve the country and all that - but you know, whenever we go to Khatm, Kitty gets a stomach upset due to the water. And of course there is no proper doctor there so what are we to do, we have to get back to the hotel in Bombay as quickly as possible. But now we're thinking of buying an apartment in Bombay because of this business we are starting with Keith and Doreen. Kitty has done a lot of research on ancient Indian paintings from Ajanta and such places which are fabulous, and her designs will be based on these so, you see, we will be serving our country, won't we, through the export-import business?"

He looked at me with eyes which were deep and yearning. (rather like Inder Lal 's, I was to discover later). I didn't meet him again after that one visit, and though I sometimes think of him here, it
is
difficult to fit him and Kitty in either at Khatm or at Satipur; or even what I saw of Bombay.