Out of India (20 page)

‘
Wonderful
weather,’ was the greeting in the street, and with a sense of gratitude at finding such a thing in India, ‘yes, another
lovely
day.’

At the head of Hulikal ravine the lower town and the bazaar huddled around Coonoor station, cramming into the niches of the hills. Hardworking rickshaws made the
short climb to the upper town. Here the spacious eyries of the Raj, in stone or local brick, commanded the views like so many captains on the bridge. In this part of the town the sense of familiarity for the British was so pervasive that it must have been a work of the unconscious, since something more studied or deliberate would have stood out like a film-set. But this townscape had all the marks and tell-tales of a favourite old coat, form-hugging, weathered beyond fashion, noticed only in absence. Memsahibs in sensible laced shoes wore light cardigans against the morning air. Small pert dogs followed them on leads for a round of the shops. Sahibs buttoned tweed jackets and struck the hilly paths with stout walking-sticks. Vigorously they strode into town, enjoying once again the pleasure of a walk, having endured for too long the sweat-soaked, fly-pestered, foot-swelling weariness of the plains. Dropping down through the mottled shade of eucalyptus and Australian wattle they heard the town cooing to them, promising the warmth of memories and the safety of home, like a nanny presiding at the nursery tea.

A shop window showed a row of Arthur Ransome’s
Swallows and Amazons
books. The barber’s shop displayed the proper candy-striped pole. A tea-shop served Huntley & Palmer biscuits. A poster for film-night at the Club offered Douglas Fairbanks in cutlass-wielding splendour. Sim’s Botanical Gardens respectfully solicited a visit. The ride by charabanc to Ootacamund was recommended. Sunsets seen from the mountain road were particularly fine.

We had arranged accommodation a little beyond the upper town. Going by broad domed pastures of hummocky grass, looping around clefts and gullies thick with stunted trees, we followed a well-kept road bordered with heliotrope and fuchsia to the geranium-scented lawns of Uplands. Here the owner, Mrs Sharp-Smith, spun out her widow’s evening surrounded by the spoil and booty
of a hundred years of tight-fisted imperial commerce, all packed into an elegant colonial bungalow. Amid the fabulous knick-knacks in silver and bone-china, the boule cabinets and the tapestries, the silk Persian rugs and the figures in marble or terracotta, the old matriarch surveyed her domain, propped against the many pillows of her daybed, feeling the after-warmth of successful enterprise flow in through the french windows from her wide acres beyond.

At the end of the cascade of well-trimmed grass, under tall eucalyptus trees, stood a small square bungalow, converted from what used to be servants’ quarters. We were permitted to rent this little house.

*

The man was rubbing long bony hands. The flesh on his face was pulled back to the skull. His voice was hoarse and deep, suggesting the security of the grave.

‘Yes, dear lady,’ he was saying, ‘our syllabus is
very
carefully tailored to the needs of schooling back home. And my wife, of course,
personally
looks after the welfare of the boys while they are here at Highlands.’

My father had returned to soldiering in the Deccan. We were about to join the attenuated little flock of sixteen boys, the boarders at Highlands School. While the headmaster, Mr Mitchell, was reassuring my mother with a tour of the premises, I was trying to take stock of our new situation.

The school was poised high on the long slope of Tiger Hill. The low building was designed in the familiar colonial style, with light, airy rooms opening straight onto a field of rough-cut grass. The world appeared to slope away from the school, the eye tumbling off the steep escarpment and floating free over the plains far below. Oblivious to the view a small group of boys was horsing around on the grass, riding piggy-back and trying to unseat each other, like medieval knights in the lists. These boys
eyed us newcomers without enthusiasm. So far as I could see, there was only one Indian boy in their midst.

There was a melancholy about the place – an abode of vanishing memories. The numbers in the school could never have been large, the buildings were too small, but now the whole school – the few boys and the fewer staff – sensed a tailing down, approaching a rick in the smooth flow of England’s destiny. Dwindling band though we were, Mr Mitchell did his best to leave us undismayed. He spoke much of ‘us’, meaning the whole history of the British in India. He would not demean the ‘natives’ – certainly not, excellent people – but in all honesty what was there in the Nilgiris before ‘we’ came? The pastoral, tattooed Todas with their buffalo-haunted rituals, or the shy, magic-wielding Kurumbas of the woodlands? A few lonely forts, part of a defensive line formed by Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan? A Roman coin, they say, was found in Ootacamund.

All that changed. Tipu was defeated and killed at Seringapatam in 1799, and his kingdom passed into the possession of the East India Company. Lowland Englishmen, forever seduced by mountains, climbed into the hills, in search of flora and fauna, and remarked on the sweet balm of the climate. Mr John Sullivan, the Collector for the Company at Coimbatore, arrived in 1819. Perhaps he saw the hillsides of
Strobilanthes
in bloom, a vast and vivid blue that drowned the hills and then died, as they did once every seven years. He became an enthusiast and propagandist for
Nilagiri
– the ‘Blue Mountains’ – of the local tribes. In 1827 a sanatorium for the Europeans of the Madras Presidency was established at Ootacamund, a few miles uphill from Coonoor. This became the chief town of the mountains. Governor Lushington himself began to take a keen interest. ‘It will be the glory of Mr Lushington’s government,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘without extravagant hyperbole, that he introduced
Europe into Asia, for such are his improvements in the Nilgiris.’

No one questioned what Europe was
doing
in Asia in the first place. And as to the improvements, ‘just look around,’ said our headmaster, gesturing grandly in every direction. Out of ‘our’ sense of responsibility, and hard work, came a worthy legacy. Look at those very extensive tea and coffee plantations on the lower slopes of the hills. The cinchona trees, the source of quinine, introduced from South America under the patronage of Sir Clements Markham. Berkshire pigs established and successfully crossbred with a Chinese variety. A Western stock of horses raised at Masnigudi, to the joy of the local hunt. Low-grade gold-bearing ores mined in the 1880s (a dubious enterprise leading to the boom and bust of a speculative bubble). A cordite factory at Wellington. More cheerfully, and with greater profit, four breweries established in the towns of the hills, and one distillery at Aravanghat. Even the ever-present eucalyptus and wattle trees were a gift from the Raj, being introduced from Australia to replace forests denuded by the great building boom after Governor Lushington had done his work.

But most dear to Mr Mitchell’s heart was Ootacamund, queen (as people told each other much too often) of India’s hill stations. The litany of its rich features brought a smile to the headmaster’s face: Government House, St Stephen’s Church, Charing Cross, the Civil Courts in redbrick gothic, good old Spencer’s store, the Club (where the game of snooker was invented) and the Gymkhana Club, Fernhill and Aranmore (the summer palaces of maharajahs), and the stuffy old mansion of the Nizam of Hyderabad. On the fringes of the town, in invigorating mountain air, were the polo ground and cricket field in Hobart Park, and the golf course sharing Wenlock Downs with the followers of the Ootacamund Hunt, ardent pursuers of the tricky hill-jackal with hounds brought
specially from England. Even the tall surrounding peaks of Doda Betta, Elk Hill and Snowdon, each over 8,000 feet, were somehow blessed, standing watch above carefree and glorious Ooty.

Mr Mitchell had the eye of vision but the daily grind of teaching seemed beneath the dignity of a headmaster. Most of our lessons were taken by Mr Jones, a middle-aged bachelor of great experience whose impassive face refused to be surprised by any foible of youth. He would rap the desk and quell even the most turbulent spirit with a stony, prolonged stare. Then the rebel would look down in confusion and Mr Jones would allow himself a fleeting grin, briefly revealing tobacco-stained teeth. He was a polymath who appeared to grasp the elements of all subjects, at least at our low level, and I wondered even then at his presence in this outpost of scholarship. Looking back I recall that he was an MA of London, not Oxford or Cambridge, and perhaps that had condemned him to colonial drudgery. Snobbery drove as many to India as did poverty. Or perhaps the spring of youth had carried him tumultuously to foreign adventure. If so, nothing of that rashness was apparent now. Was he content with his exile? For us students there was no way of telling. He gave nothing away. He served. That was enough.

We wore a uniform, prickly shorts, long socks, and gathered each morning for a communal prayer, eyes respectfully cast down before our undemanding Anglican God. The moment was more convention than worship and easily embraced Adi, our one Indian boy, who came from a rich Parsi family. He did not object and murmured his pieties with the rest of us. Though there were too few students for proper team games, hack-abouts on the bumpy grass were encouraged, loosely patrolled by the headmaster who permitted any sporting sin except swearing and loss of temper. Often we were called together for long hikes, where instruction was still mixed
with recreation. We panted through dappled forest on steep hillsides with eyes open for unusual plants or geographical formations, or for the scuttering of some small beast in the undergrowth. Out of breath we paused at the clifftop, plucking guavas, while Mr Jones explained that from this height we could see exactly 109 miles in the direction of Madurai. He had worked it out by trigonometry, which seemed to me, having not reached that far in the textbook, a very smart magic.

In the evening, we sat at two long trestle tables, poking at sweet potato and mung beans and purple vegetables that we did not much like. Before bed we stripped in the dormitory and ran naked to the bare cement bathhouse where Indian servants filled small zinc tubs with hot water carried in old jerry-cans from an outside boiler. We splashed and larked, but once when the horse-play got out of hand Mr Mitchell beat the lot of us without distinction, incensed not so much by the mess (the servants would clear that up) but by the wanton waste of soap, which was an item provided for us from the school inventory.

*

The Hindu kingdom named after Vijayanagar, the ‘City of Victory’, one of the ancient realms of South India, had developed, bloomed luxuriously, then lay broken and abandoned on the south bank of the Tungabhadra River. After many years of neglect, the riot of exuberant monumental architecture lapsed in rural peace into a state of stones wrapped in the roots of banyan trees.

This old kingdom was the touchstone of southern Indian glory, the demonstration of what had been and the lament for what was no longer. The ruins were almost forgotten, but the story somehow entered, in a manner as fragmented and incomplete as the buildings themselves, into our dormitory tales. Where had these tatters of storytelling come from? Was it Adi the Parsi, a worldly and knowledgeable boy rather older than most of us, who had
started us going? In garbled accounts after lights-out, in low voices while the scents of the Indian night drew us back from sleep, we went in search of the fabulous, perhaps with the same lazy drift and insecure geography with which the Arthurian knights had gone wandering into mystic country in their pursuit of Sarras and the Grail.

With wonder and inaccuracy we lost ourselves in stories of a city more extensive than the eye could reach, of temples so large and splendid that gods themselves could walk there at ease, of palaces with so many rooms that some were never visited or mapped, of an elephant house like celestial lodgings, of a king dressed in white silk with flowered embroidery encrusted with jewels who never wore the same garment twice. We spoke of riches and cruelty, of diamonds as big as a fist, of gold weighed by the half-ton, of criminals suspended by a meat-hook under the chin, of widows burnt abominably in the practice of suttee. We boasted, as if they were our own, of armies blotting out the ground with semi-naked warriors, of battle-elephants made drunk before fighting, of embassies escorted by 50,000 horsemen. Most of all, we whispered about women, beings almost unknown to us, but whose forms were beginning to break into our dreams, hopes and delirium. In ill-formed imagination we saw kings with too many wives and innumerable concubines, temples with thousands of dancing-girls said to give services of a lascivious kind that we could not as yet name. Night-long feasts and entertainments reeled through our minds where horses and elephants also danced and eunuchs discreetly threaded the throng with messages of assignation and love.

Exhausted by the mystery of a grandeur and an excess that seemed to me superhuman, I fell back at last into the relief of sleep.

Reality, I learnt later, was richer than dreams. Contemporary chronicles by Domingo Paes and Fernão Nuniz, Portuguese travellers who visited the great king
Krishnadeva Raya at Vijayanagar in the 1520s, pictured a genial megalomania, a baroque extravagance, that outdid anything in Europe. Louis XIV, the Sun King, was a stammering princeling compared to Krishnadeva. This plump man with marks of smallpox on his face, wrote Paes, was ‘the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be’. He was a cheerful soul who drank a pint of sesame oil at daybreak, then lifted weights and wrestled and practised sword-play until the oil was sweated out of him. He had a merry disposition, but beware of his rage!

It was clear that this king operated on a different human level, raising up on the foundation of his absolutism a social, intellectual and moral structure dizzy in its extent, stupefying in the richness of its detail, and most daring in its claim to power over things of the earth and things of the mind.