by Mark Shand
Stepping into the cool of verandas, luxuriant with bougainvillaea, I was shown proudly around the houses. Some were decorated with English chocolate-box covers pinned to the walls and prints of horses and foals, puppies and Beefeaters. Others were more elaborate. Heavy sideboards were littered with silver frames, holding faded photographs of friends and relatives back home. In the room of one house sat a Steinway grand piano, its woodwork eaten by white ants. Over well-trimmed hedges residents wearing panama hats and clutching secateurs and watering cans or baskets of cut roses, gladioli and large wild daisies, discussed their gardens and worried about the condition of their orchids.
I took tea with Mrs King, an elegant Eurasian lady, clad in crisp coloured chiffon scarves. Over cucumber and cheese sandwiches she told me that she had suffered a heart attack yesterday morning. That same afternoon she had destroyed a snake’s nest containing thirty-eight baby cobras, but was determined to be up and about today to greet me. She sweetly presented Tara with a garland of marigolds. Nearby, I visited Mrs Matthews, a widowed Indian lady, whose husband had served as a doctor in the British army before spending most of the war as a prisoner of the Japanese. She now receives a pension from the British government in recognition of his services. Mrs Thipthorpe posed for a photograph in a red wool dress and pearls, proudly clutching her deceased husband’s Service and Coronation medals, while Stanley Potter, the Gunge’s oldest resident, whose house was called ‘Dunroamin’, lent me his valuable collection of the Colonisation Observer, dating back to 1933.
At ‘Bonner Bhavan’, whose grand wrought-iron gates were designed as peacocks, I talked with Dolly Bonner, a bitter but intelligent and controversial old lady who told me that she had never fitted in, warning me against visiting certain other residents who were not ‘the right sort’. She really believed that between the time of British departure and Independence, the Anglo-Indian, who she considered to have a superior education and a greater understanding of administration than most Indians, was better prepared to take over the reins of government in the new India.
I lunched with Jit Roy, once a keen shikari, who brought his own food in a tiffin carrier – roast pork and potatoes. He carried his toothpicks in a small leather wallet. Immaculately dressed, he wore flannel trousers, silk shirt, a paisley foulard, and highly polished brown brogues, topped off by a brown felt trilby. A fan of the BBC World Service, he had requested a song on ‘The Pleasure’s Yours’, in memory of an old friend and resident of the Gunge who had died recently, and had heard it was to be played for him that very night. Later I drank with Brian Callaghan, a former boxer who had trained in the same gym with Henry Cooper. He had returned to the Gunge to look after his sick mother.
The next day, at a pretty white bungalow nestling in the hills, we met one of the area’s richest residents, eighty-eight-year-old Ida Mukerjee, an Anglo-Burmese lady who with a thirty-year-old boyfriend seemed determined to enjoy life to the full. Passionately traditional she had ostracised her son for marrying a local Adivasi (tribal) girl, forcing him to eke out a living selling fruit at the station. Four years ago, their young son had disappeared on a coal train heading north. Perhaps he had chosen this way of life at the station, in the hope that one day his son would return.
Kitty Teixaira, once regarded as the most eligible and beautiful girl in McCluskiegunge, had been dealt an equally tragic destiny. Her mother, a domineering possessive woman, had deprived her of any education, forbidden her to mix in society, keeping her a virtual prisoner. On her mother’s death Kitty had inherited a large decaying property and no money. She had since married ‘a bad sort’ and, like Ida Mukerjee’s son, struggled to make a living by selling fruit at the station. We met her there surrounded by three dirty snotty-nosed kids, a strikingly handsome young woman, with a haunting sing-song voice, dressed in a ragged sari.
‘Keep away from Clem Mendonca,’ we were warned. ‘He’s mad.’ But we paid no heed, determined to meet the Gunge’s most eccentric resident. It was dark when we arrived at the blacked out and silent house. We banged on a heavy iron grille, recoiling instantly as two snarling shapes sprang against it.
‘Who’s there?!’ a voice growled from inside.
Nervously we introduced ourselves, as a powerful torch beam blinded us. Bolts were drawn back and a head poked out cautiously, scanning left to right. ‘You haven’t been to see those bastard Camerons?’
I shook my head. Earlier I had been told of a terrible feud that raged between the Cameron brothers and Clem Mendonca.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘But I’m keeping the lights out. I’ll face them in the open, but I’ll be damned if I’ll sit like a duck in a shooting alley.’
We seated ourselves at a small table. The soft glow of a kerosene lamp illuminated an arsenal of crossbows, rifles and shotguns. Leaning against the wall was a thirty-foot aluminium boat. ‘Captain’ Clem Mendonca had served forty-five years in the Merchant Navy. Dapper and compact, he bristled like an angry otter. ‘Glad you’re not a Geordie. I’d have thrown you out. Worst crews I sailed with!’
Suddenly he jumped to his feet, crept over to the window and scrutinised the blackness outside, a pearl-handled Smith & Wesson .38 revolver appearing mysteriously in his hand. ‘That’s Cameron,’ he yelled, and I just managed to stop him shooting Indrajit, who was smoking a cigarette. He noticed me eyeing the boat.
‘I’m off soon,’ he announced. ‘Can’t stand this place. Got to get back to the sea. No Camerons there – just you and the elements.’
The arrival of Bhim announcing that Mummy was lonely cut short our visit with Mary Morris. In five minutes, however, managing to look chic in a pink fluffy dressing-gown, this spirited elderly lady had captivated us with her wit and charm. Fortunately our paths would cross again.
A unique monument to a forgotten era, McCluskiegunge hopefully will survive. Already some influential people with the right values are starting to buy property for their retirement. This would have pleased E. T. McCluskie. He sounded a splendid man, and I found a tribute to him on his death in a 1935 Colonisation Observer.
He might have built a palace grand, superb,
Which rivalled many a Raja’s rich demesne
And revelled in a gay luxurious ease
Like lordly Nabob. But he chose, instead,
The better way: his fadeless name to write
On heart and mind of a down-trodden race,
With pen of fervent zeal dipped in gold ink
Of memory pure, eternal as the soul.
Let others grovel in mire of hoarded pelf –
‘To serve’ his maxim. And his deeds transformed
Lapra, waste village, into city fair –
McCluskiegunge! Fit for a worthy race
To dwell in, whose inheritors, while time doth last
Shall rise and call him blessed.
To avoid the long dull road route to Hazaribagh, we cut across the open coal mines of Ramgarh. If there was such a place as hell, this was it. Spread like some virulent rash across the landscape, the pits were linked by a roller-coaster of conveyor belts. Grinding excavators fed waiting trucks, like greedy prehistoric birds. In minutes, we were covered in a fine coal dust and were up to our ankles in black slime, choking and wheezing as the filth hit the back of our throats. It was Tara who suffered the most. Her trunk, which she continually dipped on to the track to find a safe route, became clogged with black sticky waste, which she blew out as if cleaning an old-fashioned fountain-pen.
We passed the towns of Daccra, Rai, and Bacchra, ugly places with ugly names. Crossing a glistening inky river, we washed our faces, a pointless effort, as if we had used a bar of trick soap. Brick factories, monstrous effigies to progress, belched smoke from their tall chimneys. Bhim told me that sometimes elephants were used to drag the steel cars up from the pits; his words were a chilling reminder for me of Tara’s destiny. Most of the labourers were converted Santal tribals and I wondered whether they realised, when they took the good path from their quiet trad
itional life, that they would end up here.
After crossing the main Calcutta–Delhi railway line, we stumbled through a series of deep nullahs, and then, climbing again, reached a narrow forested plateau. As if a door had suddenly been slammed shut, hell was behind us. Along a narrow path lined with wild mint, jasmine and bridal bouquet, and alive with bird-song, we met happy groups of Santal tribals. The men stopped and offered us fruit, but the women and children, terrified of Tara, slipped quickly into the hedges. After we had passed, we saw them kneel, making their pujas in her footprints.
That night we camped close to a field of wild mustard, flanked by a clear bubbling river and a railway bridge arching gracefully over a deep ravine. It was a moonless night and in the limited radius of the firelight the area seemed to shrink to the size of a cellar, with a ceiling of stars, a wall of trees on one side and a crescent of tents, each lit by the dim glow of a kerosene lamp, on the other. In the gloom, almost invisible, Tara stood quietly like a statue, occasionally disclosing her position by a rhythmic flapping of her ears.
Winding down off this razor’s edge, in the morning we crossed the Damodar River, a roaring impassable torrent in the monsoons, but now like a mill pond. Egrets waited patiently for a passing minnow on little islands of exposed sand. The avarice of the Moghul emperors was excited by reports that diamonds were to be found in these rivers that criss-crossed the Chota Nagpur plateau. In fact, there is a legend that the Koh-i-noor diamond was discovered in the River Koel.
The track now petered out completely. Guided by two drunken tribals, Tara forced her way through thick Lantana bushes, disturbing partridge and ‘jungli murghi’, the Indian jungle fowl, a bird similar to a chicken but with a long tail, that explodes from its cover like a rocket. Finding the path again, we descended on to the Hazaribagh plateau, a patchwork of greens and pale golds where paddy and surguja were cultivated. In the distance to our left rose a misty mass of violet hills.
The villages were clean, large and well constructed. Courtyards filled with marigolds and sunflowers led into darkened rooms with thick mud walls. Instead of windows, there were a few strategically placed openings allowing the air to flow unhampered, making them deliciously cool. The roofs of the houses were tiled. Women were decorating the outside walls by a method of hand painting, dipping their fingers into a mixture of straw, ash and water and combing their fingers in long wavy strokes across the walls, creating swirling evocative patterns of trees and lotus flowers. When the painting dried the women would apply lime and red earth to add colour. With its tall cypress-like trees this terracotta landscape reminded me of the rolling hills of Tuscany.
Nearing Hazaribagh we encountered a small encampment of Birhor tribals. Traditionally nomadic hunters and jungle dwellers, their existence relies on the game that they can catch. They are a shy, little-known people who are now forced to change their ways due to deforestation, lack of hunting grounds – and by the lure of better housing donated by the government anxious to obtain the tribal vote. They are squat, dark and flat-nosed, similar to the aboriginals, wearing their hair long and straggly. Known as the ‘leaf people’, they construct their dwellings, resembling large hollow bonfires, from tightly packed leaves. If a Birhor builds a new hut, and it leaks once in two years, he is thrown out of the tribe. Masters of fieldcraft, they practise a simple and highly effective way of trapping game. For large animals, such as boar and hares, they use nets propped up on sticks, into which the game is driven, effectively entangling themselves as the sticks collapse. For birds, a small wire snare, like a noose, is used, which is carefully camouflaged by piles of leaves.
This encampment was unique, providing a contrast between those who succumbed to civilisation, living in new government-built houses, and those who still lived in the traditional leaf dwellings. The leaf house was tidy, the mud floor clean, while the government house was in chaos, pots and pans littering the floor and the wooden window-frames used as firewood.
We were accompanied into Hazaribagh by the Birhor medicine man, a splendid character carrying a sack full of oddities – lizard tongues and claws for cramps, silkworm cocoons for constipation and various roots for impotence. I saw him later selling his wares outside churches and government offices. He did thriving business, and the thought of some fat official suffering from constipation swallowing a silkworm, or dabbing his private parts with a root to improve his sexual prowess, made me very happy.
While taking Tara to bathe next morning, Gokul disturbed a nest of hornets and was badly stung. Jumping off Tara, he ran back to camp screaming. He was in severe shock, his body a mass of burning lumps. Meanwhile, Bhim went to retrieve Tara. Unaffected by the hornets that buzzed angrily around her, she was feeding happily nearby. An hour later he returned.
‘Didn’t you get stung?’ I asked him incredulously.
‘Once,’ he replied smiling, pointing to a large lump on his head. ‘But die, drunk. Eat Bhim blood.’
Later we drove over to see Mary Morris, whom we had met briefly in McCluskiegunge. She was staying at a large convent, formerly her family house and now a hostel for local Adivasi girls. By torchlight, owing to a powercut, we celebrated her seventy-fourth birthday over rum and fruit cake. She had been born in Ranchi and had left for London to train as a hairdresser and beauty specialist at the Mayfair Salon in Hanover Square. Having received her diploma, she had worked at grand hotels throughout Asia and became the Maharani of Jaipur’s personal hairdresser. For a period in the Fifties, she worked at Steiner’s in Grosvenor Street, where, she proudly informed me, her clients had included Yvonne Arnaud, Vivien Leigh, Jennifer Jones, Valerie Hobson and the Queen of Jordan. She had served as a nurse in Chittagong (now Bangladesh) during the war and escorted patients on ambulance trains from Calcutta to Lucknow. She had been awarded the 1939–45 medal, the Burma Star and the War medal.
She showed us postcards of herself as a vivacious young lady always on the arm of a handsome man, either in civvies or uniform. One portrayed her standing in front of the Taj Mahal surrounded by a large crowd of men. She laughed, her blue eyes twinkling.
‘One woman with a hundred men – all to myself on a moonlight night at the Taj. Not bad, eh? Those, of course, were in what I called my salad days. Now I am just an old woman.’
‘Not old, Mary,’ Aditya said, ‘just seventy-four and still capable of putting life into two weary travellers.’
‘Flattery, my dear boy, will get you everywhere.’
That evening, Bhim decided Tara needed to get drunk. For once, it was not just an excuse so that he could join in, but because she needed a full night’s sleep. She was very tired and the alcohol would act like an anaesthetic, ensuring her a long rest.
Mahouts often doctor their elephants, as we were to discover at the Sonepur Mela. Bhim prepared a mess of oats and gur in a bucket. He poured in two bottles of rum, moulded three or four sloppy balls of the mixture and shoved them into Tara’s mouth. When drunk, elephants are like human beings – their reactions varying according to their characters. The naturally good-natured appear even more so, the aggressive become downright dangerous. Everybody, except myself, was dispersed. Bhim explained that although Tara would not cause any trouble, it was better she was with the two people she knew best and trusted.
At first nothing happened, then I noticed slight defects in her co-ordination. Tara always stood with one back leg crossed over the other and attempting this now, she found she could not feel her back legs at all, moving them from side to side with a perplexed expression on her face. Her huge head fell aslant and she began to whip her trunk up and down as if it were some kind of toy. Slowly her eyes closed. She became still. One of her front legs slid slowly forward, then the other. For a moment, in a most undignified fashion, she seemed to crouch like a giant cat. Finally, with a contented rumble, she rolled over and passed out.
‘Mummy have hangover tomorrow,’ Bhim murmured, opening another bottle of rum. ‘Better Bhim as well. Then Mummy and Bhim ill together.’
The Land of the Buddha
A FEW YEARS ago, the inhabitants of Hazaribagh were terrorised by a man-eating leopard, which had killed with alarming frequency. Some people surmised that the killings were carried out by a pack of wolves which had acquired a taste for human flesh by consuming the bodies of deceased prisoners left to rot outside the prison. That prison, once Asia’s largest, lay to our left as we made our way towards Hazaribagh National Park.
Tara was suffering from a hangover and would not be coaxed into moving faster than a shuffling amble. Bhim stopped regularly at small canals to enable her to slake her raging thirst. I felt sorry for her. Unlike humans, she could not sweat out the alcohol. To add to her misery, she carried a full load. We were taking a short cut over rough terrain to the Grand Trunk Road where the jeep would meet us in a day or so. Barring mishaps, we would arrive on the 7th November at Bodh Gaya, where I had arranged to meet my friend, the photographer Don McCullin, who was to accompany us for the last part of the journey.
We passed slowly through a herd of cattle. Around their necks hung wooden bells, emitting a sound like heavy raindrops hitting water. We stopped to talk to the cowherd, an Oraon tribal, who showed us a selection of these bells. Each was exquisite and of a different design, and each unique in its sound, enabling him to distinguish in which direction individual cows had wandered. Aditya offered to buy one. The cowherd refused saying that he would offend the soul of the tree from which he had fashioned the bell, having asked for the tree’s blessing before cutting it down. The tree is always chosen and felled on a Saturday and the bell then made on Sunday. During its creation, no clothes can be worn.
In Assam and Burma, elephants also wear bells so that at night, when the elephants are set free, their mahouts can keep a check on their whereabouts. However, blessed with that ingenious proboscis, they fill the bells with mud and wander undetected, stealing into cultivated areas to enjoy night-time feasts.