Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  I returned to Delhi in a state of total euphoria in Bob’s car, with our luggage and Pete, Bob’s bull terrier, on the back seat. We had been the last of our party to leave, but as Bob’s car was capable of a lot more speed than my parents’ seven-seater Hudson, or the car driven by Olive’s swain, we had expected to catch up with the others on the road. But we were held up by level crossing gates that had been prematurely closed on the orders of an extremely pompous little Punjabi, a small, tubby and very minor railway official who, backed by an escort of two uniformed members of the railway police, and intent on showing his zeal for the ‘Kaiser-i-Hind’ (the Viceroy), had insisted on closing the crossing because the Viceregal train was timed to pass that way at four o’clock precisely. The fact that it was not yet three made no difference to his decision. He did not seem to think it in the least important, and though Bob argued, pleaded, ordered and finally (I suspect) resorted to bribery, the little man refused to budge.

  Compared with the flood-tide of traffic that pours down the Grand Trunk Road in these degenerate days, there were remarkably few travellers on the road that day, and most of those were pedestrians who simply ducked below the barrier and walked across, no man saying them nay. Nevertheless, as the minutes crawled by, the road on either side of the track filled up inexorably into an impressive traffic-block consisting of bullock-carts, tongas, country carts, assorted gharis, cars and lorries, a smattering of bicycles, several camels and a solitary elephant, all of which served to block us in. Indians are, in general, a patient race. They have never been averse to squatting down to wait for a train or a bus, or merely permission to move, and now they hunkered down happily to await the passing of the Burra Lat Sahib’s train and (it was to be hoped) the subsequent lifting of the barrier.

  Immersed in the idiotic throes of first love, I should have been only too pleased to be delayed for an extra hour or two with the object of my affections. And I would have been, if there had been even an inch of shade. But though the Grand Trunk Road was lined for most of its length with a double row of shade trees, this particular stretch of road happened to be treeless; probably because the constructors of the signal-box and the two small brick buildings had cut down the surrounding trees and used them for fuel.

  For a good half-mile in either direction the landscape was treeless, and the sun beat down fiercely out of a cloudless sky. The heat shimmered and danced on the rails and the cinder-strewn track, the parched earth and brittle grass and the patient ranks of waiting traffic. And, as we waited, the bullocks, ponies and camels, the elephant and some humans answered the call of nature, and strewed the ground with droppings and urine. The temperature must have been well above a hundred, and the thin canvas roof of Bob’s car — for very few cars in those days had solid, built-in roofs — provided little protection from the scorching heat and none at all from the tormenting swarms of flies that accompanied the assembled livestock. The white dust of the Grand Trunk Road rose in choking clouds from under the many restless, fidgeting hooves, and Pete, whose tongue had been lolling out as he panted distressfully in the back seat, began to express his displeasure with the heat and the smell by whining and scrabbling at the sides of the car, and finally being sick all over the luggage.

  The stench had been bad enough without that, and Pete’s contribution was the last straw; but hemmed in as we were there was nothing we could do about it. We had no water, and no hope of clearing up the mess until the Viceregal train had passed. And, judging from the obstinacy of the crossing-keeper, he might well keep us all waiting for a further ten or fifteen minutes after that, just to be on the safe side. I think I rather expected Bob to be galvanized by Pete’s unsocial behaviour into taking up cudgels again with our jailer. But he, like Kipling, had obviously been out in India long enough to realize the futility of ‘trying to hustle the East’, and, resignedly accepting the situation as part of the White Man’s Burden, he merely glanced back reproachfully at his faithful hound and said sadly: ‘Oh, Pete, you bunch of violets, you!’ Whereupon the wretched animal was sick again.

  The half-hour that followed had nothing to recommend it. But it passed at last, and so did the Viceroy’s train, by which time the traffic jam had turned into such a complicated piece of knitting that it took the various components an age to unravel themselves. Wheels had become entangled with other wheels, bullocks had become bad-tempered and backed their carts instead of pulling them forward; camels squealed and bit; car drivers honked on their horns; men shouted abuse at their animals and one another, and the hot, white dust ‘stood up like a tree above the smother’ … But in the end, of course, it all sorted itself out and we reached Delhi a good two hours late and smelling like a sewage farm.

  It was not really an auspicious beginning to my first grown-up love affair, but the next night there was a big farewell party for Olive at the Club, where, buoyed up and made suddenly confident by the conviction that this was Love at last, I danced for the first time as though my feet were at least two inches above ground, instead of stumbling or treading on my partner’s toes.

  Almost every memorable occasion in my life seems to have had a tune attached to it — nearly always some popular dance tune. The two that recall Bob Targett are ‘Lantern of Love’, to which I danced with him that night, and ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’ from the first act of La Bohème, which he sang to me (in English, not Italian) as we strolled hand-in-hand in the intervals, between dances, among the tree shadows of the moonlit gardens of New Delhi’s first Gymkhana Club. I had never heard that tune before, and though I have heard it sung any number of times since then — often by some of the great singers of the world, Gigli among them — always it is Bob in the moonlight that I hear singing it, though by now he must have been dead for many years.

  It was Olive’s farewell party, coming on the heels of our late return from that weekend at Agra, that first alerted my parents to my interest in Robert Targett. Until then they had, I think, regarded him only as ‘Olive’s older brother’; a pleasant, thoroughly reliable man, verging on middle-age and given to wearing hornrimmed spectacles. Not at all the type of man to attract a girl in her teens. (I presume they had forgotten their own courting days.) As for me, though it had not, at that date, occurred to me to regard myself as a member of the Fishing Fleet (for was I not one of the India-born, and therefore one of the elect, coming home?), I had recently begun to have daydreams about how pleased my parents were going to be if all went well and I was to end this, my very first season in India, engaged to be married and live-happily-ever-after.

  My parents’ reaction to their belated discovery that their elder daughter looked like becoming seriously interested in ‘dear Olive’s’ brother, was anything but enthusiastic. Yes, of course they both hoped that I would get married one day. The sooner the better, in fact. But only to the right man. And neither of them, it seemed, thought that Robert Targett was the right one for me. Mother’s reasons, surprisingly enough, were (a) that he was too old for me, and (b) that he was only in the Stores Department, which, strictly speaking, ranked slightly lower on the snob-scale than the box-wallahs.

  When, affronted, I pointed out that she herself had married someone exactly double her age, and that her in-laws had originally been very sniffy about her on the grounds that she had been the penniless daughter of ‘some missionary or other’, all I got was the age-old retort that, in a similar situation, every generation in turn gets from its elders: ‘That was quite different!’

  Poor Mother. She wasn’t usually given to the slightest form of snobbery, but I suspect that the fact that I had been invited to a reasonable number of parties during the season in Delhi had raised her hopes, and that she had been cherishing dreams that I might attract the attention of some dashing man in the ICS or the Foreign and Political; or — at the very least — in a cavalry regiment. A mere employee in the department that Raj Society generally referred to as ‘the Sausage and Tum-tum’ was not in the same league at all, and though until then she had been untainte
d by such considerations, the interview had ended with her remarking, as though it must be the deciding factor in her case against Bob, that although she had begun by thinking that he was a reasonably nice man, she had come to the conclusion that there was something ‘I don’t quite like about his face’.

  Oh, the times we were to hear that fatal phrase in the future, after some light-hearted love affair that might have ended differently if Mother, at first enthusiastic, had not suddenly decided that there was something that she ‘didn’t quite like’ about some possible suitor’s face. In the end it became a family joke which Bets and I greeted by collapsing in gales of helpless giggling.

  Tacklow dealt with the situation quite differently. He pointed out that while I still had control of my head as well as my emotions, it would be wise to remember that I would be taking on a life as well as a man: his life, not mine. For this, you must realize, was long before the strident days of Women’s Lib and bra-burning, and Tacklow was still essentially a Victorian in his thinking. Bob Targett, for instance, played cards and was known to be one of the best bridge players in Delhi, possibly in the whole Punjab. And bachelors of a certain age and seniority — Bob must be nearing the end of his thirties — were fixed in their ways and unlikely to change. It would be his wife who would have to change if he married a non-card-playing one, just as any girl who took on, say, a dedicated golfer, yachtsman or racing man would in the end have to learn to share her husband’s pastime if she expected to have a happy and successful marriage.

  That mention of bridge gave me pause. I knew all about Bob’s reputation as a first-class bridge player. And both Bets and I had long ago vowed that we would never, never be lured into taking any interest in cards. This was because so many of our elders and betters in the days of our childhood in Delhi appeared to be hooked on them — particularly on bridge.

  I did not realize that my beloved Tacklow had once been one of the best bridge players in the Punjab, but had suddenly given it up. Buckie, himself a bridge addict, eventually told me this, and when I asked Tacklow why he had stopped playing, he said that after Bets was born, and he found himself with a wife and three children to support, he could no longer afford to play; it was too risky. He had played a good game of whist, bridge and poker in his bachelor days and had made quite a bit of money. But cards were something you could not play for counters — it had to be for money; and since even the best of players could not always win, he did not feel he could risk running into debt now that four people were dependent on him. So he cut out card-playing in the same way that he had stopped collecting stamps. He made a lot of sacrifices for us, did dear Tacklow. And now he had made another one — he had given up Three Trees* and brought us back to India.

  He was right about Bob, of course. There were very few things, if any, that Bob and I had in common; and I knew that nothing would have induced me to take up bridge, or any other form of cards. For watching that long-vanished ‘Curzon House bridge-set’ had given me a horror of the game — I had felt as though all those adults were slaves to something as potent as a drug or drink; something that had caught them and would not let them go. Well, it wasn’t going to catch me — so there!

  The fact was, of course, that I was still only playing at being in love. Bob had not proposed; nor, when I came to think of it, had he shown any serious signs of doing so. And if he did, I hadn’t the least idea what my reaction would be. I was excited at having attracted the attention of someone so much older than I was, and who — judging from report — was known to be what the twenties called a ‘lady-killer’. The whole thing went to my head, and I have to confess that it never occurred to me to apply the Gerald du Maurier test — ‘What would you say if I asked you to marry me?’ ‘I’d be ready in five minutes … No — make it three!’ could not really bring myself to believe that Bob could possibly be serious about me. I thought he was merely an accomplished flirt, who was keeping his hand in, and I enjoyed the whole thing enormously. Tacklow could have saved his breath.

  * The house in England that he had hoped to buy one day.

  3

  ‘My blue heaven’

  Chapter 10

  The majority of India’s princely states lay in the plains, where, in the hot weather, the temperatures can soar to unbelievable heights, but one notable one, Kashmir, lay well above sea level among the mountains of the Karakorams and the Hindu Kush. So it was for Kashmir that we made when our tents in the Club gardens became too stiflingly hot to be borne.

  Kashmir enjoys a pleasantly cool climate throughout the summer and plenty of snow in winter, and had in consequence become a favourite hot-weather resort for those who could not afford the more expensive and social hill resorts, such as Simla. Living was cheap in Kashmir, for since no European was permitted to buy or own land there, the British had taken to renting furnished houseboats on the shores of one of its many lakes, or, if they preferred golf and cooler air, log-huts in the holiday resort of Gulmarg, which was in effect one enormous golf course. Others took rooms in hotels or guest-houses, or went camping under canvas among the pines and deodars, fishing for trout in the rivers and sidestreams of that delectable country.

  Bob Targett gave a farewell party for us at the Club, and in early March, while the weather was still cool enough to make travelling pleasant, we made for Kashmir.

  Why is it that the things that happen to us in our youth remain so clear in our memory? Why, of all the many times that I was to journey to that valley in the future, was this the one that remains so indelibly printed on my mind that it could easily have happened yesterday? By now, I have reached the age when I cannot remember, without a considerable effort of concentration, what I had for lunch yesterday, or if this is the right day on which to put out the milk order. Yet I can remember every incident on that first momentous drive to Kashmir as though it had happened last week, and almost see every mile of the road.

  March is a cold, grey month in the hills, but a lovely one in the plains. The ground glittered with dew and the early morning air was fresh and cool as we left New Delhi behind us and drove through Old Delhi, the red walled city that Shah Jehan had built in the days of Elizabeth Tudor — the city that Bets and I had known so well as children that we both still have the pleasing illusion that we knew, at least by sight, almost every one of its citizens. It seemed to have changed very little since those days. The same shade trees, the same shops, the church that ‘Sikandar Sahib’ — Skinner of Skinner’s Horse — had built just within the Kashmir Gate, back in the early years of the nineteenth century, and where we used to walk to morning service every Sunday. The battered gateway itself looked no different, but the dry moat that circled the city had been filled in, so that the road now ran straight through it instead of crossing the bridge on which there had been one of the fiercest battles of the Mutiny year. Curzon House, where we had lived during the cold weathers, had received a coat of yellow colour-wash and was now the Swiss Hotel. But otherwise little had altered, and as we swept past the Kudsia Bagh and Ludlow Castle (the latter still a club, though no longer the ‘Delhi Club’ but the ‘Old Delhi Club’), Imre Schwaiger’s shop, Maiden’s Hotel and Metcalf House, I felt as though I had stepped back in time and could have been sitting in the back of Buckie’s old pantechnicon, on my way to one of Mrs Strettle’s children’s dancing classes.

  In those careless days many stretches of the Grand Trunk Road were still very much as Kipling described it in Kim, and no one has ever described it better. He called it a broad, smiling river of life, ‘built on an embankment to guard against winter floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a little above the country, along a stately corridor* seeing all India spread out to left and right’. So it was on that glittering March morning in the late twenties of a century that is now almost over. One passed an occasional motor vehicle, but in the main the traffic consisted of tongas, bullock-carts and pedestrians — thin-legged villagers striding along in the dust, followed by little groups of their women in gail
y coloured saris and chinking silver anklets; sepoys on leave; powindahs with their camels and ponies, making for the hills; wedding parties complete with bands and guests, and occasional flocks of sheep or goats being herded along by their owners. Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors … and for long stretches no one at all. Only the busy crows and the monotonous creaking of well-wheels that is, or was (I suspect that it still is) the day-time song of India.

  I remember stopping for lunch on that first day at the Dâk-bungalow at Karnal, where my father, having first done a careful reconnaissance of the garden to make sure there were no cats, pi-dogs or kites around, took Pozlo for a walk in the grounds, and where we all ate a picnic meal on the verandah in the sun-freckled shade of a bougainvillaea and an orange trumpet-flower that had climbed to roof level and then spilled over to make a bright, sweet-scented curtain. In those days, and perhaps in these, it stood back from the road in a compound so full of trees that one could only catch glimpses of the passing traffic. Among them, growing to one side of the bungalow, was a single date palm which, that morning, was full of gossiping parrots nibbling at the dates. Parrots are almost my favourite Indian bird — the ordinary large green parrots with a red and white ring about their necks which are, correctly speaking, parakeets and not parrots at all. I have always had a great fondness for these amiable and gregarious chatterers, possibly because I myself have always talked far too much. Parrots in flight shriek for joy, but once a flock of them have settled in a tree they chat to each other non-stop, and if you care to listen you will be convinced that they are gossiping together in confidential undertones that suggest that they are talking scandal. (‘My dear — did you see her! … There she was, making the most shocking advances to Nutee’s husband, while poor Nutee was wearing her wings to the quills feeding those chicks — no wonder her own eggs are always addled!’) Pozlo, our baby purple-headed parakeet, whom we let out to wander around the outside of his cage, though belonging to a different branch of the family, listened delightedly, and put in an occasional excited screech. Presumably they speak the same dialect.