Golden Afternoon

by M. M. Kaye

  We made our excuses and withdrew, and later in the day we saw the bride again, at the marriage ceremony; still a bowed, shrinking figure, draped in a splendid gold-embroidered sari and decked with necklaces, rings, bracelets and brooches of rubies and table-cut diamonds. We still couldn’t see her face, or that of her bridegroom either, for the features of both were veiled behind a deep fringe made from strings of jasmine buds or pearls — I can’t remember which of them wore what, but I think Nunni wore the pearls. I do remember thinking that his brocaded coat was far too tight and that he needed to lose weight, and also that if it wasn’t for his outsize turban with its magnificent jewelled aigrette, and the drooping posture of his bride, he would have looked the shorter of the two.

  I can still see them quite clearly, sitting side by side on a raised platform and under a fringed canopy in a courtyard of the bride’s home, facing a crowd of wedding guests, most of whom were comfortably sitting cross-legged on the ground, while Tacklow and his family, and about a dozen more Sahib-log, were perched uncomfortably on small gilt chairs. And that’s it. I don’t even remember when all the uproar that followed began, whether it started while we were all still in Bhopal, or only after the Tonk contingent, accompanied now by the bride and a selection of her ladies and serving-women, got back to base. The latter, almost certainly, for Nunni would have seen little of his bride during the journey, since purdah rules are always more strictly kept when travelling. Anyway, whenever it broke, it was quite a bombshell.

  The child-bride that twelve-year-old Nunni thought he had married turned out to be one of her aunts instead. A twenty-six-year-old one, at that!

  Well, you can imagine the uproar and the coming and going between Nunni’s family and the Bhopal girl’s people. The latter were totally unrepentant. Their defence was that the Tonk lot must have known that no daughter of the house, not yet in her teens, could possibly be married while an older and close relative of the family remained unwed …

  ‘Yes, of course we said we would give you our youngest daughter,’ they admitted. ‘For if we had not, your son might have refused to accept a wife more than twice his age, and created much difficulty for us all. But knowing that you would discover that there was still an older relative whose shadi had not yet been made, we were sure that you would recognize our predicament and know that it must be the aunt and not her young niece who would be the bride.’

  That was the Bhopal family’s case. But it did not wash. They had been careful to conceal the existence of the aunt, and all the agreements between the two families had made it quite clear that it was the ten-year-old who was to be the bride. As for Nunni, he had taken an instant and violent dislike to the unfortunate woman. He said she was exactly like a bossy nurse he had once hated, and also that she chewed onions, and if there was one thing he couldn’t bear it was people who chewed onions! In short, he couldn’t stand her at any price.

  She returned to her family, and everyone was cross. For though the bride-price was eventually repaid and the gifts returned, the whole business had been an expensive waste of money and both sides were out of pocket and feeling very sour about it. All those parties! All that food and drink! All the new clothes and present-giving, the distribution of money and sweets, and the hiring of that special train — all wasted! No wonder the phoney bride had kept her face hidden and made herself look as small as possible — and no wonder her family had kept the room in which we had first seen her as near dark as makes no matter.

  We had all been made fools of, and I was still young enough to be horrified by the discovery that grown-ups could lie and cheat and scheme and do each other down. But when our old friend from the early Simla days, the Diwan-Sahib, came down to stay with us for a few days, and I poured out the whole shocking story to him, he roared with laughter. It was plain, he said, that I still had plenty to learn about his country. And he assured me that any ‘upper-class’ Indian wedding (especially the ones involving royalty) that did not include a basinful of lies, trickery and nonsense-work would be unique. They all tried it on. ‘Let me tell you,’ he said, ‘a story that my grandfather told me when I was a boy …’ And he told me the tale of a little prince and his two half-sisters who, escorted by a solitary Englishman and accompanied by a vast cavalcade of servants and soldiery, horses, carts and guns, and scores of elephants, were taken to their respective weddings on a journey of many weeks, and of the chicanery and double-dealing that they met with by the way and on their arrival.

  His story certainly made the recent goings-on in Bhopal seem mild by contrast, and I ended, as he had, by laughing and thought no more about it. But over a quarter of a century later, at a regimental dance in Ireland, a fellow guest, another army wife, told me that she had just heard that I had been born in India and had written a book about it (my first historical novel, Shadow of the Moon, had only recently been published) and she wondered if I would be interested in reading a diary that had been written well back in the last century by a member of her family who had served as an officer in the East India Company’s Bengal Army. The diary, she explained, was not the original, but only a copy; one of the several that had been made for different members of her family. So if I’d like to read hers, she would be charmed to lend it to me. I said I’d love to, and the diary duly arrived at my army quarters. And believe it or not, the man who wrote it was the ‘solitary Englishman’ who had been charged with escorting that cumbersome wedding party that the Diwan-Sahib had told me about all those years ago, sitting in the barra-durri in front of our house in Tonk —!

  * See the fatuous garden party in David Lean’s film of A Passage to India!

  † Marie Willingdon’s favourite colour — and she made sure everyone knew it — was mauve. She liked to scold Mother for always putting an expensive mauve picture in her exhibitions, ‘Because you know very well I won’t be able to resist buying it!’

  Chapter 30

  Back in Tonk, Bets and I acquired a new pet, a baby brown monkey presented to us by one of the local shikaris, who told us that he had found it clinging to its dead mother in a nearby patch of scrub and jungle in which he had been shooting. (I suspect that he had shot the mother by mistake.) The tiny creature could not have been more than two or three days old, but already every hair on her skinny little body was covered with the eggs of fleas or lice, and our first task was to shave her — which we did with a razor borrowed from Tacklow. After which we gave her a bath in warm water to which we had added a spoonful of disinfectant, fed her with the aid of a rag dipped in milk, which she sucked with enthusiasm, and attempted to put her to bed in a wooden box which Kadera had supplied, complete with bars and a door. The baby, which we had named Angelina, and instantly shortened to ‘Angie’, would have none of it. Nature had taught her to cling like a limpet to her mother, and we were the next best thing. It was like trying to rid yourself of a particularly adhesive bit of flypaper, and when Mother tried to help us out by removing her, she ended up with Angie’s skinny little arms and legs clasped tightly round her neck.

  It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship. For the first time in our family history, we had acquired a pet who didn’t instantly attach itself to Tacklow. Despite the fact that either I or Bets carried her around with us all day, fed her and allowed her to cling to one of our fingers through the bars of her box until she fell asleep (and woe betide us if we tried to free ourselves before she did), she made up her mind that Mother belonged to her, and that she belonged to Mother. Bets and I were merely ‘staff’, as were the rest of the servants, though she had her favourites, and Kadera definitely came top.

  She was all eyes when she first came to us, eyes and hands (four of those) with a scrap of furry skin and bone to hold them together, and as soon as she outgrew the habit of spending her days clinging to one of us and began to explore, we discovered that we had to find some method of controlling her destructive instincts. It was Kadera who solved the problem. He fastened Angie’s box to a wooden platform nailed on to the top of a
tall pole which he set up in the shade of one of the trees in the compound. A light metal ring of a circumference that allowed it to move easily up and down the pole was joined by a fine steel chain, roughly four or five yards long, to a small leather belt (originally a watch-strap!) fastened around Angie’s small body. This enabled her to skiddle up and down the pole, taking the light ring and the lighter chain with her, and gave her a large circle of territory on the ground, and liberty to lie at the base of the pole, lie out on the platform or take shelter in the box, or, if she felt like it, sit on some of the lower branches of the tree.

  Angie learned to use her harness in no time at all. She was as bright as a button, and the most endearing and loving of pets. I wouldn’t, though, recommend anyone to acquire a monkey unless they are prepared to keep a close eye on it when it gets loose in the house, for the damage that an inquisitive creature with four hands can do in the space of two minutes has to be seen to be believed.

  I don’t remember which month Ramadan fell in that year, but at a guess it must have been in or around April, for the hot weather was just beginning to hint at the burning days to come when it ended, and the senior Begum invited Mother, Bets and me to the feast that celebrates its end. We accepted with pleasure, and as a gesture of thanks for the invitation, Bets and I decided to keep the last day of the fast ourselves.

  Traditionally, the fast begins before daybreak and cannot be broken until darkness falls, thus allowing the faithful to eat or drink in moderation during the night hours. But while it is light they must not let a morsel of food or a drop of water pass their lips, which comes hard on those who keep it when Ramadan falls in the hot weather.

  That day, in the dark hour before dawn, Kadera, himself a devout Muslim, woke Bets and me with a breakfast of tea, boiled eggs, chapattis and fruit, and when we had finished and he had taken the trays away, we tiptoed out on to the verandah, careful not to wake our sleeping parents, and up the flight of stone steps that led to the flat roof, to watch the stars fade as the dawn crept up in the east and the sky turned from indigo to green, to silver-grey, to primrose yellow, when the birds awoke and launched into their familiar dawn chorus. The weather was not yet hot enough to drive us indoors the minute the sun rose, or to make us shut every door and window in an attempt to trap the cool night air for as long as possible. But it was still hot enough, with the dry baking heat of Rajputana, to make us begin to hanker for a drink long before the morning was half over, and though hunger proved to be no problem, the lack of the normal set meals made the day seem intolerably long.

  The party was to be held in the No. 1 Guest House, a white flat-topped building very like our own and looking down on us from the top of a little pointed hill just behind our house. We climbed up to it as the sun was setting and found ourselves engulfed in a scented swirl of women in ravishing saris and jingling, glittering jewellery, all of them talking at once. The Guest House, like our own, consisted of a single large high-ceilinged reception room, with bedrooms and bathrooms leading off it on either side and a dining-room on the third side. The whole was surrounded by a pillared verandah that could be enclosed by chiks which, when unrolled, made it suitable for purdah parties such as this. Since, in Eastern lands, the interval between the moment that the last rim of the sun disappears and that when darkness falls is a very short one, by the time we arrived, our hostess’s serving-women were already rolling up chiks, for the sun had vanished and in the gathering dusk the faces of those in purdah could no longer be spied on by prying eyes.

  The Begums were anxious, for dust and heat-haze had formed a cloud that lay like a veil of brown gauze above the line of the horizon, which might hide the moon for several hours; in the past it had been no unusual thing for a pall of clouds to hide it from sight for several days. But, fortunately, science had found a way of coping with that. All over Southern India, priests still leant from the minarets of their mosques to scan the skies for the first glimpse of the new moon, and nowadays, the moment it was sighted, the news would not only be cried to crowds immediately gathered below, but flashed by means of telegraph wires to all parts of the country. Even if the skies were overcast, the remotest hamlets could receive the news by means of primitive signals such as rockets, bonfires or gunfire, passed on over many miles.

  In case the new moon was not sighted that night, it had been arranged that one of the ancient Tonk cannons should be fired as soon as the news reached the city. But in the event, no signal was needed, for as the dusk deepened that dusty gossamer veil began to shred away, leaving a clear lake of duck-egg green sky in which there floated a thin silver crescent.

  It was barely more than a thread of silver, but at least half of the guests spotted it in the same instant, and the peacock scream of excited feminine voices drowned out the now unnecessary boom of the cannon and a clamour of gongs and conches from the house-tops and mosques of Tonk. Half a minute later the verandah of the Guest House had emptied like magic, as the Begums and their guests and their ladies turned and ran for the central reception room, which tonight had been cleared of furniture and contained instead a splendid buffet laid out on a long banquet table, every inch of which was invisible under a load of silver dishes piled full of delicious Indian food of every description.

  The way those gorgeously clad women fell upon it remains one of my pleasantest memories of Tonk. One would have thought, seeing them, that they had all been starved for the entire month instead of only the light hours of each day, as they ran through the line of french windows, laughing, pushing, jostling, and grabbing at the food as though they were a crowd of unruly kids. Bets and I, catching the fever, ran with the best of them, though it was the drinks that we made for, for we both had uncomfortably dry mouths, and I remember draining at least two tall glasses of some fruit juice or other before I turned my attention to the food. It was a lovely party, and when we had all finished stuffing ourselves, and licked our fingers clean, we returned to the verandah again and watched a display of fireworks going up into the sky from somewhere in the unseen city, and listened to a pretty girl singing songs to the accompaniment of sitar and tabla, played by two older companions.

  The nights remained cool for a little longer, making it unnecessary for us to move our beds out of doors. But every day saw the quicksilver in the thermometers in Tacklow’s office and out on the verandah creep up a little higher, until one afternoon the first of the dust-storms arrived to warn us that the hot weather was well on its way.

  At first it was just a slight darkening of the sky and, not being used to such visitations, I don’t think we would have taken much notice of it. But the servants knew better. When they began to close the doors and windows Mother inquired why, and had her attention drawn to the curious brownish stain that was reaching upwards into the blue of the sky along the horizon. ‘It is only the dust-wind,’ said the Tonk men carelessly explaining that since it could at times come very quickly, depending on the wind, it was as well to be prepared. They stuffed newspaper under the gaps below the french windows and the doors, and Kadera put an indignant Angie into her bedtime box and brought her into the house.

  The storm took some time to reach us, but when it did, it came with an awesome rush. The brown stain in the sky grew darker and darker until we had to send for lamps, and presently the first of the wind reached us and began to whine through the cracks and crevices under the doors and round the windows. By the time the storm reached us it was a whirling, seething wall of darkness that one moment was a hundred yards away and the next second had hit us so that we were in the centre of a whirlpool of dust and sand and flying debris. In spite of the paper that the servants had wedged under the doors the air was so full of gritty dust that we tied handkerchiefs over our noses. By the time it passed — which seemed an age but was probably not nearly as long as I think — it had left a thin layer of dust over everything, a grey, gritty coating that covered every inch of every single thing in the entire house, giving the interior the look of something that has lain on t
he sea-floor for long enough to collect a layer of sediment. It took days to get rid of it.

  That year we put off leaving for the hills for as long as possible, because Tacklow could not come with us. We had to make a guess at the probable day of the monsoon’s arrival, and leave a good ten days before that, because the roads between Tonk and Delhi in places were mere cart-tracks that wound between patches of cactus, thorn-bushes and palms, and came out on to wide stretches of sand leading to the banks of unbridged rivers that could only be crossed by fords. The fords, used daily by cattle and casual wayfarers, were easy enough to cross in the dry season when the rivers were seldom more than two or three feet deep at their deepest. But when the monsoon broke, these same innocent-seeming streams, fed as they were by numerous little sidestreams, could become brown, roaring torrents in a matter of minutes.

  We could not risk that, though we left it as late as possible and would probably have kept putting it off if Tacklow had not been required to go to Delhi for a few days on state business. Since he would only be staying there for two or three nights, it was decided that we too would break our journey at Delhi, and a telegram was sent off booking rooms for the four of us at the IDG Club. I can’t say that I wasn’t delighted to know that I was seeing the back of Tonk for the rest of the summer, even though it meant not seeing darling Tacklow again until some time in October. I had been lying awake for the best part of the cruelly hot nights of late, longing and longing to be cool again, and picturing the Dāl lake with its lotus lilies, and the Outer Circular Road at Gulmarg, with its view of the snow-peaks, its forests of deodars and pines, and the scent of pine-needles and waterfalls. It was difficult to believe at times that two such places as Kashmir and Tonk could exist in the same country.