by M. M. Kaye
Then there was my first silk dress. A proper party-dress. Mother had made all our baby clothes herself, many of which still survive in a box in my attic, after having been worn by my own daughters and later by my granddaughter. It was only when we were old enough to walk and run that the dirzi was called upon to make us everyday clothes in serviceable materials such as serge and cotton, and party ones in muslin, organdie or broderie anglaise. But this was a shop dress — and stunningly beautiful! Made of heavy white Chinese silk with short puffed sleeves and a yoke that was hand-embroidered with sprays of blue harebells, it was a birthday present from an old friend of Tacklow’s whom we always called ‘the Khan Sahib’. His real name was Khan Bahadur something-or-other, though Khan Bahadur what, I can’t remember because we never used it. He was just ‘the Khan Sahib’ and Bets and I admired him enormously. I have no recollection of any other birthday or Christmas presents until I was at least seven or eight, yet I have never forgotten this one; which makes me wonder why more grown-ups do not give dresses or shoes as presents to little girls, instead of toys.
The Khan Sahib, a big, burly, bearded man with a strong resemblance to the late King-Emperor, Edward VII, owned a house in Simla and another in Delhi. He understood children, and though he spoke excellent English, he realized that Bill and I spoke his language with more fluency than our own and therefore — as he did with Tacklow when they were alone — he always spoke to us in his own tongue; which was a compliment of no mean order. Yet it was from the Khan Sahib that I received one of the first truly traumatic shocks of my life, and the episode has stayed fixed in my mind like a fly in a piece of amber…
Teeta-ayah had let me put on the silk dress to show the Khan Sahib how nice I looked in it, but since he and Tacklow were deep in conversation in the study, I settled down cross-legged on the sunny verandah under the study window so that I could waylay him when he came out. From this vantage-point I could hear their voices as clearly as though I were in the room with them, but I was not in the least interested in their conversation and had not been listening to it until suddenly the all-wise Khan Sahib said something so outrageous that it caught my attention. They had apparently been discussing the difference between Indian and English thinking, and the Khan Sahib gave an illustration of this: ‘When the British are asked a question,’ he said, ‘they will instantly reply with the truth, and perhaps consider later if it might not have been wiser to lie. Whereas we of this land will always answer first with a lie, and only afterwards consider if it might not have served us better to speak the truth.’*
I can still remember the shock that a small girl, brought up to believe that lying was a major sin, experienced on hearing such a loved and admired grown-up calmly admitting to telling lies as though it did not matter at all! It stood all my ideas of morality on their heads and left me totally bewildered. But it taught me an early and valuable lesson: that people of different nationalities do not necessarily hold similar views or think in the same way — just as they do not worship the same God or conform to the same laws. If the Khan Sahib felt it was all right for his people to tell lies, then it must be right — for them. But that didn’t mean it was all right for me, for I was an Angrezi (English) and Angrezis obviously thought differently. And why not? After all, my father only had one wife, but I knew that rich old Mahommed Bux had three, because Jinni, one of his daughters, who was a particular friend of mine, had told me that her mother was only the second wife and therefore of less consequence than the senior one; and also that both Number 1 and Number 2 would gang up on the junior one who, being the old man’s favourite, had it in her power to put both their noses out of joint — which, according to Jinni, she did on every possible occasion.
I also knew that the luxurious Simla-style chalets that stood in the grounds of a palatial house owned, and occasionally occupied during the season, by a certain Croesus-rich ruler of one of India’s many semi-independent states, were bibi-gurhs, women’s quarters, that housed three Maharanis — His Highness’s mother the Dowager Maharani, and his senior and junior wives — together with at least two other lovely ladies of no specified rank, plus the usual quota of female relations, royal children and a swarm of waiting-women. Of these only the children and one of the lovely ladies (who happened to be Polish), and the humbler waiting-women, were not in purdah. The Maharanis could only attend purdah-patties, but their children were invited to all the birthday and fancy-dress parties that Bill and I, and later Bets and I, attended, and ayah would often take us to play in their beautifully kept garden.
I learned a good deal about palace life and palace intrigues from these visits, but I didn’t enjoy them much because Teeta-ayah’s respect for royalty made her insist on dressing me in my best on those occasions, even when it was only an informal morning visit. I was made to put on, over my vest, a white underbodice (to which a pair of white frilly knickers were attached by buttons), a tucked, starched and lace-edged petticoat, and finally a white, full-skirted, puff-sleeved dress of broderie anglaise which scratched abominably and was tied at the waist with a blue sash. Black patent-leather strap shoes over white socks completed this outfit, which was topped by a white topi — a pith hat rather like a mushroom — disguised by a frilled broderie anglaise cover. This ensemble was not only uncomfortable but very difficult to play games in, and I recall one full-scale row when I persuaded a young royal to let me borrow one of her outfits instead. This consisted of a loose silk shirt over a narrow pair of churri-dhan (cotton trousers), which was infinitely preferable to all the starched clobber into which I had been stuffed and buttoned. But the loan was not popular with either attendant; my ayah or hers. Hers, I learned later, had subsequently burned the garments on the grounds that her young mistress could not possibly be expected to wear them again: thereby humiliating mine, who scolded me for allowing her ‘face to be blackened’ in this manner. I do not, however, believe for a moment that my playmate’s ayah really did destroy the polluted garments; I bet she sold them. Because young children do not have any caste. Caste is something that they acquire later on — as do we all in our own fashion; together with prejudice and intolerance … ‘Isn’t it sad that our children must grow into people?’
Yet I remember another major row on similar lines that did not involve either Asians or caste and was then, and remains to this day, inexplicable to me. It happened like this. I had been playing with a small, red-headed girl who lived in the house whose rooftop we looked down upon from our strip of garden, and whose given name I never knew because she was always known as ‘Coppertop’ — just as her brother was always called ‘Sandy’. She and I had been playing in her nursery when, aware of a sudden call of nature, I went into her bathroom and used her china potty for what chamber-pots are for. It seemed an obvious and an innocent enough action, but her Scottish (not Indian!) nanny was furious with me: the reason for her fury being that I, as the child of Protestant parents, had defiled the chamber-pot of a Roman Catholic! She boxed my ears soundly and I was sent home in disgrace and floods of tears. It was the first time anyone had slapped me: which may be the reason why I remember the incident so clearly and with an odd mixture of shame and horror. I had no idea what ‘Roman Catholic’ meant, or what a ‘Protestant’ was. And though I knew all about caste, I had until now supposed that all white people were Christians and that like Muslims they did not have to worry about it. The discovery that Christians too apparently had caste rules of this kind was horrifying, as it meant I was not on safe ground even among my own people, and must watch my step with as much care as when I played with Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Tamil, Gurkha or Tibetan children.
I still do not understand why my very normal action should have aroused such fury and been so drastically punished, and I can only suppose that the ‘Scottish’ nanny was in fact a Eurasian one who had imbibed some very odd and mixed-up ideas from an Indian mother or grandmother. But whatever the reason, I never played with Coppertop again or went anywhere near her house if I could help it; though unti
l that fatal day she and her brother had been great friends of Bill’s and mine, and Teeta-ayah was always being persuaded to take us down to play with them. The only thing I remember about Sandy is that his father, a keen golfer, had a miniature set of clubs made for him and laid out a child’s-size golf course in their garden, and that whenever Sandy drove off he always said: ‘Damn!’ because he imagined, from watching his father, that the word was obligatory. Of Coppertop, on the other hand, I remember a good deal, and probably because of the alarming manner in which our friendship ended, her face was indelibly stamped on my brain. So much so that many years afterwards, attending a small drinks party in the cabin of the Commander of a cruiser in the China Squadron anchored off Pei-tai-ho, my eye was caught by a silver-framed photograph of a woman and I stared at it and said: ‘Coppertop!’ And it was! She was his wife. In later years, after they were divorced, she was to marry a famous Second World War Air Marshal.
Another Simla house that I remember from those early days far more clearly, and with much greater affection, was Fairlawn: that same house in which Mother had been staying when she heard the nightjars crying in the valley below. Fairlawn stood well down the hillside below the road to Mahasu, and if I am right in thinking that the friend it belonged to in those days, who invited us for weekends, was an Indian, then according to a book called Simla Past and Present, by Sir Edward Buck, he would have been Nawab Fateh-Ali-Khan, a Qizilbash of Lahore. We children regarded our visits there as great treats, and the thing that fascinated us most about it, and is certainly the reason why I remember it so well from my very earliest years, was that below one end of the lawn, and covered by a wooden platform, lay an enormous rain-water tank, shaded by a weeping willow. Bill and Bets and I loved to lie out on that sun-baked, shadow-mottled surface and hear the echo that our voices and our drumming heels could make in the space over the dark, unseen water below, and to us that covered tank was an exciting and mysterious place.
The caretaker, an aged chowkidar, was always careful to see that the trapdoor through which the malis and the bheestis descended to fill their watering-cans and mussacks* was opened only for them, and at all other times kept securely padlocked in case an inquisitive child might fall in and be drowned. But he could be coaxed into letting us peer in when the door was open — one brown, sinewy hand firmly gripping us by the belt as we leant in turn to look down at the shadowy water that glimmered like black satin, stretching away into a darkness where lurked a ghostly voice that would faithfully repeat back even our softest whispers. It was a scarey place as well as an exciting one, since it often contained, circling slowly round on that dark oily surface, the corpse of a drowned rat or some other small animal that had lost its footing in the dark. And rumour had it that once, in the days when the tank was new, the body of an earlier chowkidar’s wife, who was thought to have run off with her lover — a handsome young woodcutter who had also disappeared at about the same time — had been found bloated and floating in the tank many weeks after she had vanished.
Bill remembers nothing of those days: apart from being woken up and carried out one night by his father to be shown something that did not make any impression on him. He does not even remember Kullu, who was his bearer, or any of the children, Indian or British, with whom we played. While Bets, of course, was far too young to remember those early days at Chillingham.
* The lingua franca of the greater part of India. It developed under the Moguls (who invaded and conquered Hindustan but spoke Persian and Arabic) and is a mixture of Hindi with Urdu, which is a mixture of all three.
* Presumably wax, as the finished product is known a ‘wax-work’.
* Lurgan was drawn from life. The real ‘Healer of Pearls’, Mr Jacobs was a famous character who had a book based on him, written by a twentieth-century novelist, Gilbert Frankau, and called Woman of the Horizon. Tacklow bought two small carpets that were part of Jacobs’ stock. I still have them.
* A teeta is a partridge. I don’t know whether this was her given name or a nickname. Either way, it was pleasantly descriptive!
* ‘Was it true,’ asked the Wazirs, ‘that the English Suffered from a strange affliction that made them unable to lie?’ (I don’t know where that quotation comes from but it seems apt!) Somewhere in Kim, Mahboob Ali, the horse-trader, says: ‘The English do eternally tell the truth, therefore we of this country are eternally made foolish. By Allah, I will tell the truth to an Englishman!’ — and I bet Kipling was quoting!
* The inflated skins of sheep; used for centuries to carry water in, and still in use today.
Chapter 8
Adieu, adieu! my native shore…
Byron, Childe Harold
Tacklow had had no home leave, and very little casual leave either, since that first return visit to England with Foxy in the closing years of the nineteenth century. His parents had never even seen their eldest son’s wife; let alone his three children. But now at last he was granted six months’ furlough in which to take his wife and family home, and he moved us back into the Central Hotel for the few weeks prior to our departure.
There are only three things that I remember clearly about those weeks. The first and clearest is Tacklow smacking me for being rude to one of the hotel servants. I don’t know what I had said or done, only that my crime was connected in some way or other with the black-painted, tin-lined wooden packing-cases that had been taken out onto the open ground below our verandah to be stencilled with our name and, presumably, our address in England and the name of the ship on which we would shortly be sailing. I had probably been reproved by some room-bearer for hindering the painter at work and retaliated with rudery in the vernacular, or — horrors! — physical assault. Whatever the crime it must have been outrageous, for Mother, a true Victorian, considered it serious enough to be reported to Tacklow with the demand that he, as the Head of the Family, should administer justice. Which he did; with the back of a hairbrush. I was duly spanked twice on the appropriate spot, and though I don’t think he spanked me very hard, the punishment, like the box on the ears from Coppertop’s nanny, left a lasting impression on my mind. That Tacklow, my own Tacklow, could do such a thing to me was appalling. I must indeed be a lost soul; wicked beyond redemption and cast into outer darkness! I wept inconsolably for hours.
The punishment was obviously just and I was careful not to invite a repetition of it. But had I got away with it I would almost certainly have traded upon the fact and pushed my luck again — and again! So phooey! to all the chat about the horrors of giving young Edwin or Elsie a swift smack on the bottom and thereby denting the poor little darlings’ egos. The egos of the vast majority of poor little darlings are a lot tougher than any tender-hearted trendy is prepared to believe. Nor did I forget Tacklow telling me, as he mopped up my tears, that I must always remember that India belonged to the Indians: that it was their country, not mine. This was something he was to repeat on other occasions, but I don’t think I ever really believed it; not until much later, when I had reached the dignity of double figures and was sent away to school. Because of course it was my country! How could it not be, when I had been born there and never known any other?
The second thing that stays clearly in my memory as a picture of that last brief stay in the Central Hotel is of a cold, grey afternoon of lowering skies and a bitter wind, and Mother singing the hymn that starts ‘Far, far away, like bells at evening pealing’. To this day whenever I hear it, which is not very often as it seems to have lost its popularity, I can see the view through the door of the room that was my nursery: I have just woken up from my after-lunch nap and am sitting in my drop-sided cot looking through its railings at the steep drive that leads up from the hotel towards The Chalet and the Mall on the hillside above, waiting for Mother to dress me. From where I sit I can see Bill and Kullu walking hand-in-hand up the drive, dwarfed by the distance; Bill a dot of red and Kullu a streak of khaki in their warm winter coats. Behind them the pine-clad hills of Simla are dark against a stormy grey
sky, and the wind blowing in through the open door smells of fir-cones and rain. I feel cosy and safe behind my cot bars with Mother moving round the room singing to me about bells at evening pealing ‘O’er earth’s green fields and ocean’s wave-beat shore’. It is only a moment or two of time in an eternity of moments; but for some unknown reason it has stayed with me as clearly as though it had happened only an hour ago.
The last memory is again a heady mixture of sound, smell and sight. I am standing on the wide expanse of gravel that fronts the Central Hotel, watching the tin linings of our wooden packing-cases being made. The sheets of tin have already been cut and fitted, and the tinsmith, with the help of his assistant, is soldering them together. He squats beside a little pile of live charcoal that is kept glowing by a pair of makeshift bellows plied by his assistant, into which he has thrust an iron rod with a slightly flattened point. When this is red hot he draws it out and presses it onto a blob of solder in a stone bowl, causing the solder to melt with a fascinating sizzling sound and a strong and unforgettable smell, before using it to weld the sheets of tin together. Once the lining is complete except for the top piece, it will be placed inside the wooden packing-case where it will be filled by blankets or whatever — not forgetting a sprinkling of dry neem or tobacco leaves between each layer to discourage moths. After which the final piece of tin will be soldered into place and the lid of the packing-case closed over it and nailed down. The sight and sound and smell of soldering was something I enjoyed enormously, and I would squat on my heels, Indian-fashion, for hours beside the tinsmith, chatting to him as I watched him at work, or listening to his tales of life as it was lived in the maze of houses and shops that clung to the hillsides below the sprawling city.