by M. M. Kaye
Yet another official ‘in-aid-of’ entertainment at the Gaiety Theatre, in which Bets and I took part, must have been very dull, for I can remember nothing at all about it except that we danced a minuet to Paderewski’s Minuet in G, and that every time I hear that tune I can see Bets in her costume and remember some of the steps. We also took part in a series of tableaux, plus a very potted version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was presented at Peterhof — a house that was used as the residence of the Viceroy from 1862 until 1888 when one of them, Lord Minto, moved out of Peterhof and into the newly-built and truly hideous Viceregal Lodge.
I have never understood why the Victorians had such a fondness for tableaux: a static form of entertainment which also seems to have been wildly popular in Elizabeth Tudor’s day and on down through Louis XIV and Regency England, into the twentieth-century — if all those early photographs by Cecil Beaton are anything to go by! It certainly survived in Anglo-Indian circles right into my own times, for the last ones I saw were staged at the Gaiety Theatre as late as (I think) 1929, while I distinctly remember some elderly woman — probably all of thirty! — remarking of the Peterhof tableaux that they were ‘sweetly pretty’.
Once again Mrs Strettle’s dancing-class did their stuff. The first half of the programme consisted of tableaux copied from the books of nursery rhymes illustrated by H. Willebeek Le Mair. I still have my own copies of her books, which continue to enchant me; and for the information of those who are unfortunate enough to have missed seeing them, every illustration, as well as the words and music on the facing page, is set inside an oval wreath of flowers, while the decorative pictures themselves are painted in pale, unshaded water-colours. These were copied exactly on the small stage at one end of the Peterhof ballroom; and while selected members of the dancing-class posed rigidly, doing their best not to twitch an eyelid, some grown-up or other sang the appropriate song: ‘Ride-a-Cock-Horse’, ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, or whatever. I took the part of Tom in ‘Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son’ and was one of Old King Cole’s ‘Fiddlers Three’, and Bets and her best friend, Tony, were the two small pyjama-clad figures in the shadowy, all-blue bedroom, looking out at ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’!
There were about eight or nine of these tableaux and, after the interval, twenty or thirty minutes of Oberon and Puck, Bottom the Weaver and Titania and her fairies. Bargie, with her lovely black hair loose about her shoulders, made an enchanting Titania, but I don’t remember who else played who. I wasn’t in it, anyway! In that same year I was in some ‘in-aid-of’ involving the French Consul which entailed hours of practice in someone’s sitting-room at a hotel called Longwood where, among other things, a squad of us had to learn to sing the Marseillaise — in French.
In addition to our personally invented diversions, and all this prancing around on the exciting side of the footlights, there were also the time-honoured festivals of the country, to which our Indian friends could be counted on to invite us. There were the annual celebrations of Holi, which is the great festival of the lowest and by far the largest of Hindu India’s four major castes. It is a colourful and joyous Saturnalia that lasts for several days and appeals strongly to the child who never quite dies in even the oldest of geriatrics, since while it lasts people squirt each other with coloured water and pelt each other with fragile tissue-paper packets of vividly tinted powder that explode like miniature smoke-bombs. We enjoyed this exhilarating pastime enormously, but poor Punj-ayah, lumbered with the task of cleaning us up afterwards, strongly disapproved of it. And no wonder! for a topi, a frock, or a pair of shoes that have been doused with alternate jets of scarlet water and green and purple powder is practically a write-off.
Another entrancing Hindu festival was Diwali, the Feast of Lights, which is held in honour of several deities, among them the loveliest goddess in the Hindu pantheon, Lakshmi; and also to commemorate the Lord Krishna’s slaying of a demon called Naraka who had captured and imprisoned no less than sixteen thousand maidens! Every Hindu house is decorated with lights at Diwali, and though nowadays those lights are likely to be electric bulbs, in my day they were chirags — little doll-sized earthenware bowls filled with oil, in which there floated a wick made out of a twist of cotton. Lined up on window-sills, parapets and walls, and lit after sunset, they set every town and village a-glitter with swaying, shimmering lines of light. It was a magical sight. Diwali is a night for fireworks and feasting, for eating delicious sweets like almond or pistachio barfi, and for playing games of chance; since not to gamble at Diwali is inauspicious — even when one can only afford to play with the smallest of copper coins, or sweets! I used regularly to lose my pocket money at Diwali and end up playing for sweets, though on one glorious occasion I won the staggering sum of four annas which, considering the state of my finances, was roughly equivalent to breaking the Bank at Monte Carlo.
Then there was the annual Sipi Fair, where (so Punj-ayah told us with bated breath) there were brides for sale! — comely hill-girls, dressed in their best and decked with beads and silver ornaments by parents who were willing to sell them to the highest bidder. And the great Mohammedan festivals of Id-el-Fitr, Shab-i-Barat, and Mohurram. The last two cannot really be termed ‘festivals’, since Shab-i-Barat includes a feast in remembrance of all who have died in the past, while to Shi’as,* Mohurram includes a day of mourning for Hussan and Husain, the martyred sons of Ali, adopted son and eventual son-in-law of the Prophet. On this day flimsy models of the tombs of the martyrs, eight to ten feet high, constructed from bamboo-canes and tissue paper and lavishly decorated with gold and silver tinsel, are carried in procession through the streets, preceded and followed by chanting, shouting crowds of the Faithful. These paper tombs are called tarzias — a word that according to Gully, a friend and contemporary of ours (his real name was Ghulam and his father owned one of the shops on the Mall), derived from ta’ziya, meaning ‘mourning for the dead’. Which is yet another scrap of useless information that remains stuck in my head; though now that I come to think of it, I’m not sure that I ever checked it. But then Gully was a year older than I was, and at that time I thought he knew everything. The chanting processions always ended on the margin of a stretch of water; the sea, a river or a stream, a lake or a village pond, into which the tarzias would be thrown or carried and thrust under to be destroyed like the martyrs they commemorated. Next year new ones would be made…
The first Mohurram procession I ever saw was in Simla, and I suspect that I must have badgered the Khan Sahib to take me to see it. But though I remember being charmed by the glittering, swaying tarzias, my clearest memory is of the horror of seeing them followed by squads of vociferous devotees, naked to the waist, who carried short-handled, many-thonged whips, each thong ending in an iron nail, with which they flogged themselves in time to the shouted chant of: ‘Yar Hussan! Yar Husain!’ while the blood poured down their backs and stained their white loincloths scarlet. It was a horrid sight and it darkened my day.
* It looks as though we may all do so, soon!
* Pronounced ‘Luck-er’ and ‘luck-ree’.
* Honour.
* Muslims are divided into two basic groups, ninety per cent being Sunnis and ten per cent Shi’as. The reasons are too long to discuss here, but it is another example of religion bringing ‘not peace but a sword’.
4
Peacocks and Lilies
Chapter 14
God gives all men all earth to love,
But, since man’s heart is small,
Ordains for each one spot shall prove
Beloved over all.
Kipling, ‘Sussex’
… the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.
Ruskin, The Stones of Venice
Simla lies among the foothills of the Himalayas, some seven thousand feet above sea-level; and having been born there, within sight of the high white peaks of the true Himalayas where nothing grows and the
snow never melts, you would have thought that my real love would have been for mountains and mountain scenery. And it is true that I love both. But from the moment that we arrived in Delhi to spend our first cold weather there, both Bets and I lost our hearts for ever to the plains.
I cannot explain why this should have been so. It still seems to me completely irrational that anyone who has had the good fortune to be born and spend their formative years among the most beautiful and spectacular mountains in the world should prefer the flat, dusty, often arid and largely featureless plains that stretch away and away towards a limitless horizon. Why does one fall in love — really in love — with a piece of earth? Why should one particular kind of landscape hold such a strong and enduring appeal for me that even after I have seen and lived in some of the most extravagantly romantic places in the world, my real love is still for India’s plains? Not even the hill-strewn ones, but the flat lands that lie to the left and right of the Grand Trunk Road: Central India and the Punjab — the ‘Land of the Five Rivers’ — and in particular, the once empty plains around Delhi.
I was certainly in the mood to fall in love with Delhi on that first cold-weather move; for which something that occurred at Kalka, where the foothills end and the plains begin, must be held responsible. A small incident which, like that view of Simla seen through the gold-dust shimmer of the sunbeams, has stayed diamond-bright in my memory. This too happened at a railway station; the small station of Kalka where the little toy train from Simla stops and passengers wishing to go further transfer into a broad-gauge one. We had arrived there after dark, and while Punj-ayah and Alum Din and our parents were busy seeing to the removal of our luggage and bistras* and their subsequent bestowal in a reserved compartment on the Ambala–Delhi train, Bets and I wandered off to explore.
Up in Simla there had been a nip in the air and it had been cold enough after sunset for fires to be lit. But here on the edge of the plains the night was warm and windless, and the full moon that we had watched rise into the dusk like the ghost of some enormous apricot-coloured planet, now blazed bone-white overhead; flooding the world with light that seemed almost as bright as that of the vanished day. We walked across the station yard and back up the main road that led to Simla, the same road that Emily Eden had been carried along in her palanquin, that Kipling and Kitchener and Curzon and our own father, together with thousands of others both English and Indian — among them Kim and Huree Chunder Mukerji! — had driven along in tongas, ridden on horseback or travelled on foot, long before the railway had been laid or the motor-car invented.
Kalka was still little more than a village with a railway station on one edge of it, and the unmetalled road rose in a gentle slope as it led back through a small bazaar and open sandy country towards the hills that lay like wrinkled folds of grey velvet in the moonlight. Once clear of the houses, there seemed to be no one abroad but ourselves that night. The road was empty for as far as we could see, and beside it, on the left, stood a solitary frangipani tree whose shadow, like our own, lay black on the white dust. The tree was in full bloom and its pale, waxy blossoms filled the warm night air with their heady fragrance and seemed to gather and reflect the moonlight; almost as though every petal had been carved out of white jade or polished ivory. It was one of the loveliest sights I have ever seen; more beautiful by far than the pale-blue star-frosted globe at the Central Hotel, because it was real; alive and growing and smelling of Heaven.
We stood and stared at it, dumb with admiration; and neither of us has ever forgotten it. To me it became a symbol of the plains, and thereafter any frangipani tree in bloom was special; and still is. I have put that tree into at least two of my books, and it may well have been part of the reason why I, born among the most beautiful mountains in the world, lost the larger portion of my heart to the flat and limitless plains on the very first of our annual moves from Simla to Delhi.
To Bets and myself those journeys were to become one of the high-spots of our lives and the most exciting event of the year. As the little train chugged and puffed down the winding gradients of the narrow-gauge railway we would hang out of the windows to take a last look at Simla basking all greeny-gold in the afternoon sunlight. Once past Tara Devi and between the gap in the hills, Simla was lost to sight until the next spring, and the next treat was the long Jatogh Tunnel which always enthralled us. Out into the daylight again the track wound back on itself, behind Prospect Hill and then down and down in the waning sunlight until the pine trees and deodars grew fewer and one saw the first sign of the plains in the great clusters of candelabrum cactus on the bare hillsides. One especially popular spot was where the track made a complete loop and we could look out of our carriage window and see both ends of our train at the same time. And as dusk fell the air became warmer and warmer and no longer smelled of pine needles but of the plains — that indefinable, heady mixture of sun-baked earth, dust and spices, kikar flowers and cow-dung fires.
On one occasion we made the journey by car. At that date, and well into the Thirties, cars were almost unknown in Simla, and none was allowed further than the road below the Cecil Hotel where there was a row of lock-up garages for the very few who bothered to bring them that far. This particular car, known as the Yellow Peril, was the property of a certain Ronald Graham-Murray, a family friend and Bets’s godfather, who had volunteered to drive all four of us down to Delhi. We were enthralled by the novelty of the journey, but it proved to be a disaster, for I became embarrassingly car-sick and our host, who was driving, had to keep on stopping in order to let me out so that I could be sick over the edge of the road instead of all over his car. Everyone was relieved when the turns and twists and hairpin bends of the hill road were behind us; and deeply grateful, next year, to be going down by train.
The Delhi of my childhood, my Delhi, was not the great sprawling city so well known to hosts of tourists who call it New Delhi; for New Delhi had not been built then, and the site that it now occupies was a stony, treeless plain on which the foundations of the new capital were nowhere more than a foot or two high. My Delhi was the old walled city of the Moguls and the British-built Cantonment area that lay beyond it in the shadow of the Ridge — that long spine of rock which juts up from the surrounding plains like the back of a basking whale from a barely ruffled sea. The Ridge is steeped in history, and from its crest you could look down on Shah Jehan’s walled city with its battered outer gateways, close-packed houses, bazaars, palaces and great Red Fort. On the marble domes and minarets of the largest of the mosques, the Jumna Masjid that faces the Lahore Gate of the fort across the grassy maidan,* and on the winding curves and wide white sandbanks of the Jumna River which in those days skirted the outer walls of the Palace.
Standing on the top of one of our favourite vantage-points, the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, and gazing out across the city and the miles of open country that surrounded it, we were looking back over thousands of years of history. For as far as the eye could reach the plain was strewn with the ruins of the Seven Cities of Delhi which, in the course of the long, turbulent centuries, had sprung up successively on these particular miles of India’s soil: only to fall victims to war or famine or the ruthless feet of Time. Of these, ‘Old Delhi’, whose walls were already crumbling, was the seventh. But only a few miles away the foundations of yet another of them, a ‘New’ Delhi, were being laid above their bones on the stony, sandy, treeless land to the south-east of Shah Jehan’s city. And from the Flagstaff Tower, even more than from the hillsides of Mashobra, I had the illusion that on a clear day I could see for ever.
I loved the smell of the plains and the sounds of the plains. The cawing of the grey-headed Delhi crows and the harsh, haunting cry of the peacocks at dawn and at dusk; the screeching of the parrots in flight and their low-toned chatter as they discussed life with each other when they roosted; the soft, interminable cooing of the little grey doves and the shrill chatter of the galaries — those small stripe-backed Indian chipmunks that skitter around on wal
ls and creepers and tree-trunks, and are so impudent that if you stay quite still they will come and sit on your knee and eat out of your hand. In the plains when darkness fell you would hear the howl of the jackal packs hunting on the banks of the Jumna, and on white nights the barking of innumerable masterless pi-dogs baying at the moon.
I had grown up with the trees of Simla; pine trees, firs, deodars and the beautiful, blazing rhododendrons. But much as I loved them, I loved the palms and the pampas grass, the kikar trees and bamboos and bougainvillaea more; they were less awe-inspiring. Also — though I know that this cannot be true — I had (and still have) the pleasing illusion that I knew everyone who lived inside the wonderful walled city of Delhi. Now that I come to think about it, I’m not so sure, after all, that that could not have been possible, for according to a census taken no more than seven years before I was born, the entire population of my Delhi numbered only two hundred and eight thousand souls: one hundred and fourteen thousand Hindus, eighty-eight thousand Muslims, two thousand Christians and a modest four thousand who were dismissed briefly as ‘others’. (What others, I wonder? Buddhists certainly; Confucians too; atheists perhaps? and I suppose those who followed various fancy religions — Madame Blavatski’s, for instance. It would be interesting to know.)