by M. M. Kaye
In the third year, when we hurried off to visit all our old haunts, we discovered with horror that some interfering official had decided that the bamboos must be cut down and the gateway repaired. Not a single bamboo shoot remained, and without them Kudsia Begum’s lovely gateway looked shamefully undressed; rather like some glamorous lady of the harem who has been forcibly removed from purdah and deprived of her gauzy veil. The steps were still there, but they had been repaired and given a high brick and plaster containing-wall on the outer side and also, to make matters worse, two coats of whitewash. There was yet more repair work and whitewash on the top, and everything looked painfully clean and tidy and depressingly un-secret. We never played there again. But nor did we ever forget it, and many years later I used it in two of my India novels. It is the Mori Gate, the north gate of Bhithore, in The Far Pavilions, and the entrance to the Lunjore Residency in Shadow of the Moon, while its flat rooftop with the high parapet and tall screen of bamboos gave me the idea for the Hirren Minar in the latter novel — the ruin in the jungle which four survivors from the massacre at the Residency use as a hiding-place during the first months of the Mutiny.
But though the gateway was our favourite retreat, it was by no means the only thing that we loved about the Kudsia Bagh. Nor was the chowkidar our only friend, for we made many in the gardens. Among them were a number of children who lived in several tall, old and beautiful houses surrounded by lawns and flowerbeds and shaded by neem and banyan and jacaranda trees, beside a quiet, leafy side-road that ran between the Kudsia Bagh and the grounds of Maiden’s Hotel. They were a delightful lot, and we fraternized with them by way of a gap in the hedge through which we had to crawl on hands and knees. The houses were owned by one family, the Dayals, and in later years Ashok Dayal, the son of one of those children, was to marry Indu, a daughter of one of my husband’s greatest friends, Shiv Bhatia, and his darling wife Metta. Sadly, both Shiv and Metta are now dead; but Bets and I keep in touch with Indu and Ashok, and are certain to be seeing them and their children in the near future.
Another good friend that we made in the gardens was an ancient, ash-smeared Sadhu, a wandering holy man, who had hollowed out a resting-place for himself among a big clump of bamboos that grew on the edge of the gardens, on the far side of the empty stone tank that fronted Kudsia Begum’s ruined mosque. It was this old gentleman who first gave us the idea of feeding the birds…
Every morning, as the sky brightened to the dawn, we would be woken by the voice of a peacock who lived among the kitchen gardens of Ludlow Castle, and whose habit it was to fly up to the flat rooftop of Curzon House where he paraded up and down, calling raucously to his friends and relations in the Kudsia Bagh over the way. Within minutes Punj-ayah would appear with our chota-hazri, which always consisted of bananas and cream, and as soon as we were dressed she would take us out for an early-morning walk before breakfast. We always made straight for the gardens, which at that hour were deserted except for the birds and the squirrels. And one morning — it was during our first cold weather in Delhi and I imagine the peacock must have wakened us particularly early that day — walking down the path that passes behind the back of the ruined mosque, we decided to explore it, and rounding the end wall saw that all the ground in front of it, including the tank, was a shimmering carpet of emerald green. A split second later the carpet broke up into fragments that whirled up and away in a screeching cloud of parakeets. They had been feeding on the grain that someone must have scattered there for them, and looking across the now empty tank we saw for the first time the figure of an old Sadhu sitting cross-legged in a niche among the close-growing bamboo stems.
We had passed the time of day with many holy men; met with by the roadside out Mashobra way or in the streets and bazaars of Simla and Old Delhi, so it did not occur to us not to speak to this one. And like the other wandering, ash-smeared ascetics of India whom we had from time to time had speech with, this one too presumably regarded the foreign baba-log as being below the age of caste, for he did not shoo us away but became a great friend. We called him Bappu-ji, and whenever we passed that way we would stop and talk to him and bring him presents of fruit and rice, which he accepted courteously, though I don’t know if he ever actually ate them. Possibly not, though it seemed to me that he was holy enough to have sanctified anything he cared to eat or touch. He had an endless fund of stories to which we listened round-eyed and enthralled; squatting on our heels Indian-fashion in front of him — an art that many Anglo-Indian children learned when young but which few, if any, can have retained, since without constant practice it is soon forgotten; and once that happens it is lost for good. Bappu-ji told us stories about animals, gods and demons, and it was from him that we learned how the little tree-rats, the Indian chipmunks, got their stripes, and how the peacock acquired the eyes in his tail, and scores of other legends and folk-tales of the land. He had been born and spent much of his youth in Delhi, but after he became a bairagi he had roamed all over India and visited so many places of pilgrimage that if the tale of his travels had been written down it would have filled a dozen books.
It was fun hearing about the journeys he had made and shrines he had visited — particularly one somewhere in the high mountains where the path was hard on naked feet and the wind bit to the bone, and where there was the ice image of a god in a cave. (Amarnath, I suppose? He must have told us, but if so the name did not stick, though his description of it did.) But the stories that intrigued me most were the tales he told about Delhi during the ‘Black Year’ — 1857. The year that the Shaitan-ki-Hawa, the Devil’s Wind, blew through India, and the pultons* mutinied…
He told us how, as a boy of ten or twelve, he and a group of young acolytes from a nearby ashram, who had been bathing in the Jumna River very early in the morning, spied a white smoke-like streak stretching out across the dawn-lit plain on the far side of the river, and realized, since there was no breath of wind that morning, that it could only be a cloud of dust raised by a band of horsemen galloping at great speed. Standing knee-deep in the shallows they watched the riders draw near, and presently heard, clear in the stillness of dawn, the sound of their shouting voices and the thunder of their horses’ hooves as they raced, yelling, across the planks of the Bridge of Boats.
What he had seen, and what neither he nor his companions ever forgot, were the troopers of the 3rd Cavalry whose regiment, stationed at Meerut, had mutinied on the previous day† and, after an orgy of murder and destruction, had ridden to Delhi to bring the news (grossly exaggerated, as it happened) that they had killed every Angrezi in Meerut, and to urge the aged Mogul, Bahadur Shah, still titular ruler of India, to do likewise and rid his people of every white-skinned aggressor throughout the land. That was how the great Sepoy Rising began…
* Long, open-sided canvas holdalls, rolled up and fastened with leather straps, containing one’s bedding all ready made up so that when the bistra was laid on the berth and unrolled, hey presto! there was a bed. In those days no traveller moved anywhere without one.
* An expanse of common land on which horses and dogs can be exercised, children play, and the public stroll and gossip after office hours.
* Sir Herbert Baker.
* Gardens. Pronounced bargh’s (singular barch).
* Regiments.
† A century later to the day, Longmans Green & Co. published my first historical novel, Shadow of the Moon, which was set in India in the days of the Mutiny.
Chapter 15
‘Now tell us all about the war,
And what they fought each other for.’
Southey, ‘The Battle of Blenheim’
Bappu-ji was by no means the only one who told us about the Mutiny, for almost every townsman and villager in or around Delhi had a fund of stories about it. And as we explored the Ridge and its ruins, played in the dry moat that encircled Shah Jehan’s walled city, or strolled along the battlements above the battered Kashmir Gate, I had only to ask any casual passer-by (and I was alwa
ys doing that) why there were so many holes in the wall and who made them, and what happened here, to get a reply that nine times out of ten would begin: ‘Ah! now my father told me —’ or, surprisingly often, ‘I myself, when I was young —’. A story would follow; either a description of something seen and experienced at first hand, or else recounted at second hand from someone who had been there and witnessed it. For as I have said, every foot of Delhi is soaked in history, and at that time the most recent bucketful of it (if one did not count the two great Durbars) was the Mutiny, which had ended less than sixty years previously. And what is sixty years to India? No more than a blink of an eyelid!
There were still a great many people around in their sixties, seventies and eighties, whose memories were excellent, and the tales they told of that time were far more exciting than anything in a children’s annual or boy’s book of adventure stories. I much preferred them to Fenimore Cooper’s tales, or Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae, Tom Sawyer and similar classics, because for one thing they were true. And for another they had happened here, on the very ground I was standing on! Old Mr Patel, and Mohinder Singh and Mohammed Bux, and old Seeta Begum too, had actually heard the deafening bang as the Magazine blew up, and the shrieks and screams of the wounded (Seeta Begum said her mother had hidden her under a bed!). Many others had not only heard the explosion but had seen and could describe the column of smoke and fire that had shot up from the wreckage to spread out into a cloud like the head of a gigantic mushroom on a stalk that was ‘taller than the tallest tree’ … a cloud that had hung in the sky above Delhi for hour after hour and was still there when the moon rose! Mohammed Din’s father and Nunno’s grandmother had actually been there when such-and-such an incident took place; Ram Lal’s uncle had been one of the crowd that attacked the Bank House on the Chandi Chowk, once the palace of Begum Sombre, while Jaswant Singh’s grandfather had seen the bodies of the English prisoners, who had been put to death in the King’s palace in the Lal Kila, thrown into the Jumna to be taken down on the current…
I heard endless tales of the ‘Black Year’ from Indians who had heard them at first hand, or themselves witnessed or taken part in the event they described, long before I ever read a line about the Mutiny in an English book. They were my favourite ‘cops-and-robbers’ stories, replacing the Westerns — those ‘cowboys-and-Indians’ tales that all children seem to enjoy; probably because they are full of gunfire and villains biting the dust.
Sadly, when the next cold weather came round and we returned to Delhi and hurried off to make the round of the Kudsia Bagh and look up our friends, Bappu-ji the old Sadhu was no longer there. Judging from the new growth, he must have left his home among the bamboos not long after we ourselves had left for the hills, and no one seemed to know where he had gone, or when. Certain charitable folk who had kept his begging-bowl filled reported that one day his place was empty and that he had not returned; that was all — ‘perchance he would return one day? Or it might be that he was dead; he was an old man …’
We refused to believe that he was dead and continued to hope that one day the familiar figure would be back in the shelter of the bamboos. But we never saw him again. It was because of him — because he used to feed the parrots — that we decided to deputize for him and feed the birds in the gardens ourselves; and from then on every day we spent in Delhi, right up to the sorrowful day on which we left it en route to exile and school in England, we took our early-morning walks in the Kudsia Bagh laden with all the scraps, crumbs and crusts we had been able to collect during the previous day. The parrots never came down to feast on our offerings as they did on Bappu-ji’s (for we had no grain) but most of the other birds in the gardens, and all the galaries, the chipmunks, were only too pleased to do so. They took less than a week to catch on to the fact that cake and breadcrumbs and other assorted scraps were being handed out, and after that the birds would wait for us each morning, perched in rows on the telegraph wires that ran down the length of the eucalyptus avenue, and on the railings of the wooden bridge, and in no time at all they became almost as bold and as greedy as the pigeons in London’s Trafalgar Square or St Mark’s in Venice.
But much as we loved to see the blue jays swoop down in flashing arcs of colour, and the sober, yellow-eyed sāt-bhai* come hopping round our feet, it was the little striped squirrels that captured the largest share of our affections. We kept the best toast-crusts to the last for these endearing little creatures, whom we fed in the furthest corner of the gardens: the one that looks across open ground towards Delhi Wall and the Water Bastion, near where one of the old siege batteries had stood in the summer of the ‘Black Year’ — its site marked by a massive sandstone plinth in which a marble tablet recorded the name of its long-dead commander, together with the number and calibre of its armaments and the particular section of the wall that its guns had been intended to breach. In our day, a line of peepul trees, most of which were old enough to have seen that battle being fought, formed a boundary line between the gardens and the waste ground that stretched between it and the battered walls of Delhi. The peepul, a tall, grey-barked tree with heart-shaped leaves and huge knotted roots, is known as the Boh-tree and held to be sacred because it was while sitting under one that the Buddha received enlightenment. The Buddhist scriptures tell us that during the many days that he sat there, fasting and motionless, though the sun rose and set in a cloudless sky the shadow of the Boh-tree did not move, but continued to shield the Excellent One…
The peepuls on the edge of the Kudsia Bagh grew between the great stone slabs that had once formed the foundations of the wall surrounding Kudsia Begum’s garden and protecting her palace. And though layer upon layer of earth and leaf-mould had long ago covered them, it was still possible to see traces of them here and there, thrusting up between the coarse grasses. Few people came to this corner of the gardens, so the trees were full of birds and squirrels — hundreds of squirrels who soon learned to know us and as soon as we sat down among the tree roots and took out our toast crusts, would swarm around us as boldly as street urchins, snatching the larger pieces from between our fingers and sitting on the palms of our hands to eat the smaller crumbs. We never missed a day if we could help it, and used to worry about them — needlessly, I may say! — for fear that they might go hungry and miss us when the hot weather came and we had to return to Simla.
Those were our morning walks. Our evening ones were either along the Ridge or down to the river which in those days lay on the other side of the dusty unmetalled road that skirted the far end of the Kudsia Bagh, close to the bamboo thicket where our old Sadhu had lived. All we had to do was walk through the eucalyptus avenue and under the arch of the great gateway, and keeping straight on for roughly two or three hundred yards, descend the short bank where the gardens ended, cross the road that lay below, and there we were on the wide silver sandbanks that fringed the Jumna River. The blue water of the main channel ran some way out in those wastes of sand, flowing wide and deep between the shallows on the Delhi side and the steep banks of the plain, today covered with houses, but then an endless expanse of stony, uncultivated land dotted with kikar trees, clumps of high grass and the ruins of those seven other Delhis built beside the broad, slow-flowing river.
As with all India’s rivers, there were a number of shallow side-streams which had been gouged out in the rainy season when the river was in spate, and which continued to thread their way through the silver sandbanks when the monsoon ended and the river fell again. Most of these were just too deep for us to ford. But some were possible to wade across in certain places, and we had our own favourite spots among these pools and shallows. Here we would paddle, chase chilwa—the shoals of fingerlings that are India’s whitebait — and build elaborate sandcastles to which we could return on the following day, confident that they would still be standing.
Whenever they could, our parents and not Punj-ayah would take us down to the sands, where Mother proved a master architect at building sand
castles and Tacklow enlivened the evenings by telling us stories about an old gentleman known as the Kojah. I’ve no idea where they came from — some Persian or Arabic book I suppose. If so, I don’t know what it was called. There were a lot of Kojah stories and they lasted us through one entire season, for Tacklow would never tell us more than one in an evening, and I have to admit that after all these years I can only remember one of them: the one about the Kojah’s neighbour who was always borrowing his cooking-pans…
One day the Kojah decided for a change to borrow one from his neighbour, and when he returned it he sent a little pan with it. ‘Oh Kojah,’ said the neighbour; ‘what is this?’ To which the Kojah replied that during the day or so that the borrowed pan had been in his possession it had had a child. The neighbour was delighted and began to badger the Kojah to borrow his pan again, and once again the Kojah did so, and again returned it with a small one — the big pan had had another child. On the third occasion, however, no pan was returned, and after a week or so the owner went to the Kojah and asked for it back, to which the Kojah replied gravely that he was so sorry, but the big pan had died. ‘Oh Kojah,’ protested the owner, ‘how can a pan die? It is not possible!’ ‘Why not? If it can have a child, it can also die,’ said the Kojah.
To this day, when I remember those evenings on the sands by the Jumna River, memory not only shows me Mother and Bets, bare-footed and with their skirts tucked up round their waists, making sandcastles while Tacklow intones: ‘Oh Kojah!’ but the Kojah himself, whom I see in imagination walking at Tacklow’s elbow; a thin, elderly, white-bearded Persian (why Persian?) wearing a vast green turban, long robes and curly-toed shoes…