by M. M. Kaye
The first Okhla Christmas, spent in the Canal Bungalow, was made memorable by the fact that Bets actually saw Father Christmas. Imagine our excitement!
We had both been asleep, but some small sound had awakened Bets and she had opened one eye and seen that a lamp was still burning in the next room and that a stealthy figure was coming towards the open doorway. The next moment the intruder slipped through and vanished; but as the lamplight caught it (there was no electricity at Okhla in those days) she saw that its cloak was red! Father Christmas himself! — it couldn’t be anyone else. Then the door closed and she was in the dark again. She didn’t dare wake me for fear that he might hear us talking and, realizing that we were awake, magic our presents away. She lay listening for a while in the hope of hearing his reindeer sledge move off, and eventually fell asleep again, so it was not until first light on Christmas morning that I heard about it; and was bitterly disappointed to think that I had slept through it all. Our dear parents were duly impressed when they in turn heard about it, and it must have been sometime during that morning that Mother returned a red dressing-gown she had borrowed from Sir Charles, who was in camp below Number 3 Groin with the remainder of the Christmas-week party.
We had brought a Christmas tree with us which we set up under the punkah in the dining-room, and my ‘proper present’ that year is the only Christmas present — apart from the little biscuit-china angels that turned up every year in my stocking — that I can still remember. Memory holds no trace of any of the others, but this was something so special that it still surprises me that Mother, who was not over-gifted with imagination, should have been the one who chose it for me. (Tacklow was always too short of free time to do more than choose and buy her present.) She had been buying a pair of ivory-backed brushes as her present for him at a shop called The Ivory Palace in the Chandi Chowk when she saw this and on impulse bought it for me. It was a little ivory dove some five or six inches long and perfect in every detail, sitting on an ebony pedestal that had been carved to look like a broken tree-stump. Except for its colour and the fact that it was only about a third the size of a real one, the ivory dove was the image of the little grey Indian ring-doves which are as plentiful in the plains as sparrows, and whose soft, continuous cooing forms a murmurous and familiar background to each day. I was enchanted by it. It was the first grown-up present I had ever received, and holding it in my hand I felt that I had crossed some invisible threshold and become at least three inches taller. That Christmas was a memorable one for both of us. For Bets because she saw Father Christmas and for me because I was given a work of art: something to keep and to treasure for the whole of one’s life — an ivory dove! I kept it and treasured it for years. But alas, the dove too went up in smoke.
The following Christmas we pitched our tents below Number 3 Groin with the rest of the annual shooting-camp. And even though there was no Christmas tree we didn’t miss it, because it was a marvellous treat to be back once more on our favourite stretch of river and under canvas again, with the grown-ups shooting for the pot while we fished for chilwa. Our catch appeared on the menu as whitebait, preceding the main course provided by the guns which rang the changes between venison (black-buck), jugged hare, wild duck, goose and teal, roast pea-fowl (in place of turkey), partridge, quail and green pigeon, with snipe on toast as a savoury.
In order to differentiate that year’s camp from the others, we used to refer to it afterwards as ‘the Jackal Camp’, because in the course of it a jackal had tried to steal Bets’s baby doll. It was one she was especially fond of and had insisted on bringing with her to camp because neither Moko nor Teddy stood up well to river water, thorn scrub or sand. (And anyway Mrs Jones and Mrs Snooks, being townees, did not function outside Delhi.) The doll was made of celluloid and like most infants at that time was dressed in long clothes; the outer robe being of white muslin trimmed with lace, while under that came a top petticoat of white cotton, an under one of flannelette, and then a bodice, a vest and a diaper. It also wore a lace cap tied with ribbons, a caped coat and, on this particular occasion, had been swathed in a knitted shawl and carefully put to sleep on Bets’s camp-bed while she accompanied me on some expedition to the river or the weir.
The tents were pitched on hard, sandy ground in the thin shade of some half-dozen kikar trees, and the area in which they stood had been surrounded by a stoutly built zareba of thorn boughs and dead cactus to keep out night-prowling predators. The kitchen tent and the tents in which the servants and shikaris slept were outside this zareba and within a similar one of their own, and there were serviceable wooden gates in both which were closed at night but kept open by day. One hot, still afternoon, while the grown-ups and guests were all off shooting somewhere on the far bank, the servants were taking a well-earned siesta and Bets and I were busy with some ploy of our own on the sands, a jackal sneaked unseen into the deserted camp, and entering our tents, saw the baby doll lying on Bets’s bed. He presumably thought that it was a live infant, for seizing it in his mouth he was making off with it when Bets and I unexpectedly returned and saw the jackal emerging from our tent with the doll in his jaws, its long dress trailing in the dust.
The doll was less than life-size, but it looked horribly lifelike all the same, and Bets let out a piercing shriek, waking one of the sleeping camp servants who leapt into action, and whizzing out of his tent raced for the gate. The jackal, seeing its retreat cut off, turned and made for the zareba, teeth still firmly clutching its prey, and though one would have said that nothing larger than a tree-rat or a lizard could have found a way through that prickly barricade, it found a weak spot and managed to fight its way out; though fortunately not with the doll, whose, robes got so inextricably snagged up on the thorns and cactus spines that its would-be abductor was forced to abandon it — dusty and somewhat tattered, but otherwise undamaged. I never did like jackals anyway, because of Tabaqui in The Jungle Book. But after this I really hated them. If that had been a real baby it would have been killed and eaten. A horrid thought.
Apart from that episode, my chief recollection of the Jackal Camp Christmas is of trying my damndest to catch a goggle-fish. I had hoped very much that someone would give me a fishing-rod for Christmas, but despite a lot of heavy hinting, no one had, and I never did catch one of those fish. Nor do I know what a goggle-fish’s proper name is. We merely called them that because they went about in small shoals in shallow water with their large, protuberant eyes sticking up above the water, like a brace of doll-sized ping-pong balls. They would come in so close that it seemed as though one ought to be able to catch them with one’s hands, let alone a landing-net; or at the very least trap them in one of the small inlets. But they were a good deal smarter than they looked, and those silly goggly eyes were misleading. We laid all sorts of plans to ensnare them, but they invariably outwitted us, and to this day I have no idea what shape or size they are, or what they looked like out of the water. Or even if there is any more to them than just those eyes!
Since a fishing-rod did not figure among my presents I made myself one out of bamboo and boot-button thread, and spent hours trying to entice a goggle-fish to even look at my bait (a fragment of chapati* donated by the cook and attached to a bent pin). But with no success. In the end I gave it up as a bad job and returned to stalking turtles and building dams, or lying up in the long grass by the river bank to watch a mugger or a gharial crawl out on to the sand for a bit of sunbathing.
Not all our camps were Christmas-week ones. And nor were they always at Okhla. Another popular site was near Gujrowla on the Ganges, where there is a long iron railway bridge spanning the river. Sir Charles would drive us out in a shooting brake the size of a small bus, and parking it on the near bank, have us all ferried across to the far side in one of the clumsy, flat-bottomed river barges. From these we transferred into tongas or bullock carts that would take us another two or three miles to the spot where Sir Charles’s men, who had gone out the day before, would have set up camp near jheel
— a stretch of shallow, reed-grown water in the middle of nowhere, where there were always mallard and pintail, widgeon, teal and geese, and plenty of snipe.
Bets and I did not care for the Gujrowla camp nearly as much as Okhla. This was partly because it was well out of reach of the river, and partly because we considered that watching birds being shot was no fun at all (much as we enjoyed the end results, such as duck and green peas with orange sauce, cold roast teal and salad, and similar delicious dishes!). But we loved the getting there and getting back: the early start while it was still dark and the long drive to Gujrowla; first in the pearly, pre-dawn light and later in the sunrise, when the night mists lifted off the croplands and open country and all the shadows lay long and blue and stripy across the white dust on the roadway, and the air was fresh and sharp and full of the clamour of bird voices and the squeals and shrieks of well-wheels.
The sun would always be high and hot by the time we reached Gujrowla. But when we returned again a day or two later, it would be setting and the river would be a blaze of liquid gold as we crossed it once more in one of those slow-moving wooden river-boats that looked as though they had been built by Noah and his sons to a pattern that had not changed for centuries. Later, if we were lucky, there would be a full moon; and once again the long, dusty road between the shade trees would be striped with shadows, now black on silver.
Sir Charles would while away the return to Delhi by singing ‘Abdul, the Bul-bul Amir’ and other familiar songs, and on the outward journey we would all join in singing a song for which Tacklow had written the verses; the first one starting with: ‘We’re off to Gujrowla today!’. There was a verse for everyone, but alack, I never wrote them down and all I can remember of them was that one began ‘There’s Kashmera, shikari’— though no clue remains as to what rhymed with shikari — and another: ‘There’s Kate, the retriever, we never can leave her’ … Everything else is lost; even my own verse! Yet I have only to hum the tune to remember those long drives out to Gujrowla. Or hear a bar of ‘Abdul, the Bul-bul Amir’ to hear Sir Charles sing it as we drove back to Delhi by night with herds of black-buck leaping across the road ahead, their eyes glittering in the glare of the headlights. India’s plains and forests teemed with wildlife in those days, for there were still vast tracks of country which, except for a thin scattering of small, remote villages, were virtually uninhabited.
* Headman.
* The curved sword of the East.
* Fairs.
* The flat, unleavened flour-cakes that are the bread of all India.
Chapter 17
I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves and my sheers.
All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
Kipling, ‘The Palace’
If I have given the impression that our parents always took us with them when they went out camping, let me hasten to say that the only camps we could be certain of being taken to were the Christmas ones. Any others were a bonus. Not all shooting-parties liked children tagging along, and on the many occasions when they went without us, or when Tacklow had to go on tour and Mother went with him, we were left behind in the care of family friends — and Punj-ayah, of course.
On one such occasion, when they both were away for a longer time than usual, Tacklow being on tour — this time, I think, in Burma — and Mother having been invited to join some lengthy celebration in one of the Princely States of Rajputana (a combined birthday-cum-wedding party as far as I remember), Bets and I and Punj-ayah went off to spend two weeks with a middle-aged couple who lived in an isolated, old-fashioned bungalow on the outskirts of Delhi, where the Grand Trunk Road leaves the city behind and drives straight as an arrow across open, scrub-covered country.
None of our friends lived anywhere near here and there was nothing for us to do once we had finished with our morning lessons, to which we were driven in our host’s trap accompanied by Punj-ayah. In those car-less days all our old haunts were suddenly as far out of reach as the moon, and the Grand Trunk Road, where every vehicle that passed raised a smothering cloud of dust, was hardly a suitable place for morning or evening walks. We missed the Kudsia Bagh and the sands of the Jumna sorely. But the flat scrub-covered plain was new territory and we set off to explore it and see what it offered in the way of entertainment.
At first it seemed as though there were no landmarks and nothing of interest, and Punj-ayah, satisfied that no danger was likely to befall us in such open and obviously uninhabited country (and unwilling to tear her sari to shreds on the thorn bushes or the dry, knife-edged grass), gave up accompanying us and let us go where we wished. But during the first day or two, extending our explorations to the unknown territory behind the bungalow, we came on an enormous sandpit which, until we were practically on its rim, was completely hidden by the tall grass and the usual sprinkling of kikar trees. It must have been gouged out by water many years before, during a flash-flood in some bygone monsoon when the rain had formed a temporary river that washed away the soft, sandy soil, leaving a deep depression about half an acre in size, whose sides fell steeply away like cliffs below us as we peered cautiously over the edge.
The hooves of black-buck, chinkarra and wandering goats or grazing cattle had worn a track down one side of the enormous sandpit and out at the other; probably in search of water, for there would have been a pool there in the rainy season, though now there was only hard, baked earth and withered grass. But the cliffs below us were pockmarked with holes and the air swirled with the wings of myriads of tiny sand-martins who were nesting in the sides of the sandy cliffs.
The birds took no notice of us and we watched, fascinated, as they swooped and swerved like a swarm of bees; snatching flies on the wing and flashing into their holes in the cliff with a swiftness and accuracy of aim that was almost unbelievable. We watched them for hours, and later, having returned thoughtfully to the bungalow, we set about making ourselves a pair of butterfly-nets; using bamboos for the poles and the ring — a thin, whippy sliver for the latter; you can do all sorts of things with bamboos! That done, we coaxed Punj-ayah into buying us a yard of thin cotton net from the bazaar during the time that she and the driver of the trap had to wait while we sat at our lessons. Our pocket-money, which we were careful to save up for such emergencies, was at that time a lordly one anna a week, so I can only suppose that the price of cotton net was not more than a few pice a yard.
Punj-ayah obliged, and we made ourselves two admirably serviceable butterfly-nets, much admired by our hosts, who commended us for our enterprise and industry. Little did they know! For the truth is that it had occurred to me that we could easily catch one of those sand-martins. All we had to do was to watch until one went into its hole in the cliffs, and then put a net over the hole and wait, for when it came out it was bound to fly into the net. And I was right. It did. Unfortunately, after we had caught one or two, held them carefully in one hand, stroked their tiny heads with the tip of a finger and let them go again, I had another idea. What about taking one or two of them back to the bungalow and letting them loose inside our mosquito-nets? Then we could sit inside with them and watch them fly around, and perhaps they would become so used to us that when we released them they would come to our hands of their own accord?
I’m afraid our success with the squirrels in the Kudsia Bagh must have gone to my head, for we instantly put this outrageous plan into action. We brought the sand-martins back two at a time and turned them loose inside my mosquito-net, and when we had made several trips and had at least six sand-martins flying around under the net, got in with them ourselves. But here the plan hit a serious snag. Our captives thought nothing of the idea. They were plainly terrified of being boxed in with a couple of human beings and they streaked to and fro in a frenzy of panic, flinging themselves against the netting and clinging to it until their tiny claws became hopelessly entangled as they struggled to free themselves. Our efforts to help them only made matters worse, and by the time we man
aged to get them all out, the mosquito-net was in tatters and the bed-clothes, pillows and ourselves were liberally spattered with bird-droppings and feathers.
The faithful Punj-ayah would have hushed up the whole affair and mended the mosquito-net had that been possible. But it was so badly torn that it would have taken hours to make good the damage, and it was already tea-time. There was nothing for it but to own up and ask my hostess if I could please have another mosquito-net. She was not pleased, and I don’t blame her. She and her husband had never had any children of their own, and though they frequently said how sad this made them and how they doted on children, they did not understand them as our beloved Colonel and Mrs Ponson and Buckie did, and were totally incapable of coping with this sort of thing; or understanding it. They were both frankly horrified (more by the mess and destruction, I think, than by the cruelty of trapping birds for fun) and I received a tremendous scolding on that account; and another because I had ‘deliberately deceived them in that I had failed to tell them what the butterfly-nets were for’. This was quite true, of course, and I don’t remember feeling in the least guilty about that, for if they chose to think the nets were for catching butterflies that was their lookout. In any case, why was it all right to catch butterflies and kill them, and wrong to catch birds and let them go? I simply couldn’t follow their reasoning.