The response from L.W. Reynolds, Deputy Secretary in the Foreign Department, ten days later, was unequivocal. The legal limitations stood and the memorial had no standing. ‘These orders are final and no further representation on the subject will be entertained.’27 Exactly forty years after Jacob first came to the attention of the Government of India for being dismissed from the services of the ruler of Dholpur, the Raj had washed its hands of Alexander Malcolm Jacob once and for all.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BROKEN CHINA
IN 1913, tobacco-merchant-turned-novelist, Gilbert Frankau, checked into Bombay’s Taj Mahal hotel, hot and tired after the long voyage from Port Said. The monsoon had just ended and the sea breeze cooled his brow as his sat in the lounge, sipping iced lemonade ‘faintly dashed with gin’. Apart from an old bridge partner from London, the only other person Frankau wanted to see in Bombay was Alexander Jacob.
Frankau wrote up the encounter in his strange, semi-autobiographical novel, The Woman of the Horizon. In the book, the least notable in a fairly unremarkable output of work, Francis Gordon, satirist and author of The Nut Errant, a novel in verse, travels around the world, searching the horizons for a woman to replace Gemma, his wife, who dies on the very first page.
When Frankau met Jacob, he had moved out of Waterloo Mansions and was living in an apartment in Watsons Annexe, overflow accommodation of Watsons Hotel. Long since demolished, it used to be located across the road from the Royal Bombay Yacht Club and a short walk from the Taj.
It was a peculiar apartment, noted Frankau, ‘half-Indian, half-Tottenham Court Road’.1 After ascending the stairs of the high, lift-less building, he entered a room that seemed to form a library: it was dominated by a vast desk, littered with old papers, and a wooden screen of fine Indian workmanship. In the twilit dimness of the living room was a glass showcase crammed with china vases, jade ornaments, ivory figurines, trinkets and curios. Against the opposite wall was a piano draped with an intricately woven Kashmiri shawl. In the centre of the room, there was a fine carved wooden table, and old Persian carpets covered the terrazzo floor. A glass hookah with a silver mouthpiece studded with turquoise stood on the table. A mongrel terrier fled yelping as he closed the door behind him.
What struck him the most were the photos on the wall, crammed into every available corner and faded yellow with age: ‘Anglo-Indian beauties, long since dust or grandmothers, in clothes once fashionable, now almost fancy dress; officers with Dundreary whiskers, shako-on-head, hand on sword; bearded Rajahs; Excellencies dead or forgotten.’
When he entered, he found Jacob crouched like a misshapen shadow, his skin the colour of parchment. ‘Are you here to buy?’ he asked, pointing disparagingly at the contents of the glass cabinet. ‘I, who was fêted by all India once, now sell these on commission. Why else would you want to see me, an old, played-out and broken man?’
Frankau told him he was not interested in his curios but in his stories and, over the next several days, he heard many: ‘Stories of white men and brown men, of love and war, of money and of intrigue, of Europe and of Asia; pouring into the careless lap of one who did not need them, pen-treasures for which many a poor scribbler would have bartered his immortal soul.’
He also told Frankau of what he called his glory days—‘a medley of tales, some of Simla dinner parties and racing at Annandale, some of spying beyond the border in the days before Roberts had marched to Kandahar, some of strange revels and still stranger crimes’. To these memories he added stories of the supernatural, ‘of long-forgotten deeds and long-dead philosophers, of white and black magic, of secrets hidden away in ancient books, of powers to be won from darkness at the risk of eternal life.’ But the story that Frankau most wanted to hear was that of Jacob’s life. He agreed, telling Frankau he would call on him at his room at the Taj Mahal Hotel the following day.
Jacob dabbled in story-telling the way he flirted with magic. He exaggerated his exploits, like he amplified his occult powers. There never was one single version of how he became the richest jeweller and most famous wonder worker in India. With age, as Frankau was about to find out, his stories became more apocryphal.
Arriving at the appointed time, Jacob took off his fez, laid his ebony walking stick on the floor and sat balanced in a rocking chair looking ‘very old, very ill’. He began by telling Frankau his parents were Sicilians who had owned a boat and traded figs, wine and dates in the Levant. When he was still a boy, the family migrated to Constantinople. His ambition to enter the Turkish Civil Service prompted him to learn Arabic which, in turn, opened up the world of Arabic literature and the ‘great sages who possessed wisdom and power beyond those of the man of the world’.
By the time he was fifteen, he was convinced that ‘somewhere on this earth dwelt one at whose hands I might learn all the mysteries of which my books taught me but half knowledge’. His search for ‘the man who would expound [to] me the mysteries of life and death’ prompted him to find work with the British Telegraph company and leave Diyarbakir. His journey took him to Baghdad and, ultimately India.
It was in Hyderabad that he finally met his master, ‘an old man sitting alone under the shade of an old plane tree’, who introduced himself as El Moghraby. ‘Earth held no secrets from his mind,’ Jacob told his incredulous listener. ‘The lost lore of Chaldea he knew, and all the mysteries of ancient Atlantis, of Babylon and of Nineveh, of Egypt, and of That which came out of Egypt towards the East. Such was El Moghraby, and from him came all the wisdom which was mine.’
Jacob said he then summoned his own spirit guide, Afroshden, who gave ‘the power that was mine in the days when all India knew my glory’. But that power came at a heavy price. ‘I paid in the abjuration of a thousand things that make life for other men,’ he added. ‘There was no woman might share my bed, bear me children against my old age. But I prospered; all that I touched turned to power, and to gold … which is also power.’
Jacob blamed his downfall on caring too little for money until so much of it came his way that his vanity grew and he began to despise it. ‘One night, at Watsons Hotel, here in Bombay, the madness fell on me. Afroshden was with me: I laughed at him for his fears; told him he was a fool, that I was his master.’ Jacob recalled how he grabbed a wad of rupee notes and flung them out the window, breaking the spell that made Afroshden his master. When he went the next day to see a model of the Imperial Diamond he summoned Afroshden to tell him what to do, but he would not come. All the powers that he had were broken and useless, ‘nothing save laughter answered me out of the darkness’.
Now he was ‘friendless and powerless’. He continued: ‘They took away my money, my name, my reputation among men. My shop at Simla was sold to pay my creditors: to my house there, I may not return. They sold even my dogs, the great human dogs I loved …’
Suddenly Jacob’s voice ceased, his parchment-coloured face went blue-white, his chin dropped and his eyes protruded as he began to mumble words in an unknown tongue. ‘Of a sudden, the shrunk body grew rigid, corpse-like … the soul of Jacob was hovering, a thin blue flame above it,’ Frankau wrote.
But Jacob had not died; illuminated by the flickering electric current, a wave of colour touched the white face and his rigid body moved. ‘I am sorry. They happen sometimes, these fits. May I ask you to give me a glass of water, and then I shall be grateful if you walk home with me.’
As the years passed, the sight of an old man wearing a red fez and tapping the pavement with his ebony walking stick, a pathetic shambling figure who struck fear into beggars crouching on the roadside, grew rarer and rarer. Jacob was said to have prayed daily for his death as something that would be welcome when it came, ‘as something infinitely better than the best of life’. He suffered from angina and hardly ever left his flat. Unable to sustain himself by ‘trading in old pottery’, he appealed to Mahboob’s successor, Osman Ali Khan for help and was granted a pension of 450 rupees a month. It was a pittance compared to the 150,000 rupees he was ow
ed, but it allowed him to enjoy some comforts and perhaps even a slight feeling of vindication.
In 1919, his old friend Alice Elizabeth Dracott found Jacob sitting on his verandah looking frail and lonely, listening to snatches of laughter and music from the Yacht Club across the road. ‘He told me without bitterness that he loved to hear the laughter of youth, and to watch, all unseen, some little love-idyll over the way, for it cheered him and made him feel young.’
Despite his poor health, Jacob was still conducting seances and weaving fiction out of the facts of his life to anyone who cared to listen. Jacob had nearly gone blind as a result of a cataract, but his eyesight had been partially restored after a benefactor gave him the money for an operation. ‘He made his own loaf of bread daily and spent more on his dogs than on himself,’ Dracott wrote in the Occult Review. Though he was, in his own words, ‘down and out’, he insisted on giving her as a parting present some rare black coral beads saying: ‘There is only one man here who gets these and that is myself. You have been kind to me, and these are for you.’ If worn constantly, he added, they have the power to grow, ‘for there is life in them’.
Jacob also passed on to her three secrets: The Secret of Perpetual Youth as used by ‘the Queens of Oudh in olden days’; how to make oneself invisible; and how to control the sex of a child—which was of little use to Dracott who was already in her sixties.
His parting words were: ‘Give my love to Simla.’2
On Monday January 10, 1921, a notice appeared in the Times of India announcing the passing a day earlier of ‘A.M. Jacob, a world-wide celebrity’, aged seventy-one years. No cause of death was given, there was no mention of whether he died alone or surrounded by friends.
The news, however, spread quickly, inspiring a rash of obituaries in India and around the world. The Times of London was by far the most eloquent, writing that the ‘wonderfully diversified stage of India has seen no more romantic and arresting figure in our time than that of Mr A.M. Jacob’. It referred to him as a man who, from an early age, had acquired a ‘wide knowledge of Eastern life, language, art, literature, philosophy and occultism, which made him in later years a great influence at Simla and a most valuable helper of the political secret service’. His ‘unrivalled knowledge of precious stones gave him a remarkable clientele of the highest in the land’ while his compelling magnetism, sense of power and mystery led to him ‘being sought for conversation and advice by Viceroys and Princes as well as men only less exalted’.3
‘A Romantic career ends in poverty’, declared Calcutta’s Statesman which had reported extensively on the Imperial Diamond trial.4 It was almost impossible to write about Jacob’s life with sobriety, the obituary writer continued, ‘so amazing was his history and so extraordinary the stories which had grown up around him’. People might believe or reject the legends about Jacob as a wonder worker but of his eminence as an art dealer there was ‘no question’.4
The New York Times described him as a man of contrasts. When Kipling met him, he was living ‘in a palace of Oriental splendour, where he entertained Indian nobles, British satraps and notable visitors from all over the world’,5 yet, his own habits were ascetic almost to the point of sternness. The Bombay Gazette characterized his career as ‘one of extraordinary romance’. The doors of the native Princes ‘were always open to him’ and, at one time, ‘he was rich almost beyond the dreams of Aladdin’. The paper estimated that, over the course of his life, he had turned over at least £50 million of gems, jewellery and antiques.6
Was that estimate, like so much that was written about Jacob, an exaggeration? We shall never know. The value of just one item, the steel peacock now in the British Museum, fluctuated between 95 rupees and £2000. He traded in ‘jewellery and bijouterie’ for more than forty years. Many of the pieces he owned would have been priceless.
What is certain is that he died almost as impoverished as when he had arrived in India more than half a century earlier. According to records of naturalized British subjects resident in India and Burma, the estate of ‘Alexander Malcolm Jacob, alias Jacob of Simla, late of Bombay’, as determined by the Administrator General, was worth, at the time of his death, a paltry ‘Rupees 382-0-0 after deducting debts’.
EPILOGUE
IN February 2011, I found myself meandering through the streets of central Bombay past abandoned cotton mills, overcrowded bazaars and the omnipresent slums in a cramped Padmini black-and-yellow taxi with my daughter Adele. The Sewri Christian cemetery was surprisingly simple to find and the office clerk quickly located what we were looking for. Opening a heavy leather-bound register, he found the records for January 1921 and then, running his finger down a column, stopped at the entry that said A.M. Jacob, plot no 13, row B2 of the Church of North India section. It also stated that Jacob, whose occupation was given as ‘merchant’, had been buried by a priest named E.J. Gentry.
After the often-frustrating search for clues to Jacob’s life that had taken me from Diyarbakir to Delhi, from the records room of Calcutta’s High Court to the India Office library in London, it seemed too easy—and it was. When I asked to see the grave, a look of puzzlement crossed the clerk’s face. He couldn’t understand the urgency. Only when I said I was writing a book about the man who was buried there, did he explain. That entire section of the cemetery had just been bulldozed to make room for new plots.
Crucial files gone missing, a house condemned for demolition, a shop that had long since disappeared, the owner of the only portrait of Jacob falling overboard near Fremantle in Western Australia, and now a desecrated grave. I felt that Jacob was doing all he could to cover his tracks. Still, we had come a long way to find this obscure corner of Bombay and I insisted on visiting the site. After a few minutes, a guide appeared and, for a small tip, took us to where the plot had been located.
Sewri was an oasis of calm—though it carried the unmistakable stench of death as if the graves had been dug too shallow for the humid tropical heat. Densely planted trees softened the geometric layout of the different sections of the cemetery. Established in the 1860s, it was the burial place of many of Bombay’s early expatriate population and their often grandiose headstones poked through the foliage—except for the area where Jacob’s body lay.
The bulldozer tracks were still visible, running across the sun-baked clay. Above the cemetery’s ugly concrete perimeter, poked the upper storeys of crowded tenement blocks. In 2005, the travel writer David Morphet had stumbled across Jacob’s resting place while searching for the grave of his wife’s grandfather and written about it for the Guardian.1 The simple headstone recorded only the place of birth, ‘Diarbekir - Turkey’, not the date. The local kids, he wrote, had created a cricket pitch between the plots.
For ninety years, Jacob’s grave had stood here, peaceful albeit uncared for, among the weeds and dead leaves. Now not even the tombstone remained. I had arrived just a few days too late.
I had wandered the streets of his birthplace and now I was trampling the soil that had once covered his final place of internment. The mysterious Mr Jacob was as elusive in death as he had been in life. Few characters in India’s history had made such an impact, yet left traces so faint. Jacob had taken most of his secrets to his grave and now even that was gone.
Unravelling his story had taken me on a journey to many places and through the pages of history. In my mind, I had sat with him through court hearings, gazed at the treasures in his shop on Simla’s Mall, followed him to palaces of Oriental splendour and marvelled at his skills as a trader. I had learnt to believe the unbelievable and to abandon my notions of rationality. For someone who took a sceptical view of the supernatural, I was now convinced he was much more than a ‘clever conjuror’. There was an element of truth in the powers attributed to him, whether it was growing grapes out of a walking stick or thrusting a sword through a man’s torso. If I had seen the latter done in a dusty town in West Bengal, there was no reason why Jacob could not have mastered the same magic.
; I was also prepared to trust him—on most things. The Imperial Diamond Case had ultimately proved that he was much smarter than the young, gullible Nizam, and the combined forces of the British Raj and the ruling clique inside the Chowmahalla Palace. He had been momentarily outmanoeuvred, but had fought back valiantly, and I believed that there had been a subsequent secret deal by the Nizam to buy the stone brokered by Abid, that was abandoned when word of it leaked out.
I had also recognized his weaknesses. He was not greedy or dishonest. Trading—whether it was a 10-rupee turquoise or the world’s most valuable diamond—was a contest. He loved to outsmart his customers, but the thrill of the hustle often took him too far. His desperation to win back the Nizam’s trust did more to wreck his career than the legal costs and damage to his reputation arising from the High Court trial. He had started to believe in some of the more extraordinary legends concerning his life.
Jealousy of his success had bred many enemies, but his admirers were far greater in number. I liked to imagine that he did not die alone, and that friends like Alice Elizabeth Dracott had come to this desecrated graveyard to leave small mementos to his memory—a photograph, a flower, a piece of broken china. A man of his stature deserved more than this rubbish-strewn piece of dirt.
Frederick Heath was right when he said that when all the facts about Jacob’s life were finally revealed they would be more remarkable than any fiction or any mystery that our strangest dreams could possess. Perhaps, one day, someone will stumble upon his diaries in a Bombay bazaar or on a missing intelligence file in the papers of a former servant of the Raj that might throw more light on aspects of his story.
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 27