City of Djinns
Page 15
‘After they went, the young all emigrated ...’
‘... to Australia mostly ...’
‘... and the UK.’
A long silence followed. Somewhere a clock chimed, Big Ben chimes. I got up; Joe saw me out.
‘I still worry for Marion,’ he said as we stood by the taxi. ‘When I die I don’t know what will happen to her. She’s twenty years younger than me. She’ll be left on her own. She doesn’t know a word of any Indian language.’ He shrugged his shoulders, helpless.
We shook hands. As I got back into Balvinder Singh’s taxi, Joe saluted his old Auxiliary Force salute.
‘Long live Her Majesty the Queen,’ said Joe.
The taxi pulled away. In the,car’s headlights, I could see the nightjars swooping down after the moths.
During the 1830s and 1840s the new increasingly racist and puritanical attitudes which had made Skinner’s life so painful were beginning to spread. The world which William Fraser and Ochterlony knew - the world of the Scottish Nawabs with their Indian harems and Mughal wardrobes — was passing.
If Ochterlony symbolized the beginning of the period, so Sir Thomas Metcalfe (the nephew of William’s old enemy Sir Charles Metcalfe) represented its close. A fastidious Englishman, he would have blanched at even the thought of a ‘native’ mistress. Indeed so refined were his feelings, according to his daughter Emily Bayley, that he could not bear to see women eat cheese. Moreover he believed that if the fair sex insisted on eating oranges or mangoes, they should at least do so in the privacy of their own bathrooms.
He would never have dreamt of dressing as Ochterlony had. Instead, he arranged that his London tailors, Pulford of St James’s Street, should regularly send out to Delhi a chest of sober but fashionable English clothes. A trunk of the latest English books was likewise dispatched twice every year. His one concession to Indian taste was to smoke a silver hookah. This he did every day after breakfast, for exactly thirty minutes. If ever one of his servants failed to perform properly and efficiently his appointed duty, Metcalfe would call for a pair of white kid gloves. These he would pick up from their silver salver and pull on over his long white fingers. Then, ‘with solemn dignity’, having lectured the servant on his failing, he ‘proceeded to pinch gently but firmly the ear of the culprit, and then let him go — a reprimand that was entirely efficacious’.
As the nineteenth century progressed, Delhi gradually began to fill with stiff-lipped English families whose attitudes and prejudices mirrored those of Sir Thomas. Passing through the city in 1838, Fanny Eden, sister of the Governor-General Lord Auckland, described the European community as undistinguished ‘in any way, except perhaps that the female part of it are addicted to black mittens of their own making, with large brassy-looking bracelets over them’. Although Fraser was fond of remarking that these people ‘had no rational conversation’ he did every so often dine at the Residency, and very occasionally managed to find there a stimulating companion.
The most interesting was certainly Lady Hood, an aristocratic tomboy whom Fraser had taken lion-hunting in 1814. Fraser’s letters to Lady Hood are a strange testament to his odd mixture of machismo and donnishness. In one letter of 1817, having boasted of his hunting prowess (‘I have killed seven lions lately, five with the spear’), Fraser goes on to discuss his somewhat idiosyncratic personal faith. His beliefs seem to have had as much in common with Hinduism as they did with Christianity; certainly, he appears to have dropped conventional monotheism in favour of a more universal metaphysical philosophy.
The mid-nineteenth century was the Golden Age of starched evangelicalism, and unorthodox beliefs such as Fraser‘s, however unformed, were neither general nor popular; people like Lady Hood who could appreciate such enquiring open-mindedness were rare. It must have been partly this intellectual isolation that led Fraser to sink into bouts of depression; and increasingly his letters home were filled with thick fogs of gloom and homesickness. ’Fifteen years in India is equal to twenty five in Europe‘, he wrote from Hansi in 1817. ’Indian scenes and subjects get gradually stale ... war and politics are both very near their end and India proves daily less interesting ... I think there is much greater chance of getting buried than married in India.‘
Nor can Fraser’s mood have been improved by what appears to have been an embarrassing bout of gonorrhoea. There is only one reference to this affliction in the Moniack archive, but the message seems pretty unambiguous. In a letter addressed to William, one of his colleagues remarks: ‘I do not understand what kind of a affliction of the loins you can have to render mercury beneficial. You have, I dare say, been flourishing your genitals over and above that which nature requires ...’
But much more serious for William’s mental health were the series of family tragedies that befell him after he had been living in Delhi for some ten years.
In the hot July of 1812, the fourth of the Fraser brothers, Edward, arrived in Delhi and promptly moved in with William and Aleck. He had been there only a few weeks when he began to show symptoms of unusual listlessness. It was Aleck who first noticed that something was wrong. ‘Towards the end of August,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘I began to be uneasy at observing a certain languor in him which rendered him indifferent to the little excursions of curiosity and pleasure that were sometimes proposed ... I grew more and more uneasy, and being regularly all day absent at the court used to be in the evenings sometimes struck with the lassitude that appeared in Edward. He omitted his morning exercise - and addicted himself to sedentary amusements ... music, with a little reading.’
One day in early September, Edward was in the bungalow garden overlooking the Jumna, lazily pruning the orange trees. William was away bathing at the ghats two miles upstream; Aleck was busy with his legal work inside the house: ‘I was suddenly alarmed by a servant who told me Edward was spitting blood. Running out I found that in stooping to prune a tree, he had been seized with this alarming symptom. In about an hour it stopped; and he declared himself much relieved by it. The quantity of blood effused was small - perhaps a wine glass full in all, pure and florid.’
The doctor was called. He said there was no cause for worry and prescribed digitalis, abstinence from wine and a vegetarian diet. He told Edward to rest.
‘For several days after his saliva continued to be tinged with blood, but his cough was better, and he was, or thought himself, much better on the whole. About four days after this occurrence, Edward, without telling us, went out to breakfast with the Commanding Officer of our troops on guard in the Palace [the Red Fort]. There, unfortunately, he was tempted to walk about, and up several staircases, viewing the curiosities of the Palace, so little was he aware of the state he was in. On his return, however, he was again attacked by the spitting of blood, which recurred in small quantity the day after.’
The doctor was again called; this time he admitted the symptoms looked very like incipient consumption and advised that Edward should be taken immediately to Calcutta and from there ‘to sea’. Aleck volunteered to escort Edward, and the following day they set off on the long journey to Allahabad and thence down the Ganges to Calcutta, the capital of British India. On the way Edward’s health continued to deteriorate and his haemorrhages became more frequent. Nevertheless, Aleck pressed on. He booked a passage on a boat to St Helena and carried the invalid on board. When the brothers arrived at the island, Edward was clearly dying. A week later, on 25 April 1813, Edward had a final violent attack of blood-spitting and expired, ‘quite peacefully’, a couple of hours later.
Aleck was broken and exhausted. He wearily arranged for his little brother’s burial and mailed a long, sad account of Edward’s final hours back to Moniack. Then, packing up his things, he set sail back to Calcutta, alone. It was on this return journey that he noticed that his own saliva had started to become very slightly tinged with blood. A week later he had his first bloody coughing fit. Realizing immediately what this probably meant, he began to scribble an apologia in his logbook:Conceiving my
self to be at this moment in a state that, although susceptible to recovery, is more likely to terminate in an early death, I have an inclination to commit to paper while I still have adequate strength to the task, an account of my life, my character, and of the principles or passions that have chiefly influenced my actions - as they appear to myself.
I have always thought it would be a real blessing to mankind if everyone, forsaking dissimulation, were to exhibit himself and his sentiments to the world without disguise ... my life has been undistinguished and unhonoured; I know, and am indifferent to, the oblivion that will surely follow my death. It is but a slight mortification to [now] confess my views, my follies, my weaknesses and my errors, while the benefit or amusement that might accrue to my near relations and friends is a full compensation. Should such advantage accrue, it may procure to the memory of the weak but harmless author a momentary tribute of compassion and regard.
Aleck went on to confess his own laziness at college, what he saw as his essential selfishness and frivolity, and to describe the friction between him and William when they shared a house in Delhi:I had expected much pleasure from the society of a brother whom I had not seen for seven years. I was disappointed. All my pursuits were [too] trifling and frivolous [for William]. Even my reading, when I read, was of the slightest kind. My brother’s whole mind was devoted to business. A sober morning’s ride (our horses at a walk) was succeeded by a long day of business, or silence. It was only with his servants that he [William] ever chatted or joked.
Most surprising of all was Aleck’s confession of his lack of language skills, and how this affected his duties as supreme judge of the new Delhi courts:In this situation I reaped the bitter fruits of my idleness at college. I was continually at a loss. Every petition, every record, was in the Persian language, of which I was almost totally ignorant. The language of Delhi and its vicinity differed so materially from that to which I had been accustomed that I could not understand one word in five spoken by witnesses.
Aleck continued to scribble his confession as he limped back to Delhi along the same route he had taken with Edward the previous year. Eventually he became too weak and too confused to continue. Carried as far as Jokhoulee (on the outskirts of Delhi) on a palanquin, he was deemed too ill to continue and was nursed in a roadside tent by his eldest brother James. After a long and painful illness, ‘his emaciation so great that there is hardly enough to cover bones and sinews’, Aleck finally died there on 3 June 1816.
‘His sufferings for some days before his death were very great and immediately preceeding it they were distressing beyond description,’ wrote James in his diary. ‘[But] at last his pulse ceased to play and the breathing stopped. Only the corps remained before us. Such was the end of my beloved brother Aleck.’
Together, William and James closed Aleck’s eyes and washed his body: ‘About six o’clock we wrapped it up in a piece of bedding and carried it ourselves to the grave. There we restored it to its native clay.‘
Whether through uneasy conscience or genuine grief, it was William, who for so long had ignored and humiliated Aleck, who took the death most severely. In his diary, James described William’s rapid deterioration: ‘Poor William has been terribly shocked by this day’s blow, and from the time the grave was filled up and the few people who attended gone, he sat at its head or lay on the ground along its side the whole day, weeping and groaning most bitterly.’
Days later, he was still ordering larger and larger doses of laudanum.
In the years that followed, William Fraser continued to maintain his distance from the other Europeans in Delhi. ‘He hates the grim-mace and chatter of society,’ wrote James, ‘and to hear his wild talk would rather be removed to the family of the Usbecks, to Siberia or some other part of Tartary [where man remains in what] he considers an unsophisticated and noble state.’
To this end William travelled in the Himalayas, both on business with Skinner, fighting the Gurkhas, and on his own, for pleasure: one of the greatest draws of the Indian hills was what William saw as their great likeness to the Invernessshire he remembered from his childhood. ‘We now bound China and Tartary,’ he wrote to Lady Hood in 1817, ‘and live in a climate very like Scotland ... I can go and lie down under the oak, birch, larch, elm or gather strawberries and raspberries as at home.’
When in Delhi, William devoted himself to constructing a massive country house outside the city walls. The house - a kind of Palladian villa with odd Scotch Baronial features - stood on the summit of the hogsback ridge which straddled the north-west outskirts of Old Delhi, high above the Roshanara Gardens and the Sadar Bazaar.
In his letters to his father William was understandably reticent about the project; after all, for many years to come it would suck up the funds he was supposed to be sending home to Moniack. Moreover, the house anchored William in Delhi more firmly than ever- at exactly the time when his age and experience was bringing him offers of more lucrative postings elsewhere in India. For both these reasons, William only mentioned his building project once, and then very briefly in an aside. ‘I [now] go back to Dehlee,’ he wrote on 23 September 1819 from Skinner’s house in Hansi, ‘where I have built a large white house on top of a hill, from the top of which I am getting a large view of Dehlee.’
Victor Jacquemont, as usual, is more forthcoming. In one of his letters to his father in Paris he describes how he is staying in ‘Monsi- eur Fraser’s enormous house, a sort of Gothic fort which has been built at great expense on the very spot where Timur once pitched his tent during the seige of Delhi ...’ Fraser’s ‘fort’ later became known as Hindu Rao’s House (after its subsequent owner) and, although it was badly shelled during the 1857 uprising, the central part of it survives today as the core of the Hindu Rao Hospital.
In 1820, James Fraser, having conceived a plan to return home overland via Persia, Mesopotamia and the Ottoman Levant, visited Delhi for one last time. On 11 November he and William said a final goodbye to each other at a camp near the Qutab Minar.
William is not a man to shew his feelings however keen, nor to give way to common forms on such occasions. We got up — he gave me his hand & said ‘Well Good Bye — take care of yourself’ — gripping it hard - but I did not speak — I did not trust myself - I took one look - probably I shall see him no more - & quitted the tent. Such things do not do to be often felt, particularly when there is no means of giving way to feelings - but for very long I have not been able to relieve these by tears on any such occasion. Suffocation may come but tears not.
The Nawab [Ahmed Baksh Khan, William’s business partner and friend] & I mounted & set forward leaving my brother in the tent - I have requested Skinner to tell me how he is & how he bears my departure, for though it is not death he knows as I do too, how many chances there are of our ever again meeting.
William stayed on in Delhi for another thirteen years and in 1833 finally got the job he had coveted for three decades, the Delhi Residency. But it was the winning of this position that finally brought about his own downfall.
In 1834, on the death of his old friend Ahmed Baksh Khan, Fraser, as Resident, became officially involved in the violent inheritance dispute which broke out between the Nawab’s sons. In the course of this controversy, Fraser forcibly ejected from his house his own ward, Khan’s eldest child, Shams-ud-Din, a raffish Mughal nobleman who had started the dispute by seizing his younger brothers’ share of the family property.
As well as humiliating Shams-ud-Din by ejecting him without an audience, there were persistent rumours circulating in Delhi — rumours still remembered to this day in the bazaars of the Old City - that Fraser had added insult to injury by making improper overtures to Sham-ud-Din’s sister. To a young Mughal nobleman, brought up in the strict courtly etiquette of the Red Fort, this sort of behaviour was an unforgivable insult. Shams-ud-Din had not only lost face; he had been dishonoured by his own guardian. He left Delhi immediately, returned to his Haryana estates and there began to plot revenge.
‘How well I remember clinging to my Mother,’ Emily wrote later, ‘and her horror at the news - and our childlike fears for our father’s safety, because if Mr Fraser had been murdered, perhaps Papa would be killed too! We heard the carriage drive rapidly away and we sat by our mother who was silent, and remained there until Father’s return.’
Holding flaming torches in front of them, Metcalfe’s runners led him up on to the Ridge where William’s body still lay on the steps of his vast Gothic house.
According to witnesses, Fraser had been returning from an evening’s entertainment at the house of his friend the Maharaja of Kishengarh. Just before he reached the turning into his house a single figure who had been riding in front of him slowed down. He allowed William to come level, then from point-blank range fired a single shot from his sawn-off blunderbuss. Metcalfe, with his customary precision, noticed that the slugs had entered the right-hand side of Fraser’s body; ‘two had perforated as far as the outer skin of the opposite side,’ while one had passed ‘quite through’. ‘Death,’ concluded Metcalfe, ‘[had] instantly ensued.’
Thanks to some extraordinary detective work the murder was soon solved. Metcalfe and his assistant sleuth, John Lawrence, noticed that, mysteriously, none of the tracks on the road seemed to lead in the direction that the assailant had fled. But a search of a haveli belonging to friends of Shams-ud-Din Khan revealed a horse whose shoes had recently been reversed - exactly the trick used by Dick Turpin to outwit his trackers. Within the haveli were discovered incriminating letters between the assassin and Shams-ud-Din. A month later, after another accomplice had turned King’s Evidence, the case was complete. Khan and his henchman were tried and publicly executed.