by M. M. Kaye
* * *
Mother and I planned to spend the hot weather in Ootacamund, a part of India that I had never seen before. Bets had arranged to go up there to meet her mother-in-law and would be staying at Mrs Pardey’s guest-house, and she suggested that Mother and I should do the same. So we had booked rooms for ourselves and arranged to drive there, via Bangalore and Mysore where Mother had old friends from the Delhi days. We should have left while the weather was still cool, but three accidents delayed us. The first was caused by Mother’s Siamese cat, Shao-de. The second can also be laid at Shao-de’s door, though it was hardly an accident, since Mother had arranged to mate her puss to a neighbour’s tom, who was also a well-bred Siamese. With kittens on the way – and all of them ‘bespoke’ – we had to wait until they arrived and were old enough to travel.
It was during that waiting interval that I went out into the garden late one evening in the dusk to collect Shao-de, whom we did not allow out at night (too many jackals and pi-dogs around). Mother and Sandy had both gone out to some senior dinner party, Kadera was out on the town with Sandy’s bearer, and I was more or less on my own in the house. Shao-de obediently gave herself up when called, stalking elegantly out from under a mass of bougainvillaea at the far end of the garden, and I picked her up and was carrying her back in my arms, cradling her like a baby, when a hyena that had probably been stalking her suddenly broke cover and galloped away across the lawn. Shao-de lashed out in a panic, trying to turn over, and one of her claws slashed across my left eye.
Normally, an eye’s reaction is so swift that I would have closed it in time. But it was nearly dark, and by the time I got the cat and myself into the house I discovered that I was pouring blood all over the place. Realizing that my eyeball had been neatly slashed, I rang the Residency Surgeon as my best bet. He was out of course. So I rang the people Mother and Sandy were dining with, and they managed to ring the Residency Surgeon (who was not pleased!) and they all turned up, to find me with gore pouring down my face. It looked much worse than it was. The Res. doc. turned pale green at the sight and said it would have to be left until tomorrow morning, since he knew nothing about eye surgery. I would have to go to the hospital to sort out the damage. Fortunately, Mother had a couple of great friends, a doctor and his wife who were natives of Hyderabad. She managed to get them on the phone, but the doctor had two operations on his hands that night, and having told me what to do in the way of bandages, asked me to turn up at the City Hospital as early as I could on the following morning.
The City Hospital was enough to make a modern doctor or hospital nurse swoon with horror. It was a huge barrack-like Victorian structure that strongly suggested the hand of Florence Nightingale – high-ceilinged rooms and plenty of light and air. It was crammed with rows of low iron bedsteads in every room and along all the verandahs, each bed surrounded as with a swarm of flies by what appeared to be every member of the patient’s family. For India does not approve of leaving its sick to the mercy of the doctors and nurses, let alone in peace and quiet. A horde of anxious relatives accompanies a sick or dying man, woman or child to the hospital, where they squat beside the bed (veiled, if female, against the glances of strange men) so that they can offer comfort and sympathy and, too frequently, sips and scraps of unsuitable food, and pat the hand or shoulder of the sufferer in a soothing manner. (I notice with interest that the idea of allowing relatives to attend the sick in our children’s wards is catching on. India has been doing it for years.)
Sandy drove Mother and me to the hospital, where we were met by her old friend Dr Dutt and his begum, Carrie. (This was not her real name, but a nickname given to her long ago by some humorist when they were first married: ‘Dutt and Carrie’. It had caught on, and I don’t think any of their many British friends could have told you what her real name was.) Carrie had come to hold Mother’s hand in case, when the bandaging job she had done under telephone instructions last night was removed, it turned out that I had lost the sight in one eye. However, luck was with me.
Shao-de’s claw had slit the white but left the iris untouched, and Dr Dutt did a wonderful job on it. I watched enthralled through a small square, exactly the size of my eye, that had been cut out of the centre of the large sheet of rubber spread over me. My eye had been treated with a local anaesthetic, so that I couldn’t feel anything. But I could see, enormously enlarged, what appeared to be a needle the size of a small flagpole stitching up the slit in my eye with a rope capable of holding a battleship. The whole thing took less than a few minutes from start to finish, and when, some days later, I was allowed to take off the dressing, I could see as well as ever. For a year or two I had a small red scar on that eye, which gradually faded to a faint yellow and then vanished. He was one heck of a good eye surgeon was Dr Dutt.
And not only an eye doctor, for some time before the eye incident Mother had begun to suffer from what she was told must be rheumatism. She had told the doctor about this, and he had said cheerfully, ‘Oh, I can give you something for that,’ and had given her something that I can only describe as being exactly like a single floret off a cauliflower. It was about the size of a thumbnail, and she was told that she must put it into a glass of fresh milk – it had to be fresh or it wouldn’t work – every evening, and drink it first thing next morning. That was all. The thing fed on fresh milk and would, he warned her, grow. But since all she needed was a single floret, she could keep the latest one and either throw the rest away or give them to friends of hers who suffered from rheumatism. Mother followed his instructions and whatever it was (sounds like dai – yoghurt – to me, except the milk never thickened) it worked like a charm. And I have always believed that it was one.
* * *
Having recovered from the eye scare with no ill-effects, our departure for Bangalore was again delayed, this time because I developed a raging toothache. On being recommended to take myself off to a German dentist, newly arrived in Hyderabad and equipped with all the very latest and most expensive things in the way of dental gadgets and outfittery, I rashly clocked in as a patient, had my jaw X-rayed and was told that the nerve in my back tooth was causing the trouble and must be killed off. Well, I won’t go into the subsequent agony; anyone who has had tooth trouble knows what it can be like. I practically had to be strapped down in the chair, and the result was an increase of agony and no relief. Eventually Herr Whatsiz said it wasn’t a harassed nerve that was to blame, but an abscess, and the offending molar ‘go she must’! And go she did. (I presume from this that German teeth are feminine?) But in the process of yanking out the wretched thing, the Herr Dentist managed to break my jaw, so thoroughly that splinters of bone kept on surfacing and having to be removed for years to come. But at this time the pain was so bad that I couldn’t sleep, despite the endless painkillers and sleeping pills.
In the end the poor man himself came round and gave me a strong shot of morphine – which didn’t work either, except to make me feel woolly. And just to round everything off we had a sudden dust-storm that blew up without warning, and a huge square bottle of scent, a birthday present from Roger and quite the most expensive and glamorous gift I have ever received, Elizabeth Arden’s ‘Blue Grass’ (it was new then), was swept off my dressing-table by a curtain that suddenly streamed out on the wind. The floors in that house were all of stone or marble, and since that lavish bottle of scent landed on one corner, which snapped off neatly, not so much as a drop could be salvaged. The entire house reeked of ‘Blue Grass’ for days, and I remember weeping from sheer rage! And in the middle of this Shao-de’s kittens arrived: eight of them, no less.
We discovered quite a long time later why that unfortunate dentist had made such a hash of my teeth and my jaw. Apparently he wasn’t a dentist at all. He was either a German or a Polish Jew who could see only too clearly what was coming to his people, and knew that he could never escape to another country, any other country, with money. A dentist friend had advised him to put all the money he possessed into the most u
p-to-date equipment possible, which could let him (after studying the subject from the newest books) either set up as a dentist in a foreign country, or sell the equipment, for which there would always be a market. I don’t remember the details of his story or how or why this sort of thing could be got out of Germany or Poland. But it explained a lot, and though at the time I have seldom felt more uncharitable towards anyone, when I heard his story I couldn’t help hoping that in the end everything would work out for him, and that he would turn out to be one of the lucky ones. Poor fellow; what a jam he must have been in, to start practising before he was ready for it.
* * *
By this time, the hot weather was well and truly upon us. The temperature rose steadily, and at sundown each day the bheesti2 would splash water from his bulging mussack – the sheepskin that is filled at the well, and carried round the garden – no longer confining his attention to flower-beds and flower-pots, but plodding upstairs and, starting at the top, spraying water on the stone flagstones of the roof and the verandahs. As the cold water hit them, you could hear it hiss. Only when all that had been done (and it dried far too quickly) would he water the gravel paths, the lawns and the flower-beds, and the fresh, pungent scent of water on parched ground is one that no ex-member of the Raj will ever forget.
Mother and I would not normally have dreamed of setting out to drive several hundred miles on unmade roads across some of the barrenest stretches of the Deccan to the Nilgiri Hills and Ootacamund, at the height of the hot weather. But what with one thing and another, our departure had been so delayed that we decided to do the first leg of the journey by train to a small station, little more than a wayside stop, a night’s journey from Hyderabad. From there Kadera and the luggage would stay on the train as far as Bangalore, while Mother and I and the cats would finish the journey by car (a Baby Austin known as ‘the Beetle’). We had booked a two-berth sleeper for ourselves and the cats on the night train, and Sandy and about a dozen friends gave us a beautiful send-off, complete with goodbye garlands and gifts of fruit and halwa from the Hyderabadi contingent.
I don’t think we slept much, because Shao-de and her kittens took a poor view of railway travel. And an even poorer one of having to use a scratch-box in a rattling, shaking, noisy carriage. They all took refuge under the lower berth, and refused to come out, so we left them to it. And when we surfaced in the early dawn they were all back in their travelling basket, looking very dusty, but otherwise OK. I can’t remember the name of the station we disembarked at, though one would have expected it to be engraved on my memory in letters of blood. We arrived at it in the cool of the morning, a good half hour before sun-up, and discovered that it was indeed no more than a wayside halt. No sign of a village. In fact no sign of life beyond a station-master and a couple of rickety stalls in the shade of a neem tree, one of only three or four trees in an otherwise treeless landscape. The stallholder’s stock consisted of a few packets of country-made cigarettes and matches, paan and some fly-blown halwa, and a selection of bottles containing highly coloured and certainly lukewarm soft drinks, some of them fizzy, and all guaranteed to inflict a severe attack of Delhi-belly on any unwary paleface unwise enough to sample them.
Quite a lot of passengers alighted from the train, but only, it appeared, for sanitary purposes or to stretch their legs, and Mother and I were the only ones not to scramble back again when the train moved on. Its guard and the station-master and his minions had helped offload the Beetle, and while this was being done Kadera produced chuppattis, hard-boiled eggs and mugs of hot coffee for us – apparently out of thin air – as was the custom in the old days. I never knew how Indian bearers managed to come up with these commodities at the drop of a hat, however unpromising the situation. But rain or shine, desert or jungle, they never failed one. Money could not buy such service, and we shall never see their like again.
The train, after uttering a few tentative hoots, got up steam and trundled off again, taking Kadera and our heavy luggage with it, while Mother and I, having reimbursed the station-master and his assistants for their help, checked that the cats were all present and correct, the hand luggage safely installed and the car’s petrol, oil and water topped up, climbed in ourselves and were off into the great unknown. And a great unknown it turned out to be. I don’t think I have ever come across such a treeless and desolate wasteland before, unless it was in the desert country of what in my day was called Arabia, and I hadn’t been there yet! It reminded me of a particularly dreary bit of country that we had once driven through going to or coming from a shooting camp in the then empty country beyond New Delhi, and I remember Tacklow observing meditatively in Kaye-language: ‘A dezolaze country, entirely inhabizez by goze.’ This too was a ‘dezolaze’ country, and so far, there didn’t seem to be so much as a single goat in sight.
Chapter 24
The morning was still reasonably cool, and since the unmade road, though deep in dust, was comparatively free from faults and potholes, Mother thought that at this rate we would make better time than we expected. Especially as we seemed to have it to ourselves. Nothing moved on it for miles except the occasional dust devil. This might have been a good thing if the Beetle hadn’t come to a grinding halt, bang in the middle of the road and after we had driven three or four miles at most. What’s more, she would not budge.
We could not even persuade her to let us push her into the side of the road. Mother had taken a few lessons on car engines and she had become quite a good mechanic. But this was something she didn’t understand at all, and she finally gave up tinkering with the engine and joined me under a solitary tree – the only one for miles as far as I could see – providentially growing near the edge of the road not far from where the car had stopped.
The morning was growing steadily hotter as the sun climbed slowly up a cloudless sky and when, after about twenty minutes, there was still no sign of traffic on the long, dusty ribbon of road that ran straight towards the horizon, and the land had begun to shimmer and dance in the heat, Mother announced that there was nothing for it but to walk back to the station, reasoning that the train would not have stopped unless there was a fair-sized village somewhere within range. And where there was a village there was always a bazaar, and every bazaar, however humble, boasted a shop that repaired bicycles and the occasional lorry, patched up burst tyres and employed a mechanic who knew enough about car engines to tell her what had gone wrong with hers. Better still, there was a telephone in the station-master’s office, and she could ring up the garage in Hyderabad, where she and her car were known, and ask for advice.
I was not in favour of her setting off to walk several miles in that blazing heat, and we wasted some considerable time in wrangling about which of us should go and which should stay with the cats. But in the event neither of us had to walk, for Providence suddenly presented us with a tonga. The dust lay so thick on the road that we hadn’t heard it approach, and the belt of dancing heat-haze – and the long dips in the road that it had helped to disguise – had hidden it from us until almost the last minute. Also, wonder of wonders, there were only three passengers in it instead of the normal round dozen (Bets and I once counted seventeen passengers in a single tonga). I believe the law lays down that the maximum load must not exceed four passengers in addition to the driver. But India has never paid the slightest attention to this type of law, which it regards as petty interference with the Liberty of the Individual. And although the RSPCA does its best on behalf of the unfortunate ponies that pull such vehicles, they fight a losing battle.
Finding its way impeded by a stationary car in the middle of the road, the tonga pulled up and Mother ran out, and having explained our predicament, begged the driver to take her to the station if his other passengers had no objection. They had none, and welcomed her aboard with enthusiasm, hospitably vacating the front seat next to the driver so that Mother need not be too squashed up among the passengers and their bulky luggage: ‘Baitho, Mem-sahib, baitho! – bahut jugga hai.’1
Once aboard, the driver edged the tonga cautiously around the car and, as he flicked the pony with his whip and it broke into a smart trot, Mother leant out over the wheel and yelled, ‘I’ve no idea when I’ll be back – could be hours!’ And on that somewhat pessimistic note the rescue party vanished into a cloud of dust, leaving me ‘alone and palely loitering’ in the middle of nowhere.
Looking back on that morning, I find it typical of the India-That-Was that it never crossed my mind, or Mother’s either, that I could possibly come to any harm by being left stranded unarmed (and why would I need arms in friendly, kindly India?), alone except for the Siamese cats, in a totally strange part of the map. Not that my situation could occur nowadays, for a flood-tide of new villages and towns has already invaded those once ‘Empty Quarters’, and almost every road has become a river of traffic. Buses, lorries, cars, motor-bikes and bicycles by the million fighting it out with bullock-carts, tongas and such horse-drawn vehicles as remain.
Over seventy years before the day on which Mother had thankfully grabbed a lift off a passing tonga and left me in the wilderness, Edward Lear had been invited by the then Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, to visit India as his guest for a year, in return for ‘one or two of his Indian landscapes’. Lear accepted and spent over a year there, living mostly in Dâk bungalows. Lear wrote that he regarded it as a ‘semi-miracle’ that ‘even in such a remote locality – a sort of nowhere on the borders of India and Tibet’ – they had not only been well fed and comfortable, but had never felt in any danger of being molested; though there ‘was not a bolt on the doors’.