Enchanted Evening (38 page)

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'.

There weren't any in my day either. I wonder if there are now? Or if there are still any Dâk bungalows in existence? What
would
we have done without them?

*   *   *

As the shadows shrank and the heat increased, the interior of the little car, which had been standing in the blazing sun for well over an hour, began to get too hot for Shao-de, who put her head out of the near-side window and told me so in no uncertain terms. Well, there was nothing I could do except remove her basket from the back seat of the car and plonk it down in the shadiest spot I could find among the roots of the tree. Which I did. But unfortunately Shao-de thought nothing of the Great Outdoors. To her it was hostile territory, and she growled her disapproval; snatching up the nearest kitten by the scruff of its neck, she carried it back to the car and returned for another.

The next ten or fifteen minutes was occupied by a bad-tempered contest between Shao-de and myself, I returning the kittens to their basket and Shao-de snatching them away and putting them back in the car as fast as I replaced them. Shao-de won easily because she was prepared to keep it up indefinitely and I was not. Also she suddenly switched tactics, and started leaving the kittens under instead of in the Beetle, where the car itself provided a dense patch of shade, in addition to the ghost of a draught. I found this so sensible that I pushed the cat-basket under the Beetle and left her to collect the entire gang in it.

I had a lot of trouble with that cat. She was tediously coy about being watched while engaged in dealing with a call of nature, but there came a time when this would not be denied, and deserting her offspring she made for the shelter of the tree, which provided the only protection from aerial attack by a hungry kite or eagle, of whom there were always a few around. Having taken an age to select a suitable spot, she scratched a hasty hole for herself above it. At which point she suddenly lowered her tail and, flattening her ears, began to growl in a menacing manner. It seemed she had spotted a couple of stray goats, and she wasn't going to get down to the job in hand with them watching!

She really was a maddening creature, and after about twenty minutes of this Victorian prudery I could gladly have slapped her. If it wasn't a goat it was a jackal or a crow, and once it was a solitary chinkara. But in the end nature proved too strong for her and she finally got the whole business over and returned to her kittens. About a couple of hours after that, though it felt like a hundred, Mother and the
tonga
returned, minus its original passengers, who had been dropped off at their destination, and accompanied instead by a rescue party consisting of a lorry and a number of interested helpers armed with ropes and planks and various DIY bits and pieces, headed by a little man wearing nothing but a loincloth – and how I envied him! – who Mother said was a mechanic whom she had ‘found in the village'.

She seemed to be on excellent terms with the entire rescue party, and after the ‘mechanic' had tried the gears and peered under the bonnet and conferred with Mother, she fished the cat-basket out from under the car (Shao-de growling and spitting the while) and asked the
tonga-wallah
to take it and me back to the station waiting-room, plus cats, picnic basket and as many pieces of luggage as we could cram into his
tonga,
in order to lighten the load on the car, which was being brought back to the village for the mechanic to have a good look at it. Mother meant to stay with the car and do any steering that might be necessary, but in the end, since the car refused to respond to anything, the rescue party managed to drag it up on to the lorry and get it back to the mechanic's shop in the bazaar.

‘He says he thinks he might be able to do something about it,' said Mother, who from long experience (she had been one of the first women in India to drive a car) had developed a strong belief in the powers of India's wayside mechanics. She told me that she had telephoned her garage in Hyderabad, and the head mechanic had rung back to say that he was sure that it could only be the failure of a part known as a crown-wheel pinion. Since the car would not move without a replacement, they offered to put one on the night train, which stopped at our station at first light on the following morning – provided, of course, that there was someone available to do the job of fitting it in.

Mother had said confidently that there was. And how right she was. She herself had never even
heard
of such a thing as a crown-wheel pinion, but as soon as she mentioned it to the mechanic he had said cheerfully that he'd got one of those! He had apparently acquired it from a car that had been in a collision with a lorry some years ago and had been so badly damaged that the wreckage had been abandoned as worthless.

It had proved anything but worthless to him, for he had towed it back to the village and learned a lot about engines by studying the wreck of that one. Its crown-wheel pinion had been practically undamaged, and he had wrapped it in an oiled cloth to preserve it from rust, and added it to a magpie hoard of bits-and-pieces that he thought might ‘come in useful' some day. This one's day, he was convinced, had arrived, and he assured Mother that with a bit of tinkering he could make it fit.

Mother, after a good look at this unfamiliar bit of machinery for which her garage quoted a hefty figure from their spare-part catalogue, was not so sure. But feeling that she could always do with a spare, she told him to go ahead and try, and returned to the station waiting-room where the cats and I were sitting among our collective gubbins and trying to come to terms with the fact that we would have to spend the rest of the day and all the night here. At least I was. Shao-de was merely ‘lounging round and sufferin”. And making a lot of noise about it too. She didn't approve of any of this, and I couldn't blame her, for though the temperature of the little waiting-room, with its windows closed and shuttered to keep in some of the cool air of the past night, was a degree or two below the grilling, blazing heat of the platform outside, once you got used to its illusion of shadowy coolness, you realized that it must be registering
well
over a hundred degrees, though it was not yet midday. Only six hours since we had set out in the cool, yellow dawn of our fatal drive. And now we were stuck here until another dawn! That good Samaritan, the station-master, donated a bucket of lukewarm water with the suggestion that it would cool down the room if we splashed a cupful or two on the stone-tiled floor. And it did, though only temporarily, since it dried in seconds.

To Shao-de it was a life-saver. She spread herself out on the damp stone, paws outstretched and looking exactly like a doll-sized tigerskin, and not only abandoned her kittens, but refused to let any of them near her. I took off the domed top of their travel basket to give them more air, and they crawled out of it and tried to converge on their mother for a drink. But whenever one of them touched her she got up and moved away; and in the end they gave up, and copied her by spreading themselves out as flat as they could, so that the floor appeared to be covered with little white tigerskins. ‘If it gets any hotter than this,' said Mother, ‘we shall lose the lot of them, and Shao-de as well – Oh dear!' ‘And me too,' I said. I had removed my dress and was wearing nothing but pants and a bra so that I could dip the dress into the water bucket (which was getting dangerously low) and use it as a sponge to damp myself all over, which was heaven for about ten seconds. After that I was dry again, and hotter than ever.

We were wondering how on earth we were going to last out until the sun went down, when we heard a car drive into the station yard, and heard someone calling out: ‘Mem-sahib! Mem-sahib!'

Mother shot out of the door, while I hastily put my dress on again. She was back after only about five minutes, breathless with excitement: ‘Now listen,' she said, ‘that's my car out there. He drove it here from the bazaar' (roughly a quarter of a mile) ‘and he says he's sure it won't let me down. Now do we take a chance on his second-hand gadget not breaking down, and start off at once? Or would it be safer to wait until the other one gets here on the train tomorrow morning? I'm not going to cancel it because I don't know how long his one will hold out, and we may need a spare. But the station-master says he could always forward it on to Bangalore. What do you think?'

‘Chance it and leave at once!' I said, reaching for the nearest piece of luggage. And we did. With the help of that wondrous mechanic, the station-master and assistant, and the
tonga-wallah
who was still around ‘just in case', we got everything back into the car, the cats going in last. And having distributed largesse and shaken hands all round, we put up a short prayer and set off again in the blinding heat down the same shadeless, dusty stretch of road that we had driven along so gaily in the cool of the early morning.

Bad as the midday heat was, it was preferable to being shut up in that oven of a waiting-room, for the very fact that we were moving created a suggestion of a draught, and before we started we had rigged up a sort of tent around the cats, constructed out of towels that we kept damp, in the manner of kus-kus-tatties, so that the air blowing through it lowered the temperature quite considerably. So much so that Shao-de, who had refused to stay in the basket with her kittens and spread herself out along the back seat, changed her mind and actually got back among them for long enough to allow them to take a reasonable drink off her. I had to wet our improvised kus-kus-tatties at shorter and shorter intervals, because they dried with the speed of lightning in that searing heat, and our water supply began to run out.

I can't remember passing any other traffic – motor-, bullock- or horse-drawn. Or any pedestrians either. But I suppose we must have done – unless the local population had enough sense to restrict its movements to the early morning and sundown – for I know that we drove through the occasional village where we replenished our water bottles and attracted the usual number of small children – the young of whatever race seem to be impervious to extremes of heat or cold. None of them had ever seen a Siamese cat before and they were enthralled by Shao-de and her kittens, asking in tones of awe,
‘Yea kis kism ka janwa hai?'
– ‘What kind of animal is that?'

It was a very long day, one of the longest I have ever spent. And every time we stopped we were scared to death that the car would not start again. But Providence and the genius of that mechanic never let us down and, though Mother eventually collected the parcel containing a brand new crown-wheel pinion, she never had to use it.

Chapter 25

As the road took us further south the traffic on it increased and there were more trees, mostly broomstick palms and not many of those. I took over the driving to let Mother get a bit of rest, and was relieved when she fell asleep for several hours. By the time she woke up the shadows had begun to lengthen and the heat had changed from intolerable to bearable. She consulted our road maps again and announced that we were never going to make it to Bangalore that day and must start looking out for a Dâk bungalow where we could spend the night.

This turned out to be easier said than done. We were so used to driving across and around the fertile and well-populated Punjab, where there always seemed to be a Dâk bungalow when needed, that we hadn't realized that in this barren patch of wilderness such things as Dâk bungalows might be few and far between. But so it was. We asked hopefully whenever we came to a village, and the answer was always that there was sure to be one at this or that small town –
‘lakin bhoat dur hai'
– ‘but that is very far'. Which was not much help. ‘Oh, well, we must press on,' said Mother. And we did. Until with the swiftness that one never quite gets used to in the East, the vast rose-red globe that had been tormenting us all day, its size now enormously increased by the dust in the air, stood for a moment on the horizon line before sinking below it in a matter of minutes. And suddenly it was dark and the sky was full of stars. And once again we were stranded in the middle of nowhere with the prospect of spending the night in a small car and in the company of nine cats.

We had stopped to watch the sun go down, which in the plains is a sight that I never grew tired of, and we waited to see the sky put on its usual dazzling ‘pantomime-transformation' scene. All that lavish gold and red and green, like some immense fire-opal. And when the curtain came down and the show was over Mother reluctantly switched on the headlights, and instantly everything beyond their range was black, and she started up the engine again and drove off hopefully in search of a Dâk bungalow.

Apparently there wasn't one in this particular strip of wilderness that included the borderlands of the Nizam's dominions and Madras, which was part of British India. I can't remember after all this time which one we were in now, but I do remember how hot the darkness was now that we had got used to it. I had been expecting the night air to be much cooler than the day, but it wasn't, not all that cooler anyway. It was as if the earth had been inhaling the oven-heat of the sun all day and was now exhaling it into the darkness. We had still found no Dâk bungalow, or any sign of human habitation, when around eight o'clock that night we saw lights ahead. Too bright to be made by anything but electricity, and too small a patch to be a village. Nearing it we realized with rapture that it was actually a modern petrol station in the wilderness, complete with pumps and a small brightly illuminated office and forecourt.