India (81 page)

I knew the palace as a palace. In 1962 Karan Singh, the maharaja, had been in residence; his official position in the state had been that of governor,
sadr-i-riyasat;
and I had been invited to the palace more than once for dinner. On one occasion I had gone in a tonga, a horse-drawn cart. The horse had laboured and slipped up the long, hard incline of the drive. I could have walked faster. It felt absurd to be sitting in the tonga, but I didn’t know what to do. The whole procedure had seemed undignified to the officials watching: they had finally come up in a jeep to rescue me.

No memory remained to me of palace entrance or rooms. The carpet was worn in the corridor downstairs. Upstairs, outside my room, there were warm kitchen smells; and there was a glimpse, through a concrete screen, of the staff quarters. My room was big; the furniture felt inadequate; the coarse-tufted carpet was bright green. No sense of glory or comfort or holiday: just a feeling, in the spring-damp air, of a big building running down, with too many things to put right now, a building too big for those of us who were in it, a building just opened up for the season, needing summer and a holiday life, which, with the religious and political restlessness in the valley, it perhaps wasn’t going to get.

The gardens the windows looked out on were in good order, though. The grass had been cut low, the two big trees freshly pollarded, the flower-beds bright with bulbs and seed-packet colours. Two Japanese girls in jeans, having their photographs taken, posed one for the other, squatting in front of the red tulips and giving tinkling little squeals. Beyond and below, seen through spring growth, the new sprays of poplars and the soft lime-green fronds of willows, was the lake. The far-off mountains had fresh snow at the top. It was a privileged, palace view: no sight, from
the window, of the new building on the lake shore to the right, the terracing of the lower mountainside; no sight of the houseboat rows to the left.

Somewhere there, to the left, was the Liward Hotel. And it was towards that that very soon, not wanting to delay the moment, I went. I took a hotel taxi. There was a minimum charge. For that charge I could have gone two or three times the distance I did go; I could even have walked. Old Kashmiri irritations began to revive, telescoping the years.

Misled by the crowd I saw ahead on the boulevard, not able with the new clutter on the lake to gauge where the Liward might be, I got off too soon, at the wrong boating steps, and became involved in a haggle with the boatman in charge about the fare to the Liward. The boatman had the height of a child; and, below his brown gown, he had the physique of a child. Pale, marked skin, discoloured in patches; a cadaverous small face on a thin neck; light-coloured hair, bright eyes. His appearance spoke of winter starvation; but his eyes, like his haggling voice, were full of rage. I hadn’t seen anyone like that on the boating steps in 1962; but neither had there been the crowd, and the human roar.

We settled for 25 rupees for the crossing to the Liward, a pound: far too much, five times too much.

The water of the lake, streaming through my fingers, was cool. And even with all the traffic, the lake still had its spring-time clarity. It was full of little fish, a delight to see, and the ferns at the lake bottom tossed slowly in the current. (Later, in high summer, the water would cloud.) Where there had been openness in 1962 there was now a long row of houseboats, each with its signboard and steps; and some of the boats seemed to be linked by a railed timber walk, supported on stilts.

We paddled past that; made for a water lane with shop-boats and service boats. And soon – the crossing certainly not worth 25 rupees – there was the Leeward, in that corrected spelling, according to its big signboard. Not the modest cottage and lake garden I had lived in, but an establishment dominant even in the new commercial clutter: solid, concrete-walled, many-winged, many-gabled.

The photograph of the Leeward I had been sent some years before had shown a building two storeys high. I felt that the roof had been raised since then, and a third storey added. The gables
were oddly splayed at the bottom ends, thicker, and almost with the curve of hockey sticks. With the steep pitched roof, the effect was Tibetan or Japanese.

I had remembered flat lotus leaves on the lake beside the Leeward garden. A few were still there, but they were not as noticeable as the tall, litter-trapping grass that grew about the landing stage. The hotel had always been at an intersection of water lanes; but now it was as though a residential area had become a business area. Houseboat shops moored to ragged remants of black islets, rough timber and corrugated-iron shops on stilts, and handcrafts emporia faced the Leeward across all the lanes. The Leeward had its own grocery shop in one corner, with a large wall advertisement; and next to that was an emporium of Kashmir leather and wool goods.

From the landing stage a railed path led between two rectangles of garden. It was (apart from the bath-tub jardinière in one corner) a little like the garden I knew. But it was impossible to reconstruct the site, to work out where my sitting room had been, and where the bedroom with the two views. The hotel island, the plot of earth, must itself have been added to.

At one end of the building, opposite the hotel shops, was the office, a small white-walled room with glass windows. A high counter; a brown keyboard; a calendar on the wall; Kashmir tourist folders opened out. There were also posters of Mecca: the kaaba stone, and a dome. There had been no decorations with that religious twist in the old Leeward. Clearly someone had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, or wished to show his allegiance.

There was no one in the office. A little boy hanging around outside seemed to be connected with the hotel. I sent him to look for Aziz or Mr Butt. It was Mr Butt who came. I hardly had to wait. After 27 years, it was as simple as that. He had a white fringe of beard, the beard of a man who had made the pilgrimage. Perhaps in a crowd I might not have spotted him. But here, in his own setting, he was immediately recognizable: the fur cap, the dark colours he liked to wear, the thick-lensed glasses, the slenderness.

He behaved like a man who was unsurprised. We were indeed both like actors in a play, who had rehearsed this moment. In 1962 there had been nine rooms in the hotel, he said; now there were 45. The charge now was 125 rupees per night, five pounds, eight dollars, to include bedding and hot water. He knew precisely how
long I had stayed in the hotel in 1962. I didn’t have to ask him; he reminded me. I had stayed four months and 15 days. Just as writing, the ordering of events and emotion, made things manageable for me, helped me as it were to clear the decks, so it seemed that putting numbers to things, finding the right numbers, helped Mr Butt to file things away and put a pattern on events.

After the hotel news, which he had given very quickly, the most important thing he had to tell me was that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. There was his health. ‘But I am good, sir.’ And, to prove it, he held my hand and gripped it hard.

I asked how old he was. He had trouble translating the numerals. He said eighty-six first of all, then seventy-six, then sixty-six. Perhaps he was sixty-six; that would have made him thirty-nine in 1962, one year short of forty – that would have seemed to me old then.

He told me about the others. Ali Mohammed, who had brought me that lucky day to him, had gone away. The
khansamah
, the cook, tormented and temperamental, creating all kinds of crises in the cook house and quarters at the end of the garden, had died. But Aziz was still there, very much so. At the moment he was in his own house; he would be back at the hotel in the afternoon.

I said I would come back at about four to see Aziz. Language – or the absence of a common language – lay between Mr Butt and me, as it had always done. Having come to the end of such language as we had in common, we had come to the end of things to say just then. And I took the lake boat back to the boat steps and the small, angry-eyed man.

On the shore there was a hill known as Shankaracharya Hill. There was a Hindu temple at the top; in 1962 Karan Singh used to maintain the brahmin there. Many afternoons I walked up the hill. I got to know the brahmin. He was a jovial hermit, with a woollen cap. When it rained, or was misty or cold, he kept himself warm in the Kashmiri way, hugging a small clay brazier of burning charcoal below a blanket. There had been so many new things to take in: it was only now – going back to the boating steps through this echoing bazaar roar from lake and boulevard – that I saw that on the small hill next to Shankaracharya there was a big television transmission mast; and I wondered about the temple and the brahmin.

I went back to the Leeward at about four. Taxi again from the
Palace Hotel; lake boat again from the 25-rupee steps. A small handsome young man was waiting for me in the office. He had a sleeveless blue padded jacket in some synthetic material, as stylish as his haircut. He said he was ‘Aziza’s’ son – ‘Aziza’ was what he said: it was, as I remembered, the affectionate form of Aziz.

Aziz’s son! He was eighteen. He was a student at a college in Srinagar. He was studying accountancy. Accountancy! But, of course, with all the activity in the lake and the town, there was a need.

And Aziz appeared, coming out of that corridor from which, in the morning, Mr Butt had appeared. Mr Butt had remained slender; Aziz had become broad and paunchy and round-faced. He was wearing many garments: loose trousers, long-tailed shirt, a pullover stretched tight over his paunch, a kind of unbuttonable waistcoat (more back than front), and a lightweight, full-skirted jacket. Strangely, his size made little difference: he remained the man I had known. There was still the energy, the lightness of step, the neutrality of expression, the assessing intelligence, the slight blink, as though he was shortsighted.

What news? Well, he said, the boy – he meant his handsome son – had wanted to become a doctor. But they had talked him out of that. There was no business like the hotel business. And Mr Butt, joining us, chuckled and said, after Aziz, that there was no business like it.

I asked Aziz about Mr Butt’s fur cap. I had, in my earlier book, described the effect one day of heavy rain on the fur: having found those words, and having never forgotten them, I had remembered the cap. I wondered now whether the cap, like the white beard Mr Butt wore, had a religious significance; or whether it meant that Mr Butt belonged to a particular clan.

Aziz said, ‘You can pay 1000 rupees for that cap.’

That seemed to be all. It was only then I noticed that Aziz was himself wearing a fur cap; and then memory – in a dozen vivid pictures – told me that Aziz had always worn a fur cap, that the cap had been part of his appearance, and that I had seen him bareheaded only once – after some horseplay in the kitchen, which had sent him out laughing and dishevelled into the garden. But I hadn’t had to find words for his cap; it hadn’t acquired importance for me.

I told Aziz about my trouble at the boating steps, and the charge
of 25 rupees. The boatman was waiting with his boat to take me back. Aziz made a gesture and called the boatman over. I felt the boatman didn’t like being called: he appeared not to notice.

Aziz himself appeared to forget the boatman. He brought out a box of photographs and he and Mr Butt began to look for old ones. They found one of the hotel in 1962, showing the garden and my sitting room. And they found another, an over-exposed one, of the staff of that time. Mr Butt was there, and Aziz; and Ali Mohammed, blunt-featured and earnest, who had now gone away; and the dead khansamah. The khansamah was tall and really rather fine, with a face more tormented than I remembered. Perhaps his rages hadn’t been due just to temperament; perhaps he had been ill sometimes, and in pain.

There had been no more than five or six people in that old group. Now the hotel employed 20 people, and there was even a manager.

What did Aziz do, then?

Aziz’s son said: ‘He is the commander-in-chief.’ And Mr Butt, understanding, smiled.

I asked Aziz about Mr Butt’s health. Mr Butt had hinted in the morning that he wasn’t absolutely well. Aziz said that Mr Butt shouldn’t be smoking, but he smoked his hookah in secret; he couldn’t give it up. And Mr Butt, not smiling, made a grave gesture of helplessness.

I reminded Aziz about the boatman, and the 25-rupee crossing charge.

Aziz said, ‘You pay
twenty-five
rupees this morning?’

And when I said yes, he looked grave, like a doctor coming upon a bad and unexpected symptom. But then, like a doctor, he was willing to do what he could. He called the boatman over again, and this time the boatman came. Aziz and Mr Butt talked to him. Aziz said later that he had told the boatman that I was an old friend of the hotel’s, not ‘a three-day tourist’. And more than once during this talk with the boatman Mr Butt said, ‘Four months and 15 days.’ At the end the boatman smiled and Aziz said that I was to pay the boatman what I wanted. I didn’t think this was good enough. Aziz knew that; he suggested that I pay 15 rupees.

Memory had brought back that picture of a skittish, bareheaded Aziz in the garden of the old Leeward – a rare skittishness then, and hard to imagine now in the dignified, successful man in front
of me. How old had he been then? To me at the time he had been a mature, ageless kind of man.

‘How old are you, Aziz?’

‘Forty-eight, fifty.’

That was far too young. But he didn’t seem to know; and perhaps, not being able to read and write, having to depend only on his own memory, his ability to relate events in his own life to events outside, he had no means of knowing.

We talked about the Himalayan pilgrimage to the cave of Amarnath that they had arranged for me, with muleteers, tent-pitcher, a cook, and Aziz in general command. Helicopters went to Amarnath now, Aziz said; and there were immense numbers of pilgrims, four lakhs, five lakhs, 400 thousand, 500 thousand.

Aziz said, ‘You remember
ghora-wallah?
’

He was talking about one of the muleteers in our party. I would have written about him; the details would have been there in my book; but the man himself, and events connected with him, had slipped my memory. But Aziz remembered, and a memory came back to me of a muleteer who had abandoned us high up in some pass and who, before that, had caused some of our baggage to roll down a hillside – and Aziz had had to do the retrieving.