The Sun in the Morning (31 page)

Cosmos grew like a weed on the hillsides, and during its season of bloom the strip of ground between the bottom of one wall and the top of the other was a riot of pink and white. Below this surface roof of colour lay a mysterious grey-green jungle a good deal higher than a child's head, and it was through this that we constructed a labyrinth of tunnels and at least three secret retreats: each one a circular, cleared space in which we could hide from authority, large enough for three to four children to sit in cross-legged to talk and laugh and plan in whispers under a roof of fragile petals.

When the cosmos was in flower all Simla was scented with its sweet, peppery fragrance and the air was thick with pollen dust. That dust, and the scent of the cosmos, is forever connected in my mind with my first experience of one of those strange moments that I presume must come to all of us: a moment when you suddenly see an ordinary and familiar scene with extraordinary clarity — almost as though seeing it through a powerful telescope or in a different dimension — and know with complete certainty that for some indefinable reason it will stay with you for ever; printed on your brain like a snapshot on a strip of film. This happened to me for the first time on a cloudless, windless day in October…

Bets and I were leaving Simla with our parents on their annual migration to Delhi — for ever since the débâcle of Nurse Lizzie we had accompanied Mother and Tacklow to the plains instead of being left behind at Miss Cullen's. We were all four standing on the down platform of Simla railway station, waiting for our train, when I turned to look up and back at Simla and saw it through a golden haze of pollen dust: the ridge and the tower of Christ Church, the fringe of ramshackle houses that are the shops on the Mall, with below them the crowded bazaars and behind them the familiar, forest-clad heights of Jakko, daubed now with the yellow and pink splashes of chestnut
and late-flowering wild cherry. It was mid-afternoon, but the autumn sun had already dipped below the deodars of Jakko and was streaking the view with long golden spears of light, each one a shimmering, dancing stream of motes from the cosmos pollen. This was the town in which I had been born, and every yard of it was familiar to me. Yet quite suddenly it was strange in a way that I could not have explained, and I knew that I would never forget the way in which I was seeing it now. Well, never is a long, long time. But I have remembered it ever since, and if there is anything in J. W. Dunne's
An Experiment with Time
— and I have every reason to believe that there is — then somewhere back in Time I am still standing there on that station platform, staring up, entranced, through a golden veil of cosmos pollen at the Simla of my childhood.

Yet another official ‘in-aid-of' entertainment at the Gaiety Theatre, in which Bets and I took part, must have been very dull, for I can remember nothing at all about it except that we danced a minuet to Paderewski's Minuet in G, and that every time I hear that tune I can see Bets in her costume and remember some of the steps. We also took part in a series of tableaux, plus a very potted version of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
, which was presented at Peterhof — a house that was used as the residence of the Viceroy from 1862 until 1888 when one of them, Lord Minto, moved out of Peterhof and into the newly-built and truly hideous Viceregal Lodge.

I have never understood why the Victorians had such a fondness for tableaux: a static form of entertainment which also seems to have been wildly popular in Elizabeth Tudor's day and on down through Louis XIV and Regency England, into the twentieth-century — if all those early photographs by Cecil Beaton are anything to go by! It certainly survived in Anglo-Indian circles right into my own times, for the last ones I saw were staged at the Gaiety Theatre as late as (I think) 1929, while I distinctly remember some elderly woman — probably all of thirty! — remarking of the Peterhof tableaux that they were ‘sweetly pretty'.

Once again Mrs Strettle's dancing-class did their stuff. The first half of the programme consisted of tableaux copied from the books of nursery rhymes illustrated by H. Willebeek Le Mair. I still have my own copies of her books, which continue to enchant me; and for the
information of those who are unfortunate enough to have missed seeing them, every illustration, as well as the words and music on the facing page, is set inside an oval wreath of flowers, while the decorative pictures themselves are painted in pale, unshaded water-colours. These were copied exactly on the small stage at one end of the Peterhof ballroom; and while selected members of the dancing-class posed rigidly, doing their best not to twitch an eyelid, some grown-up or other sang the appropriate song: ‘Ride-a-Cock-Horse', ‘Little Miss Muffet', ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb', or whatever. I took the part of Tom in ‘Tom, Tom the Piper's Son' and was one of Old King Cole's ‘Fiddlers Three', and Bets and her best friend, Tony, were the two small pyjama-clad figures in the shadowy, all-blue bedroom, looking out at ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star'!

There were about eight or nine of these tableaux and, after the interval, twenty or thirty minutes of Oberon and Puck, Bottom the Weaver and Titania and her fairies. Bargie, with her lovely black hair loose about her shoulders, made an enchanting Titania, but I don't remember who else played who. I wasn't in it, anyway! In that same year I was in some ‘in-aid-of' involving the French Consul which entailed hours of practice in someone's sitting-room at a hotel called Longwood where, among other things, a squad of us had to learn to sing the Marseillaise — in French.

In addition to our personally invented diversions, and all this prancing around on the exciting side of the footlights, there were also the time-honoured festivals of the country, to which our Indian friends could be counted on to invite us. There were the annual celebrations of Holi, which is the great festival of the lowest and by far the largest of Hindu India's four major castes. It is a colourful and joyous Saturnalia that lasts for several days and appeals strongly to the child who never quite dies in even the oldest of geriatrics, since while it lasts people squirt each other with coloured water and pelt each other with fragile tissue-paper packets of vividly tinted powder that explode like miniature smoke-bombs. We enjoyed this exhilarating pastime enormously, but poor Punj-ayah, lumbered with the task of cleaning us up afterwards, strongly disapproved of it. And no wonder! for a topi, a frock, or a pair of shoes that have been doused with alternate jets of scarlet water and green and purple powder is practically a write-off.

Another entrancing Hindu festival was Diwali, the Feast of Lights, which is held in honour of several deities, among them the loveliest goddess in the Hindu pantheon, Lakshmi; and also to commemorate the Lord Krishna's slaying of a demon called Naraka who had captured and imprisoned no less than sixteen thousand maidens! Every Hindu house is decorated with lights at Diwali, and though nowadays those lights are likely to be electric bulbs, in my day they were
chirags
— little doll-sized earthenware bowls filled with oil, in which there floated a wick made out of a twist of cotton. Lined up on window-sills, parapets and walls, and lit after sunset, they set every town and village a-glitter with swaying, shimmering lines of light. It was a magical sight. Diwali is a night for fireworks and feasting, for eating delicious sweets like almond or pistachio
barfi
, and for playing games of chance; since not to gamble at Diwali is inauspicious — even when one can only afford to play with the smallest of copper coins, or sweets! I used regularly to lose my pocket money at Diwali and end up playing for sweets, though on one glorious occasion I won the staggering sum of four annas which, considering the state of my finances, was roughly equivalent to breaking the Bank at Monte Carlo.

Then there was the annual Sipi Fair, where (so Punj-ayah told us with bated breath) there were
brides
for sale! — comely hill-girls, dressed in their best and decked with beads and silver ornaments by parents who were willing to sell them to the highest bidder. And the great Mohammedan festivals of Id-el-Fitr, Shab-i-Barat, and Mohurram. The last two cannot really be termed ‘festivals', since Shab-i-Barat includes a feast in remembrance of all who have died in the past, while to Shi'as,
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Mohurram includes a day of mourning for Hussan and Husain, the martyred sons of Ali, adopted son and eventual son-in-law of the Prophet. On this day flimsy models of the tombs of the martyrs, eight to ten feet high, constructed from bamboo-canes and tissue paper and lavishly decorated with gold and silver tinsel, are carried in procession through the streets, preceded and followed by chanting, shouting crowds of the Faithful. These paper tombs are called
tarzias
— a word that according to Gully, a friend and
contemporary of ours (his real name was Ghulam and his father owned one of the shops on the Mall), derived from
ta'ziya
, meaning ‘mourning for the dead'. Which is yet another scrap of useless information that remains stuck in my head; though now that I come to think of it, I'm not sure that I ever checked it. But then Gully was a year older than I was, and at that time I thought he knew everything. The chanting processions always ended on the margin of a stretch of water; the sea, a river or a stream, a lake or a village pond, into which the
tarzias
would be thrown or carried and thrust under to be destroyed like the martyrs they commemorated. Next year new ones would be made…

The first Mohurram procession I ever saw was in Simla, and I suspect that I must have badgered the Khan Sahib to take me to see it. But though I remember being charmed by the glittering, swaying
tarzias
, my clearest memory is of the horror of seeing them followed by squads of vociferous devotees, naked to the waist, who carried short-handled, many-thonged whips, each thong ending in an iron nail, with which they flogged themselves in time to the shouted chant of: ‘
Yar Hussan! Yar Husain!
' while the blood poured down their backs and stained their white loincloths scarlet. It was a horrid sight and it darkened my day.

Simla lies among the foothills of the Himalayas, some seven thousand feet above sea-level; and having been born there, within sight of the high white peaks of the true Himalayas where nothing grows and the snow never melts, you would have thought that my real love would have been for mountains and mountain scenery. And it is true that I love both. But from the moment that we arrived in Delhi to spend our first cold weather there, both Bets and I lost our hearts for ever to the plains.

I cannot explain why this should have been so. It still seems to me completely irrational that anyone who has had the good fortune to be born and spend their formative years among the most beautiful and spectacular mountains in the world should prefer the flat, dusty, often arid and largely featureless plains that stretch away and away towards a limitless horizon. Why does one fall in love — really in love — with a piece of earth? Why should one particular kind of landscape hold such a strong and enduring appeal for me that even after I have seen and lived in some of the most extravagantly romantic places in the world, my real love is still for India's plains? Not even the hill-strewn ones, but the flat lands that lie to the left and right of the Grand Trunk Road: Central India and the Punjab — the ‘Land of the Five Rivers' —
and in particular, the once empty plains around Delhi.

I was certainly in the mood to fall in love with Delhi on that first cold-weather move; for which something that occurred at Kalka, where the foothills end and the plains begin, must be held responsible. A small incident which, like that view of Simla seen through the gold-dust shimmer of the sunbeams, has stayed diamond-bright in my memory. This too happened at a railway station; the small station of Kalka where the little toy train from Simla stops and passengers wishing to go further transfer into a broad-gauge one. We had arrived there after dark, and while Punj-ayah and Alum Din and our parents were busy seeing to the removal of our luggage and
bistras
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and their subsequent bestowal in a reserved compartment on the Ambala–Delhi train, Bets and I wandered off to explore.

Up in Simla there had been a nip in the air and it had been cold enough after sunset for fires to be lit. But here on the edge of the plains the night was warm and windless, and the full moon that we had watched rise into the dusk like the ghost of some enormous apricot-coloured planet, now blazed bone-white overhead; flooding the world with light that seemed almost as bright as that of the vanished day. We walked across the station yard and back up the main road that led to Simla, the same road that Emily Eden had been carried along in her palanquin, that Kipling and Kitchener and Curzon and our own father, together with thousands of others both English and Indian — among them Kim and Huree Chunder Mukerji! — had driven along in tongas, ridden on horseback or travelled on foot, long before the railway had been laid or the motor-car invented.