The Sun in the Morning (15 page)

There was the lordly
abdar
(butler), who ruled the Sahib's servants with an iron hand in an iron glove, and the Sahib's
bearer
who looked after his clothes and kept track of the bills. There was the Memsahib's
ayah
who did the same for her — but who would not sew so much as a button on her Sahib's pyjamas! There was the
hamal
who dusted the rooms by the simple process of flapping a cloth which shifted the dust from A to B and back again; the
kansamah
(cook) who produced delicious meals at any hour of the day or night — and for any number of unexpected guests as well — without a murmur. The
khidmatgar
waited at table, laid it, and looked after the knives and forks, crockery and glasses that the
masalchi
(who had a
chokra
to assist him) washed up but would not handle when dry. There was the children's
ayah
as distinct from the Memsahib's, and another and more junior
bearer
for the son of the house; a
bheesti
who fetched and carried water and filled the tin bath-tubs, and a sweeper and/or his wife the
metharani
, who dealt with the disposal of what is euphemistically known as ‘night soil' (why only night?). Then there was the
dirzi
who sat cross-legged on the verandah all day behind his whirring sewing-machine, making and
mending clothes for the household. Like the cook, he was a genius; he could copy almost anything if one showed him a picture, and all the ladies-of-the-Raj were dressed by him. A
dhobi
and his wife attended to the washing and ironing, and a
mali
and his assistant cared for the garden. There was a
syce
or
syces
for the horse or horses;
jhampanis
to draw the rickshaw and, last but by no means least, a
chowkidar
— a nightwatchman — to discourage robbers and other nefarious persons from breaking in during the hours of darkness. Or at least that was the idea, though in practice these gentlemen did little more than sleep soundly all night in the shelter of the porch, where anyone coming home late from a party must step over a recumbent and sheeted form in order to open the front door: a feat that was always performed without waking the slumberer.

Rumour has it that all
chowkidars
are members of a criminal gang and that their employment is merely a form of insurance — a sort of ancient Asiatic version of the ‘protection racket' — and that anyone refusing to hire one would soon discover that it was a lot cheaper to pay the man's modest wage and be free of his gang's attentions! I wouldn't know about that. But as you can see from the preceding list, any family man paying the wages of less than seven or eight servants at the end of each month could consider himself lucky: and probably lived in cramped discomfort in a small flat or half a bungalow! Yet by nineteenth-century standards even a dozen servants was staggeringly modest. That talented and entertaining snob, the Hon. Miss Emily Eden, despiser of Anglo-Indian society, whose acid pen did much towards colouring the views of later writers who, following her example, though unable to match her in the matter of blue blood, wrote off anyone who served in India (Governors-General, peers and all those related to them excepted, of course) as a collection of deadly little provincials married to vulgar dowds from suburbia, would herself have been waited on by considerably more than two hundred servants, since her brother, the deplorable Lord Auckland, happened to be Governor-General. He was also, incidentally, responsible for the calamitous Afghan War of 1839–42 which in the words of my revered kinsman Sir John Kaye, who wrote the contemporary history of that brawl, ‘
was disastrous because it was unjust. It was in principle and in act, an unrighteous usurpation, and the curse of God was upon it from the start
.'

In Emily's day the household staff was vast and the ‘who-does-what'
unofficial union rules were a lot stricter. It is interesting to learn that Honoria Marshall, arriving at Calcutta in 1837 to marry Henry Lawrence, a man she had not seen for over nine years, records in her diary that when, amazed by the enormous number of servants in her hostess's house, she inquired how many there were, she was told: ‘Not more than sixty. We run a
very
modest household here!' It is also worth noting that in a recent book on the partition and independence of India, there is a group photograph of some four hundred or so of the
five thousand-odd
servants deemed necessary for the running of the then Viceroy's House in New Delhi, in the days of the last Viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Admittedly the close-packed ranks of liveried men include members of the Viceroy's Bodyguard, but a note below mentions that among the missing thousands who could not be included in the photograph was a man whose sole duty was to pluck chickens, and that no less than fifty boys were employed to scare away birds from the lovely Mogul Gardens. I wonder how many gardeners they had — twenty? thirty? forty? But I still think that the whole scheme was a superlative method of jacking up the employment figures.

Emily Eden and Co. would have been horrified at the smallness of the staff employed by households in my father's day, and he in turn would probably have been surprised by the far smaller size of mine in the 1940s. But everyone in the servants' quarters behind our particular bungalow became a friend and partisan of my two small daughters; as Tacklow's had been to Bets and myself. And my children too spoke English as a second language rather than a first.

Mother thinks we moved from the Central Hotel into Chillingham in the autumn of 1908. I would have been around ten or eleven weeks old by then, so do not recall the occasion. But as Mother's memory for dates is now fairly hazy, I'm inclined to think that we probably stayed put in the hotel until the beginning of the next Simla season, because the smaller roads, such as the steep, winding one that leads down to Chillingham, are deep in snow during the winter months, and only the main ones such as the Mall, the Lakkar bazaar and the Ladies' Mile are kept passable. We had certainly moved by the next spring and summer, for a photograph of Teeta-ayah, Bill and myself, playing in the sun in Chillingham's apology for a garden, is one of those that survived among Aunt Lizzie's collection of Mother's snapshots.

Not many houses in Simla could boast a large garden, because in many places the hillsides on which they were built were too steep to allow for more than a front drive barely wide enough for a rickshaw to turn on; plus, with luck, a small lawn to one side that could just about support a single flowerbed. And that was it. The entrance to Chillingham (nicknamed ‘Warmingham' by Mother's many friends!) led straight off the hill road at a right angle, while the drive, having skirted one of those small lawns, turned left onto a level strip of ground bounded on one side by the porch and the front verandah, and on the other by a line of flowerpots and a wooden railing that topped a high stone wall which buttressed the shelf of ground on which the house stood. Below this wall the hillside dropped so steeply that we could look down onto tree-tops and the roof of a neighbour's house, as well as out toward the distant ridges of the foothills that fell away in ever diminishing folds until at last they melted into the yellow heat-haze of the plains.

That gravel frontage was really all the garden that we possessed, and since the hillside rose as steeply behind the house as it fell before it, our servants' quarters were strung out in a line along the curve of the hill, screened from our view by a high, lattice-work fence that was covered in white-flowered potato-creeper and had a green-painted door in it.

My memories of that first stay in Chillingham are so inextricably mixed up with a subsequent one that I cannot really tell how much belongs to the first time. Very little, I suspect. But there are certain things I am sure of; among them, that potato-creeper and the wide drive with its wooden rail giving onto nothingness, which was our playground. I remember, too, being dressed up in a variety of fancy-dresses and being photographed in them by Mother before being taken off by ayah to some children's party. One of these snapshots showed me dressed as a Columbine or a fairy or something of the sort, in a tight white bodice and a very short and very full skirt of white tarlatan. Tacklow presented a print of it to the
mali
, who was a particular friend of mine and was delighted with it. He was gazing at it with deep appreciation when Tacklow, becoming aware that he was holding it upside down, asked him what he thought it was? Whereupon the
mali
scratched his head and after a thoughtful pause said tentatively: ‘
Shaid fullgobi hoga?
' (‘Perchance it is a cauliflower?'). Dear
Mali-ji
!

Then there was my first silk dress. A proper party-dress. Mother had made all our baby clothes herself, many of which still survive in a box in my attic, after having been worn by my own daughters and later by my granddaughter. It was only when we were old enough to walk and run that the
dirzi
was called upon to make us everyday clothes in serviceable materials such as serge and cotton, and party ones in muslin, organdie or
broderie anglaise
. But this was a shop dress — and stunningly beautiful! Made of heavy white Chinese silk with short puffed sleeves and a yoke that was hand-embroidered with sprays of blue harebells, it was a birthday present from an old friend of Tacklow's whom we always called ‘the Khan Sahib'. His real name was Khan Bahadur something-or-other, though Khan Bahadur what, I can't remember because we never used it. He was just ‘the Khan Sahib' and Bets and I admired him enormously. I have no recollection of any other birthday or Christmas presents until I was at least seven or eight, yet I have never forgotten this one; which makes me wonder why more grown-ups do not give dresses or shoes as presents to little girls, instead of toys.

The Khan Sahib, a big, burly, bearded man with a strong resemblance to the late King-Emperor, Edward VII, owned a house in Simla and another in Delhi. He understood children, and though he spoke excellent English, he realized that Bill and I spoke his language with more fluency than our own and therefore — as he did with Tacklow when they were alone — he always spoke to us in his own tongue; which was a compliment of no mean order. Yet it was from the Khan Sahib that I received one of the first truly traumatic shocks of my life, and the episode has stayed fixed in my mind like a fly in a piece of amber…

Teeta-ayah had let me put on the silk dress to show the Khan Sahib how nice I looked in it, but since he and Tacklow were deep in conversation in the study, I settled down cross-legged on the sunny verandah under the study window so that I could waylay him when he came out. From this vantage-point I could hear their voices as clearly as though I were in the room with them, but I was not in the least interested in their conversation and had not been listening to it until suddenly the all-wise Khan Sahib said something so outrageous that it caught my attention. They had apparently been discussing the difference between Indian and English thinking, and the Khan Sahib
gave an illustration of this: ‘When the British are asked a question,' he said, ‘they will instantly reply with the truth, and perhaps consider later if it might not have been wiser to lie. Whereas we of this land will always answer first with a lie, and only afterwards consider if it might not have served us better to speak the truth.'
^*

I can still remember the shock that a small girl, brought up to believe that lying was a major sin, experienced on hearing such a loved and admired grown-up calmly admitting to telling lies as though it did not matter at all! It stood all my ideas of morality on their heads and left me totally bewildered. But it taught me an early and valuable lesson: that people of different nationalities do not necessarily hold similar views or think in the same way — just as they do not worship the same God or conform to the same laws. If the Khan Sahib felt it was all right for his people to tell lies, then it must be right — for them. But that didn't mean it was all right for me, for I was an
Angrezi
(English) and
Angrezis
obviously thought differently. And why not? After all, my father only had one wife, but I knew that rich old Mahommed Bux had three, because Jinni, one of his daughters, who was a particular friend of mine, had told me that her mother was only the second wife and therefore of less consequence than the senior one; and also that both Number 1 and Number 2 would gang up on the junior one who, being the old man's favourite, had it in her power to put both their noses out of joint — which, according to Jinni, she did on every possible occasion.

I also knew that the luxurious Simla-style chalets that stood in the grounds of a palatial house owned, and occasionally occupied during the season, by a certain Croesus-rich ruler of one of India's many semi-independent states, were
bibi-gurhs
, women's quarters, that housed three Maharanis — His Highness's mother the Dowager Maharani, and his senior and junior wives — together with at least two other lovely ladies of no specified rank, plus the usual quota of female relations, royal children and a swarm of waiting-women. Of these only the children and one of the lovely ladies (who happened to be Polish),
and the humbler waiting-women, were not in
purdah
. The Maharanis could only attend
purdah
-patties, but their children were invited to all the birthday and fancy-dress parties that Bill and I, and later Bets and I, attended, and ayah would often take us to play in their beautifully kept garden.

I learned a good deal about palace life and palace intrigues from these visits, but I didn't enjoy them much because Teeta-ayah's respect for royalty made her insist on dressing me in my best on those occasions, even when it was only an informal morning visit. I was made to put on, over my vest, a white underbodice (to which a pair of white frilly knickers were attached by buttons), a tucked, starched and lace-edged petticoat, and finally a white, full-skirted, puff-sleeved dress of
broderie anglaise
which scratched abominably and was tied at the waist with a blue sash. Black patent-leather strap shoes over white socks completed this outfit, which was topped by a white topi — a pith hat rather like a mushroom — disguised by a frilled
broderie anglaise
cover. This ensemble was not only uncomfortable but very difficult to play games in, and I recall one full-scale row when I persuaded a young royal to let me borrow one of her outfits instead. This consisted of a loose silk shirt over a narrow pair of
churri-dhan
(cotton trousers), which was infinitely preferable to all the starched clobber into which I had been stuffed and buttoned. But the loan was not popular with either attendant; my ayah or hers. Hers, I learned later, had subsequently burned the garments on the grounds that her young mistress could not possibly be expected to wear them again: thereby humiliating mine, who scolded me for allowing her ‘face to be blackened' in this manner. I do not, however, believe for a moment that my playmate's ayah really did destroy the polluted garments; I bet she sold them. Because young children do not have any caste. Caste is something that they acquire later on — as do we all in our own fashion; together with prejudice and intolerance … ‘
Isn't it sad that our children must grow into people?
'