The Sun in the Morning (23 page)

I used to begin counting as soon as the lightning flashed, because Bulaki, the old hillman who looked after the livestock and did odd jobs such as mending roofs and fences, had told me that the number of seconds between the flash and the thunder would tell me how many miles away the centre of the storm was, and that when the thunder followed immediately on the flash, the storm was overhead. Once I saw a bolt of lightning strike a tall pine tree and split it in two as neatly as a knife divides an apple; and watched the resulting blaze doused by pouring rain inside ten seconds. Yet although our house stood high on the crest of a ridge, I was never afraid that it would be hit, for it was protected — as were all Simla's houses — by a lightning conductor in which I had such complete faith that I was able to watch these spectacular extravaganzas with awe-struck admiration. The noise was almost as exciting as the lightning. The sound of thunder among mountains is quite different from what it is in the plains, for it echoes round the great peaks and ricochets off a hundred rocky hillsides that act as sounding-boards: ‘
It is Thor that is striking with his hammer! It is Odin where the sparks fly free
'…

A thunderstorm in the plains may be just as noisy, but it does not have the hollow, ringing clang, like a series of gigantic wooden planks being slammed down onto the stone floor of some enormous subterranean cave. And when at last the clouds burst, the rain roars down like Niagara in flood-time in a solid wall of water that is quite strong enough to beat a seven-year-old child to its knees. I would always gladly have exchanged the still nights for the wild ones, for I could sleep through the uproar, feeling extra safe and protected in my own warm bed just because there was so much noise and fury raging outside. But on quiet nights, particularly when the moon was full and there was no breath of wind to set the forest whispering, the silence was something that could be felt. A tangible thing that listened — holding its breath the while.

In these days there cannot be many places in the world where one can lie and listen to the silence and feel it press down on you with the weight of water. Nowadays there is always something making a noise somewhere: a lawn-mower, an electric clock, the hum of a generator,
or a car revving up; the maddening, mindless yowling of a transistor radio playing pop, the distant throb of some jumbo-jet striving to equal Puck's record and put a girdle round the world in forty minutes, or the banshee scream of a fighter plane from an RAF training base hurtling overhead. But in those far-off times no mechanical sound disturbed the peace of our hills, and listening to the silence one became acutely aware of the thousands of miles of untouched, unknown country behind and beyond the walls of that little house by the narrow mule-track that wound away through the ranges to Tibet and the high plateaux of Central Asia.

If anything stirred in that white, silent world it was possible to hear it. Every flitter of a bat's wing or hum of a mosquito was loud in the stillness, and the night noises that every house makes after dark became sharply audible. The hoot of an owl or the alarm call of a deer from the world outside could make our nerves leap, and it was on these nights that Bets and I would go to sleep holding hands under the eiderdown across the padded top of the toy-chest.

Tacklow gave up his horse, but although we kept the rickshaw and the four
jhampanis
who pulled it, he seldom made use of it; preferring to walk to Simla and back, a total of ten miles every weekday. Only very occasionally — and then only if he was exceptionally tired or the weather was particularly atrocious — would he ring up and ask for it to be sent to his office in Army Headquarters to fetch him home; and even then he would never let himself be pulled up the steep ascent from Mahasu to the front door of Oaklands, for riding in rickshaws pulled by his fellow men was something that always worried him.

It worried me too, and I remember discussing the whole problem at length with our
jhampanis
in the course of a ride into Simla to attend a dancing-class; and being interested to discover that they held very different views. To them it was both a living and a way of life, and they considered it a good one. What, they demanded, would happen to them if everyone suddenly acquired these foolish views about it being beneath the dignity of one man to pull the rickshaw of another one?
Bah!
work was work, and they, personally, considered themselves fortunate to have achieved the status of the privately employed, which entitled them to wear a smart and distinctive uniform supplied by their employer, plus the right to be referred to as
jhampanis
instead of ‘rickshaw-coolies', as was the case with the casually employed.

The gods, being sensible, said Durroo, the head
jhampani
, saw to it that there was work for all kinds and conditions of men; not merely for
bunnias
^*
and those who had brains and book-learning. The rich
and educated needed people to look after them so that they, in their turn, could look after their own high affairs; which was the making of money — and the spending of it, which created work for others. The rich, according to Durroo, were put into this world for the benefit of the poor and uneducated, without whose labour they would be unable to live or, more important, make the money that paid for that labour.

It was a novel point of view, but an interesting one. And only recently, watching my
Far Pavilions
being filmed in Rajasthan, and taking in the sheer numbers of the multiracial army of fellow humans: actors, extras, stunt-men, directors, producers, cameramen, technicians, costume and set designers, electricians, make-up experts, car-drivers, coolies,
darzis
, jewellers,
mahouts
— the list is staggering even if one does not include the families of all the people who were earning their living by working on that particular film, or the hordes of hotel servants who cooked and fed and looked after the vast number of people who had been flown out by the film company and put up in one or other of the local hotels —- I began to realize that Durroo and his
fellow jhampanis
had had a point.

Just because I had kept my nose to the grindstone and worked myself into the ground to write
The Far Pavilions
, I, personally, was for a brief space of time responsible for the employment of all these people: many of whom were making far more money out of that book than I myself had done! Granted, if they had not been working on my story they would have been working on someone else's. But the fact remained that they were all, at that particular time, employed and making a living out of and because of
me
and the work that I had done. It was a slightly awe-inspiring reflection, and I thought of that long-ago rickshaw ride into Simla. ‘Full employment', in fact: a slogan that had not been invented then, and would have been regarded as an impossible slice of pie-in-the-sky to two thirds of the citizens of what is now known, with lofty condescension, as ‘the Third World'! (
What
‘Third World'? Or, come to that, where's the second one?).

One of the great advantages of being born and brought up in India by liberal-minded parents (or, to be strictly accurate, one liberal-minded one and one fun-loving, bird-brained one who flitted through life with the airy inconsequence of a butterfly on a sunny morning) was that Bets and I were on excellent terms with the local citizens and,
being able to chatter to them in the vernacular, acquired a lot of interesting information as to their likes and dislikes, their home life, beliefs, philosophy, superstitions and politics (if any). A great deal of this would, I suspect, have horrified our dear parents had they known about it; for like all Victorians, they valued innocence and would have wished to protect us from the harsher facts of life, in the belief that children would learn about such things soon enough and that a child should be allowed to enjoy childhood to the full.

Well, I'm all for that myself. But I do not remember that the things I learned about real life or real death upset me very much; largely, I suppose, because they were told so matter-of-factly by people I knew and liked, who accepted them philosophically and did not whinge or rail against fate, or take to drink, but just shrugged and got on with the business of living. I loved them because they never treated me as a baby or told me to run away and play, but were always willing to explain and discuss matters in which I was interested or had not properly understood. They were never brusque or impatient with me, as grown-ups of my own race often were, and they were never too busy to answer a question. Time seemed to move far more slowly in Asia, and Asians treat it with a lordly carelessness that takes no account of such abstract things as ‘the unforgiving minute' — they wouldn't know what you were talking about! It is an attitude that frequently maddens the West, but it does make life seem a lot longer; and a lot more peaceful than our own swift, frantic scamper from the cradle to the grave.

Perhaps this is why my childhood in India — and my girlhood too — seems to me, in retrospect, to have lasted twice as long as the whole of the rest of my life. And for this ‘I thank whatever Gods there be'.

Living at Mashobra did not make much difference to Mother's social life. She would take the rickshaw and go into Simla with Tacklow at least twice a week, and her friends were always coming out to visit us: sometimes only for the day, but often to stay for a night or two. Their children came with them, so Bets and I had a constant stream of young visitors, most of whom I could have done without: the shining exception being Guy's sister, my great friend Bargie Slater, who came whenever she could. It was always a delight
to see her and wonderful to have her stay with us, because with her arrival life — which out at Oaklands seemed to flow gently along like a placid, slow-moving river — suddenly woke up and turned into a sparkling torrent that resembled Tennyson's famous babbling brook.

There was never a dull moment when Bargie was around. I would take her to see all my favourite retreats and we would spend hours perched among the branches of one of the orchard trees or lying comfortably in a hot, grassy hollow a hundred yards or so below the mule-track, gazing out at the wooded slopes of the far mountains while we discussed life and our contemporaries, exchanged gossip about the grown-ups and speculated about the future and what we would become when we grew up. We would, of course, get married. That was taken for granted, for we both thought highly of Love and Romance and had every intention of Living-Happily-Ever-After. Yet our interests were by no means confined solely to gallant princes and handsome husbands, for before we got around to marriage we were going to write in partnership a book that would make us rich and famous.

This opus was to be about a haunted house, and the surprise twist at the end was that the twin spectres who haunted it were not the ghosts of people who had lived there, but of their emotions. The hate and selfishness that had motivated the behaviour of two sisters who had been born in the sixteenth century, lived through the reign of Charles II and died unmarried — still at odds with each other because one of the two was a sour and bigoted Puritan, a passionate supporter of Cromwell and his Roundheads, while the other was a frivolous partisan of Charles I and his Cavaliers. These two, having vented their ghostly fury on succeeding generations, were to be finally exposed as nothing more than a couple of nasty, quarrelsome egos, and exorcised — surprise! surprise! — by the true love of the latest occupant and his wife. (He turns out to be a distant cousin; the great-great — or great-great-great? — grandson of a nephew who inherited the house from his unpleasant aunts and came under the influence of the malevolent emanations they had left behind to haunt the place.)

We thought this idea was staggeringly original. And possibly it was, since even if Kipling had written ‘The House Surgeon' by then, we were too young to have read or understood that kind of story. I was
grown-up by the time I read it, and was fascinated to find that someone of such eminence had had the same idea! Needless to say we never got around to writing this masterpiece; though we got endless pleasure out of discussing it and inventing the various evils that befell the successive owners of the house. And even more out of deciding how we would spend the vast sums of money that would reward our labours! I remember that yachts and diamonds were mentioned. A whacking great diamond tiara for Mother, and a yacht for Tacklow. Tacklow who would, if he had had Aladdin's lamp, have wished for one to take him round the world, hugging the coasts and with no time limit, so that he could stop for as long as he liked — a month or a year or two years, perhaps even longer — in any port that pleased him; moving on at once from those that did not, putting in at the Andaman Islands (from where a long-time and like-minded friend of his who had served several terms as Chief Commissioner had written him lengthy letters extolling their idyllic beauty) and, finally, spending months at a stretch on the Great Barrier Reef. This last, for some unexplained reason, had taken a firm grip on his mind. He had promised himself that he would visit it before he died, and I suspected that if he ever did, his travels would end there; for in those days, and until fairly recently, I believe that anyone landing on one of the great reef's hundreds of tiny uninhabited islands could, if they chose, establish squatter's rights and claim it for their own. Provided, of course, that they lived on it. I didn't put it beyond Tacklow to have this in mind!