The Sun in the Morning (32 page)

Kalka was still little more than a village with a railway station on one edge of it, and the unmetalled road rose in a gentle slope as it led back through a small bazaar and open sandy country towards the hills that lay like wrinkled folds of grey velvet in the moonlight. Once clear of the houses, there seemed to be no one abroad but ourselves that night. The road was empty for as far as we could see, and beside it, on the left, stood a solitary frangipani tree whose shadow, like our own, lay black on the white dust. The tree was in full bloom and its
pale, waxy blossoms filled the warm night air with their heady fragrance and seemed to gather and reflect the moonlight; almost as though every petal had been carved out of white jade or polished ivory. It was one of the loveliest sights I have ever seen; more beautiful by far than the pale-blue star-frosted globe at the Central Hotel, because it was real; alive and growing and smelling of Heaven.

We stood and stared at it, dumb with admiration; and neither of us has ever forgotten it. To me it became a symbol of the plains, and thereafter any frangipani tree in bloom was special; and still is. I have put that tree into at least two of my books, and it may well have been part of the reason why I, born among the most beautiful mountains in the world, lost the larger portion of my heart to the flat and limitless plains on the very first of our annual moves from Simla to Delhi.

To Bets and myself those journeys were to become one of the high-spots of our lives and the most exciting event of the year. As the little train chugged and puffed down the winding gradients of the narrow-gauge railway we would hang out of the windows to take a last look at Simla basking all greeny-gold in the afternoon sunlight. Once past Tara Devi and between the gap in the hills, Simla was lost to sight until the next spring, and the next treat was the long Jatogh Tunnel which always enthralled us. Out into the daylight again the track wound back on itself, behind Prospect Hill and then down and down in the waning sunlight until the pine trees and deodars grew fewer and one saw the first sign of the plains in the great clusters of candelabrum cactus on the bare hillsides. One especially popular spot was where the track made a complete loop and we could look out of our carriage window and see both ends of our train at the same time. And as dusk fell the air became warmer and warmer and no longer smelled of pine needles but of the plains — that indefinable, heady mixture of sun-baked earth, dust and spices, kikar flowers and cow-dung fires.

On one occasion we made the journey by car. At that date, and well into the Thirties, cars were almost unknown in Simla, and none was allowed further than the road below the Cecil Hotel where there was a row of lock-up garages for the very few who bothered to bring them that far. This particular car, known as the Yellow Peril, was the property of a certain Ronald Graham-Murray, a family friend and Bets's godfather, who had volunteered to drive all four of us down to
Delhi. We were enthralled by the novelty of the journey, but it proved to be a disaster, for I became embarrassingly car-sick and our host, who was driving, had to keep on stopping in order to let me out so that I could be sick over the edge of the road instead of all over his car. Everyone was relieved when the turns and twists and hairpin bends of the hill road were behind us; and deeply grateful, next year, to be going down by train.

The Delhi of my childhood,
my
Delhi, was not the great sprawling city so well known to hosts of tourists who call it New Delhi; for New Delhi had not been built then, and the site that it now occupies was a stony, treeless plain on which the foundations of the new capital were nowhere more than a foot or two high. My Delhi was the old walled city of the Moguls and the British-built Cantonment area that lay beyond it in the shadow of the Ridge — that long spine of rock which juts up from the surrounding plains like the back of a basking whale from a barely ruffled sea. The Ridge is steeped in history, and from its crest you could look down on Shah Jehan's walled city with its battered outer gateways, close-packed houses, bazaars, palaces and great Red Fort. On the marble domes and minarets of the largest of the mosques, the Jumna Masjid that faces the Lahore Gate of the fort across the grassy
maidan
,
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and on the winding curves and wide white sandbanks of the Jumna River which in those days skirted the outer walls of the Palace.

Standing on the top of one of our favourite vantage-points, the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, and gazing out across the city and the miles of open country that surrounded it, we were looking back over thousands of years of history. For as far as the eye could reach the plain was strewn with the ruins of the Seven Cities of Delhi which, in the course of the long, turbulent centuries, had sprung up successively on these particular miles of India's soil: only to fall victims to war or famine or the ruthless feet of Time. Of these, ‘Old Delhi', whose walls were already crumbling, was the seventh. But only a few miles away the foundations of yet another of them, a ‘New' Delhi, were being laid above their bones on the stony, sandy, treeless land to the south-east of Shah Jehan's city. And from the Flagstaff Tower, even more than
from the hillsides of Mashobra, I had the illusion that on a clear day I could see for ever.

I loved the smell of the plains and the sounds of the plains. The cawing of the grey-headed Delhi crows and the harsh, haunting cry of the peacocks at dawn and at dusk; the screeching of the parrots in flight and their low-toned chatter as they discussed life with each other when they roosted; the soft, interminable cooing of the little grey doves and the shrill chatter of the
galaries
— those small stripe-backed Indian chipmunks that skitter around on walls and creepers and tree-trunks, and are so impudent that if you stay quite still they will come and sit on your knee and eat out of your hand. In the plains when darkness fell you would hear the howl of the jackal packs hunting on the banks of the Jumna, and on white nights the barking of innumerable masterless pi-dogs baying at the moon.

I had grown up with the trees of Simla; pine trees, firs, deodars and the beautiful, blazing rhododendrons. But much as I loved them, I loved the palms and the pampas grass, the kikar trees and bamboos and bougainvillaea more; they were less awe-inspiring. Also — though I know that this cannot be true — I had (and still have) the pleasing illusion that I knew everyone who lived inside the wonderful walled city of Delhi. Now that I come to think about it, I'm not so sure, after all, that that could not have been possible, for according to a census taken no more than seven years before I was born, the entire population of
my
Delhi numbered only two hundred and eight thousand souls: one hundred and fourteen thousand Hindus, eighty-eight thousand Muslims, two thousand Christians and a modest four thousand who were dismissed briefly as ‘others'. (What others, I wonder? Buddhists certainly; Confucians too; atheists perhaps? and I suppose those who followed various fancy religions — Madame Blavatski's, for instance. It would be interesting to know.)

But only two hundred and eight thousand people living in Old Delhi! It does not seem believable; I wonder how many millions today live in the sprawling metropolis that is the two Delhis, the Old and the New, now joined together by crowded, ever-growing suburbs? Considering those numbers, I realize how comparatively small the city must have been when I was young. So small that it is even possible that I could have had a nodding acquaintance with a quarter of the citizens who lived between the Kashmir and the Cawnpore Gates;
beyond which, in the days of my childhood, stretched open country all the way out to the Purana Kila (the Old Fort), and on past Humayun's tomb to Okhla, where the Jumna Canal branches off from the main river. Further to the westward lay the beautiful ruins of Haus Khas, which was a famous seat of learning long before Oxford or Cambridge were even thought of; and further still that enormous, lonely minaret, the Khutab Minar, and the curiously Egyptian-style tomb of the Emperor Tuglak — the ruins of whose city, Tuglakabad, look down on his tomb which stands islanded at the end of a long stone causeway in what was once a vast tank that must have provided the water for the city whose crumbling walls gaze blindly across it.

The Old Delhi that I loved so much was fated to become a backwater when New Delhi was finally built. For the senior members of the Government of India and Army Headquarters, together with their staffs, their wives, their families and their servants, moved there; exchanging their old-style bungalows in the green suburbs of Old Delhi for the modern concrete houses nicknamed ‘Baker's Ovens' after the architect
^*
who designed them for New Delhi; and as a result of that exodus the focus of official and social life shifted to the new centre of power. Yet when, sixteen years after India became independent, Bets and I went back there again, it was still the familiar place we had known first as children and later as young women, though it had become much quieter and now wore, like a fragile and faintly dusty lace shawl, an air of shabbiness and neglect where once it had been so full of gaiety and life.

Perhaps, having made that sentimental pilgrimage and found all our old familiar places so little changed, we should have left well alone — kissed them goodbye for the last time and never gone back again. And but for the success of
The Far Pavilions
, we would probably have done just that, because we would never have been able to afford to return again. But once the financial side of things became easier, how could we possibly resist? Delhi drew us back again like a magnet with a pair of pins — only to find that most of the things we had loved best had been swept away or crushed under the trampling hooves of that sacred cow, Progress.

The Delhi that still keeps a firm hold on my heart is no more than
a memory, though even now, returning to it, there have been moments when for a brief space at dusk I have heard a peacock calling from among the shadowy thickets of the Ridge, and found myself back in imagination in the dear city of my childhood and my gay, careless, dancing teens and twenties.

Accommodation in Old Delhi was always in short supply, and a great many people, Buckie and Annie B among them, lived under canvas in the luxurious tented camp originally set up for the use of the VIPs who had come out to attend the great Durbar of 1911. But since there were neither tents nor bungalows available for us, we were allotted two adjoining suites, Numbers 38 and 39, in Curzon House; a large, two-storeyed building that had been put up for the same purpose as the camp, though for an even earlier Durbar — the one held in 1903 to celebrate the Coronation of Edward VII. Later on it had been turned into a cold-weather hostel for Army officers and Civil Service officials and their families; and later still, in the post-war Twenties when New Delhi was springing up out of the empty plain to the south-east of Old Delhi, it became The Swiss Hotel.

The quarters at Curzon House were all alike, each one consisting of a large living-room separated by a tall, curtained archway from an equally large bedroom with a bathroom leading out of it. The only light in the bedrooms came from windows set high up near the ceiling and looking out onto the flat rooftop. These could only be opened and shut by means of long cords that were attached to hooks much lower down the wall. The bathrooms were of the old-fashioned tin-tub and thunder-box variety — India not having got into modern plumbing at that date — and their windows and back doors opened onto long, narrow verandahs; the upper-storey ones being reached by a stout wooden staircase for the use of the
pani-wallahs
who carried up the tins of hot water, and the sweepers who cleaned the thunder-boxes. There were connecting doors between every quarter and the next so that they could, if necessary, be made into larger units, such as ours, which consisted of two quarters. Bachelors and childless couples occupied single ones. The front doors of all these quarters led directly into the living-rooms from long, wide, communal verandahs, paved with squares of red sandstone and carpeted with a long strip of coir matting, and the white, double-storeyed building with its arched
frontage and two parallel wings formed a big rectangular U.

There was a formal garden in front and a wilderness of flowers and trees behind, and beyond the left-hand boundary wall stretched the spacious lawns, gardens and tennis courts of a large, single-storey, castellated house, grandly entitled Ludlow Castle. In the days of the East India Company Ludlow Castle had been the residence of the Commissioner of Delhi, but in my young days had become the Delhi Club; later on to be re-titled the Old Delhi Club. Later still, after Independence, it became a college.

Beyond the boundary wall on the right-hand side of Curzon House lay the cemetery in which John Nicholson, ‘the Hero of Delhi', who died leading his men into action during the battle for the city in the Mutiny summer of 1857, is buried, together with many of the Mutiny dead. The stone-built wall was not too high for an active child of six or seven to scramble over, and though I don't think our parents ever knew it, the cemetery soon became one of our favourite playgrounds. It was a very peaceful spot: hot and quiet and drowsy, chequered with tree-shadows and freckled and barred with brilliant sunlight. And since Punj-ayah's sari was not adapted to climbing over walls, she couldn't follow us there, but would hunker down in a patch of shade to wait for us on the Curzon House side until such time as we returned; confident that no harm would come to us from her people or ours — either living or dead.

Punj-ayah could never understand our fondness for the cemetery, which she herself regarded as a ‘place of the dead' and therefore an ill-omened spot. But it never occurred to either of us to think of those who lay buried there as ‘dead'. John Nicholson —
Nikal-Seyn
— and all the men who had died in the battle for Delhi and whose names were carved on the worn, lichen-blotched slabs and headstones, together with the many British men, women and children who had joined them here in the long years since then, were only asleep; drowsing peacefully in the warm silence under the grass and flowers and the lilting butterflies, lulled by the soporific cooing of the little grey ring-doves, and dreaming of home.