The Sun in the Morning (33 page)

There was nothing to be frightened of in this pleasant backwater; and if there were any restless ghosts, they did not walk along the gravel paths that wandered here and there between the worn gravestones, or on the grass that the
malis
kept trimmed but not close-shaved and
formal like the lawns of Curzon House and the Club. The grass here was allowed to look like grass, and there was bougainvillaea everywhere and great bushes of roses and jasmine that had run wild and smelled heavenly. The air was always full of scent and birdsong and butterflies — more butterflies than I remember seeing anywhere else — and the whole sun-soaked and tree-shadowed place was strongly suggestive of Frances Hodgson Burnett's
Secret Garden
because, apart from the occasional elderly
mali
pottering around with a rake or a small hand-sickle, no one but ourselves ever seemed to visit it.

Close to the cemetery were the Nicholson Gardens: a public park full of trees and lawns and neat flowerbeds, where there was an ornamental fountain that was supposed to have come from Chats-worth — or was it Blenheim? — and two stately avenues of bottle palms at the junction of which, perched on a high plinth, stood a statue of John Nicholson, sword in hand, facing the battered walls of Delhi and the shell-pocked Kashmir Gate near the spot where he had fallen. Punj-ayah approved of the Nicholson Gardens. It was a nice tidy place in which the
chota-missahibs
were unlikely to get up to any mischief or dirty their hands, shoes or clothes. Besides, there were always plenty of other ayahs as well as European nannies and their charges in the gardens, and she enjoyed a good gossip with her fellow countrywomen.

The Moguls, a nomadic people from the harsh treeless uplands of Central Asia, had a passion for gardens, trees and running water, and there are many of their
baghs
^*
in and around Delhi: among them the Roshanara Bagh which boasts a lake with a tiny island in the middle of it, thickly overgrown with date palms which provide a roosting-place for scores of white ibis. There is also a white marble pavilion, in which Roshanara Begum, the Princess who built it and made the garden, and who died in 1663, lies buried. Her father was the Emperor Shah Jehan who built the Taj Mahal at Agra, and legend has it that she was a marvellous dancer. But our favourite garden by far was the Kudsia Bagh which lay opposite Curzon House; so close that we had only to cross the road to reach its main entrance.

This garden had none of the primness and public-park tidiness of the Nicholson one — except in the ‘public facilities' areas devoted to
tennis and cricket, and a certain treeless space where the grass was worn thin by the feet of Delhi's children who played games, ran races and flew kites there while their elders exchanged gossip or strolled to and fro ‘eating the air' of an evening. Apart from that, the rest of the
bagh
was a glorious, planless jumble of creeper-clad ruins, flowering trees and shrubs, bamboo thickets, date palms, eucalyptus, peepul and kikar trees. There were roses everywhere: the old-fashioned cabbage ones as well as the far older Persian variety that Omar Khayyam sings of and from which attar-of-roses is made and all our modern roses are descended. Jasmine too; and canna lilies; poinsettias and orange trumpet-flower creeper; and the white, piercingly sweet-scented
rhatki-rani
that flowers only after sundown and whose name means ‘Queen of the night'. The entire garden had once been enclosed by a high wall inside which Kudsia Begum, wife of the Emperor Muhammed Shah and mother of his son and successor, Ahmad Shah (whose disastrous reign finally brought about the decay of the Mogul Empire), built herself a palace and a mosque on the banks of the Jumna River.

When I was a child in Old Delhi all that remained of these buildings was a battered but still beautiful gateway, and the shell of an enchanting triple-domed mosque facing the river across a stretch of open ground — part of which must have been the courtyard, for it contained a sunken stone-lined tank in which the Faithful would have bathed before saying their prayers. I have heard that the ground beyond this used to be covered by a stone-paved terrace from which a broad flight of stairs descended to the water's edge; and even in my day the Jumna ran almost directly below the bank. However, no trace of the terrace remained, and the Jumna, which like all India's rivers is perpetually changing course, has moved well away from it since then.

A small shallow stream, barely more than a drain, in which we could catch tiddlers but were forbidden to paddle (since who knew, said Punj-ayah darkly, whence it came or what drained into it?) crossed the gardens to join the river; running
en route
under a little wooden bridge shaded by kikar trees whose scented, mimosa-like blossoms seemed always to be in bloom and provided an endless supply of miniature powder-puffs with which we would powder our noses yellow.

The gateway that had once been the main entrance to Begum Kudsia's palace was a massive affair: a vast, tunnel-like archway capable of allowing entrance to a howdahed elephant. There were guard-rooms
built into it on either side, two of which had been allotted to the
chowkidar
of the gate; one for his own use (the only one which still possessed its original iron-studded door that could be barred and padlocked) and the other as a storage place for ‘second-day flowers' which, as a sideline, he collected each day from Maiden's Hotel and the Tennis Club, exchanging them for fresh ones. Many of these slightly-used flowers, though not at their best, were far from faded, and he would let us select and take away any we liked. The rest, I suspect, were bunched and resold in the bazaar or to the owners of nearby bungalows. The archway in consequence always smelt deliciously of flowers, and for years afterwards the scent of fading roses, sweetpeas and carnations was an instant short-cut to the ruined gateway in the Kudsia Bagh.

The
chowkidar
became a great friend of ours, and it was he who told us that in the days when the gateway was the entrance to a Queen's palace, there used to be staircases in the thickness of the wall leading out of it and up to the roof and the battlements which surrounded a long-vanished inner courtyard. The stairs on the right had fallen long ago, but though the outer wall of those on the left had also fallen, the steps remained; hidden from view by the tall thicket of bamboos growing against that side of the gateway. He himself had never used them, and it obviously did not occur to him that once we knew of their existence we would not be able to resist climbing them. If it had, I am sure he would never have told us, for the staircase, when he showed it to us, was not only very steep and narrow, but lacking several of its treads, while those that remained were deep in debris and in a shocking state of disrepair.

Bets and I were both afraid of snakes and scorpions, and frankly terrified of spiders. But we could no more resist climbing that staircase than Bluebeard's wives had been able to resist entering the forbidden room. We could at least be certain of one thing — that there was no danger of falling off the stair, because the bamboos pressed so closely against its wall-less outer side that nothing larger than a mongoose could possibly have fallen between those ranks of stout stems.

Punj-ayah (no hawk-eyed duenna!) had fortunately met a friend with whom she was chatting happily in the shade of one of the fiscus trees, well out of earshot, when, to the accompaniment of agitated warnings from the
chowkidar
, we pushed back the curtain of weeds and creepers
that concealed the base of the stairway and the wall to which it clung, and wriggling through, climbed cautiously up through what looked like a green tunnel of bamboo leaves — testing each step before putting any weight on it — to emerge finally on the flat roof of the great gateway.

At first sight it looked a bit like an empty swimming-pool which the jungle had taken over, for the parapet surrounding it was much taller than we were and the bamboos to the left and right soared high above it, shutting off a good deal of the sky. The centre arch of the gateway was comparatively clear of creepers, but bougainvillaea, orange trumpet-flower and jasmine had climbed the walls and the decorative turrets on either side, to foam down over the castellated parapets in fountains and waterfalls of colour. The roof itself was hidden under a foot-deep carpet of leaf-mould, bird-droppings and assorted feathers — the discarded plumage of innumerable crows, blue jays, doves, pigeons, parakeets, peacocks and other birds which down the long years had perched on the parapets and roosted or built nests among the tangled mass of creeper — and though in and under all that debris there was bound to be a whole world of creeping and crawling creatures, and probably a few rats as well, I do not believe that the thought of them so much as crossed our minds. For we had stumbled on El Dorado!

Not Columbus himself, taking his first sight of America, nor ‘stout Cortez' staring out at the Pacific, could have felt more awed and excited than we did as we took in the fact that we had discovered a hidden, private world which nobody else knew about! Nobody but the
chowkidar
(who besides being a friend would not, for his own sake, betray us), and Punj-ayah, who would have to be let into the secret, but would keep quiet for the same reasons. It was a marvellous find and we wasted no time over taking possession. By the time Punj-ayah came in search of us we had cleared a portion of the roof and pushed all the rubbish off the stairway, and during the next few days, with the aid of a broom, a rake and a wicker basket used for carrying food and cut flowers, all kindly lent us by the
chowkidar
, we managed to get rid of all the litter from the roof.

After that the place became a permanent source of enjoyment and a safe retreat from the everyday world. It was ours. Our very own! On it we were hidden away where no one could find us, and we spent
hours up there, playing ‘house', reading, talking, discussing life and our elders, inventing stories, or being Mrs Jones and Mrs Snooks — a couple of harassed housewives and mothers whose children were a perpetual source of worry. I was Mrs Jones and Bets was Mrs Snooks, and our respective children were my Moko, a life-sized toy monkey which had originally belonged to my brother Bill and been annexed by me when he outgrew such toys, and Bets's large teddy-bear. Moko and Teddy accompanied us everywhere. And would still be doing so had they not been eaten by those tiny but voracious insect pests known as ‘woolly bears' that attacked them during six months in the late 1930s, when they were in storage with a good deal of our heavy luggage in a godown in Lucknow. When unpacked, so little remained that it was impossible to re-assemble them; and since their murderers had obviously been breeding like fun, there was nothing for it but to consign them with lamentations to the fire; which we did. Cremating them on a pyre in the back garden of my sister and brother-in-law's house in Lucknow, together with the ruined contents of the packing-case in which they had met their end — plus uncounted thousands of their pestilential destroyers and about a billion woolly-bear eggs. It was a sad moment, because I had looked forward to handing Moko on in turn to be loved, cared for and played with by a child of my own who, with luck, would hand it on to a grandchild.

I don't remember how we managed to beg, blarney or possibly blackmail Punj-ayah into letting us go on using the top of Kudsia Begum's gateway as a secret hideaway and playground. We probably used a mixture of all three. But whatever it was, it worked. She refused flatly to climb up after us (she was scared stiff of all forms of creepy-crawlies and not particularly partial to any form of animal life), but she never gave us away and we continued to use it for two glorious cold weathers. But alas, nothing lasts for ever.

In the third year, when we hurried off to visit all our old haunts, we discovered with horror that some interfering official had decided that the bamboos must be cut down and the gateway repaired. Not a single bamboo shoot remained, and without them Kudsia Begum's lovely gateway looked shamefully undressed; rather like some glamorous lady of the harem who has been forcibly removed from
purdah
and deprived of her gauzy veil. The steps were still there, but they had been repaired and given a high brick and plaster containing-wall
on the outer side and also, to make matters worse, two coats of whitewash. There was yet more repair work and whitewash on the top, and everything looked painfully clean and tidy and depressingly un-secret. We never played there again. But nor did we ever forget it, and many years later I used it in two of my India novels. It is the Mori Gate, the north gate of Bhithore, in
The Far Pavilions
, and the entrance to the Lunjore Residency in
Shadow of the Moon
, while its flat rooftop with the high parapet and tall screen of bamboos gave me the idea for the Hirren Minar in the latter novel — the ruin in the jungle which four survivors from the massacre at the Residency use as a hiding-place during the first months of the Mutiny.

But though the gateway was our favourite retreat, it was by no means the only thing that we loved about the Kudsia Bagh. Nor was the
chowkidar
our only friend, for we made many in the gardens. Among them were a number of children who lived in several tall, old and beautiful houses surrounded by lawns and flowerbeds and shaded by neem and banyan and jacaranda trees, beside a quiet, leafy side-road that ran between the Kudsia Bagh and the grounds of Maiden's Hotel. They were a delightful lot, and we fraternized with them by way of a gap in the hedge through which we had to crawl on hands and knees. The houses were owned by one family, the Dayals, and in later years Ashok Dayal, the son of one of those children, was to marry Indu, a daughter of one of my husband's greatest friends, Shiv Bhatia, and his darling wife Metta. Sadly, both Shiv and Metta are now dead; but Bets and I keep in touch with Indu and Ashok, and are certain to be seeing them and their children in the near future.