The Sun in the Morning (36 page)

Sometimes at weekends Sir Charles, Tacklow and Mother and a particular friend of theirs called ‘Bunting' (I have an idea that his real name was Hunting) would take Bets and me with them and drive out to Okhla for the weekend where we would sleep in the Canal Bungalow
or in tents. Sir Charles kept a little motor-boat at Okhla, in which the five grown-ups (the fifth being Sir Charles's head
shikari
, Kashmera, who always accompanied them when they went out shooting) would go upstream to hunt the
mugger
and
gharial
which, in those far-off days could be found in great numbers in the waters of the Jumna, both below and above the weir and the canal head.

Muggers
, the blunt-nosed, armour-plated crocodiles of the Indian rivers, are notorious man-eaters. They prefer flesh — preferably well rotted — to any other food; and in those days they were responsible for thousands of deaths every year among people who lived in towns and villages on the river banks and came down daily to bathe, fill their brass water-pots, wash clothes, water their cattle, or set fish traps while their children paddled and splashed in the shallows. It was easy for a hungry
mugger
to snatch a meal, for their diet also included unwary goats, sheep and cattle, as well as incautious wild animals coming down to drink at a spot where the water was deep enough to hide a lurking killer. And when, in times of plague or famine, the death toll rises so high that the survivors can no longer afford to cremate all their dead and consign them instead to the river, placing a token live coal in the mouth of the deceased, the
muggers
compete with the fish and the turtles and other wildlife along the river to dispose of the dead.

Their cousins, the fish-eating
gharials
who have long, slender snouts with a knob on the end, are by comparison gentle and harmless creatures. Yet they are regarded with dislike by the fisher-folk, who complain that they take an unfair share of the fish and cause considerable damage to nets and fish traps, while almost every village, and certainly every bridge and every ford, has — or used to have — a resident
mugger
who is known to have taken any number of lives, but is nevertheless regarded as semi-sacred; a sort of minor nature-demon who must be placated with garlands of marigolds and other offerings flung into the water, often by a local priest.

There were many
muggers
and
gharials
near Okhla, and wandering along the margins of the river in the evening we would come across the unmistakable marks that they had left in the wet sand: the long smear and deep curved groove where the end of an armour-plated tail had slid into the water, flanked by clawed footprints to left and right. Sometimes we would take careful note of these marks and lie up next
day on the river bank among the clumps of pampas grass and casuarina scrub within sight of them, to wait for hours until the ugly water-dragon decided to crawl out again. It was always a deeply exciting moment when it did, and worth every minute of the long waiting —

First the glassy surface of the river would be broken by a barely visible ripple, which would presently resolve itself into two small bumps that could have been bubbles or fragments of debris floating down on the current; except that they remained stationary. They were the
mugger
's eyes, scanning every inch of the shore to check that the coast was clear. Provided we made no movement, those two specks would presently be joined by two more; the creature's nostrils. Then very slowly all four would begin to draw in to the shore until at last the
mugger
grounded in the shallows, at exactly the angle that a log or a piece of driftwood would do, and waddling forward on his four stumpy feet, dragging that wicked-looking tail behind him, would settle down on the warm sand to take a nap in the sun. He is dark when he comes ashore: the dark grey of wet slate. But as the hot sun dries him the river mud on his horny scales turns pale, until he becomes almost invisible against the silver sandbank on which he lies, and if you did not know about
muggers
and were drifting down an Indian river in a barge or a sailing-boat for the first time, you would never notice him. Or if you did, you would take him for a stranded log that had been in the river for a very long time.

Nowadays both
muggers
and
gharials
have become so scarce that I am told that they will soon be an Endangered Species and are already protected in certain parts of India where rivers run through game reserves. Which is fine as far as
gharials
are concerned. But I have to confess that I have never felt anything but loathing for
muggers
ever since a day when I watched Kashmera and some local assistants slit open the stomach of a newly-skinned one and discover inside it, together with a gruesome collection of bones and bits, five unbroken glass bangles, so small that their previous owner could only have been a child and young enough for her murderer to have gulped down her entire arm without breaking the bangles.

Bets and I saw a good many
muggers
shot, and I remember one of them in particular: a small
mugger
not much larger than myself, that Tacklow shot on a sandbank upstream from Okhla. Mother wanted to take a photograph of us with it and made us sit down behind it;
but just as she clicked the shutter it suddenly came to life and whipping round with a sound that I can only describe as somewhere between a bark and a growl, snapped at Bets and only just missed taking a nice bit out of her arm. The creatures are not at all easy to kill, and at least seven
muggers
out of ten will flip back into the water with one convulsive and purely reflex-action sweep of their powerful tails the instant they are hit. And what's more, they survive. Their armour-plated suits are almost bullet-proof, and the
shikaris
say that there are only two places where a shot from a rifle can kill them: in the neck, or through the spine where it goes through the thickest part of the tail. The one that nearly took a bite out of Bets had merely been stunned, and as Bets fell backwards with a yell of alarm, head over heels, Kashmera leapt forward and dispatched it with a spear-thrust through its head.

After that we were very careful to make quite sure that a
mugger
was really dead before we got too close to it. I still have a handbag, an attaché case and a make-up box made from the skins of young
muggers
that I saw shot at Okhla, and Mother has a dressing-case and a trunk made out of large ones; all of them made up by the tanneries at Cawnpore. They still look nice, but are far too heavy to be of much use — especially the trunk, which weighs a ton even when empty and now sits in the attic taking up valuable space. I suppose one day we shall have to cease feeling nostalgic about them and throw them away, for they are of no further use and not even a museum would want them. Not that they were ever of much use, for the skin of the Indian crocodile is too thick and too heavily plated to make up well. It's the African and American alligators who make up nicely into shoes and bags and other expensive accessories.

Anglo-India's favourite way of taking a holiday, particularly the Christmas holiday, was to spend it out in camp and shooting for the pot. Luckily for us we were often allowed to accompany our parents and their friends to these camps, where we could choose between following the guns or being left to our own devices. We usually elected to go with the guns, riding either in the back of a bullock-drawn country cart or in a lorry which must have been the first of its kind in the Punjab, with Kashmera and the other
shikaris
who would tell us tales of tiger and duck and partridge shoots that had taken place long before we were born.

Kashmera's favourite tale, and one that we heard often, concerned Sir Charles (whose
shikari
he had been for many years) and a leopard which had broken cover during a partridge shoot. One of the three or four guns who had been walking up partridge of an evening across a stony plain dotted with patches of high grass had, in the excitement of the moment, lost his head and blazed off at the leopard with both barrels of his shotgun at a range of only a few yards, causing the wounded animal to go to ground in one of the dense patches of grass and kikar trees.

Since there happened to be a village close by, the thought of leaving a wounded leopard holed up near it, and likely to attack anyone who passed, was not one that Sir Charles was prepared to contemplate; for leopards are notoriously bad-tempered at the best of times and a wounded one is as dangerous and unpredictable as a stick of dynamite in the hands of a two-year-old. Fortunately Kashmera had been carrying Sir Charles's rifle in addition to his own iron-tipped
lathi
, and the
two of them cautiously entered the patch of head-high grass; Kashmera, an expert tracker, leading and Sir Charles, rifle at the ready, guarding his back —

They followed the splashes of blood with infinite caution, and with frequent pauses to listen, for while they moved their ears were filled with the noise of their own progress through the dry, rustling grass. But soon it became difficult to see because night falls swiftly in the East; the sun had almost vanished below the horizon, and in the fast-fading light it was not easy to make out the blood spots. A warning growl from a little distance away made Sir Charles bring his rifle up to his shoulder and both men stood rigid; but it was not repeated, and presently they began to move forward again; one slow step at a time, and very cautiously, towards the place from where the growl had seemed to come — ahead and to their right. But just then, said Kashmera, the last rim of the sun dropped below the world's edge, and the breeze that comes with twilight awoke and blew across the plains. And after that they could hear nothing more because of the ‘voices of the grass' all about them —

At this point they would have left that dangerous place and returned to it at first light next morning. But even as they began to retreat, walking backwards with rifle and
lathi
at the ready, the leopard charged and sprang — Not from the direction that the growl had come from, but from behind: for with the cunning of its kind it had taken advantage of the breeze, and under cover of the rustling grass had made a swift, stealthy circuit and attacked from an unexpected direction.

It buried its teeth and the claws of both forepaws in Sir Charles's arm and, clinging there, attempted to rip open his stomach with its hind claws: a feat that it would certainly have accomplished had its victim been a smaller and less powerfully-built man — or a less resolute one! But Sir Charles Cleveland, as has already been pointed out, was a huge man, and most of that hugeness was solid muscle. He kept his feet. And his wits too, for he realized that he must not allow those ripping hind claws to dig into his side and his stomach, and that with about eighty pounds of raging, snarling fury suspended from one arm it would be impossible to bring the heavy rifle to bear on it one-handed. So he dropped the rifle and concentrated grimly on swinging his arm from side to side in order to keep those lethal hind claws clear of his body. Imagine the strength it must have taken to do that! He
did not wholly succeed, for the hind claws ripped through his clothes and drew blood, but did not go too deep.

Kashmera always swore that his Sahib kept the leopard swinging for a full five minutes, during which time he himself tried first to attack it with his
lathi
and the skinning-knife he always carried, and then — diving in under that frenzied pendulum to snatch up the rifle — to put a bullet through it. But the light was fading fast and he was terrified of killing the Sahib instead of the leopard who was being jerked to and fro without ceasing. In the end he took a chance, and pushing the muzzle against its body as it swung past, pulled the trigger; and by good fortune the bullet smashed its spine and killed it. But that was not the end of the story…

There followed a nightmare fight to save Sir Charles's life. He had been appallingly mauled and blood was pouring from his wounds. The nearest hospital (which was in fact only a small dispensary run by an elderly Indian pharmacist) was miles away, and the only transport available was a bullock cart. The other members of the shooting-party — who had been given strict orders to stay outside the limits of the grass, but on hearing the uproar had rushed in to help and, like Kashmera, been unable to fire a shot for fear of killing their friend — put a tourniquet on the arm, and having filled the wounds with permanganate crystals (the only disinfectant which everyone in those days carried when out shooting or in camp), made a rough-and-ready hammock out of their coats and carried the wounded man to the village where the cart waited to take them back to their camp.

Here, at the
Talukaar
's
^*
suggestion, he was transferred to a palanquin with a team of strong villagers to carry it; that being a quicker and more comfortable method of travelling than by bullock cart. But even so, and in spite of changing bearers every twenty minutes, the miles crawled past and it seemed, said Kashmera, impossible that the Sahib could live to reach a doctor. It was almost midnight before they arrived, and the elderly pharmacist, after one horrified look at his injuries, declared that he could do nothing for him apart from washing his wounds and applying clean bandages, and that this was a hospital case. A tonga was procured and Sir Charles taken a further few miles
along a rough country-made road to the first town where there was a small hospital and an operating theatre. But it was morning by the time they got there, and the doctor declared that his wound had turned septic and that the only hope of saving his life was to amputate his arm before the poison spread too far and killed him. It would have to be done at once.