The Sun in the Morning (37 page)

Sir Charles had lost a great deal of blood, and besides being in considerable pain and only semi-conscious, was running a high fever. But the doctor's pronouncement jerked him back into full consciousness and he declared in the strongest possible terms that he would see the misbegotten son-of-a-sawbones in Jehannum before he allowed him or anyone else to chop off his arm! In the end, since he would not listen to reason, the doctor shrugged and gave in, and (thankfully, I imagine) stitched him up while arrangements were made to forward him to the nearest British-run hospital — probably the Hindu Rao in Delhi — and sent him off with the parting observation that by the time he reached it, if he were still alive there would be no point in operating, since it would be much too late to amputate; but if he wished to commit suicide, that was entirely his own affair.

Well, he got there alive. And the English medicos told him flatly what their Indian colleagues had already said: that his only hope had been in amputation, but that it was now too late for that and he had better resign himself to death. Sir Charles, however, was even tougher than he looked and he proved them all wrong. The poison and the fever raged in his blood, but as his friends and the hospital staff waited for the inevitable end, he fought back. And inch by inch it retreated; descending slowly through his body until at last it reached his right foot which, so he told me himself, turned dark purple, swelled up like a balloon and hurt like hell — ‘as though it were being stuffed through a red-hot mangle' was the way he described it; which gave me some interesting thoughts about Hell. Then quite suddenly it stopped hurting, returned to its proper size, and he was well again.

He had fought and defeated the poison in his blood as decisively as he had defeated the leopard; whose body, incidentally, had been recovered and skinned, and the head and fore-part stuffed and set up in a lifelike manner by the famous taxidermists, Van Ingams. The hind-quarters having been badly peppered by Number 4 shot and disfigured by a hole made by the heavy rifle bullet that had blasted
away part of the lower spine, it had only been possible to set up the front half of the creature, and this was done so that it looked just as though it were alive and springing out from the cover of that tall grass. The large glass case that contained it was the one set up in the hall of the house he lived in in Simla, and I always hated having to walk through that hall during the months of the monsoon when the days were dark with rain, for in the shadows the snarling creature looked horribly alive.

That story was only one of many
shikar
stories that Kashmera told us. But we never got tired of hearing it, even though we must have heard it any number of times —- and from a variety of different people, including Tacklow and Sir Charles himself who once showed us his scarred arm, as knotted and misshapen as the twisted bough of some ancient oak tree. We could see clearly where the leopard's clenched teeth had torn out a great mouthful of flesh and muscle when it fell back dead, and the deep pits its teeth and talons had driven into his arm. And once, bathing in the Jumna, we saw the long, silvery scars where the leopard's hind claws had raked his chest and belly as it strove to rip him up. All the various versions we heard of this story differed from each other in minor ways. But since the one we heard most often was Kashmera's, we came to know it so well that if he changed so much as a word we would correct him, and I have therefore given his version plus a footnote from Tacklow who told me, years later, that Sir Charles's version of the poison finally reaching his foot was correct, except for one thing: it did not happen in a matter of days or even months. It took years. The poison would seem to be defeated, only to break out again and affect some other part of his body. His left foot was the last part to be affected; and the last bit of that to be truly painful was his big toe! After exiting from that the poison never troubled him again.

Now why should I remember that it was his
left
foot — and his left big toe? — and not be able to remember which arm the leopard got its teeth into, when I actually
saw
the scars on that arm? It was only when I came to write this story down that I realized the years have taken that memory away from me, even though I can still see Kashmera acting out the whole story in dramatic detail to two small, pop-eyed girls in short khaki dresses and pint-sized solar topis, riding home from camp in the back of a plodding bullock cart.

The Christmas shooting-camps were the greatest fun. On one occasion we made camp in a mango grove near the famous battlefield of Panipat, which lies some twenty miles to the north of Delhi. Three of the bloodiest and most momentous battles in all the long and violent history of India were fought there.

In the first of these an invader from the North, Zahir-ud-Din Mohammed Barber — ‘Barber the Tiger' — first of the Great Moguls — defeated the vastly larger army of Sultan Ibriam Lodi, last of the Lodi dynasty whose tombs make New Delhi's Lodi Golf Course among the most charming in the world. Thirty years later, on the same spot, the army of Barber's grandson, Akbar the Great, soundly defeated the forces of a rival claimant, one Hemu. And just over two centuries later a third Battle of Panipat was fought between another invader from the North, the Afghan ruler of Khandahar, Ahmed Shah Durrani, whose victory over the combined Mahratta forces that opposed him signalled the final collapse of the tottering Mogul Empire and the end of the Confederacy of the Mahratta Princes…

Every inch of the level plain must in its time have been drenched in blood, and I listened enthralled while Tacklow told me the story of those violent days. Walking me over the historic plain, he showed me a brick-built plinth that marked the site of the battlefield and pointed out exactly where the opposing armies had taken up their positions, and how in each one of the three battles, though the defending army had greatly outnumbered their attackers (and in the case of the last Battle of Panipat, possessed far more guns), they had been defeated by superior generalship.

But it was from the people who actually lived there, in particular the owner of the shooting rights and the land on which our camp was pitched, and from various members of his family, that I learned a great many gruesome details about those homeric contests; the tale of which had obviously been handed down from father to son and mother to daughter in the old families of Panipat whose ancestors had seen the conquerors come and go and must have suffered sorely at the hands of both victors and vanquished.

From them I heard the tale of how the wounded and dying Hemu was dragged into the presence of the young Akbar who, at the bidding of his guardian, one Bairam Khan, finished him off with a
tulwar
.
^*
And of how, after the last Battle of Panipat — which ended with the rout of the Mahrattas and the death of most of the Hindu leaders — Shah Durrani's pursuing Afghans gave no quarter to either prisoners or wounded, but decapitated all who fell into their hands; piling up more than two hundred thousand severed heads in great mounds throughout their camps. And
that
was only the Hindu dead! There must have been heavy losses among the Muslims as well. All those dead men …! Horses too, and probably elephants as well. All that spilt blood … What on earth must the place have
smelt
like by next day? How did they know who was who, or discover which of the defeated commanders had been killed and which ones had escaped? There were all sorts of things I wanted to know, and some of the answers I received from the landowner and his family were hair-raising.

I don't believe that adults ever realize quite how much their children learn about facts that doting parents imagine they have been successfully shielded from. They do not fully appreciate how easily the nastiest things slide off the backs of the young, who have a disconcerting habit of accepting the seamy and sordid with perfect equanimity and dismissing it as unimportant. Being the fortunate possessor of a retentive and photographic memory, I did not forget the tales I was told of the terrible deeds that had taken place on the plains of Panipat. But I was far more horrified by the sight of a pi-dog who had snatched a still-born lamb that had been left lying out in a nearby field, and ran with it through our camp, pursued by a yapping pack of other pi-dogs who snatched and tore at the gory remains that dragged on the ground.
That
wasn't a story. That was real; and I can see it still. But those piles of severed heads, and worse horrors, were only stories; and though I did not doubt that they were true, they remained on a par with Jack the Giant Killer and ‘
Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman; be he alive or be he dead, I'll grind his bones to make my bread!
'.

The Slaters and their children were among the guests at the Panipat camp, and so the presence of Bargie and Tony was enough to make it a memorable one for both Bets and myself — though apart from those tales of the great battles and the incident of the pi-dog, the things I remember best are the sugar-cane and an evening visit to the local temple. The sugar-cane was being harvested, and while the guns were walking up partridge and quail across the uncultivated land, I stopped
to pass the time of day with the
Talukdar
's field-workers, who were cutting and stacking the tall canes and loading them into bullock carts, and was presented with an entire cane which one of the women workers peeled and cut up into manageable lengths for me. No child who has not experienced the pleasures of chewing the juice out of those deliciously sweet pieces of cane, and spitting out the pith with a careless disregard for where it falls, has really lived!

I can't remember who took me into the temple, except that it was an elderly Indian who had some connection with it. Not a priest, because I would have remembered the clothes, and memory holds a clear picture of a burly, grey-haired man wearing a small gold-embroidered cap, and with a thick woollen shawl wrapped about his shoulders — for even in the plains the night can be very chilly in December. I remember a lot of oil lamps and the blaze of a fire that lit up a small, dusty square crowded with stalls selling sweetmeats and hot food and brightly coloured clay figurines. There was a big peepul tree growing out of the centre of a brick platform on which more people sat and talked and smoked
huquas
in the firelight, and the surrounding shops and houses were blotched and chequered with leaping black shadows against a moonless sky in which fireworks made streaks and splashes and showers of varicoloured light.

I remember too that there was some argument over whether or not I should be allowed into the temple, but the man in the shawl, who was obviously a person of authority, said there was no harm, and together we climbed a flight of steps and went in under a stone archway decked with tinsel and paper flowers and innumerable
chirags
that flickered and glowed from every possible niche in the carved stone.
Chirags
are always lit in time of festival and there was one being celebrated that night, though I don't remember what it was. Certainly not one of the major ones. This was only a modest affair and probably in honour of some minor and strictly local deity. I remember the temple, like the square outside, as a patchwork of shadows and shimmering, smoke-filled, golden light that smelt of jasmine and incense and fading marigolds. There was a fire here too that fizzed and crackled as a priest fed it with oil and crumbs of incense and another priest chanted mantras. I remember how cold the stone felt to my feet — I had of course left my shoes outside — and how the oil lamps and the fire made the tinsel decorations glitter. One of the priests put a
tilak
,
a scarlet mark, on my forehead, and I remember leaving as an offering a whole silver four-anna piece! — an enormous sum to me in those days, when my pocket-money was one anna a week.

I have been in other temples since then, many of them far larger and older and more impressive. But none of them ever gave me such a feeling of awe and wonder, and holiness, as this small and relatively unimportant one in a village near the old and evil battlefield of Panipat.

That particular Christmas camp was, like most others, a week-long affair, planned to end the day after Boxing Day. But as Tacklow could not be away for more than three days, he and Mother had offered us the choice of spending the entire week there (in which case Tacklow would come out on Christmas Eve and return with us on Boxing Day) or of spending Christmas at Curzon House — in which case he would come to Panipat with us, and bring us back with him on Christmas Eve. Since we had not realized at that time that the Slaters and their children would be asked to join the camp and that Bargie and Tony would be there, Bets and I had elected for the second option. Our reasons being that Panipat lacked the allure of Okhla and the river and sounded pretty dull; whereas back in Curzon House there would be a Christmas tree to decorate and, more important, a proper fireplace. (We were always slightly uneasy about hanging up our stockings in a tent, for even if Father Christmas was able to trace us to our camp — as Mother assured us he would — how would he be able to deliver the goods on schedule if there were no chimney to come down?) Besides, Tacklow would be home every evening, so taking all this into consideration we had plumped for returning to Delhi.

But when the time came to leave, I for one wished very much that we had chosen differently, for I had enjoyed myself so much at Panipat, and having Bargie here had been an unexpected and delightful bonus. I hated leaving her and the camp, and the landowner and his family — and Panipat. But it was too late to change our plans, because knowing that we would be leaving, others had been asked out to take our place and our tents for the extra days. I still remember vividly the deep depression and regret I felt as I waved goodbye to them all, and which stayed with me all the way back to Delhi. A regret that was made deeper by the knowledge that I had made a wrong and irreversible decision, and had no one to blame but myself! I would come to that same bleak conclusion all too often in the future — as I suppose
everyone is bound to do — and I can only conclude that the reason I remember it so clearly is because this was the first time it happened to me.