The Sun in the Morning (41 page)

At least once a month his enormous car, packed and stacked to the roof with picnic baskets and children, would whisk us off to Okhla where, on arrival, he would line us up like a company on parade near the weir, and announce in a sergeant-major blare that the first one who fell into the water would get their ears boxed — so there! I remember how once, while we were standing in a row near the edge of the river, Joanie Kirkpatrick, who did not know him as well as the rest of us did, took a scared step backwards, and
plop
! there she was in the water. Buckie dealt efficiently with the situation. He fished her out and stripped her, and having rolled her up in a tartan rug, locked her into the back of the car with a bag of toffees to console her, while he took the rest of us off to fish for
chilwa
— bringing us back an hour or two later to enjoy a picnic tea alongside the car so that we could feed poor Joanie through the windows.

Picnics were some of the best things about Delhi. I remember one given by a friend of Mother's, a Lady Grant who later, as Margaret Grant, became a musical comedy actress and whom we last saw when we had tea with her in her dressing-room at — I think — Her Majesty's Theatre in London, where she was starring in a show called
The Good Old Days.
She took us out to the grounds of the Khutab Minar with one or two of her own children, plus Bargie and Tony Slater, Bets, Mother and me. The Khutab is a tremendous minaret that has stood there for well over a thousand years before the birth of Christ, for its foundations were laid and the building of it begun in 1200
b.c.
It stands more than two hundred and thirty-eight feet high, faced with red sandstone that is fluted and carved and inlaid with white marble, and is divided into five sections by carved stone balconies that encircle it like fretted bracelets. That picnic stays firmly in my mind because in the course of it Bets and I climbed the Minar three times. (I rather think we all did: except for the Grant children who would have been
too young, and the two grown-ups.) We climbed it once on arrival, once after lunch and once after tea.

In those days, and right up to the day on which India became independent, there was no restriction on climbing to the top of the Khutab; anyone was allowed to do it. Nor was there an ugly iron ‘lion's cage' plonked on its summit either! There are three hundred and seventy-nine steps, and climbing them is a picnic compared to coming down again. But we seem to have taken it in our stride and thought nothing of it. When I panted up it in 1942, almost a quarter of a century later, there was still no iron cage and I got acute vertigo at the top and had to sit down on the top-step-but-one with my feet firmly below the roof-level — scared to bits of falling! It was then that I stopped seeing anything funny in the story, reported in the
Statesman
, about a villager from Jullunder, who was on the top of the Minar when the last ripple of the terrible earthquake that decimated Bihar reached Delhi and rocked the great tower to and fro. The poor fellow had gasped out to a reporter, who saw him stagger out of the tower some fifteen minutes later, that when it happened he hadn't been able to make up his mind whether to jump off the top or ‘risk going down by the stairs'. I thought that was hilariously funny when I first read it, but after that day in 1942 I know just how he felt, for I might easily have had difficulty in deciding myself. (You notice that the gentleman from Jullunder apparently considered that there was no risk — or a lot less anyway — attached to jumping off the top!)

Twenty-one years later still, during one of our nostalgic return visits to the land of our birth, Bets and I decided to climb the Minar for one last time before old age and arthritis got their hooks into us; only to discover that no one was allowed to go further than the first balcony. Beyond that the stair was blocked. This, explained the local
chowkidar
, was because too many people had used the Minar to
kuttum-hogai
themselves (literally ‘finish' themselves) by leaping off the higher ones — a messy business that entailed a great deal of bother and trouble scraping the remains off the paving-stones at the bottom. I pointed out that as the lowest balcony was a good forty feet above the pavement, anyone jumping off it would surely
kuttum-hogai
themselves just as efficiently as the ones who went off the top, or one of the higher balconies. But he was not convinced. Unquestionably, a soul-mate if
not a near relative of that man from Jullunder. It made me feel even more at home.

Better than the picnics, though not as exciting as the shooting-camps, were the weekends at Agra; for even in those far-off times Agra was only a short distance from Delhi. There was a night train that left a couple of hours after midnight and would get us there in the early morning; which meant that if Tacklow could get Saturday off (most people took Saturdays off as a matter of course!) he could leave Agra by the Sunday-night train that got us back early enough on Monday morning for him to have a bath and breakfast at Curzon House before leaving for his office in Metcalfe House.

Agra was always a magical place to me. It still is. Even though so much has changed and Barber's city is now full of brand-new package-tour hotels, each one crammed to bursting-point with noisy tourists of every shape, size and nationality who bargain loudly for souvenirs when not clicking their forests of cameras or applauding the twice-nightly floor-shows which consist of so-called ‘Traditional Indian Folk Dancing', i.e. girls in spangled skirts gyrating to the sound of what in our day were called ‘Fu-fu bands'.

But all that still lay in the future; along with the car age and the air age. Back in the teenage years of the twentieth century Agra was still a green and quiet town, living on past memories of the Great Moguls and brooded over by that pearl of pearls, the Taj Mahal. Its great past had gone and its vociferous tomorrow was still to come, and Bets and I were privileged to know it in the sunset of its peaceful days, when the fact that there was a world war raging ensured a total absence of globe-trotting tourists and permitted Agra and its glories to sit back and weave dreams.

For us its spell began to work long before we reached it. First there were suitcases to be packed and a special kind of bottled milk to be bought to take with us, because Mother wouldn't let us drink hotel milk. The bottled stuff had a distinctive taste faintly reminiscent of malt and we considered it delicious. Punj-ayah did not accompany us on these expeditions, but Moko and Teddy went along, and on a Saturday evening, after an early supper, we and they were put to bed in Curzon House with instructions to go to sleep as quickly as possible and not lie awake whispering. It is difficult to do this when one is
keyed up and excited, and though we did not dare whisper, I for one would lie awake for a long time, listening to the night noises and especially to the far-away sounds of trains arriving or leaving Delhi. To anyone of my generation there will always be something haunting about the sound of distant trains heard by night: not modern trains that run on diesel or electricity, but the steam-trains of our youth. Which of us will ever forget ‘the sigh of midnight trains in empty stations'? To this day the sound of a train in the night speaks to me of Delhi and those magical visits to Agra … For the space of a few heart-beats I am young again and back in my bed in Curzon House; and wherever I happen to be, no matter in which city or town or country, it is India that lies outside, hidden from me only by the dark.

In the end, of course, we always fell asleep; to be woken at midnight and taken by tonga or
tikka-ghari
to the station which, no matter what the hour, was never empty. There Alum Din would take charge of the luggage and see to the unpacking of
bistras
, and while our parents were busy deciding who should sleep on which berth, Bets and I would escape the eye of authority — easy enough in those swirling, chattering crowds! — and make for our favourite part of the station: the great metal circle that lay out in the moonlight beyond the furthest end of the platform, where the clumsy, coal-burning engines that ended their run at Delhi were turned around on something that looked like a huge turntable, to face the direction they had come from, in readiness for the return journey. It was a sight that never failed to fascinate us, and no arrival or departure from Delhi station was ever complete until we had seen it. It was for us part of a ritual: yet as I look back and remember, I am once again astonished by the amount of freedom we were given. So much, that we could make off alone and dive into the midst of that pandemonium which was, and still is, the normal state of affairs on the platforms of any major railway station in all India, without our parents or ourselves — least of all ourselves! — thinking for one moment that we could come to any harm. We never did. Partly, I suppose, because we always knew we were among friends; but largely because Indians as a whole are a kindly and tolerant people.

Arriving in Agra in the cool, pearly dawn we always drove straight to Laurie's Hotel and a warm welcome from the proprietress, dear Miss Hotz — who was ‘young Miss Hotz' then, though to Bets and myself she always seemed old — and as soon as we finished breakfast
we were off to the Taj. I don't know how many times I have seen that Wonder of the World, because it never occurred to me to keep count. A hundred, perhaps? though even that may be an understatement. Tacklow, of course, had spent his leaves in Agra, back in the nineteenth century when his father was Commissioner of that town and the district surrounding it, so he had seen the Taj again and again when he was a newly-joined and impressionable young subaltern. I was a good deal younger than he had been then, but to use his own expressive phrase, it ‘hit me where I live'. I have never got used to it. Each time has always been as though it was the first time, and it still has the power to make my heart contract.

Many people have tried to describe the Taj, but for me only Kipling has succeeded in putting it into words; and he only saw it in the dawn from the window of a railway carriage taking him down south — and vowed never to see it closer for fear of spoiling that first breathtaking vision. Tacklow quoted me Kipling's description of it, and since I know it by heart and it cannot be bettered, here it is:

It was the Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come; it was the realization of the gleaming halls of dawn that Tennyson sings of; it was veritably the ‘aspiration fixed', the ‘sigh made stone' of a lesser poet; and over and above concrete comparisons, it seemed the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy. That was the mystery of the building … the thing seemed full of sorrow — the sorrow of the man who built it for the woman he loved, and the sorrow of the workmen who died in the building — used up like cattle. And in the face of this sorrow the Taj flushed in the sunlight and was beautiful, after the beauty of a woman who has done no wrong.

I have to admit that, unlike Kipling, the Taj never struck me as being full of sorrow. Or if it was there, it passed me by. But it was then and is now both the ‘sigh made stone' and the ‘Ivory Gate through which all good dreams come'. And what made it so perfect was that we could spend the whole day there, wandering up and down, around and all over the buildings and the gardens alike, without anyone ever saying ‘You mustn't' or ‘You can't'. Very often we would be the only visitors there. It was empty and quiet, and peaceful beyond words. No noises but the birds and the squirrels, the splash of the fountains and the sigh of the wind crooning through the marble tracery and under those serene arches.

There were several reasons for this: the first, strangely enough, being that Indians in general took no interest at all in this marvel of marvels and rarely bothered to visit it. Yet there it was, free for anyone to walk into and explore. No entrance fee to pay, nothing to prevent the humblest, poorest and grubbiest young citizen from wandering in. I know; because I went there again and again and spent hours and days there and played in the gardens with the children of the few (the very few!) Indian families who occasionally dropped in. And had Bets or I ever seen one of the sleepy custodians of the Taj, who spent their days dozing peacefully in the shade of the great entrance gate, turn away an Indian of whatever age or caste, we would have asked to know why. We knew everyone who worked at the Taj, from the head
chowkidar
down to the youngest and lowliest gardener's boy; including the old Mulvi and his assistant who had charge of the underground burial chamber in which Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Ornament of the Palace', lies beside the husband who raised this marvellous tomb for her, and by doing so made her name immortal. If any of these people had actively discouraged their own countrymen from visiting the Taj we could not have failed to notice the fact, and be curious about it. And if we had discovered that ‘only Sahib-log' were permitted to enter freely, I suspect we would have felt slightly grand and exclusive.

Until a Viceroy, Lord Curzon, began urging India to appreciate and preserve the marvellous monuments of her past, very few Indians seem to have taken any interest in ancient buildings. Temples and mosques being places of worship were OK, since Hindus and Muslims are very devout. A few tombs too, and here and there the odd fort. But that was it, and many a ruling Prince pulled down the glorious palaces that his forefathers had raised and replaced them with some frightful copy of late-Victorian wedding-cakery. Only when mass tourism broke out in the wake of Independence and Partition, and swept round the world like the Black Death, did India begin to take an interest in her historic treasures. Today the crowds that swarm through and around the Taj are three parts Indian to one of Western and Far Eastern sightseers, and hordes of shrill-voiced souvenir-sellers, with their shops and stalls and uproar, insult the approach to their Ivory Gate. Worst of all, the marble itself is being destroyed by the pollution that pours into the air and water from the giant chemical works which, with all India to choose from, some soulless, greedy, money-grubbing politician and/or
industrialist thought fit to site a few miles upstream of a building that ranks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Anyone, given the money, can build a chemical works. But there is only one Taj Mahal, and when it crumbles the whole world will be the poorer.