The Sun in the Morning (45 page)

It was years before I discovered the reason for this hasty return. And then only because I happened to come across an envelope containing a few snapshots that I had never seen before and which had certainly not appeared in any of the photograph-albums that Mother kept up to date with such care. The snapshots showed a single short stretch of sand on the banks of the Ganges, taken on that abortive trip. It was strewn with rotting corpses.

Hindus cremate their dead, but in times of pestilence or famine, when thousands die, cremation becomes impossible for the poor as wood becomes scarce and its price soars. This year, with people dying like flies in a black frost, the poor could not afford to cremate all of their kin who perished in the great epidemic, so they simply consigned the bodies to the river.

Mother said that no one in the boats had realized, until they actually set off down the river, what it would be like, because the banks near the town were kept clear of corpses and none of the local authorities had warned them. When they got further downstream and saw the numbers of the stranded dead they were horrified, but thought that these must be people who had lived and died in the town and that there would be none further on in the open country away from the towns and villages. But the further they went the worse it became.

At every bend in the river the sandbanks showed more and more bodies in every stage of decay. There were so many of them that even the vultures and carrion crows were satiated and stood around too gorged to fly. Worst of all — worse than the stench and the sight of the legions of dead — were the pariah dogs, those cringing, masterless pi-dogs that haunt every town and village in India and are such cowardly creatures that normally one had only to flap a hand at them to make them turn and run, tail between legs and yelping with alarm.
This year, gorged and made bold by feasting on human flesh, they formed themselves into packs that attacked, snarling and without provocation, and made the dark hours hideous, barking and howling and quarrelling over the dead. No one slept that night, and the next day, since they could not take the heavy boats back up river against the current (the plan had been to abandon the boats at Narora from where teams of coolies would have pulled the empty hulks back up the Ganges in the manner of the Volga boatmen, taking many days to make the journey), they went on foot to the nearest village, where they hired bullock carts to take them across country to the nearest railway station and so back to Delhi.

Tacklow told me that the river had been alive with
muggers
; more of them than any of the party had ever seen before; and that Sir Charles had shot several. But when the skins reached Cawnpore they were found to be green and spongy and could not be tanned; and the same was true of every crocodile shot in any of India's rivers during the time that the flu epidemic raged through the land.

That cold weather we did not visit Okhla even once, and nor would Punj-ayah allow us to play on the sands of the Jumna on the far side of the Kudsia Bagh, because (though I did not know this at the time) Mother was afraid that the Jumna too might be full of corpses. She did her best to prevent us from learning about the appalling tragedy that was taking place in India — and, for that matter, in most of the rest of the world — for fear that it might upset us. In the same way, we, who had known about it from the start through our numerous Indian friends, playmates and acquaintances, had never mentioned it to her because we were afraid it might upset her! But then I don't think she ever realized that the servants and shopkeepers, the children of her Indian friends with whom we played and squabbled and laughed, and every other person whom we met and passed the time of day with in the streets and bazaars of Delhi and Simla, talked freely to us or in our hearing on a score of subjects that no Western adult of that period would have dreamed of mentioning in the presence of young children.

Neither birth nor death, nor poverty, sickness, disaster or crime, held any mystery for me. It was not that I was ever indifferent to it — how could I be? Such things would always have the power to shock me or make me shudder, or reduce me to fury or tears or both. But one learned very young to accept the beauty and wonder of that most
beautiful and wonderful of lands, and with it the ugliness and cruelty that was an integral part of it. For is not Shiva the Creator — ‘
Shiv, who poured the harvest and made the winds to blow
' — also the Destroyer? And is not his consort, lovely Parbati, also Kali the Drinker-of-Blood and Sitala — Mata — the Smallpox?

Bets and I must have been among the very first people in India to hear that the Great War, the First World War, was over.

We had been playing in the cosmos jungle below The Rookery one sunny autumn morning while Tacklow, who for once had not set off for the office, sat at work in his study and Mother busied herself packing trunks and suitcases in the upper rooms of the house, in preparation for our annual move to Delhi. It was November, but the weather was as clear and hot and glittering as an English June, and though the tall stems and feathery foliage of the cosmos were already turning dry and brittle, there was still a lavish sprinkling of pink and white blossoms over our heads. The windless air was full of pollen dust, and without the surf-song of the pines, all the familiar noises of Simla drifted up from the town and the bazaars that lay spread out far below us; muted by distance but still clearly audible in the stillness. Above us in The Rookery every door and window stood wide, and the big clock in the hall had just begun to strike eleven when we heard someone run out of the house and down the stone steps into the porch, and out onto the gravel drive. And suddenly the warm, sleepy silence of the morning was shattered by the deafening clangour of the bronze Burmese gong that hung in the hall and was normally sounded, discreetly, to summon us to meals.

It was not being sounded discreetly now. The din was so violent and so unexpected that we were stopped in our tracks (we had been crawling along one of our carefully constructed paths through the cosmos stalks), and regardless of the fact that we might be giving away
the whereabouts of our secret tunnels, both jumped to our feet and rushed out headlong to discover what on earth was happening. I think we both expected to find the house on fire or some similar disaster. But it was, astonishingly, Tacklow who was creating this appalling din. He had unhooked the gong and was marching up and down in front of the house, banging on it like some demented drummer-boy.

Mother came tearing out onto the top verandah to lean over the rail and shout down to him, demanding to know if he had gone out of his mind, and everyone else in the place came swarming out from the back of the house, the kitchen, the go-downs and the servants' quarters, convinced that they were being summoned to help put out a fire or, at the very least, attack a gang of robbers. I can still see their startled faces which must have mirrored the shock on my own, when they discovered that the ‘Burra-Sahib' had apparently gone mad and was grinning from ear to ear as he woke the echoes of Jakko with the help of the dinner-gong. But as the last, unheard stroke of eleven sounded on the grandfather clock in the hall, we saw a white puff of smoke and a bright flash from Summer Hill on the far side of Simla; so far away that the crash of the gun must have taken a full four seconds to reach us. A minute later the bells of Christ Church began to peal, hooters started to blare and whistles to blow, while the crew of the noonday gun that was fired once a day to tell all Simla that it was exactly twelve o'clock and they could knock off for lunch, broke abruptly with tradition and embarked on a joyous twenty-one-gun salute … The war was over! At last, after more than four hideous years of slaughter, it was all over. An Armistice had been signed; and I was badly shaken to see, for the first time in my life, that even as he laughed and banged that Burmese gong, there were tears running down my father's face.

Tacklow had known for many hours that an Armistice had been signed and would come into force at eleven o'clock that morning. He had been the first person in India to know, for the news came in cipher. He had decoded it and, late on the previous evening, informed the Viceroy, who presumably informed the Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of the Punjab. But since the order was that the news must not be made public until the following day, and in every part of the Empire at precisely the same time — each part keeping strictly to its own time — Tacklow had not even dropped a hint to Mother. I
remember her being extremely annoyed about this and insisting that even if the Viceroy
had
told him not to breathe a word to anyone before the eleven o'clock deadline, he could at least have told his
own wife
! (If she really did think so, she didn't know her husband nearly as well as I knew my father!) ‘I bet Lord Chelmsford told
his
wife!' said Mother indignantly.

By afternoon all Simla was
en fěte
, decked out with coloured bunting and strings of coloured flags and launched on two days of rejoicing and non-stop
tamashas
.
^*
Services of Thanksgiving were held in the churches and there was a Victory Parade of all troops on the Ridge. A
feu de joie
crackled up and down the lines of khaki-clad men, bands played and there were endless side-shows in the form of Kuttack and other regional dances of India, which intrigued me far more than the military parade. Someone gave Bets and me a flag each, and Mother took a snapshot of us waving our Union Jacks. Then it was all over. And after that the grown-ups took to talking interminably of ‘going home' and indulging in excited speculation on their chances of getting a passage on a homeward-bound steamer.

I had reached the dignity of double figures earlier that year and was now ten years old. Bets and I had got up early on the morning of my birthday and walked up and down our end of the top verandah, discussing the implications of maturity in whispers so as not to wake our still sleeping parents. Now that I had reached it, ten suddenly seemed to me an awesome number, and I was sobered by the thought that I would never be in single figures again. I remember that we talked of the future and speculated, gloomily, that it would not be long now before either I was sent away to some school in Bombay or Calcutta, or that Punj-ayah was replaced by an English governess. For at that time the Great War still seemed set to go on for ever, and I don't think either of us seriously visualized what would happen to us when it ended. I remember too that our conversation was brought to a close by the familiar crash and clatter of a troop of monkeys chasing each other along the tin roof over our heads, which woke our parents. And also that my presents that year were a wristwatch from Tacklow — which made me feel older than ever — and a morocco-bound copy of
Daily Light
from Mother which I still have (it is disintegrating rapidly but I hope it will see me out).

That had been in August. Then, less than three months after Tacklow had run out of the house banging our Burmese gong, my whole view of the future changed as swiftly and dramatically as the coloured chips of glass in a kaleidoscope change patterns at a single twist of the wrist. One minute everything had been blue and gold and brilliant, and then, suddenly, it was all dark purple, grey and forbidding, and I was full of foreboding…

‘
Home'!
Yes, I remembered Freshfields. Forres too. And Ramnee. And the farm at Streatley and Aunt Lizzie's house at Bedford. I hadn't thought much of any of them, and it had been wonderful to come back to India again. Why did everyone call England ‘home'?
This
was home, and I wanted no other: certainly not that grey, drizzly and definitely chilly place which I had been fortunate enough to escape from once and would not care if I never saw again. Oh yes, of course I knew that we'd all have to go back there one day: I wasn't stupid. But I had quite simply not bothered to think about it. When one is young and completely happy, and all is going well, one doesn't bother to think much about the future unless one is gripped by an ambition to do something special — discover El Dorado or fly an aeroplane, or become a great actor or a great dancer. My ambition was simple. I wanted to spend the rest of my life in India.

Now that the Armistice had been signed, everyone who had had to spend the war years in India, leaving children and relatives back in Britain, could not wait to return. But passages were few and far between, and people had to wait their turn. The wounded and convalescent, all British soldiers who had been in action, senior civilians who could ‘pull rank', and so on, had first claim. The rest had to wait; and since our priority was a low one, there was little prospect of our getting passages for some time to come.

Buoyed up by this discovery, and by the fact that the normal amount of goods and chattels were, as always, stowed away in packing-cases and left in a storehouse in Simla to await our return, we left for the plains as light-heartedly as ever; and back once more in Delhi found nothing changed. The Kudsia Bagh was still as beautiful, Okhla as alluring, and the Christmas camp and the annual visit to the Perrins at Narora were as enjoyable as ever. The only blot on our lovely
landscape was the absence of Bargie and Tony, whose parents were spending the winter in Calcutta. Bets and I missed them a lot. But we had many other friends, and even if the old Anglo-Indian community began to show gaps as family after family left for Bombay to take ship to England, at least our Indian friends were not leaving; lucky things! Moni and Veena and Lakshmi, Rehana and Karan, Neelum, Vita and Shafi would all be staying. So
that
was all right!