The Sun in the Morning (47 page)

One thing I learned during our last few days in Delhi was that Time, which can so often move as slowly as a slug crossing a dusty road, can also move with the swiftness of cloud shadows on a windy day. Until then, a week had seemed a very long time to wait for anything one wanted, while a month ahead was something far out of sight. As for a year — well, one might as well say ‘never' and be done with it! But those last days in Delhi rushed past with appalling speed, and on one of them, paying a goodbye visit to Okhla, we witnessed something I have never seen before or since, and which no one was able to explain to me.

It was a dark, overcast day, heavy with thunder, and the air seemed to crackle with electricity. There was no lightning and no rain; though it must have been pouring somewhere further north, for the Jumna had risen dangerously close to flood-level and all the sluices, both on the canal and the river, had been opened. Downstream the water appeared to be boiling with fish. Myriads of
chilwa
were fighting their way up the fish-ladders, leaping like miniature salmon, and beyond the roaring sluices the river was alive with turtles. Hundreds of them. I presume they were catching
chilwa
, but they looked to me as though they were merely coming up for air, turning over so that for a brief moment you saw the pale plates of their bellies show white against the churning mud-coloured water, then diving, and doing it again. Up, over, down. Up, over, down. It was the weirdest sight and it made the wild water look as though it were alive, for there were big fish there too among the turtles.
Mahseer
and catfish, jumping, swirling, turning…

Raucous clouds of gulls, chalk-white against that black, forbidding sky, were swooping and diving as they competed with the kites and
crows for the swarming
chilwa
, and we could not venture onto the weir because the river was already level with the top of the stout wooden barrier that was normally sufficient to hold it in check, and beginning to lap over it. Here and there a plank had given way before the strain and was letting a smooth, head-high spate of water surge through and pour down the stony slope below, and all the sandbanks had vanished, while below the weir the Jumna ran unimpeded from bank to bank with only frothing patches of white water to show where the stone groins lay submerged. Upstream of the canal and the river sluices the tall silk-cotton trees were in flower. The ground below them was littered with their fallen scarlet blossoms, and I took one back with me to add it to the other souvenirs in the treasure-box.

It was a strange afternoon. A rather ominous one, because Okhla suddenly seemed to have turned into a totally unfamiliar place which I did not recognize at all. It was like one of those dreams in which you know that you are in a certain well-known spot even though it bears no resemblance to it, and for some unknown reason, curiously reminiscent of the day I saw the raw beginnings of New Delhi rising out of the ‘spent and unconsidered earth', and sensed uneasily the approach of a future that was destined to destroy much that I had loved and thought of as indestructible, and to put an end to an enchanted childhood.

Morning after morning, as the date of our departure drew nearer, we would set out with Punj-ayah on a tour of Delhi to say goodbye to all our friends; returning with tear-stained cheeks and loaded with a weird selection of parting-presents that included a stuffed baby
gharial
that smelt like nothing on earth (and was immediately confiscated and disposed of by Mother), scores of glass bangles and endless paper packages containing a varied selection of
halwa, jellabies
, roast
chunna, paan
and dried fruit, and a whole Noah's Ark of brightly painted toy animals: elephants, camels, tigers, parrots and peacocks, in papier-mâché, carved wood, brass and stone. All of this gubbins (with the exception of the stuffed
gharial
) was, we hoped, to go with us; and it was only when our boxes were unpacked in England that we discovered that Mother had left them behind to be distributed among the children in the servants' compound.

Tacklow and Abdul Karim
^*
would be accompanying us as far as
Bombay, but we had to say a tearful farewell to Punj-ayah in Delhi, to the entire staff of Curzon House, and a host of other friends who came to the station to see us off. Dear Buckie, Sir Charles, the Diwan-Sahib and the Khan Sahib, Nazir and Ameera, and ‘Vika and her family, a number of buddies from the Dancing Class, and many of Mother's friends as well as ours, were on the platform to say goodbye and wish us good luck and a safe return.

A safe return …! If only I could have been sure of that! If only I had known for certain that I would be able to come back again one day. But how could I be, when I had recently learned that I was unlikely to leave school until I was seventeen? Seven years!
Seven whole years!
It was a lifetime. Only three years less than the whole of my present life-span, which seemed to me for ever. Besides, Tacklow had already told me that now that the war was over his job was bound to end and very soon he would be retired on a Lieutenant-Colonel's pension — there being little or no chance of promotion for an Army man who had seen no active service during the war years. If that were so, then he himself would be leaving India for good long before my schooldays were over.

I very seldom cried in public, for I knew that it was one of the things that one should not do, whatever the provocation. But I was in floods of tears as the train pulled out of Delhi and I leaned from the carriage window and waved and waved; and for the next few miles or so, as we puffed and chugged and rattled past a score of dear, familiar places on the plains beyond the walled city, I could barely see for crying. I was leaving them all behind: the Janta Mantar, the walls of Shere Shah's Delhi, the Purana Kila — its gateways glowing copper-coloured in the late afternoon sunlight. Humayun's beautiful red-and-white tomb and the heavenly blue of the Persian tiles on the dome of the Nil Burge — the tomb of one Fahim Khan, of whom nothing seems to be known except his name. The Pepper-pot Bridge and the road to Okhla; the
suttee
monuments by the Meerut road and, far away across the plain, the Khutab Minar and the crumbling ruins of the once great citadel of Tuglakabad…

I don't remember much about that three-day journey across India to Bombay, except that I spent most of it staring out of one or other of the carriage windows, watching India glide past me and striving to imprint every yard of it on my memory. Chugging across the enormous
empty spaces of the Central Provinces and the borders of Rajasthan, I played a game with myself, one that Bets and I always played on long train journeys. The game was to see how many times you could count to sixty before you saw a fellow human (as soon as you saw one you stopped and began to count again). I remember that the average time between one sighting and the next turned out to be over twenty times: more than twenty minutes! This must have worked out at roughly twelve miles — fourteen at most, I imagine — as I am told that the trains of that day would not have travelled at more than thirty to thirty-five miles an hour. Nowadays I suppose the count would be nearer one human every fifteen seconds. But in 1919 there had not yet been a population explosion on the scale of that in later years, and though herds of black-buck and families of wild pig, chital and monkeys were a common sight, there were still enormous tracts of India in which wild animals outnumbered humans by a hundred to one.

As the train rattled southward I saw an occasional wolf, and when the line crossed a river or skirted a
jheel
there were always great flocks of water-birds, while every half-mile seemed to have its pair of sarus cranes; the big, blue, crested cranes which mate for life. Every village and hamlet was surrounded by a circle of cultivated fields and croplands; patches of bright green against the parched, lion-coloured plains. And however barren and uninhabited the country, wherever a low line of hills thrust up from the plain you could see that once upon a time, very long ago, there had been a fortress on the heights — or a hunting lodge or a lookout. For the ruins were still there, silhouetted against that enormous sky.

Once, looking out of the carriage window in the very early morning in the middle of nowhere, I saw on the crest of such a ridge a lone pavilion; a little
chatri
, its slender pillars and graceful dome dark against the yellow dawn: the last lonely remnant of some forgotten city. And to me at that moment the sight of the little ruined
chatri
seemed the personification of India and History and all Romance. It still does; for I have never forgotten it. But on that particular morning it was also a reminder of all that I was leaving behind; and watching it grow smaller and smaller as the train raced on, I knew that even if I was fortunate enough to come back again one day, nothing was ever going to be the same. Because I could only come back as a grown-up.

I made another daunting discovery when we reached Bombay. It was there that I learned for the first time that in comparison with the parents of many of our friends and acquaintances, mine were pretty badly off. I had never thought about it before; and if I had I would probably have supposed that Tacklow's pay was roughly the same as theirs, if not more. I knew we had to be careful, and that was about all. But arriving in Bombay my hopelessly unworldly father directed the driver of the
fitton-ghari
we had all piled into to take us to the Taj Mahal Hotel; presumably because it was the only one he had heard of! I remember Mother asking anxiously if he was sure we could afford it, and Tacklow replying that he meant to go in and ask what they charged for their cheapest rooms, and if it was more than we could afford, he would ask them to recommend some cheaper hotel — there were sure to be others. To which Mother replied firmly that she had no intention of allowing the Deputy Chief Censor to be seen dickering over the price of rooms with the hotel clerks, and that if anyone had to do it she would. She made the
ghari
-driver stop in a side-street near the hotel and, leaving us sitting in it, went off alone to cope with the situation; returning triumphantly to say that she had tackled the Manager and beaten him down to a reasonable price for two single rooms on the top floor, into each of which they had agreed to put a second bed for no extra charge. I remember feeling desperately embarrassed that she should have had to do such a thing — it seemed terrible to me then. I knew that we weren't rich, but I had no idea that we had to watch every penny — in this case every anna — and I was shaken by the discovery.

That brief interlude in Bombay, during which Tacklow, Bets and I in our hired phaeton-
ghari
, and Abdul Karim in a luggage-laden tonga, lurked in a side street near the Taj Mahal Hotel while Mother was finding out if we could possibly afford to spend a night there, and bargaining for the cheapest possible rate, taught me something that I never forgot: that far more than three-quarters of the men of my race who spent their lives in Indian service were not overpaid and pampered ‘Burra-Sahibs' lording it over ‘the natives', but were really people like Tacklow who worked themselves to the bone to serve, to the best of their ability, a country and a people whom they had come to love so much that they were willing to pay the heavy price that was exacted for that service. And just how heavy it was became apparent to me a
bare twenty-four hours later, when I said goodbye to my father and saw, with a terrible contraction of the heart, that he, like me, was in tears.

He had not seen his only son for six years, and now he did not know how long it would be before he saw his little daughters again — and children grow up, and grow away, so very quickly. Poor Tacklow! I remember clinging to him like a frenzied octopus as we said our farewells in a cramped cabin on the S. S. ‘Ormond', striving to express without words how much I loved him; and when the ship's hooter blew to warn all visitors to go ashore and he had to leave, watching him walk down the gangplank and turn to wave to us from the crowded dockside.

He was not a tall man and it was a family joke that he claimed to be half an inch taller than Mother. But though his heart was enormous his lack of inches, combined with his total refusal, under any circumstances, to shove himself forward, went against him now; for within minutes he was swallowed up in a mass of taller husbands, fathers and friends who stood waving on the dock and I lost sight of him — for two long years: an eternity when one is a child … The steamer began to draw slowly away, and as the rubbish-strewn harbour water widened between ship and shore the people on the dock seemed to shrink and dwindle until they were barely more than a blur of tiny dots. And presently the ‘Ormond' was steaming out of the lovely, island-strewn harbour which some fifteenth-century Portuguese adventurer had named
Bomm-baie
— ‘Beautiful Bay' — heading for the open sea.

Mother went down to the cabin to unpack and Bets and I mopped our eyes and blew our noses, and turning from the deck rail made our way to the stern of the ship from where we could watch the towers and domes of Bombay, the green outline of Malabar Hill and the rocky islet of Elephanta, grow smaller and smaller; all gold and gleaming in the low afternoon sunlight. And as the coast of India faded into the haze, we made a solemn vow never, ever, to desert her. Never to let England replace her in our affections. Never, even if we were not able to return, to forget her, but to remember her always with love. We were deadly serious about it, and we repeated it aloud in Hindustani in case any of her many gods and godlings should happen to be listening and could bear witness. Then we shook hands on it, waved
goodbye to her as she vanished, and went off, a little comforted, to look for Bargie and Tony and forgather with our friends.

I remember quite a lot about that voyage; starting with lifeboat drill, which was taken as seriously as we had taken our solemn vow. The Great War had not been over all that long, and as ships' companies were very much alive to the danger of floating mines, boat-drill was held with boring frequency. Which was perhaps just as well, since at least one passenger-ship on her way home was sunk by a mine that had drifted far off course. I remember the flying-fishes and the dolphins, and a school of whales basking and spouting on a calm day near the mouth of the Gulf of Aden — and how horrid the ‘children's meals' were. Particularly the eggs, which tasted strongly of some form of preservative. The milk too. I was a skinny child and I grew a lot skinnier on the voyage owing to my reluctance to eat the food provided for the young.