Time Stops At Shamli & Other Stories Read online

  ‘How long have we been here?’ I asked.

  ‘Two hundred years.’

  ‘No, I mean us.’

  ‘Well, you were born in India, so that’s seven years for you.’ ‘Then can’t I stay here?’

  ‘Do you want to?’

  ‘I want to go across the sea. But can we take ayah with us?’ ‘I don’t know, son. Let’s walk along the beach.’

  *

  We lived in an old palace beside a lake. The palace looked like a ruin from the outside, but the rooms were cool and comfortable. We lived in one wing, and my father organized a small school in another wing. His pupils were the children of the Raja and the Raja’s relatives. My father had started life in India as a tea-planter; but he had been trained as a teacher and the idea of starting a school in a small state facing the Arabian Sea had appealed to him. The pay wasn’t much, but we had a palace to live in, the latest 1938-model Hillman to drive about in, and a number of servants. In those days, of course, everyone had servants (although the servants did not have any!). Ayah was our own; but the cook, the bearer, the gardener, and the bhisti were all provided by the state.

  Sometimes, I sat in the schoolroom with the other children (who were all much bigger than me), sometimes I remained in the house with ayah sometimes I followed the gardener, Dukhi, about the spacious garden.

  Dukhi means ‘sad’, and, though I never could discover if the gardener had anything to feel sad about, the name certainly suited him. He had grown to resemble the drooping weeds that he was always digging up with a tiny spade. I seldom saw him standing up. He always sat on the ground with his knees well up to his chin, and attacked the weeds from this position. He could spend all day on his haunches, moving about the garden simply by shuffling his feet along the grass.

  I tried to imitate his posture, sitting down on my heels and putting my knees into my armpits; but could never hold the position for more than five minutes.

  Time had no meaning in a large garden, and Dukhi never hurried. Life, for him, was not a matter of one year succeeding another, but of five seasons—winter, spring, hot weather, monsoon and autumn—arriving and departing. His seedbeds had always to be in readiness for the coming season, and he did not look any further than the next monsoon. It was impossible to tell his age. He may have been thirty-six or eighty-six. He was either very young for his years or very old for them.

  Dukhi loved bright colours, especially reds and yellows. He liked strongly scented flowers, like jasmine and honeysuckle. He couldn’t understand my father’s preference for the more delicately perfumed petunias and sweetpeas. But I shared Dukhi’s fondness for the common, bright orange marigold, which is offered in temples and is used to make garlands and nosegays. When the garden was bare of all colour, the marigold would still be there, gay and flashy, challenging the sun.

  Dukhi was very fond of making nosegays, and I liked to watch him at work. A sunflower formed the centre-piece. It was surrounded by roses, marigolds and oleander, fringed with green leaves, and bound together with silver thread. The perfume was over-powering. The nosegays were presented to me or my father on special occasions, that is, on a birthday or to guests of my father’s who were considered important.

  One day I found Dukhi making a nosegay, and said, ‘No one is coming today, Dukhi. It isn’t even a birthday.’

  ‘It is a birthday, chota sahib,’ he said. ‘Little sahib ’ was the title he had given me. It wasn’t much of a title compared to Raja sahib, Diwan sahib or Burra sahib but it was nice to have a title at the age of seven.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And is there a party, too?’

  ‘No party.’

  ‘What’s the use of a birthday without a party? What’s the use of a birthday without presents?’

  ‘This person doesn’t like presents—just flowers.’

  ‘Who is it?’ I asked, full of curiosity.

  ‘If you want to find out, you can take these flowers to her. She lives right at the top of that far side of the palace. There are twenty-two steps to climb. Remember that, chota sahib you take twenty-three steps, you will go over the edge and into the lake!’

  I started climbing the stairs.

  It was a spiral staircase of wrought iron, and it went round and round and up and up, and it made me quite dizzy and tired.

  At the top I found myself on a small balcony, which looked out over the lake and another palace, at the crowded city and the distant harbour. I heard a voice, a rather high, musical voice, saying (in English) ‘Are you a ghost?’ I turned to see who had spoken but found the balcony empty. The voice had come from a dark room.

  I turned to the stairway, ready to flee, but the voice said, ‘Oh, don’t go, there’s nothing to be frightened of!’

  And so I stood still, peering cautiously into the darkness of the room.

  ‘First, tell me—are you a ghost?’

  ‘I’m a boy,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m a girl. We can be friends. I can’t come out there, so you had better come in. Come along, I’m not a ghost either—not yet, anyway!’

  As there was nothing very frightening about the voice, I stepped into the room. It was dark inside, and, coming in from the glare, it took me some time to make out the tiny, elderly lady seated on a cushioned, gilt chair. She wore a red sari, lots of coloured bangles on her wrists, and golden ear-rings. Her hair was streaked with white, but her skin was still quite smooth and unlined, and she had large and very beautiful eyes.

  ‘You must be Master Bond!’ she said. ‘Do you know who I am?’ ‘You’re a lady with a birthday,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I know. Dukhi didn’t tell me any more.’

  ‘If you promise to keep it a secret, I’ll tell you who I am. You see, everyone thinks I’m mad. Do you think so too?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you must tell me if you think so,’ she said with a chuckle. Her laugh was the sort of sound made by the gecko, the little wall-lizard, coming from deep down in the throat. ‘I have a feeling you are a truthful boy. Do you find it very difficult to tell the truth?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes. Of course, there are times when I tell lies—lots of little lies—because they’re such fun! But would you call me a liar? I wouldn’t, if I were you, but would you?

  ‘Are you a liar?’

  ‘I’m asking you! If I were to tell you that I was a queen—that I am a queen—would you believe me?’

  I thought deeply about this, and then said, ‘I’ll try to believe you.’

  ‘Oh, but you must believe me. I’m a real queen, I’m a Rani! Look I’ve got diamonds to prove it!’ And she held out her hands, and there was a ring on each finger, the stones glowing and glittering in the dim light. ‘Diamonds, rubies, pearls and emeralds! Only a queen can have these!’ She was most anxious that I should believe her.

  ‘You must be a queen,’ I said.

  ‘Right!’ she snapped. ‘In that case, would you mind calling me

  “Your Highness”?’

  ‘Your Highness,’ I said.

  She smiled. It was a slow, beautiful smile. All her face lit up.

  ‘I could love you,’ she said. ‘But better still, I’ll give you something to eat. Do you like chocolates?’

  ‘Yes, Your Highness.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, taking a box from the table beside her; ‘these have come all the way from England. Take two. Only two, mind, otherwise the box will finish before Thursday, and I don’t want that to happen because I won’t get any more till Saturday. That’s when Captain MacWhirr’s ship gets in, the S. S. LUCY loaded with boxes and boxes of chocolates!’

  ‘All for you?’ I asked in considerable awe.

  ‘Yes, of course. They have to last at least three months. I get them from England. I get only the best chocolates. I like them with pink, crunchy fillings, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’ I exclaimed, full of envy.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I may give you one, now and then— if you’r
e very nice to me! Here you are, help yourself. . . .’ She pushed the chocolate box towards me.

  I took a silver-wrapped chocolate, and then just as I was thinking of taking a second, she quickly took the box away.

  ‘No more!’ she said. ‘They have to last till Saturday.’

  ‘But I took only one,’ I said with some indignation.

  ‘Did you?’ She gave me a sharp look, decided I was telling the truth, and said graciously, ‘Well, in that case you can have another.’

  Watching the Rani carefully, in case she snatched the box away again, I selected a second chocolate, this one with a green wrapper. I don’t remember what kind of a day it was outside, but I remember the bright green of the chocolate wrapper.

  I thought it would be rude to eat the chocolates in front of a queen, so I put them in my pocket and said, ‘I’d better go now. Ayah will be looking for me.’

  ‘And when will you be coming to see me again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Your Highness.’

  ‘Your Highness.’

  ‘There’s something I want you to do for me,’ she said, placing one finger on my shoulder and giving me a conspiratorial look.

  ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘What is it Your Highness?’

  ‘What is it? Why do you ask? A real prince never asks where or why or whatever, he simply does what the princess asks of him. When I was princess—before I became a queen, that is—I asked a prince to swim across the lake and fetch me a lily growing on the other bank.’

  ‘And did he get it for you?’

  ‘He drowned half way across. Let that be a lesson to you. Never agree to do something without knowing what it is.’

  ‘But I thought you said. . . .’

  ‘Never mind what I said. It’s what I say that matters!’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ I said, fidgeting to be gone. ‘What is it you want me to do?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Her tiny rosebud lips pouted and she stared sullenly at a picture on the wall. Now that my eyes had grown used to the dim light in the room, I noticed that the walls were hung with portraits of stout Rajas and Ranis: turbaned and bedecked in fine clothes. There were also portraits of Queen Victoria and King George V of England. And, in the centre of all this distinguished company, a large picture of mickey mouse.

  ‘I’ll do it if it isn’t too dangerous.’ I said.

  ‘Then listen.’ She took my hand and drew me towards her— what a tiny hand she had!—and whispered, ‘I want a red rose. From the palace garden. But be careful! Don’t let Dukhi the gardener catch you. He’ll know it’s for me. He knows I love roses. And he hates me! I’ll tell you why, one day. But if he catches you, he’ll do something terrible.’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘No, to himself. That’s much worse, isn’t it? He’ll tie himself into knots, or lie naked on a bed of thorns, or go on a long fast with nothing to eat but fruit, sweets and chicken! So you will be careful, won’t you?’

  ‘Oh, but he doesn’t hate you,’ I cried in protest, remembering the flowers he’d sent for her, and looking around, I found that I’d been sitting on them. ‘Look, he sent these flowers for your birthday!’

  ‘Well, if he sent them for my birthday, you can take them back,’ she snapped. ‘But if he sent them for me . . . . ’ and she suddenly softened and looked coy, ‘then I might keep them. Thank you, my dear, it was a very sweet thought.’ And she leant forward as though to kiss me.

  ‘It’s late, I must go!’ I said in alarm, and turning on my heels, ran out of the room and down the spiral staircase.

  *

  Father hadn’t started lunch or rather tiffin, as we called it then. He usually waited for me, if I was late. I don’t suppose he enjoyed eating alone.

  For tiffin we usually had rice, a mutton curry (koftas or meat balls, with plenty of gravy, was my favourite curry), fried dal and a hot lime or mango pickle. For supper we had English food—a soup, roast pork and fried potatoes, a rich gravy made by my father, and a custard or caramel pudding. My father enjoyed cooking, but it was only in the morning that he found time for it. Breakfast was his own creation. He cooked eggs in a variety of interesting ways, and favoured some Italian recipes which he had collected during a trip to Europe, long before I was born.

  In deference to the feelings of our Hindu friends, we did not eat beef; but, apart from mutton and chicken, there was a plentiful supply of other meats—partridge, venison, lobster, and even porcupine!

  ‘And where have you been?’ asked my father, helping himself to the rice as soon as he saw me come in.

  ‘To the top of the old palace,’ I said.

  ‘Did you meet anyone there?’

  ‘Yes, I met a tiny lady who told me she was a Rani. She gave me chocolates.’

  ‘As a rule, she doesn’t like visitors.’

  ‘Oh, she didn’t mind me. But is she really a queen?’

  ‘Well, she’s the daughter of a Maharaja. That makes her a princess. She never married. There’s a story that she fell in love with a commoner, one of the palace servants, and wanted to marry him, but of course they wouldn’t allow that. She became very melancholic, and started living all by herself in the old palace. They give her everything she needs, but she doesn’t go out or have visitors. Everyone says she’s mad.’

  ‘How do they know?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she’s different from other people, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that being mad?’

  ‘No. Not really, I suppose madness is not seeing things as others see them.’

  ‘Is that very bad?’

  ‘No,’ said father, who for once was finding it very difficult to explain something to me. ‘But people who are like that— people whose minds are so different that they don’t think, step by step, as we do, whose thoughts jump all over the place— such people are very difficult to live with. . . . ’

  ‘Step by step,’ I repeated. ‘Step by step. . . . ’

  ‘You aren’t eating,’ said my father. ‘Hurry up, and you can come with me to school today.’

  I always looked forward to attending my father’s classes. He did not take me to the schoolroom very often, because he wanted school to be a treat, to begin with; then, later, the routine wouldn’t be so unwelcome.

  Sitting there with older children, understanding only half of what they were learning, I felt important and part grown-up. And of course I did learn to read and write, although I first learnt to read upside-down, by means of standing in front of the others’ desks and peering across at their books. Later, when I went to school, I had some difficulty in learning to read the right way up; and even today I sometimes read upside-down, for the sake of variety. I don’t mean that I read standing on my head; simply that I hold the book upside-down.

  I had at my command a number of rhymes and jingles, the most interesting of these being ‘Solomon Grundy’.

  Solomon Grundy,

  Born on a Monday,

  Christened on Tuesday,

  Married on Wednesday,

  Took ill on Thursday,

  Worse on Friday,

  Died on Saturday,

  Buried on Sunday:

  This is the end of

  Solomon Grundy.

  Was that all that life amounted to, in the end? And were we all Solomon Grundies? These were questions that bothered me, at times.

  Another puzzling rhyme was the one that went:

  Hark, hark,

  The dogs do bark,

  The beggars are coming to town; Some in rags,

  Some in bags,

  And some in velvet gowns.

  This rhyme puzzled me for a long time. There were beggars aplenty in the bazaar, and sometimes they came to the house, and some of them did wear rags and bags (and some nothing at all) and the dogs did bark at them, but the beggar in the velvet gown never came our way.

  ‘Who’s this beggar in a velvet gown?’ I asked my father.

  ‘Not a beggar at all,’ he said.
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  ‘Then why call him one?’

  And I went to Ayah and asked her the same question, ‘Who is the beggar in the velvet gown?’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Ayah.

  Ayah was a fervent Christian and made me say my prayers at night, even when I was very sleepy. She had, I think, Arab and Negro blood in addition to the blood of Koli fishing community to which her mother had belonged. Her father, a sailor on an Arab dhow, had been a convert to Christianity. Ayah was a large, buxom woman, with heavy hands and feet, and a slow, swaying gait that had all the grace and majesty of a royal elephant. Elephants for all their size, are nimble creatures; and Ayah too, was nimble, sensitive, and gentle with her big hands. Her face was always sweet and childlike.

  Although a Christian, she clung to many of the beliefs of her parents, and loved to tell me stories about mischievous spirits and evil spirits, humans who changed into animals, and snakes who had been princes in their former lives.

  There was the story of the snake who married a princess. At first the princess did not wish to marry the snake, whom she had met in a forest, but the snake insisted, saying, ‘I’ll kill you if you won’t marry me,’ and of course that settled the question. The snake led his bride away and took her to a great treasure. ‘I was a prince in my former life,’ he explained. ‘This treasure is yours.’ And then the snake very gallantly disappeared.

  ‘Snakes,’ declared Ayah, ‘were very lucky omens if seen early in the morning.’

  ‘But what if the snake bites the lucky person?’ I asked.

  ‘He will be lucky all the same,’ said Ayah with a logic that was all her own.

  Snakes! There were a number of them living in the big garden, and my father had advised me to avoid the long grass. But I had seen snakes crossing the road (a lucky omen, according to Ayah) and they were never aggressive.

  ‘A snake won’t attack you,’ said Father, ‘provided you leave it alone. Of course, if you step on one it will probably bite.’

  ‘Are all snakes poisonous?’

  ‘Yes, but only a few are poisonous enough to kill a man. Others use their poison on rats and frogs. A good thing, too, otherwise during the rains the house would be taken over by the frogs.’