Our Trees Still Grow In Dehra Read online

  Then everything began to happen at once.

  Lucy put a record on the gramophone, and the strains of Basin Street Blues filled the room. At the same time George sat down at the piano to hammer out an accompaniment to the record: his huge hands crushed down on the keys as though he were chopping up hunks of meat. Marian had lit the gas-fire and was busy frying bacon and eggs. Eric was opening beer bottles. In the midst of the noise and confusion I heard a knock on the door—a very timid, hesitant sort of knock—and opening it, found my landlady standing on the threshold.

  ‘Oh, Mr Bond, the neighbours—’ she began; and glancing into the room was rendered speechless.

  ‘It’s only tonight,’ I said. ‘They’ll all go home after an hour. Remember, it’s Christmas!’

  She nodded mutely and hurried away down the corridor, pursued by something called Be Bop A-Lula. I closed the door and drew all the curtains in an effort to stifle the noise; but everyone was stamping about on the floorboards, and I hoped fervently that the downstairs people had gone to the theatre. George had started playing calypso music, and Eric and Lucy were strutting and stomping in the middle of the room, while the two nephews were improvising on their own. Before I knew what was happening, Marian had taken me in her strong arms, and was teaching me to do the calypso. The air, I think, was Banana Boat Song.

  Instead of the party lasting an hour, it lasted three hours. We ate innumerable fried eggs and finished off all the beer. I took turns dancing with Marian, Lucy, and the nephews. There was a peculiar expression they used when excited. ‘Fire!’ they shouted. I never knew what was supposed to be on fire, or what the exclamation implied, but I too shouted ‘Fire!’ and somehow it seemed a very sensible thing to shout.

  Perhaps their hearts were on fire, I don’t know; but for all their excitability and flashiness and brashness they were lovable and sincere friends, and today, when I look back on my two years in London, that Christmas party is the brightest, most vivid memory of all, and the faces of George and Marian, Lucy and Eric, are the faces I remember best.

  At midnight someone turned out the light. I was dancing with Lucy at the time, and in the dark she threw her arms around me and kissed me full on the lips. It was the first time I had been kissed by a girl, and when I think about it, I am glad that it was Lucy who kissed me.

  When they left, they went in a bunch, just as they had come. I stood at the gate and watched them saunter down the dark, empty street. The buses and tubes had stopped running at midnight, and George and his friends would have to walk all the way back to their rooms at Highgate and Golders Green.

  After they had gone, the street was suddenly empty and silent, and my own footsteps were the only sounds I could hear. The cold came clutching at me, and I turned up my collar. I looked up at the windows of my house, and at the windows of all the other houses in the street. They were all in darkness. It seemed to me that we were the only ones who had really celebrated Christmas.

  The Last Time I Saw Delhi

  I’d had this old and faded negative with me for a number of years and had never bothered to make a print from it. It was a picture of my maternal grandparents. I remembered my grandmother quite well, because a large part of my childhood had been spent in her house in Dehra after she had been widowed; but although everyone said she was fond of me, I remembered her as a stern, somewhat aloof person, of whom I was a little afraid.

  I hadn’t kept many family pictures and this negative was yellow and spotted with damp.

  Then last week, when I was visiting my mother in hospital in Delhi, while she awaited her operation, we got talking about my grandparents, and I remembered the negative and decided I’d make a print for my mother.

  When I got the photograph and saw my grandmother’s face for the first time in twenty-five years, I was immediately struck by my resemblance to her. I have, like her, lived a rather spartan life, happy with my one room, just as she was content to live in a room of her own while the rest of the family took over the house! And like her, I have lived tidily. But I did not know the physical resemblance was so close—the fair hair, the heavy build, the wide forehead. She looks more like me than my mother!

  In the photograph she is seated on her favourite chair, at the top of the veranda steps, and Grandfather stands behind her in the shadows thrown by a large mango tree which is not in the picture. I can tell it was a mango tree because of the pattern the leaves make on the wall. Grandfather was a slim, trim man, with a drooping moustache that was fashionable in the twenties. By all accounts he had a mischievous sense of humour, although he looks unwell in the picture. He appears to have been quite swarthy. No wonder he was so successful in dressing up ‘native’ style and passing himself off as a street-vendor. My mother tells me he even took my grandmother in on one occasion, and sold her a basketful of bad oranges. His character was in strong contrast to my grandmother’s rather forbidding personality and Victorian sense of propriety; but they made a good match.

  But here’s the picture, and I am taking it to show my mother who lies in the Lady Hardinge Hospital, awaiting the removal of her left breast.

  It is early August and the day is hot and sultry. It rained during the night, but now the sun is out and the sweat oozes through my shirt as I sit in the back of a stuffy little taxi taking me through the suburbs of Greater New Delhi.

  On either side of the road are the houses of well-to-do Punjabis, who came to Delhi as refugees in 1947 and now make up more than half the capital’s population. Industrious, flashy, go-ahead people. Thirty years ago, fields extended on either side of this road, as far as the eye could see. The Ridge, an outcrop of the Aravallis, was scrub jungle, in which the black buck roamed. Feroz Shah’s 14th century hunting lodge stood here in splendid isolation. It is still here, hidden by petrol pumps and lost within the sounds of buses, cars, trucks and scooter-rickshaws. The peacock has fled the forest, the black buck is extinct. Only the jackal remains. When, a thousand years from now, the last human has left this contaminated planet for some other star, the jackal and the crow will remain, to survive for years on all the refuse we leave behind.

  It is difficult to find the right entrance to the hospital, because for about a mile along the Panchkuin Road the pavement has been obliterated by tea shops, furniture shops, and piles of accumulated junk. A public hydrant stands near the gate, and dirty water runs across the road.

  I find my mother in a small ward. It is a cool, dark room, and a ceiling fan whirrs pleasantly overhead. A nurse, a dark pretty girl from the South, is attending to my mother. She says, ‘In a minute,’ and proceeds to make an entry on a chart.

  My mother gives me a wan smile and beckons me to come nearer. Her cheeks are slightly flushed, due possibly to fever; otherwise she looks her normal self. I find it hard to believe that the operation she will have tomorrow will only give her, at the most, another year’s lease on life.

  I sit at the foot of her bed. This is my third visit, since I flew back from Jersey, using up all my savings in the process; and I will leave after the operation, not to fly away again, but to return to the hills which have always called me back.

  ‘How do you feel?’ I ask.

  ‘All right. They say they will operate in the morning. They’ve stopped my smoking.’

  ‘Can you drink? Your rum, I mean?’

  ‘No. Not until a few days after the operation.’

  She has a fair amount of grey in her hair, natural enough at fifty-four. Otherwise she hasn’t changed much; the same small chin and mouth, lively brown eyes. Her father’s face, not her mother’s.

  The nurse has left us. I produce the photograph and hand it to my mother.

  ‘The negative was lying with me all these years. I had it printed yesterday.’

  ‘I can’t see without my glasses.’

  The glasses are lying on the locker near her bed. I hand them to her. She puts them on and studies the photograph.

  ‘Your grandmother was always very fond of you.’

&n
bsp; ‘It was hard to tell. She wasn’t a soft woman.’

  ‘It was her money that got you to Jersey, when you finished school. It wasn’t much, just enough for the ticket.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘The only person who ever left you anything. I’m afraid I’ve nothing to leave you, either.’

  ‘You know very well that I’ve never cared a damn about money. My father taught me to write. That was inheritance enough.’

  ‘And what did I teach you?’

  ‘I’m not sure …. Perhaps you taught me how to enjoy myself now and then.’

  She looked pleased at this. ‘Yes, I’ve enjoyed myself between troubles. But your father didn’t know how to enjoy himself. That’s why we quarrelled so much. And finally separated.’

  ‘He was much older than you.’

  ‘You’ve always blamed me for leaving him, haven’t you?’

  ‘I was very small at the time. You left us suddenly. My father had to look after me, and it wasn’t easy for him. He was very sick. Naturally I blamed you.’

  ‘He wouldn’t let me take you away.’

  ‘Because you were going to marry someone else.’

  I break off; we have been over this before. I am not there as my father’s advocate, and the time for recrimination has passed.

  And now it is raining outside, and the scent of wet earth comes through the open doors, overpowering the odour of medicines and disinfectants. The dark-eyed nurse comes in again and informs me that the doctor will soon be on his rounds. I can come again in the evening, or early morning before the operation.

  ‘Come in the evening,’ says my mother. ‘The others will be here then.’

  ‘I haven’t come to see the others.’

  ‘They are looking forward to seeing you.’ ‘They’, being my stepfather and half-brothers.

  ‘I’ll be seeing them in the morning.’

  ‘As you like ….’

  And then I am on the road again, standing on the pavement, on the fringe of a chaotic rush of traffic, in which it appears that every vehicle is doing its best to overtake its neighbour. The blare of horns can be heard in the corridors of the hospital, but everyone is conditioned to the noise and pays no attention to it. Rather, the sick and the dying are heartened by the thought that people are still well enough to feel reckless, indifferent to each other’s safety! In Delhi there is a feverish desire to be first in line, the first to get anything …. This is probably because no one ever gets around to dealing with second-comers.

  When I hail a scooter-rickshaw and it stops a short distance away, someone elbows his way past me and gets in first. This epitomizes the philosophy and outlook of the Delhi-wallah.

  So I stand on the pavement waiting for another scooter, which doesn’t come. In Delhi, to be second in the race is to be last.

  I walk all the way back to my small hotel, with a foreboding of having seen my mother for the last time.

  The Good Old Days

  I took Miss Mackenzie an offering of a tin of Malabar sardines, and so lessened the sharpness of her rebuke.

  ‘Another doctor’s visit, is it?’ she said, looking reproachfully at me over her spectacles. ‘I might have been dead all this time….’

  Miss Mackenzie, at eighty-five, did not show the least signs of dying. She was the oldest resident of the hill station. She lived in a small cottage half way up a hill. The cottage, like Longfellow’s village of Attri, gave one the impression of having tried to get to the top of the hill and failed halfway up. It was hidden from the road by oaks and maples.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ I explained. ‘I had to go to Delhi for a fortnight. I hope you’ve been all right?’

  I wasn’t a relative of Miss Mackenzie’s, nor a very old friend; but she had the knack of making people feel they were somehow responsible for her.

  ‘I can’t complain. The weather’s been good, and the padre sent me some eggs.’

  She set great store on what was given to her in the way of food. Her pension of forty rupees a month only permitted a diet of dal and rice; but the thoughtfulness of people who knew her and the occasional gift parcel from England lent variety to her diet and frequently gave her a topic of conversation.

  ‘I’m glad you have some eggs,’ I said. ‘They’re four rupees a dozen now.’

  ‘Yes, I know. And there was a time when they were only six annas a dozen.’

  ‘About thirty years ago, I suppose.’

  ‘No, twenty-five. I remember, May Taylor’s eggs were always the best. She lived in Fairville—the old house near the Raja’s estate.’

  ‘Did she have a poultry farm?’

  ‘Oh no, just her own hens. Very ordinary hens too, not White Leghorns or Rhode Island Reds—but they gave lovely eggs; she knew how to keep her birds healthy …. May Taylor was a friend of mine. She didn’t supply eggs to just anybody, you know.’

  ‘Oh, naturally not. Miss Taylor’s dead now, I suppose?’

  ‘Oh yes, quite dead. Her sister saw to that.’

  ‘Oh!’ I sensed a story. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘Well, it was a bit of a mystery really. May and Charlotte never did get on with each other and it’s a wonder they agreed to live together. Even as children they used to fight. But Charlotte was always the spoilt one—prettier, you see. May, when I knew her was thirty-five, a good woman if you know what I mean. She saw to the house and saw to the meals and she went to church like other respectable people and everyone liked her. But Charlotte was moody and bad-tempered. She kept to herself—always had done, since the parents died. And she was a little too fond of the bottle.’

  ‘Neither of them were married?’

  ‘No—I suppose that’s why they lived together. Though I’d rather live alone myself than put up with someone disagreeable. Still, they were sisters. Charlotte had been a gay, young thing once, very popular with the soldiers at the convalescent home. She refused several offers of marriage and then when she thought it time to accept someone there were no more offers. She was almost thirty by then. That’s when she started drinking—heavily, I mean. Gin and brandy, mostly. It was cheap in those days. Gin, I think, was two rupees a bottle.’

  ‘What fun! I was born a generation too late.’

  ‘And a good thing, too. Or you’d probably have ended up as Charlotte did.’

  ‘Did she get delirium tremens?’

  ‘She did nothing of the sort. Charlotte had a strong constitution.’

  ‘And so have you, Miss Mackenzie, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘I take a drop when I can afford it—.’ She gave me a meaningful look. ‘Or when I’m offered ….’

  ‘Did you sometimes have a drink with Miss Taylor?’

  ‘I did not! I wouldn’t have been seen in her company. All over the place she was, when she was drunk. Lost her powers of discrimination. She even took up with a barber! And then she fell down a khud one evening, and broke her ankle!’

  ‘Lucky it wasn’t her head.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t her own head she broke, more’s the pity, but her sister May’s—the poor, sweet thing.’

  ‘She broke her sister’s head, did she?’ I was intrigued. ‘Why, did May find out about the barber?’

  ‘Nobody knows what it was, but it may well have been something like that. Anyway, they had a terrible quarrel one night. Charlotte was drunk, and May, as usual, was admonishing her.’

  ‘Fatal,’ I said. ‘Never admonish a drunk.’

  Miss Mackenzie ignored me and carried on.

  ‘She said something about the vengeance of God falling on Charlotte’s head. But it was May’s head that was rent asunder. Charlotte flew into a sudden rage. She was given to these outbursts, even when sober and brought something heavy down on May’s skull. Charlotte never said what it was. It couldn’t have been a bottle, unless she swept up the broken pieces afterwards. It may have been a heavy—what writers sometimes call a blunt instrument.

  ‘When Charlotte saw what she
had done, she went out of her mind. They found her two days later wandering about near some ruins, babbling a lot of nonsense about how she might have been married long ago if May hadn’t clung to her.’

  ‘Was she charged with murder?’

  ‘No, it was all hushed up. Charlotte was sent to the asylum at Ranchi. We never heard of her again. May was buried here. If you visit the old cemetery you’ll find her grave on the second tier, third from the left.’

  ‘I’ll look it up some time. It must have been an awful shock for those of you who knew the sisters.’

  ‘Yes, I was quite upset about it. I was very fond of May. And then, of course, the chickens were sold and I had to buy my eggs elsewhere and they were never so good. Still, those were the days, the good old days—when eggs were six annas a dozen and gin only two rupees a bottle!’

  Binya Passes By

  While I was walking home one day, along the path through the pines, I heard a girl singing.

  It was summer in the hills, and the trees were in new leaf. The walnuts and cherries were just beginning to form between the leaves.

  The wind was still and the trees were hushed, and the song came to me clearly; but it was not the words—which I could not follow—or the rise and fall of the melody which held me in thrall, but the voice itself, which was a young and tender voice.

  I left the path and scrambled down the slope, slipping on fallen pine needles. But when I came to the bottom of the slope the singing had stopped and no one was there. ‘I’m sure I heard someone singing,’ I said to myself; but I may have been wrong. In the hills it is always possible to be wrong.