There weren’t any in my day either. I wonder if there are now? Or if there are still any Dâk bungalows in existence? What would we have done without them?
* * *
As the shadows shrank and the heat increased, the interior of the little car, which had been standing in the blazing sun for well over an hour, began to get too hot for Shao-de, who put her head out of the near-side window and told me so in no uncertain terms. Well, there was nothing I could do except remove her basket from the back seat of the car and plonk it down in the shadiest spot I could find among the roots of the tree. Which I did. But unfortunately Shao-de thought nothing of the Great Outdoors. To her it was hostile territory, and she growled her disapproval; snatching up the nearest kitten by the scruff of its neck, she carried it back to the car and returned for another.
The next ten or fifteen minutes was occupied by a bad-tempered contest between Shao-de and myself, I returning the kittens to their basket and Shao-de snatching them away and putting them back in the car as fast as I replaced them. Shao-de won easily because she was prepared to keep it up indefinitely and I was not. Also she suddenly switched tactics, and started leaving the kittens under instead of in the Beetle, where the car itself provided a dense patch of shade, in addition to the ghost of a draught. I found this so sensible that I pushed the cat-basket under the Beetle and left her to collect the entire gang in it.
I had a lot of trouble with that cat. She was tediously coy about being watched while engaged in dealing with a call of nature, but there came a time when this would not be denied, and deserting her offspring she made for the shelter of the tree, which provided the only protection from aerial attack by a hungry kite or eagle, of whom there were always a few around. Having taken an age to select a suitable spot, she scratched a hasty hole for herself above it. At which point she suddenly lowered her tail and, flattening her ears, began to growl in a menacing manner. It seemed she had spotted a couple of stray goats, and she wasn’t going to get down to the job in hand with them watching!
She really was a maddening creature, and after about twenty minutes of this Victorian prudery I could gladly have slapped her. If it wasn’t a goat it was a jackal or a crow, and once it was a solitary chinkara. But in the end nature proved too strong for her and she finally got the whole business over and returned to her kittens. About a couple of hours after that, though it felt like a hundred, Mother and the tonga returned, minus its original passengers, who had been dropped off at their destination, and accompanied instead by a rescue party consisting of a lorry and a number of interested helpers armed with ropes and planks and various DIY bits and pieces, headed by a little man wearing nothing but a loincloth – and how I envied him! – who Mother said was a mechanic whom she had ‘found in the village’.
She seemed to be on excellent terms with the entire rescue party, and after the ‘mechanic’ had tried the gears and peered under the bonnet and conferred with Mother, she fished the cat-basket out from under the car (Shao-de growling and spitting the while) and asked the tonga-wallah to take it and me back to the station waiting-room, plus cats, picnic basket and as many pieces of luggage as we could cram into his tonga, in order to lighten the load on the car, which was being brought back to the village for the mechanic to have a good look at it. Mother meant to stay with the car and do any steering that might be necessary, but in the end, since the car refused to respond to anything, the rescue party managed to drag it up on to the lorry and get it back to the mechanic’s shop in the bazaar.
‘He says he thinks he might be able to do something about it,’ said Mother, who from long experience (she had been one of the first women in India to drive a car) had developed a strong belief in the powers of India’s wayside mechanics. She told me that she had telephoned her garage in Hyderabad, and the head mechanic had rung back to say that he was sure that it could only be the failure of a part known as a crown-wheel pinion. Since the car would not move without a replacement, they offered to put one on the night train, which stopped at our station at first light on the following morning – provided, of course, that there was someone available to do the job of fitting it in.
Mother had said confidently that there was. And how right she was. She herself had never even heard of such a thing as a crown-wheel pinion, but as soon as she mentioned it to the mechanic he had said cheerfully that he’d got one of those! He had apparently acquired it from a car that had been in a collision with a lorry some years ago and had been so badly damaged that the wreckage had been abandoned as worthless.
It had proved anything but worthless to him, for he had towed it back to the village and learned a lot about engines by studying the wreck of that one. Its crown-wheel pinion had been practically undamaged, and he had wrapped it in an oiled cloth to preserve it from rust, and added it to a magpie hoard of bits-and-pieces that he thought might ‘come in useful’ some day. This one’s day, he was convinced, had arrived, and he assured Mother that with a bit of tinkering he could make it fit.
Mother, after a good look at this unfamiliar bit of machinery for which her garage quoted a hefty figure from their spare-part catalogue, was not so sure. But feeling that she could always do with a spare, she told him to go ahead and try, and returned to the station waiting-room where the cats and I were sitting among our collective gubbins and trying to come to terms with the fact that we would have to spend the rest of the day and all the night here. At least I was. Shao-de was merely ‘lounging round and sufferin”. And making a lot of noise about it too. She didn’t approve of any of this, and I couldn’t blame her, for though the temperature of the little waiting-room, with its windows closed and shuttered to keep in some of the cool air of the past night, was a degree or two below the grilling, blazing heat of the platform outside, once you got used to its illusion of shadowy coolness, you realized that it must be registering well over a hundred degrees, though it was not yet midday. Only six hours since we had set out in the cool, yellow dawn of our fatal drive. And now we were stuck here until another dawn! That good Samaritan, the station-master, donated a bucket of lukewarm water with the suggestion that it would cool down the room if we splashed a cupful or two on the stone-tiled floor. And it did, though only temporarily, since it dried in seconds.
To Shao-de it was a life-saver. She spread herself out on the damp stone, paws outstretched and looking exactly like a doll-sized tigerskin, and not only abandoned her kittens, but refused to let any of them near her. I took off the domed top of their travel basket to give them more air, and they crawled out of it and tried to converge on their mother for a drink. But whenever one of them touched her she got up and moved away; and in the end they gave up, and copied her by spreading themselves out as flat as they could, so that the floor appeared to be covered with little white tigerskins. ‘If it gets any hotter than this,’ said Mother, ‘we shall lose the lot of them, and Shao-de as well – Oh dear!’ ‘And me too,’ I said. I had removed my dress and was wearing nothing but pants and a bra so that I could dip the dress into the water bucket (which was getting dangerously low) and use it as a sponge to damp myself all over, which was heaven for about ten seconds. After that I was dry again, and hotter than ever.
We were wondering how on earth we were going to last out until the sun went down, when we heard a car drive into the station yard, and heard someone calling out: ‘Mem-sahib! Mem-sahib!’
Mother shot out of the door, while I hastily put my dress on again. She was back after only about five minutes, breathless with excitement: ‘Now listen,’ she said, ‘that’s my car out there. He drove it here from the bazaar’ (roughly a quarter of a mile) ‘and he says he’s sure it won’t let me down. Now do we take a chance on his second-hand gadget not breaking down, and start off at once? Or would it be safer to wait until the other one gets here on the train tomorrow morning? I’m not going to cancel it because I don’t know how long his one will hold out, and we may need a spare. But the station-master says he could always forward it on to Bangalore. What do
you think?’
‘Chance it and leave at once!’ I said, reaching for the nearest piece of luggage. And we did. With the help of that wondrous mechanic, the station-master and assistant, and the tonga-wallah who was still around ‘just in case’, we got everything back into the car, the cats going in last. And having distributed largesse and shaken hands all round, we put up a short prayer and set off again in the blinding heat down the same shadeless, dusty stretch of road that we had driven along so gaily in the cool of the early morning.
Bad as the midday heat was, it was preferable to being shut up in that oven of a waiting-room, for the very fact that we were moving created a suggestion of a draught, and before we started we had rigged up a sort of tent around the cats, constructed out of towels that we kept damp, in the manner of kus-kus-tatties, so that the air blowing through it lowered the temperature quite considerably. So much so that Shao-de, who had refused to stay in the basket with her kittens and spread herself out along the back seat, changed her mind and actually got back among them for long enough to allow them to take a reasonable drink off her. I had to wet our improvised kus-kus-tatties at shorter and shorter intervals, because they dried with the speed of lightning in that searing heat, and our water supply began to run out.
I can’t remember passing any other traffic – motor-, bullock- or horse-drawn. Or any pedestrians either. But I suppose we must have done – unless the local population had enough sense to restrict its movements to the early morning and sundown – for I know that we drove through the occasional village where we replenished our water bottles and attracted the usual number of small children – the young of whatever race seem to be impervious to extremes of heat or cold. None of them had ever seen a Siamese cat before and they were enthralled by Shao-de and her kittens, asking in tones of awe, ‘Yea kis kism ka janwa hai?’ – ‘What kind of animal is that?’
It was a very long day, one of the longest I have ever spent. And every time we stopped we were scared to death that the car would not start again. But Providence and the genius of that mechanic never let us down and, though Mother eventually collected the parcel containing a brand new crown-wheel pinion, she never had to use it.
Chapter 25
As the road took us further south the traffic on it increased and there were more trees, mostly broomstick palms and not many of those. I took over the driving to let Mother get a bit of rest, and was relieved when she fell asleep for several hours. By the time she woke up the shadows had begun to lengthen and the heat had changed from intolerable to bearable. She consulted our road maps again and announced that we were never going to make it to Bangalore that day and must start looking out for a Dâk bungalow where we could spend the night.
This turned out to be easier said than done. We were so used to driving across and around the fertile and well-populated Punjab, where there always seemed to be a Dâk bungalow when needed, that we hadn’t realized that in this barren patch of wilderness such things as Dâk bungalows might be few and far between. But so it was. We asked hopefully whenever we came to a village, and the answer was always that there was sure to be one at this or that small town – ‘lakin bhoat dur hai’ – ‘but that is very far’. Which was not much help. ‘Oh, well, we must press on,’ said Mother. And we did. Until with the swiftness that one never quite gets used to in the East, the vast rose-red globe that had been tormenting us all day, its size now enormously increased by the dust in the air, stood for a moment on the horizon line before sinking below it in a matter of minutes. And suddenly it was dark and the sky was full of stars. And once again we were stranded in the middle of nowhere with the prospect of spending the night in a small car and in the company of nine cats.
We had stopped to watch the sun go down, which in the plains is a sight that I never grew tired of, and we waited to see the sky put on its usual dazzling ‘pantomime-transformation’ scene. All that lavish gold and red and green, like some immense fire-opal. And when the curtain came down and the show was over Mother reluctantly switched on the headlights, and instantly everything beyond their range was black, and she started up the engine again and drove off hopefully in search of a Dâk bungalow.
Apparently there wasn’t one in this particular strip of wilderness that included the borderlands of the Nizam’s dominions and Madras, which was part of British India. I can’t remember after all this time which one we were in now, but I do remember how hot the darkness was now that we had got used to it. I had been expecting the night air to be much cooler than the day, but it wasn’t, not all that cooler anyway. It was as if the earth had been inhaling the oven-heat of the sun all day and was now exhaling it into the darkness. We had still found no Dâk bungalow, or any sign of human habitation, when around eight o’clock that night we saw lights ahead. Too bright to be made by anything but electricity, and too small a patch to be a village. Nearing it we realized with rapture that it was actually a modern petrol station in the wilderness, complete with pumps and a small brightly illuminated office and forecourt.
Better still, as we drew up in front of it, there was a large, family-sized car standing in the forecourt, its very British-looking owner, who had obviously been paying his bill in the office, just about to leave. Mother stuck her head out and hailed him, and he came over to us looking more than slightly surprised at finding a couple of dusty, crumpled and exhausted Englishwomen in such a place at this hour of night. Mother asked if he could direct us to the nearest Dâk bungalow, and when he said there wasn’t one nearer than fifty miles, she said: ‘Oh, no –!’ in such a tone of despair that he asked her what on earth we were doing there, and on hearing a potted version of our saga, said we had better come back with him to his house for the night. It turned out that he knew Sandy, and was the local District Commissioner, or something of the sort, and he took Mother in his car and left me to follow in the Beetle. This was easy enough, for he left a trail of dust that could probably be seen for miles in daylight, and looked like the Biblical ‘pillar of fire’ in my headlights.
The house had probably been built in the early years of the previous century by some affluent member of the East India Company. It stood in an acre or two of what appeared to be totally barren and very stony ground, and depended on oil lamps for illumination, as we had done throughout Tonk State. The brilliant show of electricity that had impressed us at the petrol station did not extend to the house.
Our rescuer’s wife had only been waiting for the return of her husband to sit down to supper, and though plainly taken aback by the arrival of unexpected house-guests, she rose nobly to the occasion and insisted on us sharing their meal while a room was prepared for us by the servants. This, she explained with many apologies, would have to be on a covered section of the roof, because there were no other rooms available at present. Mother assured her that we were not fussy, for we had been facing the prospect of spending the night in or under the car, and a barra-durri on a rooftop would be luxury.
We had left the car under the porch, and since Shao-de and her kittens made no sound, we left them alone until we had finished a light supper – all we needed was sleep, not food! – and when the bearer came down to announce that was all was ‘te ah’, or Indian ‘ready’, we collected what little we would need for the night, and while Shao-de, who had abandoned the basket and been lying along the top of one of the suitcases, refused to move and was carried up by Mother, I followed with the kittens. It was only after climbing the first set of stairs and finding that the second set, which were much narrower and led up to the roof in a tight curve, were a bit difficult to negotiate with a large oval basket in my arms, that I put down the basket and decided to carry the kittens up two at a time in my hands. And picking up the first one I got a nasty shock. The tiny creature was dead.
Its minute and almost weightless body lay across my palm exactly as Shao-de had done on the stone floor of that railway waiting-room, like a miniature tigerskin rug, limp, boneless and completely devoid of any sign of life. I picked up another, and t
hat one too hung like a tiny scrap of lifeless fur from my hand. There was no reaction from any of them, and I can still remember the feel of those limp and apparently boneless scraps of fur as I carried them up and laid them out in a row on the flat stone roof. ‘I’m afraid they’re all dead,’ I told Mother. ‘All of them?’ she asked wretchedly. ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Oh well,’ said Mother, ‘it can’t be helped. We did our best…’ She lifted one of the limp little scraps of fur and stroked it with one finger before replacing it, and said that she could only be thankful that she hadn’t lost Shao-de as well, as she couldn’t have borne that.
A pair of nawar beds, both fitted with mosquito nets, had been brought up and put in a section of the roof between two massive chimney-stacks joined by a brick wall and roofed, in order to make an open-sided barra-durri from which the original owner and his family and friends could sit and watch the sun go down, or eat their supper by moonlight. We had also been provided with a properly fitted out Victorian washstand, complete with china soap dish, basin and all the doings including jugs and cans of water. A bathroom had been put at our disposal on the floor below, and we had been given kerosene lamps and matches, and since Mother and I never travelled without a torch apiece, we couldn’t have been better provided for. When Shao-de, ignoring that sad little row of white fur rugs and the plates of cat food, milk and water that had been provided for her, wriggled under the mosquito net and ensconced herself at the foot of Mother’s bed, I returned her babies to their basket, and pushed it under the washstand.
There was a rolled up chik spanning the front of the barra-durri, probably for a curtain that could be let down when holding purdah parties, and Mother and I rinsed out our sweat-soaked clothes and pinned them to it, knowing they would dry within minutes. Having done that, we said our prayers (we had much to be thankful for!), fell into our beds and were asleep in seconds. It had been a long, long day, and I hoped that we wouldn’t oversleep too badly.