The crash of the shot in that confined space was incredibly loud, and though the bullet hit it between the eyes, the creature’s reflexes were still enough to make it rush forward and collapse just inside the mouth of the cave, where Mike gave one more shot just to be on the safe side. It was as well that it lurched forward, for otherwise I don’t believe we should ever have got it out of that noisome cave. Certainly none of the villagers would have faced crawling inside in order to drag out the corpse. But as it was, it was easy enough to put a rope round its neck and haul it out and along that stretch of high bank until we reached a shelving beach once more.
The creature was not as large as it had looked when alive, but it was a fair size all the same, and sure enough, when its stomach was cut open that evening (after the skin had been removed and rubbed with salt, and rolled up in a piece of sacking ready to be dispatched to the Cawnpore tanneries) it was found to contain the forearm of its last victim, together with several small and unbroken glass bracelets. These and the bone, we learned later, were, together with a good many other grisly relics, collected and burned as the ritual demands, so that the ashes of the deceased could be consigned to the river.
Kashmera found the whole episode enthralling. He said that in all his years as a shikari, and the many times he had accompanied Cleveland-Sahib on his shooting trips down the Ganges, he had only once before come across a mugger’s cave. And that had only been because a particularly heavy monsoon had brought down great chunks of bank and exposed it. And never before had he heard of anyone shooting a mugger in its lair. I imagine he lived on that story for the rest of his life.
I can’t remember whether it was after this or before it that we camped for two days in a grove of silk-cotton trees near a little village called Puth, in the hope, which proved a vain one, of seeing butterflies. This was because just once in all their Ganges trips, my parents and their party had tied up there and found that a particular creeper that grew there was in full bloom. Tacklow said he was not aware of having seen it before (he was no botanist!) but that it had a small and rather undistinguished white flower with a strong and very sweet scent, and that it climbed all over the surrounding bushes, almost smothering them, and was smothered in turn by hundreds of thousands of butterflies. Not just Monarchs, which have a habit of swarming in that manner, but butterflies of every size, kind and description, drawn by the heavy scent and gorging themselves on the honey. He knew a lot about butterflies and had once collected them. But this was the only time he had ever seen them in such numbers, and so hypnotized by the scent and drugged by honey that they made no attempt to avoid the humans who stared at them and put out a finger to touch them, or the birds which gorged on them.
The villagers had told him that this always happened once every year, during the flowering time of the creeper, but that one never knew when it would be. And Tacklow told me that ever afterwards they had tried to arrange to visit Puth at the time the creeper would be in flower, but had never managed to get it right again. Either they were far too early, or just too late! And since the men all had pressing work awaiting them in their respective offices when the all-too-short holidays were over, and could not loaf down the Ganges like we were doing, there had never been any question of staying on for a few days in the hope of seeing a creeper come into flower. Yet every year after the ‘butterfly year’, Tacklow had hoped against hope to hit the right date again, until a dire year when they found that some of the villagers had ploughed up an acre or so of the ground where the creeper had grown and sown it with Indian corn.
Mother had taken a snapshot of the butterflies, but nothing had come out but a blur that might have been anything — or nothing. Many years later, hundreds of miles to the north-west of the great subcontinent, when Bets and I saw the same sort of sight — thousands of Monarch butterflies (we used to call them ‘potato butterflies’ because they could always be found fluttering about the potato creeper in our garden in Simla) smothering the lantana bushes on the banks of the Chenab river, within sight of the Kashmir snows, and I took at least half-a-dozen colour transparencies of that fantastic sight, the result was the same. A blur of colour that could have been anything. For even though by then I had a far more sophisticated camera with a much better lens, it had not been quick enough to freeze or make sense of the vast cloud of fluttery, shimmery butterfly wings.
If Tacklow hadn’t promised to be back in Tonk by a certain date I think he might have stayed another day or two hoping for the creepers to flower. But he could not wait any longer, and nor could he identify that particular creeper among the many that grew along the river-bank and in the open country behind it — or on the rough ground that had once been a cornfield.
The only large town that we passed on that trip was Benares. It is one of the most sacred towns in all India and, seen from the river, one of the oldest and most beautiful. I don’t know where the name ‘Benares’ came from, probably from some fifteenth- or sixteenth-century British adventurer’s mispronunciation of ‘Varenese’ which was its old name, and is again now. Holy men of all persuasions flock there, as do men and women who wish to obtain merit or petition the Gods for a particular favour — a male child, or a cure for sickness. And very many — those who can afford it — come there to die, for the most flourishing industry of the town is death. Ceaselessly, by day and night, the smoke from the funeral pyres rises like incense in some medieval cathedral as the bodies of the dead who have come there or been brought there to die are burned among the chattris (umbrellas) near the river’s edge, so that when the fires die down the ashes will be consigned to Mother Gunga who will carry them to the sea.
The air can never be free of smoke, which draws a thin, gauzy veil over the high, cliff-like wall of ancient domes and towers and temples, peepul trees and palaces, that rises above it; and the long flights of stone steps that lead down to the burning-ghats at the water’s edge are, from sunrise to sunset, as crowded as Jacob’s Ladder with pilgrims or mourners ascending or descending.
I am told that the time to see Benares is in very early morning, when the pyres of the previous day have burned out and the next ones have yet to be built and lit, and the wide sweep of those ancient stone stairs can be seen, uncluttered by the bee-swarms of humanity. Well, we couldn’t break camp in time to reach it by sunrise, and it was nearly midday by the time the current took us slowly down past that beautiful frieze of domes and temple-tops and the lovely white marble palace of His Highness the Maharajah of Benares. By that time humanity had taken over with a vengeance, and not only the steps but the river for at least thirty feet out from the shore was black with people bathing, and uncomfortably full of boats of every size and shape, of which ours was only one among many.
The left bank, opposite the town is — or was in those days — surprisingly empty. Apart from a scattering of reed-built huts and a few more solid buildings that looked as if they had been started but left unfinished, it seemed to have been ignored by the housing trade. The sandy shallows on that side, and much of the surface of the river, were full of strings of faded marigold flowers which are by tradition used to adorn the dead as well as to garland honoured guests and holy men, and other VIPs. Odd, when they have been used for so many centuries as funeral flowers.
I remember regretting yet again that I hadn’t had the sense to take a paintbox with me. But my admiration for the spectacular town was ruined by the horrid discovery that what I had taken to be just another, though more venturesome swimmer, dog-paddling down on the current, was in fact a partially burned corpse. And that the lifelike movements that had given it an illusion of keeping itself afloat were caused by scavenging fish and river-turtles tugging at it as it was carried down-stream.
It was not that I hadn’t known about such things, because I had since my early years of childhood. The holy books of Hinduism direct that bodies should be burned and their ashes consigned to the nearest river, preferably the Ganges. But wood is expensive, and since very many of the poor cannot possib
ly afford the expense of priests and a pyre, it is considered permissible — particularly in times of war, plague or famine, when there are many corpses to be disposed of — to place a live coal in the mouth of the deceased before consigning it to the river. This one had probably been slipped into the water on the quiet from somewhere a longish way up-stream, and left to the mercy of the current. It should not have horrified me, but it did. And though it had never occurred to me that I might one day attempt to write a book, the seeds of a novelist, to whom all is grist to the mill, must have been there. Because years later, when I was at work on my first India novel, Shadow of the Moon, I remembered that corpse and described it going down-river, tugged this way and that by scavenging fish and turtles, so that it looked alive.
Throughout that lovely journey Mike had behaved like an angel. He was enjoying every minute, and it showed. Tacklow had been asked by the old Nawab if he would please shoot a tiger that had been taking too heavy a toll of the herds of the villagers of Pirawa, a small hamlet near the border of his state. He had also suggested that we should use the occasion to lay on a camp for the Christmas holiday and ask anyone we wished to join it. His heir and some of his relations had expressed a wish to be present, and he himself would give the orders to lay on a camp for the occasion, and see to all the details of the shoot. Tacklow had accepted with pleasure, and we had already asked my brother Bill and one of his friends, Campbell Harris. And now Mike, having heard of it, badgered my parents to let him come too, on the grounds that he had never been on a tiger shoot before — and might never get such an opportunity again, since tiger shoots were not in everyone’s gift, and were apt to be reserved for the senior ranks of the ‘Heaven-born’ or visiting bigwigs and brass-hats.
I don’t think Tacklow thought much of the idea, since Mike and I had been living in each other’s pockets for a good many weeks on end now; what with the Nageem Bagh Navy, the NBN reunion and Mike’s twenty-first birthday celebration in Peshawar, our stay at Lahore and then in Delhi, followed by this Ganges trip, Tacklow thought it was high time we took a break from each other’s company. However, it became impossible to refuse, and after all, it only meant another ten days at most. Mike was wildly excited at the prospect, and could talk of nothing else during our final days on the river. The whole trip had been an enormous success — and then, on the day that we were due to reach Narora, where our trip ended, Mike sprained his ankle.
I don’t remember how he managed to do it. Presumably by putting his foot into some old rat-hole that had been enlarged by a snake or a mongoose for a temporary home. All I do remember is that while the tents were being set up at our last-but-one campsite, Tacklow, Colonel Henslow and Mike had gone off to shoot partridge, or anything else that was suitable for the pot, and Bets, Mother and I had not accompanied them. We had stayed on the campsite to watch the birds coming home to roost in the trees overhead, and to admire what looked like being a really spectacular sunset; and saw Mike, looking pale grey under his tan, hopping painfully to the camp with one arm round Tacklow and the other round Colonel Henslow.
Mother, who had attended first aid classes throughout the Great War years and never travelled anywhere without a first aid box, soaked a roll of bandages in cold water and bandaged up the swollen ankle as well as she knew how, but could not commit herself as to whether it was only sprained and not broken. Mike was obviously in great pain and the sooner we got him to a doctor the better. That, however, was easier said than done. As far as we knew there was not a qualified doctor within miles. But Kashmera assured us that there was a skilful dai (nurse) at Narora, and if we left immediately after breakfast next morning, we could reach Narora by mid-morning. If she proved to be useless — which he refused to believe — we could get the Sahib to the railway station and on to the first train to Delhi, as the next best thing. He would send a runner immediately to Narora to enlist the dai’s services.
Mike had a nasty night but managed to drown the pain in a good deal of brandy, with the result that he had a hangover next morning to provide a counter-irritant to the ankle. We left Mahdoo and Kadera and the rest of the second boat’s crew to strike camp and follow us, and left for Narora as early as we could, taking only Kashmera and two crew men.
This hasty voyage on the final day of our journey was a sad anticlimax. We had meant to take it slowly, savouring every last precious minute of it, because all of us knew that this was something that we were never likely to do again. Not ‘us Kayes’, anyway. I suppose Mike could, if he had really felt like it, have repeated the trip; though not with people like my parents and Kashmera, who knew and loved every last curve and bend of that fabled river, its shoals and shifts and sandbanks, the high bluffs and the lantana and pampas grass and the occasional groups of trees, mango and silk-cotton, neem and Dâk trees, and the grey-greens of casuarina and the tall broomstick palms.
As it was, we took it as fast as we could, keeping to the main current and not bothering, when we rounded an outflung arm of land, to look out for the grey shape of a mugger or a garial basking in the sun near the water’s edge. In places where the current slowed, Kashmera and two boatmen would man the two huge, clumsy wooden oars, and hurry us along. And when we reached Narora, the dai was waiting, and so were four coolies from the canal-works with a stretcher who under the dai’s orders, carried Mike up to the nearest Canal-bungalow — the one that we used to stay in when Bets and I were children and paid our annual visit to Narora.
The dai turned out to be an ancient, witch-like old village woman, grey-haired and wizened, with bony, wrinkled hands, and wearing a not over-clean sari which she kept on twitching into place in order to hide her face, whenever it fell away — which it did every other minute. Mike took a dislike to her on sight and began by saying he wasn’t going to let the old hag touch him, and that she probably had at least six diseases which he could catch if she did. There followed an exhausting argument, which in the end I won, though not until I had become so exasperated with him that I would have enjoyed slapping him. He gave in eventually, and sulkily allowed the old creature to have him transferred from the hut to a mattress that was laid on the ground. Having got him there, she squatted down beside him, very carefully removed the bandages and felt his ankle with the tips of her long, bony fingers, announcing after a moment or two that the Sahib had only sprained his ankle and the bone was not broken, and she could put that right at once. Which, believe it or not, she did. Mike was fascinated. He hadn’t come across the ancient Indian skill of massage before, but he swore the old lady had drawn out the pain with her fingers and got all the wrenched muscles straightened out again.
She told him he must rest it as much as possible for a week or two, but otherwise he was OK, and she advised against going off to catch a train to Delhi for the next couple of days. So Mike stayed in the Canal-bungalow, while the rest of us camped as usual in tents set up in a grove of trees above the canal-works on the banks of the river, where it widens out and slows because it is held back by a weir, and by the great sluice-gates controlling the water that flows into the Ganges Canal.
It was lovely to be back in Narora again, even though our friends the Perrins were no longer there. But it had been a mistake to let Mike sleep alone in the Canal-bungalow, with only his bearer and a chowkidar who was employed by the Canal Company to keep an eye on him. He was cheerful enough while we were all there with him, and after a comparatively long spell of sleeping under canvas on camp-beds, I think we all rather envied him in his more spacious and civilized bedroom in the Canal-bungalow. But once we had said our goodnights and left him, he found that even with his own bedding the regulation narwar bed provided by the Company was not all that comfortable and that he could not sleep — not even after counting flocks of sheep. Finally he gave up the attempt and stood himself another slug or two of brandy, which proved far more effective than the sheep. So much so that he ended up by finishing the bottle and sending his bearer down to his tent to fetch another.
I knew very well
that Mike wasn’t an alcoholic, or even on the way to becoming one, for he hadn’t drunk more than two regulation ‘sundowners’ every evening, and one, or at the most two, chota-pegs — small whiskies and soda — between dinner and going to bed, during the entire trip. I think it was a combination of a lot of petty things — sheer fury at being confined to bed with a still swollen ankle, finding, when he could not sleep, that he had no one to talk to, and general frustration because a narwar is uncomfortable to sleep on unless you are used to it, aggravated by being made to stay still, or told that he couldn’t do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it; plus the disappointment that a trip that had been so much fun, and such an enormous success, should be spoiled like this at the very last moment, and that he might even have to spend another day — even two — supine on this wretched narwar while the rest of the party carried out the prearranged programme for the final day in Narora: fishing for chilwa on the weir, and for maseer, the great fighting fish that are the salmon of India’s rivers, in the mile-wide waters above the Canal head.
There was also the fact that he was in pain, and that Mother’s first aid box contained neither painkillers nor sleeping-pills, and that all we carried in the way of drugs was brandy and a few aspirin. Whatever the cause, Mike consoled himself by getting beautifully tight and waking up in a filthy temper and with the hangover of a lifetime. What he needed was loads of sympathy and a couple of prairie oysters and I was in no condition to offer either. Because the one thing I had no idea how to deal with, and felt that I could not and would not cope with, was a drunk. And I, too, was feeling on edge and far from calm and controlled, for after all, this was to have been the day on which I decided my future, and presumably Mike’s. Well, I suppose you could say that at least I did that, because we ended up having one hell of a row.