THREE

I met other members of the Kipling family at dinner that evening. Lockwood presided at the head of the table. Ruddy and I were to his right and the women to his left. Lockwood’s leonine head and grey beard gave the impression of a far bigger man than belied his small and pudgy frame, now partly hidden by the table. The contrast between mother and daughter, who sat across me, could not be more striking. Alice Kipling, née Macdonald—as she immediately let me know by mentioning a letter she had received that day from her sister Louisa, Ruddy’s godmother, who was married to Stanley Baldwin, now a rising star in the Conservative Party and widely tipped as a future prime minister—was a handsome woman struggling to hold on to her vanishing youth. Of medium height, Alice must have once been as slender as her daughter, Trix. The passage of years had thickened her waist and forced her to wear long-sleeved dresses that hid the sagging flesh of her upper arms. Her dark-brown hair was showing the first signs of grey. The expertly applied makeup, with delicately pencilled eyebrows that drew attention to what was her best feature, her expressive grey eyes, could not disguise the ravages that years of exposure to the Indian sun had wrought on her looks. As with most Anglo-Indian women of her age, in spite of a desperate recourse to lotions and creams, the Indian sun had gradually but inexorably sucked out the moisture from her skin, leaving it sallow, with the beginning of creases around the eyes and the corners of the mouth, their arcs more deeply etched around the throat.

After that first remark, Alice took little part in the conversation during dinner. I was uncomfortable with her protracted silences and sought to draw her out but was answered with monosyllables. The one exception, when she came alive, was when I complimented her on the quality of the food. My praise was not the insincerity of a courteous guest but heartfelt appreciation of the delicious meal we were being served. The food was a welcome departure from the Anglo-Indian tradition, also followed in my own family, where roasts of chicken, pork or beef dominate the menu and heavy brown sauces are created by thickening a ready-made curry powder with flour and adding it to a base prepared by frying onions, garlic and ginger in ghee or animal fat. At the Kipling table, even the classic mulligatawny soup tasted better. As did the main course of Lancashire hotpot, the lamb casserole with sliced potatoes on top, here enhanced with chillies, cardamom, clove and peppercorn and accompanied by numerous side plates of chutneys, dried banana, Bombay duck, chopped onions and hard-boiled eggs.

‘The difference is the curry powder. It is freshly made, not the premixed stuff from tins, which most Anglo-Indian housewives believe is superior. Our khansama has strict instructions never to use ready-made stock and to always grind the spices fresh, each time,’ Alice informed me before she again withdrew into a brooding silence.

The family seemed accustomed to Alice’s shifting moods. Her self-chosen exile from our company did not seem to affect the flow of conversation at the table. Ruddy has described his mother as ‘all Celt and three parts fire’. What I experienced on that first evening with the family was the remaining part, the fire doused, the ashes wet. It was only in subsequent meetings that I saw Alice’s other side, vibrant and alive, animating any conversation with her ready wit and repartee. It was a delight to see her agile mind at play, although at other times the same mind could take on the texture of a sodden rag. Even then I wondered how the family, especially her husband, coped with her unpredictability. I must admit that I also found the extent of Alice’s self-regard trying. Ruddy’s mother certainly thought well of herself. There was no doubting Alice’s genuine love for poetry and music, and she did have a fine singing voice. But to believe yourself to be a gifted poet and someone who could well have been a professional singer on no more evidence than the strength of your passion for the two arts? As if the intensity of your feelings and the immediacy of your response is sufficient proof of your talent?

And Trix? Ruddy’s three-year-younger sister who had been back in India for a year now? Petite and slender, with surprisingly full breasts, she had just returned from her evening ride and changed into an off-white frock after her bath. Her oval face with the flawless peaches-and-cream skin, which some young English girls are blessed with, was still flushed from the exercise and the cold bath. Escaping from a bun coiled high at the back of her head, tendrils of damp, silken hair trailed behind an ear on to a long neck, begging for strings of pearl to encircle it. Content to listen to her father and brother as they agreed or jousted with each other, she rarely interjected her own opinion in their discussions. Yet she was fully present throughout the dinner conversation, her luminous grey eyes seeming to deepen or pale in colour according to every passing emotion that flitted across her open face.

It had taken only a few minutes to leave me smitten, and I tried to keep my eyes from flying in her direction and furtively drinking in her beauty, fearful that one of my hosts would notice.

During the day, Lockwood had had problems with the carpenters working to finish the extension to the museum. Normally a gentle, even-tempered man, reputed to be tolerant to a fault, he must have been provoked beyond his limits.

‘Doors don’t come up properly to the jambs. The windows are never straight. There is no finish in the roof. The floors and plinths are badly put down and timber is wastefully misused without any increase of strength. Native hinges and locks and ironwork, generally, are all abominations. There is no correct rabbeting, mortising, mitring, dovetailing or joinery of any sort and this disgusts me a good deal. The very keys on the railway lines seem as if they had been hammered in by a man who did not know which end of the hammer he ought to use. Everything here is kutcha, raw, unfinished, slack and wrongly jointed and built. Everything is just as an English workman would never turn it out.’

As someone who always saw two sides of every issue, Lockwood immediately sought to temper his outburst,

‘Can you understand it, Mr Robinson? These are the same people who excel in metalworking and woodcarving. I have collected some wonderful examples of works of native craftsmen for the museum. The attention to detail, the imagination and exquisite craftsmanship in these pieces are equal to that of any other people in the world.’

‘Perhaps because they value their crafted pieces more than the doors and windows of their houses? I have noticed that in a race that has so little concept of time, where unpunctuality is a norm, every religious ritual in a temple or mosque still begins at the dot of its prescribed time. Religious occasions are important, the others are not.’

‘Don’t make excuses for them, Kay,’ Ruddy joined in. ‘We will never understand the natives unless we become like them, think like them. Can an Englishman ever apprehend the inconceivable filth of mind the peoples of this country are brought up on right from their cradle? Realize the views—one-tenth of the views—they hold about women, and their absolute incapacity for seeking the truth as we understand it? People who cannot fathom that the opposite of truth is a lie, not another form of the same truth. People who cannot think in terms of either/or, cannot recognize contradictions in what they say. The gulf that lies between the two races in all things is immeasurable. If we are honest we will admit that all of us are prone to despise the native and, except in matters of trade, to have little or nothing in common with him. Now this is a wholly wrong attitude of mind but it’s one that a Briton who washes, and doesn’t take bribes, and who thinks of other things besides intrigue and seduction, most naturally falls into. When he does, it’s goodbye to his chances of attempting to understand the people of the land.’

‘Now, Ruddy,’ Lockwood, ever seeking to be balanced, said, ‘you are right about the native being different from an Englishman. But that is why we are here. To narrow the gulf between us by giving them the benefit of an English education. I see the result in my own school where we teach them to first see before they can draw, paint or sculpt. The cow and the bull are sacred to Hindus; why then are cattle forms so vaguely seen by the Hindu artist? Because there is too little observation of nature and the world. The native mind dwells in a cloud cuckoo land full of imaginary forms, a jungle never penetrated by the light of fact or reason. But it can be educated and thus changed, to be more like ours. The natives who go through our education system are now beginning to care for accurate statements of fact, whether in a literary, scientific or artistic sense.

‘Although I must say that I will regret the extinction of the winged horses and other creatures of fantasy in their art,’ Lockwood added.

The bearer, a strapping young Pathan in white livery, scarlet cummerbund and starched white turban tied Peshawar-style around a skullcap, with one end hanging down the back almost to the waist, silently cleared the table. The dessert was a delicious steamed ginger pudding, which I much prefer to the obligatory bread pudding served in most Anglo-Indian homes. Ruddy was not yet finished.

‘Pater has always been an unregenerate optimist,’ Ruddy addressed me. ‘First, when he says “native”, who does he mean? The Muslim who hates the Hindu, the Hindu who hates the Muslim, the Sikh who loathes both, or the semi-anglicized product of our Indian colleges who is hated by Sikh, Hindu and Muslim? Do you mean the Punjabi who will have nothing to do with the Bengali? The Maratha to whom the Punjabi’s tongue is as incomprehensible as Russian to me? The Parsi who controls the whole trade of Bombay, looks down on all other natives and ranges himself on all questions, as an Englishman? The Sindhi who is an outsider, the Bhil or Gond who is an aborigine, the Rajput who despises everything on God’s earth but himself? Which one of all the thousand conflicting tongues, races, nationalities and peoples between the Khyber Pass and Ceylon do you mean? There is no such thing as “Indians”. You may rest assured that if we didn’t hold the land, in six months it would be one big cockpit of conflicting principalities.

‘We spend our best men on the country like water, and if ever a foreign country was made better through the blood of martyrs, India is that country. How Englishmen have laboured and died for this country. When tens of thousands of peoples are panic-stricken with an invasion of cholera or dying of famine, Englishmen, Oxford men expensively educated, are sent to that district—to make arrangements for the cholera camp. It is the same for the prevention of disorder, or for famine relief—to pull the business through or die—whichever God wills. But will our sacrifices change the country? Will it change the people? No! With education, they may learn to mimic us to our faces but their heathen hearts will remain black. The way they treat the animals that work for them, the indifference and contempt they show for their women and lowest castes will remain, despite our best efforts. All our education will do is to make their talk drip with what they regard as English sentiment, while their practice remains one of casual, dry brutality.

‘Underneath our excellent administrative system, under the piles of reports and statistics, the thousands of troops, the doctors and the civilians, runs wholly untouched and unaffected the life of the people of the land. Yes, Kay, immediately outside our own English life, is the dark and crooked and fantastic and wicked and awe-inspiring life of the native. Our rule, so long as no one steals too flagrantly or murders too openly, affects it in no way whatever—only fences it around and prevents it from being disturbed.’

‘You are absolutely right about the niggers, Ruddy,’ Alice suddenly spoke up, and then pointing to the frown on Lockwood’s face she addressed me, ‘John doesn’t like that word. Wants me to call them “natives”. But there are plenty of people that call them niggers, Mr Robinson. John may be in raptures about their heathen mosques and monuments, but I for one rejoice that our people all live quite separately, well outside the city walls.’

With only my embarrassed smile and muttered ‘mmm’ as a response to her interjection, Alice again withdrew into a sulky silence.

Even as I was awed by Ruddy’s eloquence, I was not sure if I admired or deplored his self-confidence that slid so easily into cocksureness. As if he took for granted that any phrase or sentiment he may fling to his audience would be accepted as the mintage of genius.

After dinner, we bid the women goodnight and the men retired to the drawing room for a smoke. The conversation flagged as gastric juices and smoke from strong Burmese cheroots worked their magic on our innards, sending forth a wave of well-being that any talk more than asking for a match or the cutter to clip off the cigar end would have only diminished. Lockwood looked on benignly as I let my eyes wander over the furnishings of the room, obviously stamped by the mark of Lockwood’s taste. The conventional Ruskin-style decor of most Anglo-Indian houses, including our own in Allahabad, was embellished here with Persian and Kashmiri carpets on the wooden floor, bright Punjabi panelled design above the dado, a Rubens engraving and some black-framed nursery-rhyme illustrations by Walter Crane on the wall.

Lockwood’s head had begun to droop. Taking our leave from him, Ruddy walked me back to my room. It was the night before the Mohammedan festival of Eid. The garden rippled like sheets of white sand under the glare of moonlight. From the servant quarters came the sounds of women talking and laughing, interspersed with the cranky cries of children trying to keep awake, as preparations for the morrow’s feast were being made.

‘Ruddy, it strikes me that all your servants are Mohammedan,’ I said.

‘All Indians are deceitful and thievish but generally Muslim servants are much better than Hindu ones. There is no knowing what is in a Hindu’s heart, and he is hedged about with so many strange and often disgusting observances. Frankly both Pater and I prefer Muslims to Hindus.

‘They are a better lot, roughly speaking. But they have to be handled like children or young horses. Touchy as children, obstinate as men, patient as the high Gods themselves, vicious as Devils, but always loveable if you know how to take ’em.’

I told him about my conversation with Kadir Baksh.

Ruddy smiled fondly.

‘The bugger is twice as handy as the unkempt slatterns one employs in England and four times as cheerful.’

*

I did not welcome sleep that night as I am wont to do after a day such as this one and, in fact, fought its slow descent. I was loath to let it erase the images of Trix that were flitting across the screen of my mind, especially the last one, in which, standing close together at the door to the dining room, her huge grey eyes had looked up into mine as she bid me goodnight and invited me to join her and Ruddy for an early-morning ride before breakfast.

Dawn was breaking when we met at the stable next to the servant quarters. On my way out to the stable, I passed Lockwood, who was an early riser. Still in his pyjamas, his beard uncombed, he was reclining in a commodious planter’s chair in the veranda in front of his room. Intently watching the play of two lizards on the floor, he did not look up, although his greeting in response to mine was pleasant enough. He had kindly put his roan mare, which he seldom rode, at my disposal for the duration of my stay.

‘She is called “Dolly Bobs” because she bobs mightily,’ Ruddy informed me. ‘It isn’t shyness but simple pirouetting and ducking and curtseying all over the road. Not an atom of vice but simply feminine nervousness.’

Ruddy was in high spirits as we waited for Trix and the syce Dhunnu to saddle the horses.

‘God knows what his real name is,’ Ruddy said as he watched the syce work. ‘I insisted on calling him Dhunnu. That was the name of the man who looked after my fat white pony Dapple Grey when I was a small child and we lived in Bombay.’

In her khaki jodhpurs and white open-collared poplin shirt, her thick blonde hair tied in a ponytail and an American cowgirl hat tied with its string around her neck, Trix looked most fetching when she finally arrived. Bidding her brother and me ‘Good Morning!’ with a smile that burrowed straight into my heart, she went to her horse and began stroking its forehead.

‘And that Waler pony is Brownie, Trix’s very own horse,’ Ruddy said as we watched his sister stroke the pony’s forehead before preparing to mount. ‘He is the most perfect ladies’ horse I know—a mouth like silk and paces like an armchair. The maiden is charmed with his style and manners. You know, the sort of beast ladies delight in—neck arched, a tail-switching prancer who foams at the mouth and pretends to be jumping out of his skin at the least provocation but really is as quiet as a sheep.’

‘Oh, Ruddy!’ Trix laughed in mock exasperation. Then grabbing the bridle with one hand and with Dhunnu holding a stirrup, she climbed expertly into the saddle.

Astride our horses, we trotted through the vast Lawrence Gardens, which lay blissfully quiet in the first light of day, devoid of the noise and unending babel of loud voices that is a necessity of Indian nature. The only sound was the scurrying of the few remaining night animals who were heading for their resting places for the day. Right in front of me a jackal dashed to its lair at the sound of my horse’s feet. Breaking into a canter after exiting the park, we made our way to the Ravi River. Whenever I rode next to Ruddy I observed that he kept a watchful eye on his sister, as if any moment she might fall off the horse and sustain some terrible injury. To me, Trix seemed a very good horsewoman. She appeared fearless and had a pair of very good hands.

By the time we turned and cantered back to the house, the sun had begun its day’s climb, bathing the river in a shimmering, roseate light. Surrounded by that unearthly light, the sound of rushing wind in my ears, I began to have the same, hard-to-describe experience of my spirit unmooring itself from the body and beginning to float. For a few moments I felt the rhythm of the cantering horse under my thighs become part of the rhythm of my own body, synchronous with the pulsing of my blood. Carried by the aftermath of that fleeting feeling but without any conscious intention, I found myself spurring my horse to come abreast of Trix. As she turned her smiling face towards me, the colour of her cheeks merging into that of the river, her hair blowing about in the wind from under her hat jammed at the back of her head, I felt I had been blessed by a vision of beauty that would remain stamped on my soul for the rest of my life. As it has.

I had promised Lockwood at breakfast that I would visit his museum later in the day. He had generously taken time off from supervising the work of his wayward masons and carpenters to show me some of the recently acquired metal handicrafts, wood carvings and miniature paintings that were spread on a rectangular table like the one used by architectural draftsmen, waiting to be catalogued in his small, untidy office. The office was but a wooden cubicle partitioned off by a cedar door from the main gallery that was lined with Greco-Buddhist sculptures—which had once encrusted the brick walls of Buddhist stupas and now, identified and labelled, were the pride of the museum. I do not have an eye for art and artefacts crafted by man, although I flatter myself that I have compensated for this lack by developing a highly sensitive antenna for nature and her works. Yet, I could not fail to be moved by Lockwood’s enthusiasm for native handicrafts.

‘Isn’t this exquisite?’ he said as he picked up a little silver goblet, enamelled with turquoise-blue medallions on a rich sea-green ground.

‘Or this painting, Mr Robinson?’ he said, holding up a small watercolour in blues, reds, greens and yellows. It showed the Hindu god Krishna as a youth, playing the flute at the centre of a ring of dancing women in a bower, two cows in each corner of the painting placidly regarding the divine frolicking. The time was either dawn or dusk, the light about to leave, or arrive, on the low swooping hills in the background. To the right of the dancing circle there was a tree like none in nature, its branches laden with bunches of flowers never seen by a mortal eye.

‘One can see that it has been influenced by Persian art and yet it is clearly Indian in its expression. That is the strength of native craftsmen. Soft as wax to receive impressions from foreign sources, they absorb and fuse them into a harmonious unity which is the most striking characteristic of their work.’

Seeing me trying to figure out the painting’s half bush–half tree, he said, ‘Yes, the traditional craftsman seems to seek no help from the external world. It results in such graceful and richly coloured forms that are in harmony with the life of the people. Native art has a mysterious quality of organic fitness to the varying aspects of the country. At the Mayo School we encourage students to keep strictly within the native lines of construction, and keep traditional Indian forms as exemplary models.’

This was a very different Lockwood from the one at last night’s dinner table, bemoaning the native lack of observation of real forms. The other Lockwood returned when he saw me pick up and study a lewd drawing of Krishna on a horse ingeniously composed of nude women.

‘This is an example of misapplied ingenuity, abominable to the English eye. Trivialities of this nature scarcely bear description. Like many other native fancies, they are safe from serious criticism.’

He was much more enthusiastic about the large alto-relief representing the apotheosis of the Buddha, waiting to be catalogued. Twenty-five years later, I came across the sculpture again, this time in the opening pages of Kim, Ruddy’s best novel, where the Tibetan lama stops in front of the sculpted Buddha in open-mouthed wonder:

The Master was represented seated on a lotus the petals of which were so deeply undercut as to show almost detached. Round Him was an adoring hierarchy of kings, elders, and old-time Buddhas. Below, were lotus-covered waters with fishes and water-birds. Two butterfly-winged devas held a wreath over His head; above them another pair supported an umbrella surmounted by the jewelled headdress of the Bodhisat.

‘This is Indian art at its best, Mr Robinson,’ Lockwood said, ‘created by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch. Indian art is wonderful when it is pollinated with European forms. The hybrid Gandhara sculptures are the highest artistic achievement of Indian civilization.’

Lockwood, who had been so generous with his time and knowledge, insisted on seeing me off. At the end of the main gallery, in the entrance hall, I noticed a group of rustics from the countryside gathered around a breast-high wooden stand. A creation of the advanced students of Lahore’s School of Art, of which Lockwood was the principal, the exhibit represented, to quarter scale, a field with miniature men, women, bullocks and ploughs, modelled in clay and tinted in natural colours. Our country cousins seemed to regard the little figures as things altogether uncanny and wonderful, for they had been constructed with a most minute attention to detail, as well as with much artistic taste and freedom. The visitors regarded the figures in inquisitive silence, sensitively fascinated by the miniature animals. Presently a bolder spirit among them put out a finger and carefully touched one of the bullocks. Then, as the animal was evidently constructed of nothing more terrible than clay, plaster of Paris being naturally unknown to the villagers, the whole hand was drawn gently over its form. After an appreciative pat the adventurous one began a lengthy dissertation to the bystanders that neither Lockwood nor I could follow.

As I was taking leave of Lockwood we were joined by a young Englishwoman who had just entered the museum. She seemed on familiar terms with Lockwood, who introduced her as the niece of the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab.

‘Edith has come out to India for a six-month holiday, although I am making her work hard.’ He smiled warmly at the girl, who was no more than twenty.

‘She is very interested in learning about Indian ceramics and terracotta, somewhat of a speciality of mine.’

The girl was not especially pretty, her frame sturdy rather than slender, but her fresh colouring and youthful vitality lent her an aura of warm sexuality to which one reacted instinctively as a man.

‘And Uncle Lockwood is such a wonderful teacher!’ the girl gushed, looking at Lockwood, who was actually shorter than her.

Lockwood stroked his beard with every sign of gratification. Even his smile seemed to preen. The look he gave the girl before he quickly disengaged his eyes and turned to me was far from avuncular. Had I witnessed a crack in the Family Square? I wondered.