An Area of Darkness

  Outside, the snow-capped mountains ringed the lake, at whose centre stood Akbar’s fort of Hari Parbat; poplars marked the lake-town of Rainawari; and far away, beyond an open stretch of water, on the fresh green lower slopes of the mountains – as though the earth had been washed down through the ages to fill the crevices of rocks – were the Mogul Gardens, with their terraces, their straight lines, their central pavilions, their water-courses dropping from level to level down rippled concrete falls. The Mogul one could accept, and the Hindu. It was this English presence which, though the best known, from books and songs and those pale hands beside the Shalimar – not a stream as in my imagining, but the grandest of the gardens – it was this English presence which seemed hardest to accept, in this mountain-locked valley, this city of hookahs and samavars (so pronounced) where, in a dusty square on Residency Road, was the caravanserai for Tibetans with their long-legged boots, hats, plaited hair, their clothes as grimy-grey as their weather-beaten faces, men indistinguishable from women.

  But we did not take a houseboat. Their relics were still too movingly personal. Their romance was not mine, and it was impossible to separate them from their romance. I would have felt an intruder, as I felt in those district clubs where the billiard rooms were still hung with framed cartoons of the 1930s, where the libraries had gone derelict, the taste of a generation frozen, and where on the smoking-room walls were stained engravings, difficult to see through the reflections on the dusty glass, of tumultuous horsemen labelled ‘Afridis’ or ‘Baluchis’. Indians could walk among these relics with ease; the romance had always been partly theirs and now they had inherited it fully. I was not English or Indian; I was denied the victories of both.

  PART TWO

  5. A Doll’s House on the Dal Lake

  HOTEL LIWARD

  Prop: FLUSH SYSTEM M. S. Butt

  The sign came later, almost at the end of our stay. ‘I am honest man,’ the owner of the C-class houseboat had said, as we stood before the white bucket in one of the mildewed and tainted rooms of his rotting hulk. ‘And flush system, this is not honest.’ But Mr Butt, showing us his still small sheaf of recommendations in the sitting-room of the Liward Hotel, and pointing to the group of photographs on the pea-green walls, had said with a different emphasis, ‘Before flush.’ We looked at the laughing faces. At least a similar betrayal could not be ours. The sign, dispelling conjecture, was placed high on the pitched roof and lit by three bulbs, and could be seen even from Shankaracharya Hill.

  It seemed an unlikely amenity. The hotel stood in the lake, at one end of a plot of ground about eighty feet long by thirty wide. It was a rough two-storeyed structure with ochre concrete walls, green and chocolate woodwork, and a roof of unpainted corrugated iron. It had seven rooms altogether, one of which was the dining-room. It was in reality two buildings. One stood squarely in the angle of the plot, two walls flush with the water; it had two rooms up and two rooms down. A narrow wooden gallery went right around the top floor; around two sides of the lower floor, and hanging directly above the water, there was another gallery. The other building had one room down and two up, the second of which was a many-sided semi-circular wooden projection supported on wooden poles. A wooden staircase led to the corridor that linked the two buildings; and the whole structure was capped by a pitched corrugated-iron roof of complex angular design.

  It had a rough-and-ready air, which was supported by our first glimpse of Mr Butt, cautiously approaching the landing stage to welcome us. He wore the Kashmiri fur cap, an abbreviation of the Russian. His long-tailed Indian-style shirt hung out of his loose trousers and dangled below his brown jacket. This suggested unreliability; the thick frames of his spectacles suggested abstraction; and he held a hammer in one hand. Beside him was a very small man, bare-footed, with a dingy grey pullover tight above flapping white cotton trousers gathered in at the waist by a string. A touch of quaintness, something of the Shakespearean mechanic, was given him by his sagging woollen nightcap. So misleading can first impressions be: this was Aziz. And flush was not yet finally installed. Pipes and bowls had been laid, but cisterns were yet to be unwrapped.

  ‘One day,’ Aziz said in English. ‘Two days.’

  ‘I like flush,’ Mr Butt said.

  We read the recommendations. Two Americans had been exceedingly warm; an Indian lady had praised the hotel for providing the ‘secrecy’ needed by honeymoon couples.

  ‘Before flush,’ Mr Butt said.

  With this his English was virtually exhausted, and thereafter we dealt with him through Aziz.

  We bargained. Fear made me passionate; it also, I realized later, made me unnaturally convincing. My annoyance was real; when I turned to walk away I was really walking away; when I was prevailed upon to return – easy, since the boatman refused to ferry me back to the road – my fatigue was genuine. So we agreed. I was to take the room next to the semi-circular sitting-room, of which I was also to have exclusive use. And I needed a reading lamp.

  ‘Ten-twelve rupees, what is that?’ Aziz said.

  And, I would need a writing-table.

  He showed me a low stool.

  With my hands I sketched out my larger requirements.

  He showed me an old weathered table lying out on the lawn.

  ‘We paint,’ he said.

  I rocked the table with a finger.

  Aziz sketched out two timber braces and Mr Butt, understanding and smiling, lifted his hammer.

  ‘We fix,’ Aziz said.

  It was then that I felt they were playing and that I had become part of their play. We were in the middle of the lake. Beyond the alert kingfishers, the fantastic hoopoes pecking in the garden, beyond the reeds and willows and poplars, our view unbroken by houseboats, there were the snow-capped mountains. Before me a nightcapped man, hopping about restlessly, and at the end of the garden a new wooden shed, his home, unpainted and warm against the gloom of low-hanging willows. He was a man skilled in his own way with hammer and other implements, anxious to please, magically improvising, providing everything. The nightcap did not belong to a Shakespearean mechanic; it had a fairy-tale, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White-and-the-seven-dwarfs air.

  ‘You pay advance and you sign agreement for three months.’

  Even this did not break the spell. Mr Butt wrote no English. Aziz was illiterate. I had to make out my own receipt. I had to write and sign our agreement in the back of a large, serious-looking but erratically filled ledger which lay on a dusty shelf in the dining-room.

  ‘You write three months?’ Aziz asked.

  I hadn’t. I was playing safe. But how had he guessed?

  ‘You write three months.’

  The day before we were to move in we paid a surprise visit. Nothing appeared to have changed. Mr Butt waited at the landingstage, dressed as before and as seemingly abstracted. The table that was to have been painted and braced remained unpainted and unbraced on the lawn. There was no sign of a reading lamp. ‘Second coat,’ Aziz had said, placing his hand on the partition that divided bathroom from bedroom. But no second coat had been given, and the bright blue paint lay as thin and as scabrous on the new, knot-darkened wood. Dutifully, not saying a word, Mr Butt examined with us, stopping when we stopped, looking where we looked, as though he wasn’t sure what, in spite of his knowledge, he might find. The bathroom was as we had left it: the lavatory bowl in position, still in its gummed paper taping, the pipes laid, the cistern absent.

  ‘Finish,’ I said. ‘Finish. Give back deposit. We go. No stay here.’

  He made no reply and we went down the steps. Then across the garden, from the warm wooden shack, embowered in willows, Aziz came tripping, nightcapped and pullovered. Blue paint spotted his pullover – a new skill revealed – and there was a large spot on the tip of his nose. He was carrying, as if about to offer it to us, a lavatory cistern.

  ‘Two minutes,’ he said. ‘Three minutes. I fix.’

  One of Snow White’s own men in a woollen nightcap: it was impossible to ab
andon him.

  Three days later we moved in. And it had all been done. It was as if all the folk at the bottom of the garden had lent a hand with broom and brush and saw and hammer. The table had been massively braced and tremendously nailed together; it was covered with an already peeling skin of bright blue paint. A large bulb, fringed at the top with a small semi-spherical metal shade, was attached to a stunted flexible arm which rested on a chromium-plated disc and was linked by incalculable tangled yards of flex – I had specified length and manoeuvrability – to the electric point: this was the lamp. In the bathroom the lavatory cistern had been put in place. Aziz, like a magician, pulled the chain; and the flush flushed.

  ‘Mr Butt he say,’ Aziz said, when the waters subsided, ‘this is not his hotel. This is your hotel.’

  *

  There were others beside Aziz and Mr Butt. There was the sweeper boy in flopping garments of requisite filth. There was Ali Mohammed. He was a small man of about forty with a cadaverous face made still more so by ill-fitting dentures. His duty was to entice tourists to the hotel, and his official dress consisted of a striped blue Indian-style suit of loose trousers and lapel-less jacket, shoes, a Kashmiri fur cap and a silver watch and chain. So twice a day he came out of the hut at the bottom of the garden and, standing with his bicycle in the shikara, was paddled past the tailor’s one-roomed wooden shack, high and crooked above the water, past the poplars and the willows, past the houseboats, past Nehru Park, to the ghat and the lake boulevard, to cycle to the Tourist Reception Centre and stand in the shade of chenars outside the entrance, with the tonga-wallahs, houseboat-owners or their agents, below the hoarding with Mr Nehru’s portrait. And there was the khansamah, the cook. He was older than Aziz or Ali Mohammed, and more nobly built. He was a small man, but he was given height by the rightness of his proportions, his carriage, his long-tailed shirt and the loose trousers that tapered down to his well-made feet. He was a brooder. His regular features were tormented by nervousness and irritability. He often came out of the kitchen and stood for minutes on the veranda of the hut, gazing at the lake, his bare feet beating the floorboards.

  Our first meal was all ritual. The concrete floor of the dining-room had been spread with old matting; and on the table two small plastic buckets sprouted long-stemmed red, blue, green and yellow plastic daisies. ‘Mr Butt he buy,’ Aziz said. ‘Six rupees.’ He went out for the soup; and presently we saw him and Ali Mohammed, each holding a plate of soup, coming out of the hut and walking carefully, concentrating on the soup, down the garden path.

  ‘Hot box coming next week,’ Aziz said.

  ‘Hot box?’

  ‘Next week.’ His voice was low; he was like a sweet-tempered nurse humouring a spoilt and irascible infant. He took a napkin off his shoulder and flicked away tiny flies. ‘This is nothing. Get little hot, little flies dead. Big flies come chase little flies. Then mosquito come bite big flies and they go away.’

  And we believed him. He withdrew and stood outside below the projecting sitting-room; and almost immediately we heard him shouting to the kitchen or to some passing lake-dweller in a voice that was entirely altered. Through the windows at our back we had a view of reeds, mountains, snow and sky; before us from time to time we had a glimpse of Aziz’s night-capped head as he peered through the as yet glassless window-frame. We were in the middle of the unknown, but on our little island we were in good hands; we were being looked after; no harm could come to us; and with every dish that came out of the hut at the end of the garden our sense of security grew.

  Aziz, his delight matching ours, shouted for the khansamah. It seemed an impertinent thing to do. A grumble, a silence, a delay showed that it was so taken. When at last the khansamah appeared he was without his apron; he was nervous and bashful. What would we like for dinner? What would we like for dinner? ‘You want scones for tea? And pudding, what you want for pudding? Tipsy pudding? Trifle? Apple tart?’

  Snow White had gone, but her imparted skills remained.

  *

  It was only early spring, and on some mornings there was fresh snow on the mountains. The lake was cold and clear; you could see the fish feeding like land animals on the weeds and on the lake bed, and when the sun came out every fish cast a shadow. It could be hot then, with the sun out, and woollen clothes were uncomfortable. But heat presently led to rain, and then the temperature dropped sharply. The clouds fell low over the mountains, sometimes in a level bank, sometimes shredding far into the valleys. The temple at the top of Shankaracharya Hill, one thousand feet above us, was hidden; we would think of the lonely brahmin up there, with his woollen cap and his small charcoal brazier below his pinky-brown blanket. When the wind blew across the lake the young reeds swayed; on the rippled water reflections were abolished; the magenta discs of the lotus curled upwards; and all the craft on the lake made for shelter. Some pulled in at the hotel landing-stage; occasionally their occupants went to the hut to get charcoal for their hookahs or for the mud-lined wicker braziers which they kept below their blankets. And immediately after rain the lake was as glassy as could be.

  The hotel stood on one of the main shikara lanes, the silent highways of the lake. The tourist season had not properly begun and about us there still flowed only the life of the lake. In the morning the flotilla of grass-laden shikaras passed, paddled by women sitting cross-legged at the stern, almost level with the water. The marketplace shifted, according to custom, from day to day. Now it was directly in front of the hotel, beyond the lotus patch; now it was farther down the lane, beside the old boat that was the pettiest of petty lake shops. Often it seemed that buyer and seller would come to blows; but the threatening gestures, the raised voices, the paddling away, abuse hurled over the shoulder, the turning back, abuse continuing, all this was only the lake method of bargaining. All day the traffic continued. The cheese man, priest-like in white, sat before white conical mounds of cheese and rang his bell, he and his cheese sheltered by an awning, his paddler exposed at the stern. The milk-lady was fearfully jewelled; silver earrings hung from her distended lobes like keys from a key-ring. The confectioner’s goods were contained in a single red box. The ‘Bread Bun & Butter’ man called every day at the hotel; on his shikara board N was written back to front. ‘Beau-ti-ful! Mar-vellous! Lover-ly!’ This was the cry of Bulbul, the flower-seller. His roses sweetened our room for a week; his sweet-peas collapsed the day they were bought. He suggested salt; his sweet-peas collapsed again; we quarrelled. But his shikara continued to be a moving bank of bewitching colour in the early mornings, until the season was advanced and he left us to work the more profitable A-class houseboats on Nagin Lake. The police shikara passed often, the sergeant paddled by constables. In the post office shikara, painted red, the clerk sat cross-legged at a low desk, selling stamps, cancelling letters and ringing his bell. Every tradesman had his paddler; and the paddler might be a child of seven or eight. It did not look especially cruel. Here children were, as they have until recently been elsewhere, miniature adults in dress, skills and appearance. Late at night we would hear them singing to keep their spirits up as they paddled home.

  So quickly we discovered that in spite of its unkempt lushness, its tottering buildings and the makeshift instincts of its inhabitants, the lake was charted and regulated; that there were divisions of labour as on land; and that divisions of water space were to be recognized even if marked by no more than a bent and sagging length of wire. There were men of power, with areas of influence; there were regional elected courts. And such regulations were necessary because the lake was full of people and the lake was rich. It provided for all. It provided weeds and mud for vegetable plots. A boy twirled his bent pole in the water, lifted, and he had a bundle of rich, dripping lake weed. It provided fodder for animals. It provided reeds for thatching. It provided fish, so numerous in the clear water that they could be seen just below the steps of the busy ghat. On some days the lake was dotted with fishermen who seemed to be walking on water: they stood erect an
d still on the edge of their barely moving shikaras, their tridents raised, their eyes as sharp as those of the kingfishers on the willows.

  *

  The hot box, promised by Aziz, came. It was a large wooden crate, grey with age and exposure. It occupied one corner of the dining-room, standing on its end at a slight angle on the uneven concrete floor. It was lined on the inside with the flattened metal of various tins, one side was hinged to make a door, and it was fitted with shelves. At mealtimes a charcoal brazier stood at the bottom. So the soup no longer came in steaming plates from the kitchen; and every morning we found Ali Mohammed squatting before the brazier, his back to us, utterly absorbed, turning over slices of bread with his fingers. A dedicated toastmaker he appeared, but he was in reality listening to the fifteen-minute programme of Kashmiri devotional songs that followed the news in English on Radio Kashmir. In the curve of his back there could be sensed a small but distinct anxiety: the toast might be required too soon, we might turn to another station, or he might be called away to other duties. Already at this time he was in his official suit; and I doubt whether, if otherwise dressed, he would have turned abruptly from his toast one morning and asked, ‘You want see Kashmiri dancing girl?’ His top dentures projected in a sad attempt at a smile. ‘I bring here.’