Durbar Read Free Page B

in half-built houses on plots that had been marked out in the fields. My parents moved constantly from one army cantonment to another and I never got to thinking of the houses in those army bases as home. They always had about them the atmosphere of a transit camp. So 5 Jantar Mantar Road with its Persian carpets and hunting trophies on the walls, its carefully decorated bedrooms and its manicured gardens seemed to my childhood mind like a sanctuary. I remember the house on Jantar Mantar Road as vast, filled with more rooms than we could count and bursting with cousins and aunts and uncles. My mother used to be allotted the rooms she had lived in before she was married. They opened on to a red sandstone courtyard on one side and a garden with colourful swings on the other. Sadly, we never stayed there for long and seemed always to be on the verge of leaving for yet another army cantonment to move into yet another empty, charmless house.
    The India of my childhood seemed full of people rebuilding disrupted lives in a country where every commodity seemed always to be in short supply. I can remember grown-ups complaining constantly about shortages. Even such ordinary things as sugar, milk and bread seemed every other day to become unavailable. Sometimes it would be kerosene and petrol thatwould be rationed. Everything about life in India had a rundown, makeshift quality about it as if life itself had seen better days, but we saw this as an acceptable price to pay for Independence. If we blamed anyone for India being such a shabby sort of place in which even rich people lived in genteel poverty, we blamed it on ‘colonization’. We were building a new India, after all, and when new things are built there is about them an unfinished quality. In the army messes and the musty old British clubs conversations were often about ‘falling standards of cleanliness and discipline’. Men in immaculately pressed evening clothes lamented, in clipped British accents, about how things had declined after the British left. The circles in which my parents moved blamed this on our new socialist rulers, though nobody blamed the prime minister.
    When I was eight I was sent off with my sister to a boarding school that had about it that same new and unfinished feel.
    Welham Girls’ High School was six months old when my sister and I became its ninety-ninth and hundredth students. It did not have proper classrooms or dormitories but functioned languidly out of two old-fashioned houses with tin roofs and long verandas. The houses, we heard, had once belonged to a nawab. When I finished school two years too early at the age of fourteen (because they put me by mistake in the wrong class), India was still a dilapidated, unsure sort of place but it had about it the innocence of a country that believed in its dream of democracy and freedom.
    As an army child it was the war with China in 1962 that I remember as the moment when things began to change. I turned twelve that year and was not capable of fully understanding how the Chinese had defeated us, but I remember Krishna Menon, the defence minister, and General Kaul, the Army Chief, being talked of as the villains of the war. Nobody blamed Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru but what I remember repeated in conversations about the war was ‘that scoundrel Menon was making coffee percolators in defence factories’. It made a deep impression on my twelve-year-old mind because it seemed so extraordinary that a factory meant to make guns should be making coffee percolators instead.
    By the time of the next war, with Pakistan in 1965, I was in St Bede’s College in Simla which was so removed from politics and current events that even when the sirens went off signalling an air raid we were never sure what was happening. We knew that we were at war with Pakistan and that Simla, as the headquarters of the Western Command, could be a target butwe never really understood what the war was about. A Kashmiri friend