A Dog's Life (15 page)

I had noticed on entering the restaurant a tall woman with obviously dyed black hair who was swathed in a gaudy yellow and green evening dress. ‘Are you by chance from England?’ she enquired, in a very posh Kensington accent. I answered yes. ‘From London?’ Yes, again. ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling mysteriously.

It transpired that there were five other English people staying at the hotel, and two of them were in the dining room. I suddenly heard ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’ being played on an upright piano behind me. I turned round in my chair and saw that the pianist was the gaudily dressed woman I had just spoken to. She then gave a hearty rendition of ‘I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts’. ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ came next. The two elderly Englishwomen opposite me were trying desperately to stifle their giggles, and so was I. The English music hall theme once exhausted, the pianist plunged into ‘Santa Lucia’ and ‘Over the Rainbow’. The most enthusiastic member of her audience was a tiny old woman, sitting in state at the end of the room and beaming with pleasure. The waiters treated her with special attentiveness.

There were two hot water bottles in my bed and a coal fire, lit by a maid, was burning. I had to remind myself that the year was 1994, and that I was in India, not some chilly English suburb. My bedtime reading, with a glass of Indian brandy to hand, was the notes I had overlooked earlier:

About salads, all uncooked vegetables are washed thoroughly in ‘pinki-pani’, or potassium permanganate (the stuff you gargle with when you have a sore throat) before being served. We have been doing this also since 1939.

That particular note made the idea of ordering salad instantly resistible.

The next note exhorted:

SEND IT TO KAN-CHI

If you need a sock darned, a button sewn on, or a stitch put in a seam, please send the article for repair to Kan-Chi through your room maid. Kan-Chi sews for love. Her service is free.

There was a final note to study:

WINDERMERE [sic] TEA. Served by the fire, in the sitting-room of Windamere Hotel, since 1939. Remembered by guests as ‘The Champagne of Teas’.

I began to realize 1939 was a key year in the Windamere’s history.

I rose early the following morning, had a warmish shower, and went to the dining room for breakfast. I told the Nepalese waiter that I wanted very weak Darjeeling tea without milk or sugar, and I ordered scrambled eggs. I thought I was safe with scrambled eggs, but I was wrong. The tea was fine, but the eggs were grey, their greyness emphasized by the dollop of mashed potato that came with them. I remembered powdered egg from my childhood in wartime, and wondered if the chef was still using the supply the hotel had purchased in – could it be? – 1939.

I wandered about the town, taking in some long-in-the-tooth American disciples of Hare Krishna, passing the NU LADEE beauty parlour, and a little cinema that was showing FILTHY DELIGHT, with the unnecessary caution ‘For Adults Only’. I found a bookshop that contained every book P. G. Wodehouse had written – which seemed appropriate, since the great chronicler of English idiocy might have invented the Windamere. I visited a tea plantation, and bought various kinds of Darjeeling and Sikkim tea. The saddest sight was of a pair of abandoned ponies – too old and frail now to be of use. One of them followed me some of the way up Observatory Hill, until he was scared off by a troop of excited monkeys. Every litter bin on the hill had a message from the Darjeeling Council printed on it, my favourite being ALLOW US TO KEEP YOU SMILE. On my way to the zoo – where wonderfully beautiful Siberian and Indian tigers were kept in far too confined a space – I paused before the HOT AND STIMULATING CAFE, which specialized in tea and instant coffee (produced with Science, and probably tastier than the kind made with Art).

I was in Darjeeling, courtesy of the British Council, to talk to the teachers and students at Loreto College. I was immediately charmed by the principal, Reverend Mother Damien O’Donoghue, not least because she spoke about Shakespeare, Keats, Dickens and Jane Austen with luminous enthusiasm. It was clear that the staff and pupils respected and loved her. I spent two days at the college, and was impressed by the quality and intelligence of the questions I was asked. Of the teachers, I best remember a large man – the Nepalese and Sikkim are small in stature – whose eyes disappeared into his head whenever he spoke. I was so intrigued by this ocular vanishing trick that I scarcely heard what he was saying.

Mitalee joined me to savour the delights of Windamere cuisine: a cream of potato and onion soup, straight from the tin or packet, thick with monosodium glutamate; roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, potatoes and carrots, and a curry with pork and vegetables. Crème caramel was the dessert. Mitalee, being Hindu, refused the beef and I resisted the Yorkshire pudding, which resembled a dry biscuit. There was a power cut during the meal – the pianist played gamely on, by candlelight – so I escorted Mitalee to the New Elgin Hotel, and I, in turn, was guided back to the Windamere by a tiny man with a torch.

Guests can take afternoon tea in the sitting room, dominated by a picture of the youthful Elizabeth II, or in Daisy’s Music Room. It was in the latter that I drank the ‘Champagne of Teas’ (not quite as terrible as the coffee made with Art) and then had a Bloody Mary. The pianist, playing on a slightly less tinny upright, entertained me with standards by Cole Porter, Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Noeël Coward. As she tickled the ivories with her customary panache, I flicked through some of the many photograph albums on a side table. They dated back to 1912 – the year the chain-action water closets were installed. Daisy was the daughter of the original owner of Windamere, and can be seen kitted out for tennis or on a croquet lawn with her parents. The photos tell the story of the Raj in miniature – men in linen suits or in the uniform of their regiment; a whole ensemble of bored-looking women, their pearls on prominent display, daring the camera to conceal their boredom. Everybody dressed for dinner, and everyone got blotto (the
mot juste
) at Christmas, to judge by the expressions captured for posterity.

In 1994, the Windamere was ruled over by the beaming woman I had seen in the restaurant. She walked with the aid of a stick. The pianist told me that Madam, as she was addressed by the ‘boys’ and maids who worked there, was related to the Sikkim Royal Family. Madam came into Daisy’s Music Room, mid-Gershwin, and said to the pianist, ‘Tea in the private dining room at four tomorrow.’ The musician was overcome. ‘In the private dining room, Madam. What an honour.’

When her bravura performance was done, the pianist and I went out on to the terrace, with its breathtaking view of the Himalayas. ‘I sigh for the old England,’ she announced. She gasped for breath at the end of each sentence. ‘No more lovely pounds, shillings and pence,’ she boomed. ‘Nothing but decimal, decimal.’ Yes, she had lived in London, but not when the socialists were in power. And yes, she was Anglo-Indian, but with the emphasis very much on the Anglo. Would she go back to London? ‘Good God, no. Not while Harrods is owned by an Arab.’ I said how much I loved the music she had just been playing, and she observed that she was trying, with little success, to bring her repertoire up to date. ‘There only seems to be Mr Lloyd Webber on the musical horizon.’

On my last morning, I ordered scrambled eggs again, hoping that something pleasingly yellow would appear on my plate. It was a vain hope. They were as grey as before, but there was no mashed potato. A curled-up strip of bacon, mostly fat, was the only accompaniment.

Mitalee came to the hotel for a farewell lunch. We were on the terrace when the pianist appeared, clutching a gin and tonic. ‘Are you going to entertain us for lunch?’ I asked. ‘No, no, no,’ she responded. ‘I only do cocktails and dinner. If I did luncheon as well, I’d be
whacked
.’

We travelled back to the city of plump sacred cows and famished stray dogs, of vibrant life and reeking death, by overnight train. I was glad to be returning to the real world after my brief sojourn in that make-believe Raj, with its dreadful, ultra-English food, and those diminutive servants literally bowing and scraping.

Shortly before I checked out, I saw Madam talking to an American. I learned that he had married into her (royal) family and was now the proud owner of the Windamere. The myth of the undying Raj was being sustained from the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps it still is, and no doubt the scrambled eggs are still grey.

I phoned Jeremy from Calcutta, telling him about the Windamere and its antiquated ways. And he assured me that Circe was in exuberant health, bothering the bewildered Max with her unsubtle advances.

The house on the corner was owned for many years by a one-eyed Serb with a mouthful of metal teeth. Its occupants were notable for the pall of depression and failure that hung over them. They were men of all ages, each one of whom had a woefully familiar story to tell, if anyone had ever felt inclined to listen to it. They lived in the upper rooms, which were sparsely furnished – wardrobe, bed, table, chair – beneath a solitary light bulb dangling from the ceiling. They came and went, these drifters – some making their exit in the middle of the night; others dying on the premises or in the local hospitals. The house on the corner would have been the perfect setting for
The Lower Depths
, Maxim Gorky’s play about the terminally dispossessed in a town in Tsarist Russia.

There was one regular tenant, who lived on the ground floor. Brian was very fat when I first saw him in the 1970s, but in two decades he grew to be enormous. He was a scrap merchant, dealing in anything discarded he could sell for a small profit. His lorry was often parked outside a nearby betting shop. I can’t remember when he abandoned his profession, but it must have been towards the end of the 1980s, when the lorry became a permanent fixture yards from my front door. Brian was now too large to fit into the driver’s seat, and the strain of adjusting his belly behind the wheel was making him angry and upset.

I looked out on that lorry for eighteen months. Passing motorists used it as a rubbish tip. Its tyres began to sink into the road. I complained to an environment officer at Hammersmith Council, who advised me to consult the police. I rang the police, who suggested I complain to the council. I duly phoned the council again, and learned that the removal of the lorry was the responsibility of the police. I retired, bewildered.

Then, one afternoon, the Features Editor of the London
Evening Standard
called to ask me to write a column for the following day. I could choose any subject I wished. Thus it was that I penned a eulogy to Brian’s lorry, with its array of rusty cookers, battered television sets, threadbare clothes and worn-out electric and gas fires. I loved the view from my window, I declared, for it reminded me of the vanity of human aspirations and the transient nature of modern technology. I thanked the council and the police for their splendid obtuseness, for without their indifference I should have been deprived of the melancholy vision I delighted in each passing day.

My heavy-handed irony must have irritated someone in authority, for I awoke the very next morning to see the lorry being tugged away. Such, I told myself, is the power of the printed word.

As he became fatter and fatter, Brian developed into a philosopher. He would hold court from a wobbly chair on the doorstep, expressing opinions he had read in the editorial page of the
Sun
, his favourite newspaper. He usually had a couple of cronies to sound off to before drink made them incoherent or incapable of listening, or both. He cursed me, playfully, as a wishy-washy liberal, though he always praised Circe’s beauty and envied her slimness. Whenever I returned from Romania, I brought him back a gallon of
ţ
uica
, the lethal plum or apricot brandy I find undrinkable.

Brian died in his sleep, and the one-eyed Serb sold the filthy dosshouse to a man who, after two dedicated years, has transformed it into something palatial. Gorky’s desperate waifs and strays would not feel at home in it.

In 1995 I decided that I wanted to learn Romanian. I also decided that I needed a teacher. I already knew a few basic words and had followed a course on two cassettes, but now I needed to be guided through the language’s tortuous grammar. I phoned an acquaintance at the Romanian Embassy, asking for help. There was a student at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies in the University of London who might be interested in giving me lessons, she said. She would make enquiries on my behalf.

My tutor turned out to be a beautiful, raven-haired young woman called Cleopatra. Was Cleopatra a common name in Romania? ‘No, no, no,’ she laughed. ‘It was my mother’s idea. I prefer that you call me Cleo.’ The shortened version, she added, was less of an embarrassment to her.

She came to the house every Wednesday afternoon for several months. We worked at the kitchen table, with Circe – who approved of her – sometimes curled at her feet. She often brought newspaper or magazine articles for me to translate into English. With the aid of
A Course in Contemporary Romanian
, I managed to construct sentences that sounded as if they hadn’t come out of a phrase book. She was patient when I committed ludicrous errors, and praising on those occasions when I saw chinks of light in the linguistic darkness.

*

Early in 1989, I received a letter from the Literature Department of the British Council inviting me to visit Romania. I accepted the invitation and flew to Bucharest on a fine Sunday in March, having first deposited Circe at the kennels Michael Gordon had recommended, and where she was known as by far the most voluble and certainly the most energetic of all the dogs the staff had ever cared for.

I set off in more or less total ignorance of the country and its customs. I had no idea, then, that the language would be so approachable and so appealing to the ear. And although I was aware that Romania was currently in the hands of a dictator named Nicolae Ceau
ş
escu, I had no knowledge of the extent of his wickedness. He and his wife, Elena, had been in England in the 1970s, courtesy of the Prime Minister, James Callaghan. The bizarre, diminutive couple had stayed in Buckingham Palace, and the Queen had bestowed upon him the oldest and highest honour in Britain, the Order of the Garter. That much – or rather, that little – I knew.