A Dog's Life(37)

Adjacent to the roundabout near Ravenscourt Park is a stretch of grass known as Starch Green. It’s a favoured haunt of the local alcoholics, who gather there all the year round. The star among them is Peggy, a volatile pensioner with an impressive collection of funny hats – a jester’s cap with bells; a medieval liripipe; a gentleman’s topper – who sings and dances lewdly before passing out. In June 1993, the Polish woman and the husband she had barred from their flat because of his own problems with drink walked towards Starch Green with their lustrous pet. The man had wanted to visit her, but she had insisted they discuss their differences in the open air. It was a balmy evening.

They sat on a bench on the green and talked. She was seen to rise, and then he produced a gun and shot her dead. He turned the gun on himself, collapsing beside her.

The police and paramedics were unable to remove the bodies. The dog wouldn’t countenance them doing so. He was protecting both master and mistress, baring his teeth at anyone who came remotely near them. An hour passed. A dog-handler appeared, gently coaxing the distraught Alsatian to come to heel.

What was the dog expressing? The deepest devotion, I care to believe.





A Time in the Hills



There is a soup in Britain called Brown Windsor which tastes of nothing in particular. I think I last consumed it in Darjeeling in March 1994, but I can’t be certain. It was set before me in the dining room of the Windamere Hotel, which the poet Dom Moraes had recommended to me, with a chuckle, as the only place in India that still served steak-and-kidney pudding. It looked brownish, and there were no suspect pieces of meat floating in it. Yet when I swallowed a spoonful I realized that it tasted of warm water, with the faintest suggestion of beef extract. The very faintest suggestion of beef extract.

Earlier that day, I had flown from Calcutta to Bagdogra, in the company of Mitalee Chatterjee from the British Council, an independent spirit who prefers jeans to the perpetual sari. She was wearing jeans for the flight and received many disbelieving stares from policemen, soldiers and airline staff. At Bagdogra it was necessary to have my passport stamped, since Darjeeling is, officially, in the kingdom of Nepal. I queued up outside a dusty, cobwebby hut, in which a pile of moth-eaten ledgers was perched on top of a dirty filing cabinet. An amiable Englishwoman, dressed in a sari neatly folded through Salvation Army epaulettes, remarked that the ledgers had been there, unopened, since 1947. It was like a scene from one of R. K. Narayan’s novels or stories, for the three men on duty – two of whom entered our names and passport numbers in ledgers at the pace of a comatose snail, while the third pretended to be supervising – were blissfully oblivious of the anger and annoyance they were causing us. They took their time, and it seemed to last for ever.

Mitalee and I were driven up to Darjeeling in a Land Rover, the driver negotiating the narrow mountain roads with great skill. The air was crisp and cool, and a welcome change after the ferocious heat of Calcutta.

The Windamere is a former hill station. It consists of a main house, furnished and decorated in the style of the 1930s, and a series of chalets. From the moment I walked in to my chalet, I knew I was going to enjoy my stay. The notice in the frugal bathroom was enough to lift my spirits. I read:

NOTE

The chain-action water-closet in

this room has been giving dependable

service since 1912.


There were other notes to digest. I copied them into the diary I was keeping.


COFFEE BY WINDAMERE

From the Baba Budan Hills of Mysore in Southern India comes some of the finest coffee in the world. Windamere adds a northern character to the distinctive flavour of this southern coffee by hand-roasting the beans in a rotating drum over a very slow charcoal fire. The beans are then ground to perfection in an old-fashioned coffee mill just prior to brewing.


I read on, enchanted:


There may be occasional small variations with coffee brewed for you at meals. Coffee making, even now, remains more of an Art than a Science at Windamere.


There was more:


INFORMATION FOR NEW GUESTS

We have been filtering and boiling our drinking water since 1939. No one has been known to become ill after drinking our water. Nevertheless, if you prefer to drink mineral water, we keep an adequate supply in hand.


Mineral water, I quickly discerned, is the Windamere’s sole concession to modernity. The hotel is run (I am assuming it is the same in 2002) on the principle that the Raj is still in existence, as I learned that first evening when I dined alone in the restaurant, the chalet adjacent to the house.

The cuisine, in 1994, was Anglo-Indian. The meal was of a memorable ghastliness, reminding me of the school dinners I’d had to endure forty years earlier. There was that clear soup, which might or might not have been Brown Windsor, to begin with, followed by an unidentifiable fish, accompanied by defrosted, lukewarm beans and carrots, and a chicken curry which contained the tiniest chicken leg I had ever seen, with barely a mouthful of flesh on it. The curry had a distinctly English look about it, since the powder was manufactured, not prepared in the kitchen. I declined the banana crumble, swamped in lumpy custard, and drank a cup of coffee made with Art rather than Science. It tasted disgusting.