Free Golden Afternoon by M. M. Kaye Page B

off, except for a single spotlight focused on a lone woman who danced and sang in the centre of the darkened floor. A thin little woman who wore a blouse, tights, and one of those flat, peaked caps in midnight blue, and sang a song that I had never heard before. It was called ‘Me and My Shadow’, and is, by now, a very old song, but it was new then, and I have never forgotten the words or the tune, or how the singer’s shadow followed her every movement until the spotlight blinked out on the last note.
    To this day, whenever I hear that tune played on some ‘golden oldies’ programme on the TV or the radio, I am once again the young Mollie that I was, sitting enthralled in that darkened ballroom in New Delhi and watching a spotlight in which someone is dancing with their shadow … It can even bring back the strong mixture of odours that permeated the ballroom. Coty’s ‘Mon Boudoir’ and ‘L’Aimant’, cooked food and cigarette smoke, and the strong scent of orange-blossom, sweet peas and roses that drifted in from the garden and brought with it the strange and wholly individual smells of the dusty roads and raw-new buildings of this latest Delhi.
* Yes, we still had dance-programmes — and kept on doing so to the very end of the Raj.
* Sir Edward Buck, head of Reuter’s in India for many years, and author of
Simla Past and Present
.
* Kaye-language for ‘Polly’.
* Sixteen-button gloves were the very long, white kid gloves which custom decreed should be worn by all memsahibs of the Raj when attending any Viceregal function.

Chapter 5
    Tacklow, when not away visiting princely states, was busy for most of the day in an office in the Secretariat building, and Mother, Bets and I spent a lot of time looking up old friends. But, for me, a lot of the old magic had gone.
    The Khan-Sahib had been dead for several years, and his children and grandchildren had moved away from Delhi long ago. And though we often visited his widow, the Begum, who still lived in their house in the old walled city, spoke no English and had always kept strict purdah, bereavement had turned her into a sad, prematurely old woman who preferred to moan to Mother about the misery of widowhood and the difficulty of getting really trustworthy servants in these degenerate days, or attempting to talk to Bets and me in our now halting Hindustani.
    The Diwan-Sahib had returned to his home in Rajputana, and I remember seeing him only once, when he called in to see Tacklow on his way north to visit relatives who lived somewhere near Karnal. The fathers of most of the Indian children with whom I used to play in the old days had either been promoted or left to take up senior appointments in other provinces or districts, or, like Tacklow, retired after years of service in the Government of the country and gone back with their wives to spend their old age in their own home towns or villages. Their families were scattered: the daughters married and gone to their husband’s homes, and their sons studying in universities in Bombay, Calcutta or England, if not already in jobs in one or other of India’s great cities.
    Vika * had married the son of some merchant prince and now lived in great splendour in, I think, Madras, while the house off the Rajpore Road in which lovely Lakshmi and her parents had lived had changed hands several times during the last nine years, and the only person whoremembered them was an old
mali
who said he thought they had been transferred to Lucknow. Of the rest, very few still lived in Delhi, and since all of them had, like myself, spent a large part of the intervening years in school, their English had improved out of all knowledge and they no longer spoke to me in their own tongue, but in mine.
    When we were young it had been different. Because they knew that I could speak and understand their language we used that as a matter of course and without thinking. But now that they