Chapter XXII: Sir Pratap Singh

"His Highness has sent a carriage for you." This was a two-horsed, two-wheeled vehicle in which I was speedily whirled away from the railway station of Idar Road, four hours' journey from Ahmadabad, along a very rough road. The Highness in question was Sir Pratap Singh, now the Maharajah of the little State of Idar.

The town of Idar itself was eighteen miles away, but close at hand beyond yellow ruined walls I could see the city of Ahmednagar at the palace of which Sir Pratap was in residence. Presently, leaving the road, we rumbled and bumped and lurched over a tract of sand covered with coarse, low bushes to the State guest-house which looked like a very ordinary dak bungalow. It was built on a square plan with doors in such positions as ensured a through draught. A large lizard scampered over the wire of the outer gate as I walked in over the matting of the verandah. Outer gates were placed on all four sides to permit the four pairs of inner double doors to be left wide open.

"I shall inform the Resident of your honour's {310} arrival and he will arrange for your honour to pay his respects to His Highness at four o'clock." This fluent English proceeded from the man who had "met" me at the railway station.

I walked into the central room of the house which had eight double doors opening into it. All the walls and the ceilings were washed over with very pale blue. Great bees were booming and buzzing in and out over the bedsteads of which there was a large variety from the native charpoy to an iron double four-poster with brass ornaments and painted with flower garlands. In addition to the beds the furniture consisted of square wooden cane-seated chairs of ugly pattern covered with brown varnish--what is commonly known as a "nursery" table--with turned and varnished legs and no cloth, and part of a dressing-table by way of writing desk in one corner with pen, ink and paper.

In front of the bungalow, planted in the sand but quite out of the perpendicular, two square-sectioned blue wooden posts supported crookedly set lamp glasses in the blinding glare of noon sunlight.

There was no punkah in spite of the intense heat, but I counted no less than nineteen large iron rings in the ceiling. If these were not intended for punkahs perhaps they were to dissuade intending suicides by the difficulty of choosing which one to hang by!

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The man who had driven me had disappeared with a promise that tiffin would come immediately, and while I was noticing the above-mentioned details I sat on one of the cane-seated chairs and Tambusami waited with an eye on the outer sand. A long time seemed to have gone by with no sound breaking the intense hush except the noise of the bees when Tambusami said: "One basket coming I see: one man coming I see," and from a blue palace beyond the tawny sandstone walls over the sand and out of the heat at last came--breakfast.

The one man carried a series of pans, fitted into one another like a tall cylinder in a frame, as well as the basket, and was accompanied by several little black Sambos carrying chatties of water on their heads. And now there were placed on the table a tea-cup with a hare-lip and the motto "Remember me," some marmalade in another tea-cup with blue cornflowers on it, and in gold the words "Think of me," and a third cup with the same motto containing some butter which looked like thin melted white lard, but when the contents of the cylinder of pans were put before me I forgot to notice what they were in my eagerness to consume them.

When four o'clock came and no one had called for me I started out alone with umbrella spread leaving Tambusami to watch our baggage at the bungalow. The heat was intense as I ploughed {312} through the sand and scrub towards the arch in the broken wall which extended for a long distance on either side. It must at one time have been magnificent, being built of very large blocks of stone cut and squared with towers at intervals, and the gateway, with its deep but simple Gothic arch, was an imposing structure with handsome square pillars in the corners having brackets as in Jain work. As I passed through this archway I saw about forty yards ahead of me a line of houses, several storeys high, the lower part of which had evidently been built of stones from the dismantled wall. They were roofed with the half-tube tiles lipped over and under exactly like those of houses in the Pyrenees, and as I entered a street I was reminded of an old home of the former Dukes of Montmorency near Carcassonne by the carved woodwork of a house front.

Asking my way--by what must have seemed to native ears uncouth sounds and weird signs--I gradually reached what I supposed was the palace, and approaching a kind of guard-room with a number of soldiers lounging about, I asked to be directed to the Vakil. Another building was pointed out to me a little below where I was standing and thither I next turned my steps. It was a curious structure without any pretence at design, an iron spiral outside staircase in one portion and a long verandah in another upon a {313} raised platform. I passed a few rose-bushes and walked up on to the verandah and found a long series of doors, and between them on wall and sideboards, rifles, polo-sticks, horse-trappings, bits, shields, revolvers, field-glasses, and one much dented cricket bat.

I knocked at one door after another pausing at each in hope of some response, and at the fifth door this was forthcoming and I found myself quite suddenly in the presence of His Highness the Maharajah Dhiraj Major-General Sir Pratap Singh.

Beyond the door was a vast apartment which seemed in semi-darkness as I entered from the outer glare. A young native gentleman in riding breeches and a khaki shirt came towards me and asked if I was the gentleman who had arrived that morning. It appeared there had been a misunderstanding about sending over for me, and I was at once led up to a _charpoy_ with a white quilt on it upon which was reclining a strong-looking little man with a grizzled bullet head, kindly brown eyes and a grey moustache. He wore just a white cotton shirt and a thin pair of riding-breeches and had his well-shaped feet bare.

Rising into a sitting posture, Sir Pratap--for it was he--shook hands, and as soon as a chair had been brought for me we were chatting comfortably. It seemed that he had had fever badly {314} two days before through the sudden and untimely heat and was only just recovering. Another native gentleman sitting at some distance was Sir Pratap's doctor.

Close by stood a man swinging a large fan punkah rhythmically with both hands, and outside the three window openings nearest to us bheesties (water-carriers) kept constantly pouring water upon the grass tatties or blinds.

His Highness spoke English well and was quick to understand and we talked for more than an hour on many subjects. He said he had fought plague successfully at Ahmednagar in what he believed was the only practicable way--namely by building two small cities of detached houses at some distance away and compensating the poorer people for turning out of their old dwellings. In this way he had made a clean sweep of the dirtier part of the town.

Sir Pratap expressed a great affection for our royal family and reverence for the memory of Queen Victoria, whose portrait he showed me with pride within two little folding doors of a shrine of elaborately-worked metal about two feet high and one and a half feet deep.

Spare and wiry in figure, simple and unaffected in dress, quick and alert in manner, there seemed little that was Oriental in this man, and in spite of the tatties and the fan very little suggestion of luxury in his surroundings. He {315} said he had travelled a great deal but liked his own part of India better than any other place in the world.

"One difficult question for India," he said, "is the increasing consumption of cows' flesh and the consequent recent large increase in the slaughter of cattle. I do not believe it is good for our people in this hot climate to take to the eating of flesh. It is quite a different thing in Europe where the colder climate makes it practically a necessity. Here the price is already three times what it was a few years ago, which alone shows the diminution of cattle, and their continued slaughter for an agricultural people must produce harm. In any case we lose great numbers of cattle in our famine times which are more frequent of late, and even this year, though we shall not lose human lives through the famine, numbers of cattle must starve. Also I do not think our grain should be sent out of the country. This is no doubt good for the traders, but they are few and the continued export of grain is disastrous for the agricultural population."

Two trays of tea were brought in, one for each of us, and we poured out for each other, His Highness taking saccharine tabloids instead of sugar, and the motto "forget-me-not" upon my tea-cup suggested near relations to my breakfast furniture.

"The chief trouble of all in India," continued {316} Sir Pratap, "is that the Mussulman will not be friends with the Hindoo. The Mussulman says the Hindoo is a bad man, and the Hindoo says the Mussulman is a bad man, and these, together with people in your English Parliament who call out and make a great noise, are all bad for India."

It was about five years since Sir Pratap moved to Ahmednagar from Idar, eighteen miles away, and his house is practically in a jungle as he delights it to be. Both carriages and motorcars he dislikes as enervating things, and roads he is not fond of, preferring his Arabs and Walers and a life in rough country half spent in the saddle.

I was introduced to His Highness's son, Dolat Singh, and also to his grandson, Himat Singh, a healthy-looking lad in shirt and riding-breeches, with a pearl in each ear, and the next day was granted a sitting by Sir Pratap for a painting, when he appeared in military uniform, with top boots and a grand array of stars and medals and a turban with a beautiful aigrette. He sat very patiently, sought in every way to make my task as easy as possible, and behaved throughout with a charming courtesy.

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