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as I wanted it. I do remember thinking that if, by some miracle, I was able to get back to India one day, even if my pronunciation were a bit rusty, the moment I heard people speaking Hindustani again it would all come flooding back to me. This confident assumption was probably based on the fact that whenever I groped for a word in French, it invariably presented itself to me in Hindustani, something that I suspect happened to very many of us ‘children of the Raj’, for I well remember a young ex-Indian Army friend of mine, who had assured me that he could speak French fluently, entering a shop in Marseilles in search of a hat and announcing to a bewildered saleslady that, ‘
Hum eck
chapeau
mungta
’ (‘I one hat want’).
    To find myself in the same situation with regard to Hindustani was a nasty shock. And I am ashamed to say that, try as I would, I never again learned to speak it so that I could have passed as a native of the country, but remained at best a speaker of ‘
memsahib’s Hindustani-bhat
’, the result, I presume, of having a poor musical ear. I could always understand agreat deal more than I could speak though, and I remember Mother, whose vocabulary was considerably larger than mine, being incensed when, many years later, her bearer, Kaderalone, * who, like all our servants, spoke no English, complained that he did not understand something she had told him, and that he proposed to get ‘
Mollie-missahib
’ to translate it for him, because she spoke much better Hindustani. I didn’t, of course: I merely attacked it at a gallop, gabbling it at twice the speed and far more colloquially. I have always spoken too fast (and too much) but it sounded OK to him.
    Nowadays, few people will admit to speaking Hindustani, and the very name of that useful language is becoming forgotten. Those who remember it like to pretend that it was merely a bastardized form of Kitchen-Urdu, the invention of memsahibs who could not be bothered to learn the languages of the country. In fact, it came into being with the conquest of India by the Moguls — Tartars, Mongolians and Pathans who spoke a mixture of Arabic, Pushtu and Farsee (Persian). This mixture of Urdu and Hindi became in time the lingua franca of the land, and to this day, whenever I return to that great subcontinent that was all ‘India’ in my time, if I happen to be in the section that is still India today, old friends in the bazaars say, ‘Ah! I see that the memsahib has not forgotten her Hindi!’ and when I cross the border into what is now Pakistan they say, ‘It is good that you still speak Urdu!’ I don’t, of course. What I am actually speaking — and badly — is Hindustani.
* Yes, I know it is part of Pakistan now, but it wasn’t then!
* Treaties between the British and the rulers of the semi-independent princely states.
† After the publication of
The Sun in the Morning
a great many readers wrote in giving suggestions as to why Tacklow should have acquired that name. One (who did his National Service in the 7th Gurkha Rifles) wrote to say that not long ago in Bombay he heard a bald-headed man referred to as
Tacklo
, which it seems is Hindi for ‘bald’. Since my Tacklow-Sahib was bald by the age of twenty-three, I bet that’s the answer. Thank you, Mr MacLeod.
* Apologies to my Indian friends for the use of that possessive pronoun. Having been born there (it was all one country then), I feel it is mine by affection, as one of my dear friends is my sister-by-affection.
* Now known as Uttar Pradesh.
* A white plaster made from crushed shells that can be polished until it looks like marble.
* Miss Beatrice Lewis, ‘Aunt Bee’, a friend of Mother’s who took charge of us when Mother went back to India.
* Car-der-er-
lone
(accent on
lone
),
Card
erah for short — ‘
Car
-der-ah’. (Now try to pronounce it!)

Chapter 2
    From Calcutta we went