He laughed. “Not those, no. He was a dirty old man, my grandfather. Here, let me show you one I rather like.”
He slipped through a part of the room I hadn’t got to yet, ending up not far from the door. Before him stood a particularly magnificent carved wooden plinth about waist height, on which stood a foot-tall mechanical contraption and a perfect little celadon bowl holding half a dozen old-fashioned coins. The maharaja took one of them and pushed it through a slot on the wooden base.
With a creak that I at first thought was the protest of disuse, the machine began to move. But it was not a creak, it was a mechanical simulation of a roar, because the creature was a tiger. Its tail wagged and its legs began to carry it forward to where a man in red uniform lay. It stopped—a marvelously complex piece of clockwork, this, considering its obvious great age—and bent to the man, seizing him in its great jaws. The man kicked, the tiger’s tail wagged, the geriatric roaring went on.
The maharaja was watching me watch his tiger, and although it was too dim in there to be sure, I thought the man smiled.
“This is magnificent,” I told him, my voice rather louder than it needed be. “I’ve seen something of the sort, in London.”
“Tipoo’s Tiger, in your Victoria and Albert Museum. A smaller, less sophisticated version. My grandfather saw it, liked it, and had this made. Two years after the Mutiny, in fact.”
That took me aback. A man who had made a clear gesture of loyalty to the British, and had been lavishly rewarded for his brutal but effective actions, less than two years later commissions a piece showing a British soldier chewed to bits by an Indian tiger.
“Did your grandfather show this to many of his English visitors?” I asked.
The man at my side laughed, pleased that I had understood the underlying jest. “Not many, no. Come, it is too nice a day to be closed in this stuffy room.”
Stuffy, I thought as I followed him out the door, it was not. Uncanny, perhaps. Even macabre.
The sun was a welcome antidote.
Four others waited for us in the gardens, watching as a servant scattered food over the lotus pond to bring a school of exotic white and golden carp to the surface. It was not until I saw my fellow guests that it struck me how odd the means of my retrieval had been. Why have me go first to the room of mechanical toys, when the others had clearly been told to gather near the pond? And beyond that, why had a servant not fetched me back here, instead of the prince himself? I could only assume that my host had wanted me to see his grandfather’s machines, and me alone; and moreover, he had wanted to see my reaction to them.
I did not know what this meant. Perhaps, I told myself, it was just that he’d wanted to keep Sunny Goodheart’s innocent eyes from the erotic devices and the small furry creatures, for Sunny was one of those at the pond. Or maybe it was something about me that promoted me above the others. As an honorary member of the pig-sticking fraternity, were my sensibilities hardened beyond those of most women? I decided to prod, gently.
“Your Highness, why—”
“Please, call me Jimmy.”
“Jimmy, then. Why not display the machines more openly? It’s an extraordinary collection.”
He continued walking, until I thought he was not going to answer. Then, just out of earshot of the others, he said, “I am a public figure. I like to keep some things to myself, and a few chosen friends.”
Then the others were with us, Sunny, her brother, the Kentish polo-player (whose name was, I thought, Robbins), and a tall, silent woman I had seen but hadn’t realised was his wife. We walked across the courtyard to the gate, where we were joined by three merry salukis, and a pair of armed guards fell in behind us. The dogs raced ahead down the road that circled New Fort, their plumed tails adding a touch of gaiety, although the maharaja ignored their antics entirely. At the base of the hill we continued around, as I had done the first day, although instead of going on to the stables, the salukis flashed down a tree-lined set of steps leading to the left, in the direction of a growing chorus of jungle noises. In moments, a great uproar was heard from the tall monkey- house.
“The monkeys don’t seem to care for the dogs,” I noted.
“Oh, they don’t mind them so much. But the dogs signal my arrival, which always causes excitement.”
Then the steps gave way to a pathway of crisp, white gravel, and we were in the Khanpur zoological gardens.
It was, indeed, a zoo, with cages and paths, but considerable aesthetic attention had been paid, and the areas behind the bars resembled landscape rather than merely concrete and iron boxes to hold the specimens. The lions watched us from a little piece of Africa, a cunningly constructed rock wall with ledges and caves wrapped around by heavy bars; on the other side of their enclosure half a dozen varieties of African herbivore ran free, zebras and wildebeests and even, hiding in a far corner, a pair of wan-looking giraffes. The monkey-cage was the height of a three-storey building, and although the trees inside had long since been stripped to dead trunk, a natural-looking waterfall welled up from a pile of rocks in the centre of the cage, and the tall trees outside of the cage provided shelter to the inhabitants.
Sunny was nearly speechless with pleasure, exclaiming over the glimpse of a baby monkey and clapping her hands together at the lemurs, who looked disgruntled at being prodded from their rest by a servant.
The most startling thing, at first glance, was the collection of servants tending the animals. They bore the skin tones and facial characteristics of peoples from across the world—Asia, Africa, Scandinavia—but not one of them was taller than four feet: These were the inhabitants of the dwarf village Gay Kaur had referred to. And sure enough, between the cages and the sprawling plain filled with African wildlife lay a pseudo-African village whose proportions were at first disconcerting, the height of its grass huts and the size of its residents making it appear farther away than reason permitted.
I thought it somewhat tasteless to house this particular group of servants alongside the zoo they tended, as if they were a part of it, but I supposed it was no stranger than the archaic European fashion of importing Nubian boys as decorative pages and footmen. Certainly, the small people seemed pleased enough with their lot, bustling officiously along the white paths and giving brisk orders to
I often think that caged predators are kept alive by their deep inner fantasies of ripping apart the two-legged creatures outside their bars. It would explain their habit of watching our movements from beneath half-lowered eyelids, as if tempting us to venture too near. These, no less than their brothers in Regent’s Park, seemed to be salivating at the proximity of their small attendants, and I had no doubt that they would be even happier to make a fuller meal should, say, a royal personage stray close. The maharaja, however, kept his distance, although he did take us into the building behind the cage so that we could look through thick, smeary windows at the great dun carnivores, lying in the shade two feet away. I could practically feel the heat rising off them; when one of the females stretched luxuriously and her claws scraped on the stone floor, more than one of us shivered.
The dogs were snuffling in the bushes behind the building, but the maharaja called them sharply back, and indeed, this white path ended at the door to the lion building. Instead, we retraced our steps into the central area, past the cages of hippopotamus and wart hog, finally going into a low stone building with pens behind it. The inside was light and, despite the smell of animals, well kept. The maharaja led us over to a small, glass-fronted cage built at chest height into one wall; I, being taller than most of them, had no problem in seeing what he was doing.
The cage contained a single slim, short-haired creature resembling a cross between a cat and a ferret, with clever hand-like paws and a wise-looking face. More of the creatures could be seen in the open-air pen attached to the outside of the building, many perched upright on their hind legs, watching their trapped comrade through the intervening glass with worried expressions. They were clearly perturbed, making quick forays in and out of their burrows, sitting up, chattering to one another. But the one inside was nearly frantic, for the maharaja had inserted his arm into the cage through a small trap-door, on his hand a glove-like puppet the shape and colour of a dove.
“You see?” he was saying. “They have an instinctive fear of birds, even harmless ones such as this. I have been trying to overcome this instinct by invariably feeding them with a hand concealed inside a dove, but time and again they panic, and need to be hungry to the brink of starvation in order to overcome their fear of a thing with wings.”
As he lectured, he glanced at Sunny, whose reflection in the glass showed her face twisted with an agitation nearly as great as that of the animals imprisoned outside.
