Golden Afternoon by M. M. Kaye Page B

anna a yard. Only an Indian royal, I reflected with awe, could have treated such fabulous jewels so carelessly.
    Except for Mother, Bets and me, and the little princess who was below the age of caste, the party was a strictly masculine one, since in those days the majority of royal ladies kept strict purdah and, apart from Mr Crump and my family, all the other guests were Indian. None of them seemed to be particularly impressed by the conjuror’s performance. I suppose they had seen this sort of thing since they were knee-high to a tiger-cub and so accepted it as a matter of course. But to me it was pure magic.
    The conjuror, an unremarkable middle-aged man in white, began with a few spectacular tricks of the kind that all conjurors do, and then, moving towards the guests, whom the Regent had seated in a half-circle, he did a trick for each one of us in turn and in close-up. I don’t remember any of the turns except the one he did for me, and the one he did for Tacklow, who was sitting on my left. Tacklow’s was the old trick of a length of rope that is cut again and again, but always ends up in one unbroken piece. But this time there was a difference, because it was performed by a man standing immediately in front of him and less than ten inches away. A man whose hands and wrists were in clear view throughout, and who, instead of cutting the rope himself, gave it to Tacklow to cut with a razor-sharp knife and then took the two ends from him, one in each hand, merely crossed his hands under Tacklow’s nose (and mine!) and in the same unhurried movement handed it back in one piece. What’s more,he repeated the trick in several different ways; sometimes cutting it himself while Tacklow held it, sometimes letting Tacklow do the cutting; but always ending up with the same unblemished piece of rope.
    The trick he did for me was far more exciting. He asked for a tall glass, which he told me to hold, and while I was holding it he filled it about half full of water and beckoned to one of his assistants, who stepped forward with a silver shovel on which there were several lumps of coal. This, after I had examined it (getting coal-dust all over my fingers in the process), he proceeded to smash up with a hammer until it was reduced to a pile of black dust and small fragments of coal which he added to the water in my glass. He then took it from me and, putting his other hand on top of it, shook the glass briskly and threw it all over me. I remember shrieking as the contents hit me and that was the only moment that I took my eyes off him; because I had flinched back instinctively, expecting a shower of wet, black slosh and bits of coal all over my party dress. Something damp did deluge me; I felt it on my face and hair and arms. But when I opened my eyes I found I had been showered not with coal but with dewy rose petals, and the glass in the conjuror’s hand was as clean as a whistle. I kept some of those petals for years, since clearly they were magic ones. But alas, as things do, they got lost.
    Nothing so special happened at any of the other princely states we visited. We arrived. We were greeted kindly — in Tacklow’s case almost as though he had been a valued and much-loved relative returning home after a long absence: they all seemed to know him well. We were housed in magnificent rooms that looked out on to lakes and glorious gardens. We breakfasted on marble verandahs or
bara-durris
screened by curtains of flowering bougainvillaea, jasmine, climbing roses and trumpet-flowers. And while Tacklow went off to talk to the rulers and their
diwans
and councils, our hosts’ wives and their ladies made us welcome in the women’s quarters, and took us for drives and picnics in their purdah cars, whose tinted windows did not prevent us from seeing out, but prevented anyone from seeing those inside.
    Since the royal women were gay and charming and, to my shame and dismay,
far
better educated than I