Kipling's India by Khushwant Singh

Author:Khushwant Singh [Roli Books Pvt. Ltd.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roli Books Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE MALTESE CAT

Fast paced and full of descriptive colour, this splendid polo story is as much a paean to the game as to the celebratory side of British life in India which was accessible even to impoverished officers and gentlemen. It tells of their life from the inside, lived here in our country when it was ‘theirs’ – and only Kipling can give us a glimpse of it.

They had good reason to be proud, and better reason to be afraid, all twelve of them; for, though they had fought their way, game by game, up the teams entered for the polo tournament, they were meeting the Archangels that afternoon in the final match; and the Archangels’ men were playing with half-a-dozen ponies apiece. As the game was divided into six quarters of eight minutes each, that meant a fresh pony after every halt. The Skidars’ team, even supposing there were no accidents, could only supply one pony for every other change; and two to one is heavy odds. Again, as Shiraz, the grey Syrian, pointed out, they were meeting the pink and pick of the polo-ponies of Upper India; ponies that had cost from a thousand rupees each, while they themselves were a cheap lot gathered, often from country carts, by their masters who belonged to a poor but honest native infantry regiment.

‘Money means pace and weight,’ said Shiraz, rubbing his black silk nose dolefully along his neat-fitting boot, ‘and by the maxims of the game as I know it–’

‘Ah, but we aren’t playing the maxims,’ said the Maltese Cat. ‘We’re playing the game, and we’ve the great advantage of knowing the game. Just think a stride, Shiraz. We’ve pulled up from bottom to second place in two weeks against all those fellows on the ground here; and that’s because we play with our heads as well as with our feet.’

‘It makes me feel undersized and unhappy all the same,’ said Kittiwynk, a mouse-coloured mare with a red browband and the cleanest pair of legs that ever an aged pony owned. ‘They’re twice our size, these others.’

Kittiwynk looked at the gathering and sighed. The hard, dusty Umballa polo-ground was lined with thousands of soldiers, black and white, not counting hundreds and hundreds of carriages, and drags, and dog-carts, and ladies with brilliant-coloured parasols and officers in uniform and out of it, and crowds of natives behind them; and orderlies on camels who had halted to watch the game, instead of carrying letters up and down the station, and native horse-dealers running about on thin-eared Biluchi mares, looking for a chance to sell a few first-class polo ponies. Then there were the ponies of thirty teams that had entered for the Upper India Free-for-All Cup – nearly every pony of worth and dignity from Mhow to Peshawar, from Allahabad to Multan; prize ponies, Arabs, Syrian, Barb, country bred, Deccanee, Waziri, and Kabul ponies of every colour and shape and temper that you could imagine. Some of them were in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.