"أيام ثيم ولَّت" [و‎‎٦] (٢٤٨/١١)

boat was filled with
joining the party,
ret urn, the lifting
the boat, dangling like a toy on the
its entire contents into the sea,
sharks. As some of the officers in
and reputedly unable to swim, the
interest not unmixed with glee.
everybody who could think of an excuse for
But while being hoisted aboard on their
tackle at one end of the lifeboat failed and
end of a string, deposited
already tolerably full of
it were less than popular,
episode was watched with
^ 0 lLrn 0 M 9 H my f fell0W P assen g ers » * spent part of each day trying
hpJnH . Urdu from 3 g^mmar. They appeared to have no ambition
beyond becoming part of a British unit and a British society
temporarily exiled to India; whereas I wanted to get as close as
possible to the Indian scene, and the first essential for this
was to have some command of an Indian language. It was difficult
to make progress without hearing the language spoken and I had
been outstandingly inept at classical languages while a't school
howevec I discovered later that the Urdu spoken by upwards of 90%
of the British officers in India was in fact a language almost
he't^ 6 hr 9 !! 6 untutored Indian! A recruit would have to
mnthf ^ by hlS fen ° ws how t0 relate "Sahib's Urdu " to his own
mother tongue, and had to go just as far in learning a foreign
language as his officer, who imagined he was talking one!
I approached India with
the merits or de-merits
made up its population.
India, the writings of
the Indian Mutiny (a
I should like to be able to record that
an open mind and without prejudices about
of thevarious races and religions which
Sadly it was not so. Two generations in
Kipling, and above all the story of
?Mnk t inn C l e n U 1 ! 6 ' 1 at the S1ege of Delhi > had coloured one's
Dart k nf 9 i-h t one conceived the population of the North-west
part ofthe sub-continent to be brave, manly hardv Inval anH
ODDOsite Sti V if Wher i e i dS thG peoples of the East ’and South were the
tics this JVs t- generalisations about national characteris-
find’this out! ° n W3S lncorrect : but 11 some decades to
However, instead of heading for the shores of India, we took a
RAF at U Basra ° Wp 6 Pers ' an Gu1f > to disembark a contingent of the
which I w/s' i f saw nothing of the countries on either side in
r Was 1ater to spend so much time, except the South
barren 1 $ burnt”° si a'' h® which . ’o° ked lik e an endless succession of
In fact b ffh’p 9 ' h6 f^ W1th never a tree or a house in sight.
faCt ', course, this outwardly forbidding country housed
people of the greatest human interest.
tedious Journey of over a week up the Persian (or
rffff f^ 9 T y ° Ur . pr . ed ' 1 ec t i ons) Gulf - a stretch of sea wit
fhl%ha ? , 9 „ k° 11 ° n eUher s1de - n was a ce'ief to e
flow of thp Fnnh 3 % r VaS s Mver ° f fresh water combining
flow of the Euphrates from Syria, the Tigris from North Irag
ths
ant
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