My Traveling Companions two Flying Horses continue… August 14, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Asia, China, Europe, Hotels, India, Money, Round The World, Sightseeing, Tour, Travellers Cheque, Trip , trackbackThere is a sweet old chestnut about the JAL jumbo mistakenly landing on a tiny nearby private airfield in smog. On that occasion three miles of slums were levelled as a pathway along which the stranded plane could be dragged back to the International Airport runway. Only from here could it be reasonably expected to take off.
Our problem had been landing at all. The hydraulic lines had burst and the wheels had to be lowered manually. The crew hadn’t been able to knock in (locate’, for the purposes of the Captain’s log) the nose- wheel pin. They took near-disaster as an everyday occurrence, which it probably is. In fact, the Captain, miffed that there was no hotel taxi waiting, was preparing to return to Abu Dhabi with his leaking plane when I left. I’m sure he did.
Deposited on the runway, horribly close to the fast lane, we must have been an unusual sight for incoming international passengers, gazing at a three-horse traffic island. The horses oggled back, equally bemused — especially the stallion, who would have failed dope tests for the next six months. At Heathrow I’d been asked specifically not to tranquillise him in case of the possibility of side-effects which could have seriously affected his future stud career. As he reared and kicked all those miles above the earth, the decision narrowed down to him or me. He had three syringes administered to him. The last one I saved, just in case, for myself.
To be brave, or blasé, was not my ambition. Having worked in racing stables for a number of years, I went to India with every prospect of enjoying racing despite the absence of luxuries like The Sporting Life. When we landed, the problems weren’t nearly over. All the paperwork seemed correct, except that most important paperwork of all — the baksheesh. There weren’t enough rupees to oil the wheels for those ‘whose hands are greased not from honest toil’, as an Indian newspaper euphemistically described sticky palms.
Two pretexts were given for the failure to release us from the airport: that one of the mares wore a head-collar with an obviously masculine name embossed, and that one of the fillies’ passports was stamped GONE TO STUD. India has a number of diseases all her own, but if there is any suggestion that a foreign filly has been on the loose in a British stud she is rejected as unclean. So my first act on Indian soil was to telex a friend at Weatherbys, the British racing bureaucrats, to get them to explain the facts of life to the Bombay Turf Club.
After three days — as Indian delays go, lightning — the caravan moved to one of the best-run studs in India, in the grounds of the Maharajah of Mysore’s Palace in Bangalore. Here I encountered some of the problems indefatigable Indian breeders deal with. In the middle of Bangalore, as you thread through a jungle of exotic trees and overgrown ornamental gardens, cross long neglected croquet lawns, tennis courts and disused summer houses, you are confronted with Windsor Castle, or at least a very passable facsimile locked up and in pawn to the Government to pay Royal debts. This is the Palace. There was no water, though, for an artificial Thames; and the whole relic, presently used as a backdrop for the film of A Passage to India, is patrolled by a pensioner who served the last war in South Shields.
The stud occupies the old cavalry stables and, imaginatively, the elephant houses. Nowadays it is run by an Englishman who arrived in India forty years ago with his billiard cue and eight shillings. He went on to become leading trainer in Madras for eighteen years and is set to retire to his property in Cheshire, which is fenced by the running rail from Castle Irwell, Manchester’s racecourse.
The traditions of the British Turf, like the last Englishman, are safely enshrined in Indian racing centres like Bangalore, where scribes still describe jockeys as ‘knights of the pigskin’. Horses with names meaningful to English ears have passed this way: Lance Corporal, Red Indian, King Midas and now the stallion I had delivered, Pink Tank. An effort was made to set up the stud in a more favoured, not to say more conventional, site in the foothills of the Nilgiris. This was defeated by panthers who ate the foals, and by wild elephants on whose walk the buildings were sited.
Now the Palace Stud lives on borrowed time as Indian racing moves up a gear. Apart from delivering Pink Tank and the two mares, and six foals in the stud season, my contribution to the future of Indian breeding was almost certainly sacrilegious. Snakes abounded in the palace grounds, as did ants. They, and all of life in India in its own way, are sacred, but the holes bored by the former and the mounds erected by the latter in the paddocks were a threat to the horses. Occidental logic demanded that the one could best be filled by the deposition of the other. This was achieved but the worst was feared.
In my diary, more danger would come from the vet, whose tetanus syringes were kept in his bicycle puncture outfit. But he meant well, and the place and his practice thrived in the way that life tends to in India. Fecundity and infinity make happy bedfellows: there are probably 1,000 million Indians and — who knows? — the only impossibilities in this country are finding a size-three horseshoe nail and a bath plug that fits.
Given the chance, I suppose I’d take the Flying Carrot to Bombay again, though by that time I’d have taken parachute lessons.
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