Passage to India Part 4 - My Father's Flight to India in 1934

Copyright (c) 2009 Michael Ogden

My Father continued the story:

At first we thought he was merely asking for money, but by degrees, mostly by signs, we gathered that there were bandits, bad men or robbers in the hills around who would come down during the night and cut off our ears and hands (most graphic and realistic signs for all this) if they didn't stay and guard us all night with their guns, and of course we would pay them at the same time.

Our dilemma was to decide how much of this was truth or fiction (we had heard stories of bandits in Persia certainly), and also which was the greater danger to us, these three more or less known ruffians, or the unknown, and perhaps mythical bandits. Being unarmed ourselves we suggested a possible solution that they hired us their two guns and left us to defend ourselves, but that did not at all meet with their approval, and we eventually agreed that they should stay after much arguing, and as far as we could see very little chance of getting rid of them in any case.

Meanwhile it was quite dark and we sat down on the sand under one wing of the aeroplane while our guard of three sat under the other.

Frankly that night was a nightmare. Lady Blanche was terrified, both of the known and the unknown, hungry and cold it was pitch dark and raining, and we hated even more the behaviour of our "guard" who, if they weren't making rude sounding remarks at (apparently) us, were creeping about in the dark keeping us on the qui vive all the time. After a couple of' hours of this there were shouts out in the desert and Haidar and Squint Eye (with guns) went out to meet our "foes". We started to follow suit to see what the commotion was all about but Ali the Jew told us to remain where we were as it was the "bad men" out there.

He, himself, stayed under the plane and I could see him creeping about and going through the pockets of our leather coats which we'd left lying on the ground. However, he only actually took a charm I had been given on our way through France, and the belt of my coat, which was very inconvenient till I could get another one. Meanwhile out in the dark a great deal of shouting and talking was going on and we expected any moment for it to develop into a fight, but after twenty minutes or so our guard returned still shouting, and we never discovered if it really was an attack or merely a put up show to impress us.

Personally I think it was the latter. Anyhow it was quite unpleasant while it lasted, and the rest of the night didn't help to improve our peace of mind as it went on raining and the wind started to get up quite strongly. This wouldn't have mattered so much if it had kept in the same quarter, but it eventually veered right round and meant us turning our machine into the wind to prevent it being blown over as we had no picketing gear or anything like that. This we did and it annoyed our guard very much as having dug themselves a nice hole in the sand under one wing, our turning of the machine left them sitting out in the wind and rain!!