John McGivering Writing Competition 2024

 

The winner of Kipling Society’s John McGivering Literary Competition 2024 for stories featuring ‘Food and Drink’ is Stef Downham, whose story ‘A Cup of Chai’ vividly communicates how glamorous  and puzzling India  appears to a Victorian traveller arriving in Bombay (now Mumbai), with more than a side-glance at Kim.  The runner-up is Nick Meo, whose  ‘Dinner with the Enemy’ reveals a wary meeting, at a rare moment of fragile cordiality, over a village feast between very different races and cultures: Afghan villagers and British soldiers. Both stories have appeared in Kipling Journal 400 (January 2025), and are now published here.

   Please note that the 2025 John McGivering Literary Competition, for poems about the sea with a connection to Kipling’s life and/or works, is open for submissions from 1^st March to 1^st May 2025. Details and rules of entry can be found on the Kipling Society website.

Janet Montefiore
Competition Organiser

Today there have been seven as far as I can tell, perhaps more, perhaps less. The languages I do not understand proliferate. My Hindi I am told, is childish, but then I am still an infant to this continent and its profusion of mother tongues. Even the most ravenous of linguists could sate their appetite, listening to the teeming concourse of that edifice known locally as Victoria Station. For clarity I mean neither the station belonging to the London Brighton and South Coast Railway, nor the terminus of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company nestled cheek by jowl adjacent to it in the heart of Westminster. I refer to the extravagantly grand and bustling headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway here in Bombay, from whence its iron tendrils snake out across the continent.

Thus far this morning I have walked a little less than half the distance in between my lodgings and the self-important governmental office that anxiously awaits my toil. There is a more direct route, less bestrewn with colour, but the sheer energy of the market has diverted me. It always does.

Each weekday, and on most weekends, I wend my way between the close-packed, vibrant stalls piled high with vegetables and spices beyond name to me, familiar only by scent. One street, barely an alley by London standards, is filled with the acrid smoke of a myriad of modest forges and the cacophony of blacksmiths’ hammers. There is little that they can not make, and at a tenth of the price one would pay in even the smallest English market town. There are miniscule shops and vast stalls selling every grade and colour of cloth known to man. There are close by purveyors of leatherwork from the simplest to the most ornate.

But I stand by none of these. I stand in the shade afforded by a stout sheet of canvas protruding from a stall selling Chai. The cups are clean, the Chai is hot, and I stand on this brisk street corner in a state not far from bliss, a wonder twice as far removed from panic as I ever thought was possible in such a place. Without blasphemy I can say Thank God for Mr. Kipling. Without him I would certainly have lost my mind, and a good deal else beside.

Let me go back, as tellers of tales are wont to say, to the beginning.

He saw me first, I believe, standing frozen to the ship’s rail adjacent to the gangway. He had come to meet a friend. But this friend was well acquainted with Bombay and more than sufficiently equipped to face its rigours. Both men, familiar with the land, recognised my need for rescue.

A pirate captive, hopelessly resigned to walk the plank, was never so desolate. Behind me, the ship that had borne me slow from England, away from everything that I had ever known as fair. Ahead of me the great sub-continent of India.

How can one describe such dissonant bewilderment?

If all a young man knew in life was a small rural town in Shropshire, and he were transported bodily to the Champs-Élysées, he would be acutely aware that he was not at home. A great many things that met his eye and ear would say it. He might not find it fundamentally unpleasant, but he would certainly find it different.

If one were to add to this the confused disorientation of heat-stroke, together with a mild concussion, the noise and jostle of a fiercely contested rugby scrum colliding with a full costume carnival and the reek of a steam-powered sewage pumping station, then one might begin to approach my sense of shock.

From this vision of hell, worthy of Dante Alighieri, a quite ordinary European man emerged. So ordinary that if such a man had joined me on the boundary of a village cricket match, his appearance would have gone unremarked, yet here also he was at home. He wore a lightweight summer suit with a boater, and carried a stout but simple cane. He had about him the air neither of superiority nor humility.

For a moment he stood next to me and surveyed the scene before us.

“May I ask, sir, where your people are from?” I turned to look at him, only a little stunned by the mundane nature of his question. He continued his casual perusal of the quayside.

“Shropshire, sir. I was raised and schooled in Oswestry.”

“I met a man from Chirk once. He waxed lyrical about the market in Oswestry years ago.” The calmness of the man was infectious. The atmosphere of casual acquaintance on the village green permeated the air around us. “He was quite the most stupid man I ever met.”

I laughed without reserve and assured him Chirk was not totally devoid of intellectual merit. We shook hands and exchanged names.

He went on in the same friendly tone. “I see by your demeanour, sir, you have the good sense, lacking from so many of our fellow Englishmen, to recognise you are no longer in Shropshire. Do you have half an hour, that I might offer you some small introduction to the continent of my birth?”

We negotiated the gangway and thronging quay. The party being sent to conduct me onwards would be an hour at the very least. Mr. Kipling moved with deft assurance through the crowd, observing everything and nothing. Only once catching a pickpocket across the knuckles with the blunt end of his cane.

We found our way to a cart so ramshackle that had I seen it unattended and unadorned I would have assumed it had been abandoned many years ago. On top were two tin trays. One contained a dozen unadorned bone china tea cups without saucers, some of them unchipped. The other tray was piled high with some form of native pastry which we did not attempt. Adjacent to the cart, perched firmly above red glowing coals, sat what can only be described as a cauldron of tea, gently simmering.

A price for two teas was suggested that was commensurate with any Lyons tea house in London. However, I discovered later, this represented several days’ if not weeks’ wages for a local labourer. Mr. Kipling grunted once and handed over two small coins of considerably lesser denomination. The stall holder looked at them in his hand for a moment then nodded, slipping them inside his shirt.

My guide chose two of the less-damaged cups and wiped them with a handkerchief. Into these the stall holder ladled a liberal quantity of the steaming tea.

Mr. Kipling paused in the act of handing me one of the cups.

“What you see in my hand may, to all intents and purposes, appear to be a cup of tea. Some might say rather unfashionably milky, but it falls within the scope of that general description. Appearances, you will find, can be deceptive.

“If you raise this to your lips expecting a cup of English tea, you will be sorely disappointed. It is a cup of Chai, a peculiarly Indian concoction.” Without letting go of my cup, he sniffed and sipped his own. “This is a blend that includes what you would call tea, but also cardamom, ginger, cinnamon…” He took another sip. “…a little clove, and a not ungenerous amount of sugar. Try some.”

He released the second cup into my hand and I drank. It was almost, but not entirely, unlike tea. But as a refreshing drink in a hot climate, it was most acceptable, and I said so.

Mr. Kipling appeared gratified. “Many things in this country may appear, at least superficially, as English. A great many choose to surround themselves with the familiar, to make their lives as English as may be. They will expect you to do the same. It is best not to offend them too badly. Perhaps I laugh a little too loudly behind their backs.

“But I assure you, sir, if you can once admit that you have left that green and pleasant land behind, if you can accept that a thing foreign is not automatically wrong, you will find this land a palace of wonders.”

We talked and sipped Chai for all of our half an hour. He gave me an address for lodgings considerably cheaper and more friendly than the standard government recommendation and at least as clean. He gave me also the name of a retired teacher, who had been a great many things before, as an old man, he resigned his classroom. This man became my friend, and introduced me to a good many more, both Europeans and sometimes quietly, at night, in private, friends from the panoply of Asia.

He taught me a little Hindi and how to read a street for my own safety and entertainment. We would stand here drinking Chai, occasionally indulging in their sweet Jalebi pastries. It was here he started to pick out for me the different languages of the traders, Hindu, Sikh and Musalman. He would tell where they had come from, near or far, north or south, hills or plain. He would tell me stories of his youth, of the treasures all across Mr. Kipling’s palace of wonders.

“I have a birth certificate that says that I am British,” he told me once. “But my heart is more than seven-eighths Indian, and always will be.”

His name was O’Hara.

 

The headman waved a hand over the spread of food in an invitation to eat and a dozen village notables leaned forward to see what would happen.

Gough shuffled into a more comfortable position. He studied the browned meat, the great pile of rice dotted with plump raisins and slices of carrot, cooked until they were sweet and caramelized, the stack of nan bread straight from the oven.  He studied the villagers. Everybody was sitting on rugs on the floor, them facing him across the feast. He was the honoured guest so of course he had to eat first.

He was hungry. Since he’d flown in on the helicopter there’d been nothing but army rations, scoffed with a plastic spoon out of plastic self-heating bags and now there was a fabulous spread. His men weren’t happy about it at all. “What if they poison you, sir?” the sergeant asked. Gough told him to just crack on, got him to stand at the back and keep an eye open.

You had to eat with Afghans, even when you suspected some of them might be Taliban. Gough had been in the war for five months, four months still to go. Home seemed long ago and far away and a life outside the war hardly seemed real to him now.

At dawn his effective little force had raided the village over the hill, chased four insurgents for miles over rough ground, then called in a bloody great airstrike when it became clear they would never catch up.

Next job was this village, see if it felt any loyalty at all towards the government. See if he could identify Taliban supporters. The village had a bad name. The police dared not come. His own men had been silent when he told them where they were going. It was not far from where Johnson had been killed last month.

But he was quite sure he would be safe. They were eating in the guestroom of the headman’s house, a spacious, bright room with no furniture but not unpleasant with its colourful rugs laid on the floor.  In this room there was no war, he was confident of that.

As soon as his force arrived, heavily-armed and wary, the villagers did what villagers usually did; they invited him to dinner. He happily accepted. He knew that in this room he had a guarantee of protection better than all his men’s guns. In here no self-respecting Pashtun would breach the code of hospitality towards guests. They wouldn’t poison him. On the other hand, even as he was sitting down to eat with them their friends might well be on the road out of the village with a shovel and explosives. Outside this room was the war; there was no protection for anybody out there.

Gough shaped his fingers into a scoop, took a handful of rice and clumsily shoved it into his mouth as he’d seen the Afghans do, spilling grains down the front of his dusty uniform. He chewed slowly, examined the faces watching him.

The headman smiled, held his gaze. He had dark brown eyes, deep set in a dramatic, craggy face, and his stare was unblinking, not hostile exactly but certainly quizzical. He wanted to know what Gough was thinking. If there was any fear there or any hatred he was careful to give no hint. They were two strong men from the ends of the earth.

The Afghan leant down to the meat, pulled off a choice morsel, held it out to Gough with a grin. The village many have been poor, in one of the most backward districts in the whole impoverished nation of Afghanistan, but they were proud of their hospitality. Gough admired these farmers almost as much as he’d learnt to fear and mistrust them. He was a commander in the most high-tech army on earth, with its planes and firepower and theories about counter-insurgency warfare, and the Afghans he was fighting were like something out of the Middle Ages, with Kalashnikovs.

This morning, after the drama of their arrival, his soldiers had taken up positions in the road and on the rooftops and waited and watched the village for hours while the women prepared the feast. There was only one road, rutted from the time a few months ago when it had been deep mud. Now in high summer it was dusty and dried out. The road – track really – wound its way around the flat-roofed, mud-brick houses and carried on towards stands of poplars, pomegranate orchards and green fields squeezed into a narrow valley where the village made its living. That road carried on south until it arrived at a district where the war was at its most brutal.

Beyond the green were stony desert hills, mountains in the distance. Scowling young men sat in the shade and watched the soldiers. The day’s slumber was only broken once when loudspeakers on the village mosque crackled into life. While they waited they saw a goat being slaughtered for dinner, saw the pool of congealing blood in the dust of the road, flies buzzing over it. They cut the throats of their own animals here, held on to them as they kicked and writhed in the terror of the death agony.

Gough took the meat from the headman, chewed it. His audience grinned and stroked their long goaty beards. A dozen turbans bobbed approvingly.

“Tell them this is delicious,” Gough said to the interpreter when he’d swallowed his mouthful. “Better than the army food in Camp Bastion. Better than meat we get in England.”

The terp looked surly, repeated what he had been told. He was a city boy from Kabul, far from home in this alien land of cut-throats.

The villagers crowded forward now, took handfuls of rice and meat, slabs of bread. This was the time for the serious business of eating. Nothing was said. They grinned at Gough like friendly schoolboys with a new arrival in class, indicating the meat, inviting the Englishman to take more. The village may have had a bad name but for a moment Gough had a wonderful feeling of contentment, camaraderie even. His stomach was full of good food, his dining companions were agreeable. He’d found a respite from the constant tension of war in the heart of an enemy village.

He couldn’t let himself enjoy it too much. Today was his chance to find out what he wanted to know. But he mustn’t hurry. He’d learned not to hurry with these farmers. Time had a different meaning here. They were polishing off the feast, sharing out the last scraps of meat as the headman spoke to the interpreter. The terp wore a Manchester United shirt under his camouflage jacket. He’d learnt to joke around with the lads, loved to swap banter with them, army jokes. But in here he looked tense.

“He says, why have you come to Helmand?” the terp said to Gough. A dozen men stopped eating to listen to his reply.

“We are here to help the Afghan government,” Gough said. The farmers looked unhappy. Government people only ever came here to cut down the opium fields.

“We are also here to build peace and stability,” Gough said. He had to say these things. They were in his counter-insurgency handbook. There were murmurings. The terp was starting to look really scared now. The headman began to harangue him. For a second there was a flash of anger in the headman’s eyes, then it was gone. Self-control was back. Gough wondered what he was saying.

The terp looked furtive as he translated, wouldn’t meet Gough’s eye. “He says that before Nato came, there was peace. Now you are here, there is jang – war. Fighting every day. Bombs are dropped by planes. Like this morning. Young men are angry, go to join the Taliban.”

It was what Gough expected. Were his dining companions trapped in the middle between two sides, doing their best to survive? Or had they secretly decided to throw their lot in with the enemy, the Taliban?

“Those four men today had weapons and they were running from us,” he said. “We’ve had reports of the Taliban in this area. You must know that one of my men was killed by a bomb a few weeks ago.”

He watched the faces as this was translated. Some of the farmers looked bursting with things to say. Some looked puzzled, or fearful. Two or three were old, old men, watery-eyed. They looked weighed down by their own turbans. One was a bulky, jolly chap who made jokes that seemed to be at Gough’s expense, making the others laugh nervously. Two or three seemed quite friendly. A couple of the younger ones stared with undisguised hostility. There was a drowsy-looking one. Gough guessed he was on opium even though it was haram – forbidden – not to be consumed in the village but supposedly sold strictly for export.

One just listened carefully. Gough noticed the body language of the others towards this man, the youngest one there. Raven-black long hair flowed out from under his turban. The villagers were making a point of not speaking to him but you could see they were conscious of him. Gough caught the headman glancing at the man, then looking away quickly.

The headman sighed deeply. He didn’t dispute that the four boys from the neighbouring village had been Taliban. He stroked his beard, calculating what he should say. Since the war had blown up the year before, igniting in the south and spreading like wildfire up the eastern border, young men had gone to fight holy war. But nobody here was going to be rash enough to admit their young men had become fighters.

The headman sighed again, this time for dramatic effect. “It is true that many young men join the Taliban,” he said through the interpreter. “They believe they are fighting for their religion and for their village. Afghans have always fought foreign invaders.” There were murmurs of approval.

“Those boys who were killed today knew they could be shaheeds – martyrs. No man can escape his kismet. Their friends will be angry now and more will join the Taliban.”

Not for the first time Gough wondered how he was supposed to win his war.

“At least you don’t drop as many bombs as the Russians did,” the headman said. The ruined ghostly villages from that war were everywhere, so were the tattered green flags marking the burial places of shaheeds and the rusting armoured vehicles. Although some of the ruins were supposed to be of villages destroyed hundreds of years ago by the Mongols.

One of the shaven-headed boys who’d been watching from the side of the room darted out to clear away the remains of the food, staring at Gough. He disappeared into a side room where the women had done the cooking, came back a few moments later with a clean mat and huge baskets of fruit.

There were yellow pomegranates which they broke open to show shiny blood-red seeds like jewels, golden-yellow grapes sparkling where the light caught the water they had been washed in, bowls of sweet purple and yellow mulberries. Best of all were the giant green watermelons, sliced into red wedges with a knife as big as a carving knife.

The headman passed Gough slices of dripping melon. It was wonderfully sweet and thirst-quenching in the late-afternoon heat. The soldiers had learnt that you were usually OK with the melons but you risked a spectacular stomach upset if you were tempted by other fruit. Yet another risk to worry about in this treacherous land. He spoke again at length to the terp. The audience was watching Gough keenly.

“There are those who say…” the terp began, “that the English are here for revenge.”

“What revenge?” Gough said, intrigued. “We are here to offer help, not take revenge.”

The headman spoke again. “It is because of the Battle of Maiwand, that our ancestors fought against your ancestors. When Malalai led our forebears to victory.”

Gough had heard this one before. The Battle of Maiwand was the Afghan’s national myth. Malalai was their Joan of Arc. She had defeated, according to them, the British Army. When he looked the history up on the internet Gough had been mildly disappointed to see that his regiment had not been involved.

It happened during The Second Afghan war, 1880. The British, led by the general who became Lord Roberts of Kandahar (his men called him Bobs) launched a punitive mission which had been a tremendous success, except for one unfortunate setback at the dusty crossroads town of Maiwand not far from where they were eating. A British force had been chewed up and retreated and it was one of the great Victorian military disasters although soon forgotten. But not in Helmand. Down here everyone knew the story. Gough pretended he didn’t, asked them to tell it.

The headman sat up, back straight, head up. “She was a young girl of true Afghan courage,” he began. “When the warriors faltered before the English rifles, it was Malalai who rallied them. Led them even into the deathly bullets! She led our ghazis and they won a great victory against the English – forced them out of Afghanistan.”

This wasn’t quite right but Gough decided this wasn’t the time to argue it out. “Times have changed,” he told the headman. “The English are here to fight terrorism and help the Afghan people.” He knew it wasn’t much of an answer to men swollen with pride after hearing their national legend.

Green tea was being served now. The boy handed round a bowl of sweets and sugar cubes.   Gough decided he’d got what he needed. He rose on his stiff legs, thanked the village profusely for the meal, asked if they were interested in contractors coming to build a well (they were) and made sure he shook hands with everyone.

Outside the sergeant looked relieved. “Did you get what you wanted Sir?” he asked. Gough ignored the tiny hint of sarcasm. He’d asked the sergeant to discreetly film the meeting from the back of the room, make sure he got everyone’s face.

“Oh yes,” Gough said. “The long-haired chap, the young one, he was there to find out what we were up to. He was the Taliban’s man. We can’t do anything now – I can’t breach their code of honour – but we’ve learned something today and we can keep an eye out for him. You may think it a strange thing to do in the middle of a war, Sergeant, but that was one dinner that was well worth eating.”