Rangoon Villa in Patel Nagar has been renovated and one doesn’t see the marble plate proclaiming it to be so but in the second decade of the 20th century there was a bungalow in the Civil Lines, which was referred to as Rangoon House, though there was no such sign outside it. The person who occupied it was an old Eurasian bachelor, Jeremmy Caleb, who had lived long in Rangoon and was very fond of the girls there and relating his experiences. He spent Christmas in Calcutta but at Easter time he was always in Delhi. And that was also when he held his annual party. The man seemed to have made good money in Burma, both as a high salaried officer and also as an amateur treasure hunter. He was believed to have unearthed hoards of gold coins buried by Burmese kings, the last of whom was exiled to India by the British. In Delhi, his maternal granduncle had been among the prize-agents, who had collected a lot of treasure from aristocratic Muslim homes in the after math of 185, recapture of Shahjahanabad by the East India Company troops and the consequent harassment of the residents.

Being a widower without issue, Granduncle Kenneth had left all his wealth to Caleb’s mother, after whose death he had inherited the asharfis, silver coins and jewellery. This is as per the late Mrs Macdonald’s account. This lady used to stay in Kashmere Gate and was close to the Skinner family, one was told by Mrs Winifried Singh, wife of the noted surgeon Dr C B Singh, herself a Skinner relative, who had met the doctor at Thompson Hospital, Agra, where she was serving as a nurse. Their friendship led to marriage (the second for the surgeon). Well, Caleb was no relative of Mrs Singh but knew her as the pretty girl, who used to live in Nicholson Road in the Skinner Haveli. But, whatever she had heard about him was from her mother Mrs D’Souza, who had attended many parties at Rangoon House, along with Mrs Macdonald.

There were two stories that Caleb was fond of repeating. One concerned an English friend of his. That officer was riding to Haflong on the Indo-Burmese border in 1890 or so but got benighted and reined in his horse wondering whether he should continue the journey or return home. He finally decided to move on as it was a full moon night. As he preceded merrily he saw a strange sight ~ a pack of wolves and leading them was a wild, unkept woman, hair streaming in the breeze and her naked body glistening with sweat. The Englishman’s path crossed that of the wild pack and the wolves began to follow him. It was a long chase and finally the horse stumbled and the rider crashed to the ground senseless. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a cave with a nauseating smell. The wild woman nursed him as best as she could and one day led him to a stream along with his horse. Having recovered his strength the Englishman hit the woman on her head, knocking her down and jumping on the horse sped away. Later he wondered who the woman was. Was she a werewolf or a wolf-girl reared by wolves like Romulus and Remus? He tried to trace the woman but did not meet her again. Caleb said the Englishman swore his tale was true and Augustus Sommerville, the great narrator of such happenings, also mentioned it in his Strange Tales of Shikar.

The evening party in Delhi, high on beer, relished the tale as much as the dinner, but Caleb was in no mood to relax. He followed it up with another take if a Scotsman in Rangoon, who had to spend a night in the open with a pack of wild dogs barking at him and forcing him to take refuge in an old tomb. The experience was such that the man had a nervous breakdown and took a long time to recover, Caleb was convinced that Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote under the pseudonym “Saki”, had based his tale, The Open Window, on the Scotman’s ordeal. The difference was that it ended on a farcical note with the Scotsman’s hostess of the evening convincing him that her brothers, who had disappeared on a Shikar trip and presumed dead, had suddenly emerged right then through the French window, sending the nervous man hurrying out as though he had seen three ghosts. To quote Saki, “Romance at short notice was her speciality.”

These tales told and retold at parties by Caleb attracted more and more guests to his Rangoon House and among those usually present were, beside Mrs Macdonald and Mrs D’Souza, Mr Maidens, who built Maidens Hotel, George Heatherley’s father and Old Louis of Bombay House in Ludlow Castle Road, who also was known as a great host at his winter and summer parties, but the former ones were mostly luncheons, after which the guests either went for a picnic to the Ridge or reassembled for high tea at the Delhi Club, housed in Ludlow Castle, which was demolished in the late 1960s. But Rangoon House may still be surviving as the residence of some neo-rich Delhi family, though Jeremmy Caleb is long dead and forgotten and Mrs Singh rests in an Agra cemetery. But one cannot help thinking of the yesteryear parties and wondering what happened to Caleb’s hoarded treasure and the old teacher, Mrs Hays, who was a wonderful church singer.

Old teachers and singers never die. They linger in the memory. One other such was Master Yonnus, a slim man, who always walked with a slight tilt of the head. He had been teaching since heaven knows when. Besides teaching, he used to play the organ in the church and lead the vernacular choir in Bandiqui too, going there all the way from Agra. You could always make out Master Sahib’s voice, it was thin but pleasant and slightly tilted like the way he carried his head. Without it the church service wasn’t complete ~ or so it seemed to ears long used to listening to his voice.

There were other voices too, like the baritone of Lazarus and Jarji, the long-winded one of Alfred, the skimpy notes of Seraphina and Sophina, the lilting tone of Mariam, the fulsome melody of Ady and the titillating stuff churned out by the vivacious Eva. The last named had been kidnapped, both of her looks and her voice. She returned, of course, after having worsted the kidnapped but that is another story.

Other voices merged with these to impart that special flavour to festival morning, which was missing on Sundays. At Christmas and Easter the hymns changed with a sprinkling of Latin and the quaint touch that translation in Urdu brings with it. Adeste Fidelis in the vernacular sounded just as pleasing at X’mas as “Gadaryon ne dekha sitara adhi raat ko” (The shepherds saw the star at midnight). On Good Friday the hymns were mournful like “mercies” but at “Pascha” they were joyous again in the spirit of Easter.

Master Sahib’s voice, however, was the vital link. You could glean the urgency in it as he enthused the choir, held it in check lest it go astray and then moulded the discordant notes into one harmonious whole that filled up the nave of the church and carried the effort past the Virgin, installed amidst a starry sky painting, and the statue of the infant Jesus till it reached the Italian Father Leo, resplendent in ecclesiastical vestments on the altar at a time when the priest did not face the congregation.

Meanwhile, old Jamoo rose and genuflected by turns as though offering namaz, while Nenah Joseph and his friend Jailor Sahib stood side by side in the pews and Lucas sat in a corner like the beadsman in Keats’ poem on St Agnes’ Eve. The choir saw the service through and, even after the main celebrant had left, kept people glued to their seats with its enthusiastic renderings, after which Master Yonnus regaled the dispersing congregation with Shikar yarns over cups of tea as he was a keen angler, who had seen some weird sights at Keetham Lake while waiting late into the night for the fish to bite the bait. To egg him on was old Major Peter, who had fought in Burma during World War II long after George Orwell had left the place to write his Rangoon Talesin the more congenial British climes.