Rangoon Villa in Patel Nagar has been renovated and 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 girl 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 aftermath of the 1857 recapture of Shahjahanabad by the East India Company troops and the consequent harassment of the residents. Being a widower without issue, grand uncle 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 Easter 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 the officer was riding to Haflong on the Indo-Burmese border in 1890 or so but got benighted and retired in 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 proceeded merrily he saw a strange sight – a pack of wolves and leading them was a wild, unkempt woman, hair streaming in the breeze and her naked body glistering 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 she could and one day led him to a stream along with the horse. Having recovered his strength the Englishman hit the women 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 women but did not meet her again. Caleb said that the Englishman swore his tale was true and Augustus Somerville, the great narrator of such happenings, also mentioned it in his “Strange Tales of Shikar.”
The Easter party in Delhi, high on beer, relished the tales as much as the dinner, but Caleb was in no mood to relax. He would follow it up with another tale of 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 Scotsman’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 Scotsman hurrying out as though he had seen three ghosts. To quote Saki, “Romance at short notice was her specialty.” The tales told and retold at Easter parties by Caleb attracted more and more guests to his Rangoon House and among those usually present were, besides 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 X’mas and Easter parties, but the latter 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 1960’s.
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 Agra cemetery. But whenever Eastertide comes around one cannot help thinking of them wondering what happened to Caleb’s hoarded treasure.
