The Gardners are descendants of Lord Alan Gardner who made a name for himself in “Gardhi ka Wakhat” of the 18th Century. It is after him that the Army’s Gardner’s Horse (now a mechanised unit) is named. He was known as Latsahib in Kasganj, where he built a big residential complex, complete with a Bibi Ghar for the women of the harem, among whom was his wife, the Princess of Cambay.
After inter-marriages with princely houses, including the latter Mughals, particularly at the time of Shah Alam, one of whose granddaughters Mulka Zumani Begum was married to James Gardner, half the clan became Muslim. But the remaining part was assimilated into the Anglo-Indian community, though Urdu poetry still attracted them, with both men and women excelling in “Shairi”, like Suleiman Shikoh “Fana” and his sister Ellen (Raqia Sultan Begum).
Among the earliest traditions the Gardners probably introduced in the country was that of Halloween, observed on October 31. Dead ancestors are believed to make their annual visit on this day. The first Halloween this scribe remembers was the one held by Eric Gardner in Ludlow Castle Road in the 1960s. Eric was a self-effacing sort of man, slim and soft-spoken, who had studied at St Peter’s College, Agra, where among his best friends was Nawabzada Fazal-ur-Rahman, who later settled down in Rawalpindi. Both he and Eric had acted in a Halloween drama at St. Peter’s in the 1930s. The Delhi Halloween concert was a smaller affair in which a few families participated. Most of them were teachers of St. Xavier’s School that had come up in the building of the old Cecil Hotel.
Well, Eric, George Marthins, the Fernandes’, Whelpdales, Halges, Saldhanas, Maxie’s family, complete with the vivacious aya Saira Bano and the Dawsons, got together to hold a show after the Jesuit principal of the primary school in Bombay House reluctantly gave permission for it. That was because the Church frowns on such an observance in which ghosts, hobgoblins and the spirits of air, earth and water are also said to make an appearance, along with ancestors, sometimes accosting belated travellers. Eric dressed up as a wizard, with witches as assistants. Irene, Gale, Ena, Joe and Betty acted as vampire victims (probably because the film Dracula was then being shown at the Odeon).
There were some ticklish moments when the girls screamed at being made to drink blood (actually water coloured dark red). But the frightening part really began when the wizard started calling out the assembled “ghosts” with a flaming torch in hand. Then a door suddenly burst open and from it emerged men arrayed as zombies (the living-dead). People squirmed in their seats when someone said in an audible whisper that they had actually come from the Nicholson cemetery nearby. Since all the actors were beyond recognition, children, especially schoolgirls, really believed that there was an invasion from the Netherworld. Some fainted and had to be revived with smelling salts and splashes of water on their faces. It was then that the older folk put their foot down and said it was time to end the macabre drama. Soon the lights were switched on and many in the audience started recognising the erstwhile ghosts. Mrs. Dawson pushed away her husband, a former Ceylon Navy officer, with great force for giving her the jitters in his hooded black suit and Betty scolded her fiancé Eddy for having made her hair stand on end by coming quietly behind her chair and pulling her sleeve. Eric, who had stunned everyone with his performance, handed over the painted pumpkin ghost-head he had pretended to pull out from a makeshift grave with an apologetic grin. But his wife did not seem to be in the mood to forgive him for his ghoulish deed. His daughters, including the grandly named Ava Gardner, however, recovered their senses and clung to him with the cry, “Oh Daddy you made our flesh creep”
That drama is revived in the mind’s eye whenever Halloween comes around but now it is the foreign embassies and hotels that cash in on this day of spooky stunts. What is more, families, along with children, come with hideous masks to heighten the ambience. Halloween has become a commercial show and not the stuff of earlier decades when it made the spine tingle even if a twig shook suddenly in the night or a cat purred on the window ledge.
Incidentally, many of the Gardners have migrated abroad though some stay put in Kasganj Chhaoni around the Bibi Ghar of their legendary ancestor, while one branch holds fort in Dehradun, where Halloween is not such a craze as in Delhi.
