Seven Summers Read online

  At that instant Ganesh came in.

  I began to sob at the sight of him.

  ‘Ohe, what is the matter? What has happened?’ Ganesh asked.

  ‘Masterji asked him to slap all the boys,’ one of the sympathetic children reported, ‘because they could not repeat their lessons. And because he did not hit them hard enough, the master slapped him. And now the boys are waiting to revenge themselves on him.’

  ‘Come,’ said Ganesh timidly. He seemed to be embarrassed.

  I got up and, catching his finger, went out rubbing my eyes with my left fist as they were sore with weeping.

  There was no sign of Ali and the crowd of boys.

  Ganesh encouraged me to hurry, saying that there was no danger.

  The two sympathizers walked away towards their homes.

  Ganesh and I crossed through Abdul Rahman’s fuel stall which stood on the right-hand side of the school, on the edge of the track leading to the regimental barracks.

  As we emerged into a piece of flat land, Ali, Dost Muhammad and two other Pathan boys descended upon me from a hiding-place and ambushed me.

  ‘Why did you slap us?’ Ali asked, wresting me from Ganesh.

  I started screaming, struggling and kicking to get away.

  Ali struck me a sharp blow on the face. A Pathan boy struck me another slap.

  I got hold of Ali’s leg and dug my teeth into it deep, as behoved my reputation as a little bulldog.

  Ali veered round and dealt me a heavy blow on the head, while Dost Muhammad kicked me in the belly.

  I wheeled round at the impact of the last, staggered and fell.

  ‘Give him another,’ said one of the Pathan boys.

  Ali came towards me, but Ganesh warded him off.

  ‘Give him another, another!’ the boys were shouting as Ali stood grinding his teeth with a still-unexpressed fury.

  Ganesh stood pale with fear, protesting weakly, appealing.

  An office orderly on his way from Lal Kurti, the English Barracks, to the Malakand lines, where our regiment was stationed, heard my shrieks and ran to my help.

  Ali and his gang had bolted.

  The orderly recognized Ganesh and me as he used to come to our quarter to deliver messages from the office to my father.

  He dusted my clothes and carried me home, followed by Ganesh who, from the information he gave the orderly, now seemed very sorry for me.

  After more howls, shrieks and sobs, exaggerated by sympathy, I lay still, enjoying the pleasure of being carried on the sepoy’s shoulder. Before long, exhausted by the day, I had fallen asleep.

  3

  It was some days before I got over the shock of this first visit to school. But the process of my recovery was speeded up by the excitement of my father’s promise to take me to Delhi, where he was going with the 38th Dogra contingent to attend the Coronation Durbar of George Panjam, Badshah of Englistan and Shahinshah of Hindustan and his consort, Mary.

  The reason why my father chose to take me there was that, apart from my bad luck at school, he supposed that my predilection for Vilayat and Sahibdom would be stimulated by a vision of these exalted personages. For my predilections in favour of England were growing with remarkable rapidity ever since my mother’s chance phrase had aroused my curiosity about my nurse, my fairy godmother, who had gone back to Vilayat.

  The impetuous, impulsive soul of a child takes colour from any vaguely indulged fancy. But the whole atmosphere of the cantonment was dominated by the superior, exalted white sahibs, who lived rich lives in sequestered bungalows, curtained off and protected from the dust, the flies and the natives by tall privet hedges, sahibs who occasionally emerged in smart, clear-cut clothes, who went about silent and mysterious, pink and red blurs, an unknown and unknowable element, except in the gossip of orderlies, bearers and shopkeepers. I was growing up quickly and grasped the superficial manifestations of Sahibhood with the pertinacity in logic of the enfant terrible.

  The regimental band practised as a full orchestra under the shadow of a porch, morning, noon and afternoon, about fifty yards away from our house. At first I was struck by the meaningless noise of angrezi music. Then when I had persuaded Clayton to teach me to read the hieroglyphs on the books from which he played his flute, and when I had been privileged by the Drum Major to beat the drum with my own hands, my feet began to thump to the tunes of the waltzes, foxtrots and march-music like those of a wild animal and my body swayed to the airs of ‘Home Sweet Home’, ‘God Save the King’, which, along with a few others, constituted the main items in the repertoire of the regimental band. And the clarinets, the saxophones and all the strangely shaped brass and ebony instruments looked so polished and fine, and the sight of Mishta Jones, the Indian Christian bandmaster, standing on a raised box and waving his pointer up and down in zigzag curves over the loose leaves spread on the iron rests before him, looked too ridiculous and sublime not to be the favourite item in the repertoire of my own mimes. I kicked up a continuous row with my shrill squeaks, loud raucous noises, beatings of an empty kerosene oil tin, and often brought the house down.

  And then there was the daily sight of the sepoys being drilled by English and Indian drill instructors on the gymnasium ground by our house, and I had fleeting visions of the Sahibs of the regiment who came to inspect the parade every morning. I would stand outside the house, my hands under my armpits, seeking the first rays of the morning sun, and I would watch the drill and gymnastics that the sepoys performed. The way in which uncouth, awkward recruits in shirts and shorts were made to push their chests forward, to hold their heads high, and were kicked on the shins or slapped on the face if they erred, frightened me and left me staring like a rabbit, fascinated by the cruelty which I saw being practised before my eyes. The measured movements of fully fledged sepoys to NCO’s orders, ‘Tand-i-tees’, ‘Shrup-arm’, ‘Orderup’, ‘Kik-march’, ‘Lef-rye-lef’, amused me, so that I wanted to become a soldier.

  The accomplished movements of ‘Holder’ Lachman Singh and his pupils, all clad in white vests and trousers, over the horizontal and the parallel bars, were breathtaking and marvellous, so superior in their Englishness they seemed, as compared with the wrestling matches in the native style practised near the Sadar Bazaar and so like the graceful, highly skilled performances of the troupe in Prof. Ram Murti’s circus, which I had been taken to see, that I was obsessed with the desire of joining a circus.

  And, of course, there was nothing more spectacular than the Sahibs who came on bicycles, or ‘phut-phuties’, dressed in khaki uniforms and sun helmets or in fine blue or fawn suits and felt hats, mopping their sweating foreheads and necks with silken handkerchiefs, an aroma of tobacco around them! A close view of red faces and blue eyes aroused my wonder and admiration and dispelled the original fear that I had felt. For they seemed kindly, speaking slowly and seeming to smile. My father had enjoined us not to make the slightest noise in their presence or near them, as they did not like to be disturbed, but to salaam them from a distance and to pass on. Compared with my own people, however, my parents, the sepoys, the bandsmen, the followers, the banias in the bazaar and the shopkeepers in the town, the Angrez Sahibs seemed so remote and romantic that I soon wanted to be like them even as I wanted to go to Vilayat.

  Possessed by this sense of otherness, I had come one day and asked my mother to get me ‘one of the topees which the Sahibs wore’. With the cool sobriety of worldliness, uninterested in the silly demands of her children, she had asked me not to worry her and referred me to father. With the dogged persistence of the child who is obsessed, I had interrupted father on the way home from the office and presented my demand. Father had laughed and, saying that if one of the Sahibs ever forgot his hat at the office I should have it, he had sought to quieten me with a vague promise.

  As I waited for the fulfilment of my desire for the western hat, I built up an idea of Englishness in the light of which all the details of my home life seemed a sordid drudgery, an interval of lustrel
ess, ‘natu’ existence, relieved only by the few rays of the exotic which entered our home. My mind devoured the pictures of Englishmen in raincoats, of Englishwomen in lingerie and of English children in Eton collars and school kits and of all the appurtenances of Anglo-Indian existence—boots, shoes, hats, pistols, forks and knives, pushbikes, motorbikes, cricket bats and the rest in the catalogues of Whiteaway Laidlaw and Company and other firms, which flooded in by every mail for the British officers from Bombay, Calcutta and London and which my father kept for us to play with when he sorted the mail for the post orderly in the mornings.

  These wonderful products of western civilization illuminated the course of my imaginings so intensely that I built up a vivid dreamworld Vilayat on the basis of this rubbish and went about dressed in paper clothes cut to the English pattern and ordered about dummy figures of fuel wood as if I were a full-blown Sahib. The fervour of these early desires sank into the labyrinths of my mind, soaked me in the colours of this fantasy and filled me so that though it became a less superficial and more conscious inclination afterwards, my first goings inwards into dreams had made inevitable the course of my later destiny.

  The thrill of anticipation at the prospect of going to Delhi with my father to see George Panjam and Queen Mary gathered momentum from these dreams.

  All the preparations for our departure to Delhi had been completed.

  My father, who very rarely wore the uniform of the ‘Colour’ Havildar to which he was entitled by his rank, had brought out and aired the red jacket, the blue breeches and puttees and a wonderful turban with the yellow and blue colours of the 38th Dogras. And he had entertained the whole house to a dress rehearsal at which we wished that he could always wear this uniform, so wonderful he looked. And everything augured well for the heroic performance.

  I had felt very proud to see father in his uniform. And though, for myself, I wanted an English boy’s suit to wear, I had been persuaded with difficulty to accept for the time being the wonderful, blue velvet uchkin, embroidered with gold, and a Peshawri skull cap and shoes worked in gold thread, which had been shrinking away since they were ordered for me on the occasion of Harish’s marriage.

  But a day before the contingent was due to start, father went to secure a cough mixture at the regimental hospital, and was by mistake given some poisonous medicine instead by Dr Ghaseeta Ram, the Babu doctor. And he fell seriously ill that night till his life was despaired of. The coronation contingent left without us the next day.

  Luckily, however, my mother gave him a strong emetic, which was her patent remedy for all the ills of the body, and the poison was washed out.

  Luckier still, my father recovered without a long period of convalescence and just in time to travel to Delhi in the special train in which the General Officer Commanding of the Nowshera Brigade and his staff were going a day before the coronation. I was put in charge of an orderly in the servants’ carriage, for fear so flagrant a breach of army discipline as an Indian child travelling in the same train as a ‘Jarnel’ might be discovered.

  I slept through the night, fatigued as I was with the strain I had suffered in my anxiety to go to Delhi, overweighed with the fear, arising from my father’s illness, that I might never go and then the sudden decision to go after all. And, in the morning, the orderly in charge of me kept covering me up with a blanket so that I might not be seen by a Sahib. All that I remember of that long journey, therefore, is the horror I developed of ‘Jarnels’ and ‘Karnels’.

  Of the visit to Delhi, indeed, I can only remember terrors of one kind or another.

  I was not taken to the resting place of the regimental contingent, which was situated somewhere in the white canvas city that stretched for miles and miles around Delhi, because my father thought that I might become conspicuous and the Sahibs might tell him off for bringing so discordant an element into so gorgeous a ceremony. I could see a great many English children with their ayahs being taken there in phaetons, but then I had always been taught to regard them as superior little Sahibs, whom one should not touch lest their clothes should get soiled or some contagion be passed on to them. Naturally, the white city became to me a sublime abode of gods, in which only the great white Sahibs and their chosen retainers were allowed. And I disapproved, aesthetically, of Babu Haveli Ram, the fat, squint-eyed friend of father, who was a clerk in the secretariat and to whom I was handed over, because his children were considered more wholesome company for me than the sepoys of the Dogra contingent.

  The strangeness I felt with these aliens baulked all the pleasures of the spectacle of Coronation Delhi, though so voracious a curiosity as mine could hardly be completely crushed. My all-seeing eyes, which never tired of looking, feasted on the welter of confusion, saturated themselves with visions of the immense pavilions glistening in the nimble sun of the cold morning as I progressed in a tonga with my guardian on the smooth, well-oiled road, bordered by beds of chrysanthemums and stretches of grass, through the giant entrance courtyards of the camps of princes and noblemen, more sparkling and resplendent and huge than anything I had ever seen before.

  While we were yet on the way to the town there was the reverberation of innumerable guns booming out somewhere. Babu Haveli Ram assured me that it was the Royal Salute being fired.

  ‘Just as there is a salute offered to the Jarnel Sahib at Nowshera, Uncle?’ I asked.

  ‘To be sure, but this salute is being fired in honour of the greatest Jarnel that there is in the world, the Badshah George Panjam,’ he said. And in order to prevent me from being frightened, he continued, ‘Look, the guns are in the fort there.’

  I looked in the direction in which Babu Haveli Ram was pointing, but a low haze hung over the canvas city and beyond, and the humming motors sped past the car in which I sat and raised a dust which obscured the view. But soon the sun was scattering the low-lying mist and the fort became visible.

  ‘I left your cousins among the schoolchildren, there,’ said Babu Haveli Ram, pointing to the masses of yellow and pink and green and orange pugrees on the top of the city gate. ‘I will leave you with them and they will bring you home afterwards.’

  As the tonga stopped, the Babu showed a pass to a sentry and, panting, bore me through a side street up the circular stairs of the pillars which led to the top of the gate to his sons: Shambu, a dark-faced boy of twelve with thick glasses and Krishna, my namesake, a cherubic, ugly child who was also about the same age as myself.

  My aesthetic objections to Babu Haveli Ram became a perverse hatred for his sons, especially as they, in the pride of their pink turbans, treated me as a mere outsider of the fifth remove and an embarrassing appendage.

  As I stood there among the long rows of happy, chirping, talkative Southern children, I felt alone and miserable. The pangs of hunger and separation from my father increased my disquiet, till I began to weep and howl as I had seldom done before.

  The state procession had begun to move long before and the schoolmaster in charge of the pink-turbaned contingent came and shouted angrily at me for not shouting and waving the school slogans. This made me cry with a shriller insistence at that delicate moment when everyone was supposed to present a smiling face. This frightened the schoolmaster and he secured me a good seat from which I could get a clear view of the scene, though I still sobbed stubbornly for nothing.

  Through tear-dimmed, frightened eyes, tired out by looking, after several hours then I saw the vast panoply pass in a procession under the noble portals decorated with tissues of gold and silver and coloured paper and bunting. First came the marching soldiers, then the battery and the agile horsemen of the cavalry and then a phaeton followed by the resonant hum of a broad whisper. The schoolmaster encouraged the boys to cheer. But I had not been instructed in the exact way in which to give the greeting. And, anyhow, I was struggling to distinguish the greatest ‘Jarnel’ of the world, Badshah George Panjam, among the feather-hatted officers who kept reining their chargers to a slow walk, their hands lifted in a salute
. I could not see him, but I got a glimpse of the top of that radiant vision of English womanhood, Maharani Mary, who sat with a large basket hat decorated with multi-coloured flowers in an open phaeton, with several Maharajas and coachmen in turquoise turbans and long white tunics riding behind on black steeds covered with saddlecloths of snow-white leather.

  ‘Who is this illegally begotten?’ the schoolmaster asked, after the procession had passed in what seemed almost a flash.

  Babu Haveli Ram’s sons were too snobbish to own any responsibility for me. In fact, when the teacher shepherded the boys to where they received a portion of sweets and a coronation medal at the door leading downstairs, they left me where I stood.

  I fell to sobbing with renewed vigour at being abandoned and at the shame of being pointed at by the boys.

  For a little while I stood there thus. Then I realized that I would never be able to find the house of Uncle Haveli Ram if I did not go and find my cousins.

  I ran, panic-stricken, after them.

  The dispenser of sweets and medals gave me my share.

  I took it and hurried downstairs. But the stampede of the heftier boys prevented haste. I descended with the tide slowly. In the gloom of the vault someone snatched at my sweets and ran away. I felt the empty leaf pot in my hands and began to weep again. There were some other boys who had suffered the same plight and the vault was full of wails. But a schoolmaster came shouting and we hustled downstairs, falling, rolling, crying and almost crushed.

  As I came into the street, I ran hither and thither, looking at the faces of the boys, to recognize Shambu and Krishna whom I had only met for the first time a little while ago. It was impossible, for it was difficult to move among the hurrying, scurrying forms of myriads of men. Pushed and pulled, almost trampled underneath the press of black-legged, hard-jointed Southerners, I was lost in a hostile world and began to howl again.

  A policeman caught hold of me and asked me why I was crying and whose son I was. The particulars that I gave him were no use at all. For, though everyone knows everyone else in India, this policeman had not heard of either ‘Babu Ram Chand of the 38th Dogras’ or of ‘Babu Haveli Ram of Delhi and Simla’. Nevertheless, the policeman took me about for a while, persuaded me to eat some fried bread and semolina, consoled me, admired my clothes and felt my ornaments. Then he handed me to a fat little silversmith and went away.