Seven Summers Page 12

  I was overcome with fatigue and sorrow by this time and dozed off on the nicely carpeted and cushioned boards of the silverware shop.

  That afternoon, Babu Haveli Ram came distractedly in search of me, and got to the silversmith’s shop after making inquiries in the Bazaar. I was yielded up, still half asleep, and my guardian carried me home on his shoulder in time for the evening meal.

  Here I partook of a rich and sumptuous dinner which had been kept for me from midday and, Babu Haveli Ram’s wife being away, his young daughter washed my face, engaged me in play and was kind to me.

  Even my cousins were much more friendly now and brought out various games to amuse me. I was, however, very tired and sleepy and my eyes closed in the midst of snakes and ladders and did not come to till the next morning.

  Eager at the mention of my father, I rallied, drank hot tea with biscuits and issued forth with uncle Haveli Ram and my cousins to go and see the Durbar.

  Through the intricate network of bazaars went the motor, blowing its noisy horn to scatter the agile, colourful Southerners, through gateways and arches which already looked rather forlorn and neglected after yesterday’s ceremony, and we came to a scene which has remained deep in my memory:

  Before a high stand where we, the more privileged citizens, were arrayed tier by tier on a smooth plain warmed by the sun, were two huge amphitheatres, making a vast circle. On one side of this was a magnificent canopy, before which stood armed guards.

  With a sudden blare of bugles and to the beating of drums, which excited me with the affection of the sounds that I had heard from my infancy, came the contingents of troops marching from the outlying camps.

  ‘My Baji must be among them,’ I said proudly, almost jumping out of my seat.

  But uncle Haveli Ram restrained me as well as his children, who were eagerly asking questions, and pointed to the spectacle.

  I contemplated the horsemen who were riding in, with lances flashing in the sun, and the contingents on foot, with their regimental colours fluttering in the slight breeze that invigorated the morning, and then the artillery in gay uniforms, shining and resplendent, while from among the sea of rustling faces on the packed citizens’ stand I gazed wide-eyed, intent, awestruck by the glory of the army, proud that my father was in it and looking for him with a naive faith that he, the hero of the morning to me, would soon be visible, a towering giant among the giants. Only I wished that I were walking there or somewhere by the canopy where the English children were, and I could not understand in my simplicity that my father was only a humble Indian clerk and an NCO and not to be thought of in the same breath as the exalted Sahibs! …

  The Rajas and Maharajas came along with a bustle, in their court robes of velvet and silk, decked with glistening jewels and diamonds and rubies and sapphires. And the breath of rumour floated from mouth to mouth among the crowd of citizens, as to which of these Rajas was which, and how many wives he had in his zenana and how many elephants in his stables.

  But the massed bands of all the Indian Army entered, playing a march tune, and drowned the whispers, as if to prepare the crowd for the Viceroy. This god arrived, the train of his cloak held up by boy princes, who, in their surtouts of gold cloth and their turbans caught up with aigrettes, and their flashing robes, outshone in glory any children I had ever seen in my life.

  Now the air was very tense and everyone seemed to be waiting, breathless.

  A state carriage drawn by four horses with scarlet postillions and outriders rolled in, noiseless as the breeze, and there was a little cheering where the great Sahibs, the Maharajas and the officials were seated, while a whisper ran down among the crowd: ‘Badshah and Malka.’

  ‘They are sheltered by golden umbrellas,’ one of the spectators said, ‘exactly as gods of old!’

  ‘He is wearing jewels!’ said another.

  ‘He is naked from the knees!’ repeated a third.

  But the thunders of bursting artillery drowned this talk, and the specks of two figures were seen walking into the arena, and the audience rose to its feet and salaamed, while the dignitaries clapped their hands.

  The Badshah and his Mem bowed to the spectators’ mound. Then they paused by the dais till a large Union Jack was lifted by means of ropes and pulleys, which seemed to me miraculous, till it unfurled to the breeze from a lofty pole, the silver sheen of naked swords glittered across the arena in a salute and the massed bands of musicians sent out the waves of a sonorous and deafening music.

  ‘Why has he got his hat on and not the other Sahibs?’ I asked, suddenly struck by the incongruity.

  ‘Sh …’ said Babu Haveli Ram and cautioned me with his forefinger.

  A blare of trumpets rang out and instilled further fear into my heart.

  And then a great roll of drums began from the massed bands and spread a volume of muffled sound as at a Sahib’s funeral, like the one that I had once seen at Nowshera.

  The Badshah, who had sat down, now stood to speak.

  The hoarse, resonant accents of his Angrezi tongue were incomprehensible to the crowd and waves of whispers fluttered down the mound.

  ‘That red stone in his hat is the Koh-i-Noor,’ said a Sikh to Babu Haveli Ram. ‘It belonged to Maharaja Ranjit Singh before the Angrez log beat the Sikhs at Aliwal. This king’s grandmother snatched it from the little Maharaja Duleep Singh whom she adopted as a godson …’

  ‘That is the brightest jewel in the British crown,’ said Babu Haveli Ram.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Sh …’ Babu Haveli Ram silenced me as various Inspectors of Police were riding up and down enforcing respectful attention.

  Then the sonorous speech of George Panjam died down. There was a momentary pause followed by the cheers of the dignitaries.

  After that the Rajas and the Maharajas advanced one by one to pay their homage to their Shahinshah.

  The crowd wearied of this lengthy ceremony and whispered and gossiped and babbled. Even the Inspectors of Police, who charged up and down the length of the enclosure, could not hush them.

  Truly, the Indians are an irrepressible people. I understood later, as I grew up, that the bad behaviour of the crowd at the Delhi Durbar had created a most unfavourable impression on the Angrezi Sarkar. It was said that not only the crowd but one of the Princes, the Maharaja of Baroda, had been disrespectful to the King-Emperor, because, though he had bowed before his suzerain, he had turned his back as he retreated, with his head erect and that he had not walked back the prescribed ten yards still facing the King with bowed head. My father said that the Army officers particularly were very angry about the lack of discipline at the Durbar.

  At length, the Badshah walked up from under the canopy and showed himself in full to the vast gathering.

  ‘Darshan! Oh, the showing!’ the crowd whispered and a quiver of excitement ran down among the spectators.

  The massed bands thundered out a loud song.

  They were followed by the clamorous, insistent calls of the trumpets and muffled drums.

  Again, there were the clarion notes of trumpets.

  Then one spoke:

  ‘The Lat Sahib!’ someone said. ‘The Viceroy is speaking.’

  ‘What?’ a spectator applied his ears.

  He says: ‘Transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi.’

  ‘Grants of land? What did he say?’

  ‘What is he saying?’

  ‘Can’t hear!’

  The babble of talk rose again; there were suppressed whispers, and hushed inquiries; then some of the spectators were craning their heads and their bodies to look ahead of others; and further back were loud protests. Curiosity and interest had got the better of the good manners of the crowd. To me as a child it all seemed fun.

  The Viceroy finished his speech and the bands rang out ‘God Save the King’, drowning the babble of voices.

  ‘I want to go and see my Baji,’ I said. ‘He is there.’ And I darted across the grandstand into the maidan.
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br />   Babu Haveli Ram caught me, however, before I had actually jumped into the arms of the law. And, taxed by my impetuosity, he decided to take me to my father’s camp … As he lifted me, suddenly, the glance of his squinting eyes fell on my bare arms. The golden bangles, which my father had asked him to take off and hold in his safe keeping, and which my guardian had forgotten to collect before leaving me with his sons on the previous day, were not there.

  ‘Where are your bangles?’ he said, shaking with fear and by this time thoroughly sick of me.

  My heart sank within me and I pictured my father beating me as he had beaten my elder brother, Harish, for playing with bhangi boys at Lahore. I began to weep in anticipation of the moment when I would be face to face with my father. Now I was not so eager to go to him.

  But, of course, I had to go, because Babu Haveli Ram felt very responsible.

  And the awful thing for me was that my father, who was feeling very expansive after having taken part in the ceremony, was very happy to see me and kissed me and petted me, singing the nonsense rhyme, ‘Bully, Bully, Bully, my son …’ But when Babu Haveli Ram drew him aside and told him about the missing bangles, his face fell.

  All the joy, all the pride, all the exhilaration he had felt through the increase in his izzat which his participation in the coronation contingent of his regiment had given him, was smothered by the news of the loss of the golden bangles from my hands. He thoroughly regretted having brought me with him. Partly because he was afraid of his chancellor of the exchequer, my mother, who thought him careless with ornaments and money, partly because he was a man with a small income who valued the property he was amassing by stinting his own wants and pleasures, and partly because, in spite of the arguments of his intelligence, he was inclined to ascribe the calamity to the influence on me of the planet Saturn under whose shadow I was said to have been born; he regarded this inauspicious happening as the harbinger of more troubles to come.

  But that extra prestige which my father believed to have accrued to him as a member of His Majesty the King-Emperor’s army, worked miracles.

  For, having abused me and cajoled me by turns into yielding the whole story of my plight during the hours when I had been lost, he got a shrewd suspicion about the man who had taken the bangles. Taking a detachment of sepoys from the contingent, he presented himself at the shop where the policeman had left me, and asked the Bania whether he knew the constable who entrusted me to him. The Bania had known of third-degree methods perhaps, but he certainly did not know of the first-degree methods of the army. Before he answered the question, my father’s attendants, the sepoys, were beating him. He was humility itself and offered to come to the police lines and indicate the man, whom he knew as a regular constable on duty by the city gates. The army fancies itself superior to the police in India, mainly because the sepoy’s pay is higher than that of the policeman, and the uniform of the constable does not show him off to advantage.

  Confronted by the detachment of sepoys, the policeman, used to protecting property by keeping it in his safe keeping, was truth and honesty itself. He said that he had only put the bangles in the custody of a silversmith in such and such a lane, because he was sure from the presence of rogues, hooligans and beggars at coronation time in Delhi that I would lose them. And he and the local inspector treated us all as guests and would not let us go till we had had milk and sweets at their expense. The constable was the soul of courtesy and offered to go and fetch the bangles from the custodian. It seemed that by mistake the silversmith had twisted and broken the bangles, in order to keep them safe from the possibility of rusting! …

  ‘Gold,’ he assured my father, ‘keeps better in blocks than in the shape of ornaments.’

  Certainly I have never forgotten this advice: I have never worn a gold ornament since.

  4

  If, according to the horoscope of my life, worked out from various astrological almanacs by Pandit Balkrishan, I was under the influence of Saturn, then my father must have been under the influence of a still unluckier planet, my mother under the influence of a worse star and my brothers, Harish, Ganesh and Shiva, of the very worst constellations; because a series of incidents followed which affected us both individually and as a family. The fictitious period of blissful calm which my parents always imagined they had once enjoyed, never came back again, although for years my mother propitiated the evil spirit of Mangal on Tuesdays by giving oil to the barber, and the foul devil, Shukar, on Fridays by entertaining a Brahmin to a meal.

  Some days after our return from Delhi my father came rushing into the kitchen from where he had been standing reading the Civil and Military Gazette, wrapped in a shawl according to his familiar habit, and announced to my mother in the most agitated manner that something terrible had happened.

  ‘A bomb was discovered on a road near the Viceroy’s house,’ he said. ‘They say it had been put there with the intention of killing or injuring the ferungis … It killed only an Indian sepoy who kicked it, imagining it to be a football …’

  ‘Who did it, do you think?’ My mother said, casual and unperturbed.

  ‘It is suspected that it was placed there by Bengali seditionists who objected to the transfer of the capital of India from Calcutta to Delhi. And the Sarkar thinks that there is a large-scale conspiracy to destroy British Raj in India.’

  ‘So!’ mother commented.

  ‘The newspaper says that among the conspirators are the agitators who were prominent in the disturbances after Lord Curzon’s partition of Bengal. And members of the Arya Samaj.’

  ‘What is so terrible about it?’ mother said coolly. ‘After all they deserve what they get, these Angrez log, they have raised their heads to the skies! They have no religion, no shame. Look how they butchered the Sikhs. My father lost half his land because of their injustice when they rewarded the traitors. The eaters of their master!’

  ‘Oh, you are a fool,’ my father said impatiently. ‘The Sahibs of the regiment know that I am a member of the Samaj …’

  ‘Has a Samaji been caught then?’ my mother said.

  ‘No, they have only taken a Bengali yet, a man called Rash Behari Ghosh,’ said father. ‘But they will soon arrest Arya Samajis.’

  ‘It has surely nothing to do with us,’ my mother said. ‘You didn’t do anything, did you?’

  ‘You are silly,’ said father, frowning. ‘I am the President of the Samaj in the Sadar Bazaar. And these hillmen, or Chattar Singh and the others, are always looking for an excuse to tell upon me to the Sahibs. They are jealous and they may poison the Sahibs’ minds.’

  ‘I don’t see anything wrong with the Samaj,’ mother said. ‘After all it is because all those Babus know that you can out-drink them that they have made you their Pardhan. And you don’t do anything more wicked there, all of you, than play cards or chess or go together to see the mujra of a courtesan … Don’t think I don’t know of the goings-on there …’

  ‘Madwoman, the Samaj has lofty ideals, given to it by its founder Swami Dayanand.’

  ‘Drinking and whoring, I presume!’ mother said caustically.

  ‘No,’ father protested. ‘Swami Dayanand took us back to the Vedas. He was a sage. He called upon the Hindus not to worship idols …’

  ‘The godless one!’

  ‘Of course, you would say so, fool, but he was against superstition, child marriage and the caste system. And he wanted us to revive the glories of the ancient Aryas!’

  ‘And he stood for fashion, I suppose!’ mother waxed ironical.

  At this we laughed, because whatever we could or could not understand about the talk, we knew that at the meetings all the Babus who gathered together wore collars and neckties.

  ‘Don’t put such silly ideas into the heads of the children,’ father rebuked mother. ‘You know that I had to join it, if only in order to keep my position in the regiment and among intelligent people in the Sadar Bazaar. After all, we belong to the low profession of coppersmithy and the stigma of
that brotherhood is always sticking to us. Besides, what is one to do after office if not go to some sort of club?’

  ‘Bless your grey hair!’ mother said bitterly. ‘It makes everyone call you “uncle” and you can get away with all the drinking and whoring that you want under cover of your popularity with the Babus and shopkeepers of Sadar Bazaar. A good leader they have found in you!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ father said. ‘The Sarkar regards us as a hotbed of intrigue and sedition. You know that Lala Lajpat Rai belongs to it. And also Ajit Singh of the “Pagari Sambhal Ohe Jata” fame …’

  Mother mischievously began to sing ‘Pagari Sambhal Ohe Jata’, the revolutionary peasant song invoking the men of the land to stand erect and look after the turban on their head, for the turban symbolizes all dignity in India.

  My father just walked away in despair at the lack of sympathy he found in her.

  He did not do his dumb-bell exercises that morning. And he went to the office without eating his food.

  The house was electric with the tension he created by his panic.

  He came back that afternoon complaining of a fever in his bones and he collapsed for five days.

  This was perhaps fortunate, because it prevented him from going to the town and opening himself to the suspicion that he had been in consultation with the suspected society or any of its members …

  But before my father’s anxiety about the repercussions of this bomb affair had been allayed, something else happened which gave him sleepless nights, ruffled his temper and cast the shadow of terror on the household, which had been vibrant before with the shrill cries and laughter of us children, with his own raucous voice and my mother’s pleadings and remonstrances.