Seven Summers Page 13

  For one day, suddenly, some Pathans descended from the low-lying hills beyond our barracks, disguised so as not to arouse the least of suspicion, at a time when the chill mist had settled on the dry river bed which separated the barracks from the hills. It was said that they bound and gagged the sepoys on ‘sentry-go’ at the quarter guard, looted seventy rifles from the magazine and disappeared into the hills.

  ‘How brave are these eaters of their masters!’ my mother said.

  ‘Don’t you praise them lest someone should hear,’ father cautioned her surlily.

  ‘And why not? They have always behaved like brothers to me. Why, I have passed at midnight under the bridge and they have never so much as lifted their eyebrows towards me.’

  ‘Fool! Someone will hear you,’ father said. ‘A sepoy or bhisti, and talk has a way of spreading. Don’t you know that the Sarkar fears nothing more than a Bengali bomb or a raid by the tribesmen of the North-Western Frontier?’

  ‘Then why do the ferungis come and occupy other people’s land?’ mother said. She had never forgotten her father’s hostile talk against the usurping foreigners who had handed over his land to his cousin, the traitor Harbans Singh.

  ‘That is true,’ said my father. ‘That they have done—occupied other people’s land. But you don’t realize that once they began they can hardly quit now. And while they are here they are afraid. That is why our paltan is stationed here in this desert of stones. And that is why the police picket every patch of road on the frontier. The whole area was once out of bounds for the Memsahibs and their babas and has only lately been opened up to them.’

  ‘What are they so frightened of?’ mother said with sound peasant common sense. ‘They have got all the army they need and the guns. The poor Pathans have only a home-made bandook or two.’

  ‘Ah, you don’t understand, Sundariai, they have never been able to subdue the Waziris, the Mohmands and the other tribes,’ explained father. ‘Besides, they are frightened of Roos, whose Badshah, they say, covets our rich land.’

  ‘I don’t know about the Badshah of Roos, but they might give a few crumbs to the Afridis and the Waziris and a few rags—these generous ferungis—rather than always be hounding them to death. The poor only attack when they are hungry, you know, but the rich oppress to show their power.’

  ‘It is true that the Pathans are a wonderful people if given half a chance,’ said my father. ‘They are a proud people, now violent, now gentle. They are loyal friends when they give anyone the hand of friendship, and terrible enemies—’

  ‘Yes, terrible enemies of the ferungis—who isn’t?’ mother said.

  ‘But you know as well as I do that they would carry on a feud for generations,’ said father. ‘Besides, they are fanatical and Pir-ridden.’

  ‘They respect religion and therefore follow their Pirs,’ mother contradicted. ‘But when our Maharaja Ranjit Singh conquered them, they became our friends.’

  ‘They are just a flamboyant crowd and mad with their lungis and their turas, reckless shooters of bullets!’

  ‘They spin and weave silk, such lovely silk!’ mother interrupted.

  ‘Acha, acha, don’t sit praising them here!’ hissed father. ‘Danger lurks for us all in these hills. It is like a nest of wasps. If only that fool of a Jarnel had not ordered a route march! The Angrezi Sarkar wanted to impress all and sundry that the Shahinshah of Hindustan had been crowned at Delhi. And now they have disturbed the wasp’s nest.’

  ‘Let them then reap the reward of their feud with the Pathans,’ mother said and proceeded to pick the stones out of the lentils.

  ‘Shut up!’ father burst out. ‘The Sahibs of the paltan are going about guarded by armed orderlies and with revolvers on their hips. The whole brigade is out looking for the culprits, and there is panic about and you talk like that. Please don’t say things like that to Gurdevi because she is sure to tell Chattar Singh.’

  But my mother was not to be restrained from expressing her revolutionary ardour. ‘Little mother’ Gurdevi had been drawn nearer to mother since the raid by the tribesmen because her house was next door to the quarter-guard. So when she came they had a good get-together and renewed their treaty of friendship by running down the wife of Dr Ghaseeta Ram of the regimental hospital.

  My father suffered by these disturbances more acutely than most people. For more than anyone else in the regiment he was in touch with the increasingly aggressive and bad-tempered Sahibs at the office, and it was his duty to read the fresh orders which arrived from Army Headquarters every morning. Also, with a large, cordial manner, he had, through the various spells during which the regiment had been posted on the Frontier, cultivated the friendship of the local Pathans. He wrote letters and applications for them, in exchange for which they sent us gifts of fruit, new-laid eggs, woollen cloth and, on their festivals, sometimes a whole sheep.

  Over long, anxious days father sought the evidence of a smile on the faces of the Sahibs to assure him that they did not suspect him of disloyalty. And with that fear of someone backbiting through jealousy of him, he lived in dread of some enemy who might go and poison the Sahibs’ minds about him. And he went about sedulously cementing his relations with his friends in the regiment …

  Outside his quarters, a hundred yards away from our house, the Indian head of the regiment, Subedar Major Garka Singh Bahadur, kept court as he sat on a chair. My father went round daily and paid his respects to the Subedar. Garka had always been cordial to father, because in the old days my father had used his own position as a ‘shadow colonel’ to secure rapid promotion for him from rifleman to his present exalted rank. And the stolid Rajput, with a lion’s face except that his mane was brushed apart from the base of the chin to look like a goat’s beard, remained a staunch friend. Sensing the Babu’s nervousness, he would order hot milk for him. He even came round to our house to cheer him, gave me and my brothers coppers and sweets and sent my mother fruit and vegetables.

  On his way back from the office, father made it a point to meet another worthy, ‘Holdar Surjan’ Singh, the short, fat Quartermaster Havildar, who was so fat that his eyes were always half-closed and his breath came and went as if he were continually puffed up with the strain of carrying about his enormous globe of a belly. Surjan was my father’s ‘old numbria’, contemporary, having joined the regiment in the same year, and father used to hail him from a distance with a joke and then come and dig playfully into his fat belly or stand talking to him in serious tones for hours. Therefore he was helpful and the fact that he wielded a tremendous influence over the regiment, through the affection which his comic figure earned for him from most of the experienced sepoys, was an asset, making all those who gathered round him popular through the aura of fun and laughter that oozed from him.

  Sometimes father could be seen in conversation with Pandit Jay Ram, the clean-shaven, clean-apparelled regimental head-priest. But the priest was wily like most of his tribe, and a dubious case. For some reason, inwardly resentful of my father’s position, he had sought in the past to counteract his influence with the British officers by intrigues with the Indian officers and the clerks in the regimental office. Some of these people harboured private grudges, the Indian officers because their papers had not been pushed, the Babus because my father was their immediate superior and a check on their promotion so long as he remained in office and did not retire. But as, in the end, they had to depend on my father to negotiate their business, they did not come out openly against him. And Pandit Jay Ram could be flattered and his mischief-making tendencies checked for long periods by counter-intrigues and by asking him to a feast on the death anniversary of an ancestor.

  The real measure of my father’s sense of security, or insecurity, was the attitude of Babu Chattar Singh, the Quartermaster’s Clerk, our ‘little father,’ all beard and no face. In spite of the veiled talk of father and mother, who did not want to alienate us from him and Gurdevi, we learnt that Chattar Singh was a more real danger to father beca
use he aspired to be Head Clerk of the regiment and was only waiting for an opportunity to have him ousted. But Chattar Singh’s ambition was robbed of all strength by his lack of mastery of the Angrezi tongue, each word of which got lost in his beard. My father’s English had been perfected by the teachings of the Rev. James Furber, the headmaster of the Church Mission High School at Amritsar, and his writing of this language had been refurbished by his reading of English books on every summer afternoon and winter evening.

  Still, Babu Chattar Singh constituted a potential threat. My father now tried to be cordial with the Quartermaster’s Clerk, calling for him affectionately by the initials of his name C.S.O. (for Chattar Singh Oberoi) and taking him out for a walk and talking vaguely about the possibilities of his retirement in five or ten years. My mother actively cultivated the C.S.O.’s wife, the demure Gurdevi, who kept aloof from her at intervals, as she had not only made her husband’s cause her own, but had her own peculiar bitterness for she could not have a child and was jealous of my mother’s flourishing womb. However, Gurdevi had been exchanging visits with mother more frequently since the raid and there was no danger on her account. And we were in the seventh heaven of delight, receiving ‘oh kuch’, something, from two sources, from mother’s box as well as from ‘little mother’ Gurdevi’s.

  There were other men in the regiment who had to be cultivated lest they should spread disaffection: there was Siraj-Din, the regimental armourer, whom my father had nicknamed Tamerlane, because this fanatical Muhammadan with a henna-dyed beard limped since the day he had fallen off the train during the journey to the front in the Third Afghan War; there was Hanumant Singh, the headmaster of the regimental school, a tall, serious young man whose uprightness forbade intimate contact; there was Babu Ghaseeta Ram, an angular, abject, sycophantic man from the plains who had risen from compounder of medicines to doctor. He was really attached to the 44th Artillery paltan, but he was sufficiently influential in the cantonment if he should start whispering about a man whose popularity in the Arya Samaj he had coveted. And there were other ‘snakes in the grass’ in this narrow world, where every one intrigued to rise in the favour of the Sahibs and thus gain more prestige.

  My father gravely contemplated the possibilities by which he might fall in the estimation of the Sahibs; he discussed the issues with my mother at mealtimes in tones of high seriousness and fear; he developed a persecution mania which made him wear a scowl on his face for days and which led him into alternate bursts of tenderness and violent anger towards us children.

  The tension was relieved somewhat on the eve of the Burra Din, Christmas Day, when an orderly arrived at our quarter with a basket of fruit and a mysterious box addressed to Brute, Bully and Bitti from Colonel Longdon, the Officer Commanding the regiment.

  My father’s joy knew no bounds. For was not this gift an indication of the ‘Karnel’ Sahib’s goodwill towards him? And he ran across the courtyard smiling, laughing, bursting, shouting: ‘Come boys, come and see what Karnel Longdon Sahib has sent you.’

  Ganesh and I ran excitedly from where we were doing homework in the sitting room and elbowed each other out of the way as we eagerly waited for the box addressed to us and Shiva to be opened. And when the packet was undone we greedily fell upon it, straw and all, so that it was only with abuses and injunctions that my father rescued the things out of our hands. But we were not to be restrained and, on the excuse of helping to unpack, began to separate the straw from the contents.

  Soon in our eager fingers appeared toys.

  At first there came the parts of a toy train, which my father wound with a key and let go, a vision which excited me so that I shrieked for joy and woke up baby; then there was the vision of a beautiful, pink-faced, blue-eyed doll which my mother said was the image of my future bride and which I therefore hugged and would not allow Ganesh even to touch; and there was a clay elephant, a clay camel and a wax swan.

  Coming from the god of all gods, the ‘Karnel’ Sahib, these playthings came later to be cherished almost as the relics of saints. Meanwhile they delighted me so much that they were in danger of affording no more delight at all as I wrangled with Ganesh on the rights of ownership. There could have been no doubt about this issue, of course, as I was the spoilt child, more vociferous, the ‘bully’ and more ‘fashionable’. But as soon as I had wrested them from my brother my mother came and said she wanted to keep them intact for the special ceremony, the ceremony of dedication to the gods, which she considered it necessary to perform so that more barkat or blessings should flow from them into our house.

  ‘I want them! I want them! They are mine!’ I cried with the self-will of an indulged child, and I tried to pull them out of her hands.

  ‘Don’t buk, sit still and you will get them after your mother’s ceremony,’ shouted my father, falling in with my mother’s plan about sanctifying the toys. For, though he had belonged to the Arya Samaj, an iconoclastic society which sought to bring back the pure worship of the Vedic Age, my father was, like most Hindus, a man of no very pronounced faith, conceding his assent to all the ceremonies and festivals over which my mother presided with the devotion of a naive peasant woman.

  I sat back rather chilled and crestfallen, defeated in the very moment of my victory over my brother, and began to ride my wooden horse …

  That evening my father relaxed, dropped the Civil and Military Gazette he was reading, beamed with a smile of self-satisfaction, covered his legs with the milk-white homespun shawl which he usually wrapped round himself for warmth during the not-too-cold winter, and leaned back comfortably on the cow-tailed cushion which stood against a whitewashed wall whence the small bright jet of the tin lamp reflected a pale light on the floor covered with a durree. And he sat as if contemplating, with bland assurance and considerable relief, the glazed pictures of beautiful society women, in long flowing robes with tiaras on their heads, and reproductions of paintings of lords and ladies in hunting dress, seated on fine horses with packs of hounds behind them, and cartoons which he had cut from old and discarded copies of the Tatler and Bystander from the Officers’ Mess and plastered on the wall.

  ‘The Karnel is a very good man!’ he said to my mother, full of pride. ‘And that basket which he has sent us is a shoe in the face of all my enemies. They can go on back-biting now if they like, for I have got the Sahibs on my side. And even the Arya Samajis can keep their Samaj. I have served the Sarkar all these years and I shall not betray the salt I have eaten … Let us have some of that fruit …’ And he looked greedily towards the basket as if he had never seen such dainties in his life, as, indeed, he had seldom enjoyed luxuries; for he had been deprived of the good things of life in his childhood by a mean old mother and, being careful himself, had never bought expensive foodstuffs, so that there was seldom any fruit in our house unless my mother went shopping and bought some overripe bananas cheap, or someone presented a basket for a gift.

  ‘Wait a while now,’ my mother said, emerging from her prison in the kitchen. ‘You are as impatient as a child.’

  And she brought out a platform which served as her shrine, with little brass images of the various gods on it. There was the blue-coloured god Krishna, after whom I had been named, who played his flute as he stood with crossed feet next to the goddess Radha. There was Ganesha, the funny elephant-headed deity of wisdom and wealth, after whom my elder brother had been named. There was Vishnu, the Blessed One. There was Yessuh Messih on the cross of a small steel crucifix, with a bulging tongue, an image which my mother had begged of a nun. There was a brass Buddha seated in the lotus seat. There was a large photograph of the Aga Khan, who, my mother said, was the incarnation of Krishna and Vishnu and Rama and head of the Ismaili sect, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad, and was Household God of our coppersmith’s caste. And there were other minor gods, all neatly polished and arranged in a row, wrapped in the oils of smoke from an incense which lay before them. The Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu prayer book, the Japji, the Sikh gospe
l, an Angrezi ‘anjeel’, and a symbolic copy of the Koran rubbed shoulders or rather elbowed each other away from the platform, especially since the gifts which had arrived from the bungalow of Colonel Londgon were also enthroned on the mandala.

  ‘Ho ho! Ha ha!’ my father laughed, his critical faculties aroused by his chagrin at not getting what he wanted when he asked for it. ‘Look, boys! Look! Your mother is going crazy!’

  My mother seemed to take no notice and, murmuring prayers and incantations, waving the censer before the images and over the toys and the fruit, she joined her hands and bowed her head upon them in a fit of dedication to the gods.

  ‘Ha ha!’ my father laughed again, a half-embarrassed, half-mischievous laugh. ‘She has gone mad. She worships Yessuh Messih at the same time as Vishnu, Krishna, the Koran and Japji … She is mad, boys, mad. She is crazy!’

  My mother went on murmuring her incantations, now pale and disturbed by my father’s mockery, now smiling self-consciously. And then she was almost tearful in her hurt simplicity.

  ‘Will you give me the hot milk before you begin to pray,’ said my father, ‘and a piece of that Christmas cake which the Sahib has sent? Then you can do what you like.’

  ‘Acha,’ my mother answered wearily. ‘But fear God. The curse of Heaven may fall on you for mocking at my worship. If your own religion was just a way of becoming the Pradhan of the Arya Samaj and then leaving it faintheartedly as soon as you knew that the Sarkar wouldn’t like it, leave others to pray if they want to!’

  ‘Do you call this religion?’ my father said. ‘Worshipping Vishnu, heaping flowers on the Koran and the Gita and joining hands to Yessuh Messih?’

  ‘The God behind all of them is the same,’ my mother said hesitantly.

  ‘May I have my milk too, mother?’ Ganesh said softly in order to be on the side of my father. ‘I want to go to bed. I feel sleepy.’