Seven Summers Read online

  ‘Take it, here,’ said my mother impatiently. And she hastily poured portions of milk from a brass pot into wide bronze cups. Then she heaped some plates with fruit and sweets and put them before us.

  My father sipped the milk noisily, his moustache covered with the cream, a twinkle in his eye and a laugh in his throat. He seemed to assert his triumph over his enemies with each bite he took of the delicacies.

  My mother went out to the kitchen.

  When my father had finished his supper he announced he was going to bed.

  Ganesh crept away behind him.

  I sat playing with the toys alone, completely master of the situation.

  ‘Go to bed, you too, Krishna,’ my mother said huskily as she came in from the verandah.

  I turned to her and saw that she was hiding her face in her apron.

  ‘What is the matter, mother?’ I wanted to say. But, instead, tears welled up in my eyes. Because I surmised that it was not my father’s contempt for her worship that made her cry, but her fear of him, the lack of something in him, I did not know what, which often made him sullen and angry.

  ‘I can’t sleep without you, you come too,’ I said, as I had now decided on which side I was going to be in this quarrel between my father and my mother.

  In the past I had always regarded my father as a hero and had been somewhat afraid of my mother, for as she prayed she would sit with her eyes closed and her whole manner taut, and she seemed to me distant, detached and not my mother but someone ugly and dead. And her idols had such a sinister air about them, the evil shadow of gods who seemed to take my mother away from me. But now I felt linked to her in a love that was simple and immutable and beautiful and sad. I put my arms round her neck while she wept silently and I clung to the tormented warmth of her dark face. And the gods didn’t exist any more …

  5

  About this time I began to notice a conspicuous change in my father’s relations with us all. He was harder, much more reticent in his manner and short with anyone who dared to contradict him. Perhaps he had got scent of another conspiracy against himself by his enemies, or perhaps it was just a passing mood, but he began to absent himself from home in the evenings when previously after dinner he used to sit down and coach us in our studies and preside over the family hearth, as it were. He would go away for weekends to Peshawar or to Amritsar on a few days’ leave and my mother often cried herself to sleep. And when he was in the house, a nameless oppression reigned there like a dark thundercloud.

  I did not then know the reasons for this change. I found later that it certainly had something to do with the strained atmosphere between the Sahibs and the people, ever since the discovery of the bomb in the Viceroy’s house. The fact that my father had suddenly cut any connections he had had with the social life of the Arya Samaj seemed to weigh on him. And although the fear of possible intrigues against him still haunted him, he was unhappy at the restrictions which he had to impose on himself. The company of narrow-minded, illiterate Indian officers, and wine and women at Peshawar, were inadequate compensations. And he hated, though he accommodated himself to them, the petty rivalries, the meannesses and the intrigues of the small-minded men in the army.

  I recall now that I felt acutely the impact of this change in my father’s temperament, because it so happened that about this time I was growing up from the petted child to the active school-going age, and experiencing all the miseries of that crucial development besides the other miseries.

  I had been relinquishing my status as the ‘baby’ of the house to Shiva for some time, quite willingly, because I liked him, and, being unacceptable to older children like Ganesh and his friends as a companion, I played with my baby brother and built up a joint front with him against my elder brother. I had also, of course, accepted the ‘don’t do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ from my father and mother with the characteristic nonchalance of the child who listens to an injunction with one ear and lets it go out through the other. I had accepted the beliefs, prejudices and preferences which my father had cultivated through his own experience and which, even though he was himself far removed from the years of his own childhood, he ordered us to adopt because he wanted to help us to grow up to be men like himself.

  I had even accepted the family code that we should all make a positive contribution towards increasing the prestige of our father by doing deeds worthy of the family, which was held up as a model of izzat and respectability, for I could recite paragraphs from the Gita, as a parrot imitating my mother, and was good at school. But I resented the physical force and the abuse which my father began to use suddenly and drastically at the least little infraction of his capricious will, which constituted the unwritten laws of parental authority that were supposed to help our growth.

  I remember the first time I was beaten by my father. I had stolen a rich, luscious mango from a basket which had arrived as a gift from some sepoy who had just returned from furlough at his home in the Kangra Hills. I was busy merrily sucking it as I hid behind the vegetable patch which my father had grown at the back of the house, when I was missed. As father came to look for me and found me and I suddenly burst out crying, he swooped down upon me and slapped me hard for the double crime of weeping at his approach and stealing the mango. The strong sense of resentment against this burned itself into my memory. And it may be that the violent thrashing which I received then made me hate him for ever on one side of my nature and largely transformed me into the uncompromising rebel that I became, gave the spoilt, self-willed child in me the impetus of an overdeveloped sense of grievance and misery. Anyhow, apart from the instincts of early childhood, there sprang perhaps from this ridiculous incident the lava of violence in me which sizzled like an active volcano during my boyhood, till my whole life became a series of constant eruptions.

  The first time this volcano burst is memorable to me for the sense of injustice which prompted it. One morning when I was tying up my satchel to go to school, my father asked me to go and call the barber who used to come to shave him every day before he went to the office, but had not turned up that day.

  ‘I shall be late for school,’ I said to my mother, as I was afraid of talking directly to my father at such moments.

  ‘Go and do what you are told, ohe swine,’ my father shouted suddenly.

  I sulked because I was afraid that Ganesh might be well on the way to school without me if I went to call the barber. These orders to run errands just as we were going to sit down to a long-awaited meal, delayed by my mother’s scrupulousness in cleaning and dusting the house every morning before cooking and by her total lack of any sense of time, generally made us late for school and conjured up before our mind horrors of being flogged by the masters that were no less gruesome than the actual reality of the cane on cold, frosty mornings. Ganesh had become inured to punishment through his comparatively long experience of school. But, after the few times I had been flogged at school, a sense of doom had taken possession of me, creeping into my skin, till the whirring of the cane in my imagination was enough to start tears in my eyes.

  ‘Dare you disobey!’ shouted my father, swinging his heavy frame which was sweating from the dumb-bell exercises that he had been performing. ‘Get up and go!’ he roared. And he kicked me with the protruding ends of his wooden sandals.

  I had begun to sob at the mere sound of his harsh words. I howled at the kick.

  My father naturally lost his temper at the weakling in me and slapped me sharply on the face.

  ‘Oh, what have I done that I am being beaten like this!’ I cried loudly, bitterly to win my mother’s sympathy. But she was too frightened of my father at this time to intervene. Fearing another blow, I took my satchel and ran out without eating my meal.

  Of course, bound in the cage of dependence which seemed, to my as yet uncritical mind, to legitimize the punishment I had received, I went obediently to call the barber.

  But in my heart smouldered the rage of a helpless stubborn child. I knew t
hat I was right. For had I not been beaten for being late at school only a week ago? And it had never been my fault if I had been late, for my mother did not begin to cook early. ‘But this cruel father of mine has hit me!’ I cried. ‘The swine! How I hate him! I hate him! I wish he would die!’

  With these and similar thoughts in my mind, half expressed, half suppressed, I rushed along, hot and perspiring when as ill-luck would have it I stumbled against a boulder which lay on the pathway. I cursed at the first impact of the knock but walked along till, after I had gone a few steps, I looked down and saw blood oozing from my toes. I suddenly shrieked, not so much from the pain of the hurt, which was still warm, but at seeing the blood.

  Settling down on the dust and lifting my foot in my hand, I began to suck the blood out of the wound as I had been told to do by the other boys, for it was said that one should not lose even a single drop of one’s strength.

  ‘Oh my mother! Hai mother!’ I cried, as I still saw the blood running in a trail. But the particles of dust and stones that I had sucked with the blood irritated my palate and I spat in furious spurts about me, ceased to weep and took to sobbing.

  As I sobbed I had time to brood over the grievance against my father again. And there was a resurgence of hatred as I remembered that I had asked him a hundred times to buy me a pair of English boots but he had said he could not afford them. The result had been that as I didn’t want to wear the Indian style shoes I had had to go barefoot and by doing so had hurt myself several times.

  I went on my way, however, and having dutifully performed my father’s bidding and sent the barber to the quarter, pushed on to school, confident about my righteousness in the full light of the soaring sun and yet diffident as I slowly trod through the deserted landscape where only the sparrows chirped and a solitary crow cawed freely and without any fear of schoolmasters.

  As I reached the school compound, the drumming of my heart quelled all the strength in me and made it inevitable that the munshi Trilok Chand, the Second Primary Class master, should inflict on me the punishment prescribed by the hard Indian schools of those days to their errant pupils.

  Indeed, the master was more incensed than ever as I offered an excuse: ‘My Babuji …’ I began.

  ‘The son of Babuji! Your father may be the Commander-in-Chief, but the Inspector of Schools will stop my promotion if you are not up to the mark,’ the master shouted.

  And he gave me the usual three stripes with the bird cane that had been torn to shreds with its strenuous application on the bodies of the boys for months together.

  For a few days I went about subdued by the humiliation of being punished both at home and at school, unable to face anyone lest they should see from my eyes that I had been disgraced. And sadness seemed to become the natural climate of my universe. There seemed no place where I could go and no one to whom I could tell my tale of woe, for the sepoys and the grown-up elders in the outside world hardly seemed to notice children except as toy; and playthings with whom they could occasionally have prattling exchange or a joke, and the older boys chose playmates of their own age for their games and left awkward little children like myself alone, as any hurt received by someone like me in one of their violent pranks would be an embarrassment to them. I had been warned not to go too frequently to ‘little mother’ Gurdevi, because my mother said she ‘didn’t want us to carry tales there and blurt out what we had heard at home’. I felt that I would never be happy any more or at least not till I grew up to be taller and bigger.

  In despair I would go off on my own into the deserted regimental gymnasium, but the horizontal and the parallel bars, the horses and the jumping-boards were too high for me. I vigorously drilled an imaginary platoon of sepoy; till I got tired. Then I returned disgusted with my small round body, incapable of running fast and thus contemptible in my own eyes as well as in the eyes of the older boys, and with a face which, from the barber’s mirror, seemed covered with dry spots just like those on Ganesh’s flat visage, and with podgy hands and shapeless legs compared with the face of Sohanlal, the son of the regimental contractor who was about my age and wore nice Angrezicut clothes, rode a tricycle to school and got two pice a day pocket money to spend at recess time.

  I secretly hoped and prayed that by some accident of fate I would suddenly wake up one morning to find myself grown into a tall, self-assured boy whose company would be much desired by all the older boys of the regiment, as was the company of John Longdon, the son of the ‘Karnel’ Sahib, who came out for a walk daily in the care of an ayah and an orderly and whom everyone gaped at admiringly from a distance, because his chaperones absolutely forbade any contact or communication between the exalted son of the Sahib and the ragged native children. I hoped that I would be able to wear a fine pair of shorts as he did, be rid of the responsibility of going to school as he was and just be coached by a special tutor at home, and that I would generally grow up to be an attractive fop of a Sahib. But this miracle did not happen. Instead, I was to learn that the splendours of life were only for the Sahibs in Lal Kurti, the English part of the cantonment, and degradation for those in the native regiments. And I went about bound up in an aura of self-pity only relieved by spurts of physical enthusiasm. Woe to the boy whose father is merely a clerk in the pay of the Sarkar! …

  And then something else, something more violent and horrible, happened to disturb the peace of mind of my father and consequently of our household.

  My father brought news one day that while Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, had been driving through the streets of Delhi a bomb had been thrown on his phaeton from the window of a house. The Lat Sahib had been wounded in the leg and an attendant had been killed. And although the perpetrators of this crime were not discovered, the Sarkar was now convinced that the outrage was committed by members of a widespread conspiracy which the police had suspected was responsible for planting a bomb in the Viceroy’s house. My father said that the Sarkar believed that most of the conspirators were drawn from that hotbed of intrigue, the Arya Samaj. He said that Major Carr Sahib, who was the ‘Ajitan’ of the regiment, had called him that morning and asked him if he were a member of the Arya Samaj and that, on his confessing that he had once belonged to the society, the Major Sahib had asked him to cut his connection with that disloyal society completely if he valued his job.

  Now even my mother was perturbed and we were sad because she was sad, because we only heard the words they spoke without understanding the meaning of what was said.

  My father tried to assure her that the ‘Ajitan’ Sahib had been quite kind, and that there was really no danger. But he wondered nevertheless what the Sahibs would do.

  ‘Why do they hate the Samaj?’ my mother asked.

  My father lingered in the kitchen that evening and, if he were unburdening his soul in distress to us all, told us that the Sarkar connected this incident with a bigger agitation sponsored by the Congress, a bigger organization than the Arya Samaj. That, in particular, they put the responsibility on Tilak of Bambai and on a man called Hardyal, a resident of Delhi and a student at Lahore, who had gone to Vilayat some years ago on a government scholarship but had given up his scholarship and told the Sarkar that he did not want education when most of his countrymen could not enjoy as good an education as he could. He had come home and begun to lecture at Lahore to destroy the Angrezi Raj by a general boycott. He had attracted many pupils, among whom were a Punjabi called Dina Nath and a Bengali called Chatterji. He had himself gone to ‘Amreeca’ but these two, and a schoolmaster called Amir Chand, and a clerk of Dehra Dun Forest Department Rash Behari, and some students, had been disseminating leaflets against the Sarkar, saying that the Gita, the Vedas and the Koran all enjoined the killing of the enemies of our country. The police had not found exact details, but they said that these people had thrown the bombs.

  ‘But you stopped going to the Samaj,’ my mother said trying to hearten my father. She could only dimly understand how her own husband, a law-abiding, loyal person
so proud of his position in the eyes of his coppersmiths brotherhood, could be held responsible, especially after he had stopped going to the Arya Samaj.

  ‘The Sarkar distrusts all educated people,’ my father told her, ‘because all the seditionists are drawn from the educated classes—barristers, clerks, students are all suspect. Especially if they happen to belong to the Arya Samaj.’

  ‘Well, then, it is a bitch, this Sarkar,’ said my mother, summarily roused and indignant. ‘It shouldn’t do so much zoolum on people! And you need not be so frightened. Be a man like my father, the Sikh Surma, who never accepted defeat even though he lost his land!’

  But my father, who had been scared stiff after the first incident, could not shed his fear and went about apprehensive of a court-martial, especially as he knew that the ‘ji-Huzoor’ sycophants, who had gone so far as to put it in the ear of the ‘Ajitan’ Sahib that he was a member of the Arya Samaj, might frame something against him. He absolutely cut all connections with the Samaj and his friends in town, and again took to staying at home in the evenings, hovering tense and silent and as if he would burst any moment into the wildest temper.

  Needless to say, to us children it was a sinister, rather distant legend only made real by the anxious, angry look on our father’s face, except perhaps that we saw the pictures of the incident in the newspapers with which we played and because a portrait of Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy, inset in a calendar of Munshi Gulab Singh and Co., booksellers, hung on the wall of our living room.

  Hard upon this came the news one day that a gang of Pathans had kidnapped the Stationmaster of Rawalpindi and made off with him, and that they demanded one lakh of rupees as ransom before they would yield him up.

  My father often used to write letters and documents for the Pathans whenever they had occasion to go to court or get concessions from the Sarkar, and he had even been invited to the jirgas or conferences of the tribesmen. Therefore, he felt nervous that the Sahibs might think that he was in the know about this kidnapping of the Stationmaster of Rawalpindi.