Seven Summers Read online

  My mother tried to point out that as the Stationmaster of Rawalpindi was a Hindu of the same caste as ourselves, my father could not possibly be suspected of having conspired with the Pathans to have him kidnapped. But this kind of logic did not soothe my father, who lived in daily fear of intrigues against him and was convinced of the complete lack of faith of the Sahibs in any native employed by them.

  The only alleviating circumstance in this situation was that the kidnapped person happened to be an Indian and not the usual Englishman or Englishwoman. For if a Sahib or Memsahib had been abducted immediately after the affair of the bomb on Lord Hardinge, the Sarkar would have connected this with the widespread conspiracy they suspected against them in the country, and then they would have begun to take stern action against the natives.

  As it was, the Sarkar felt its Raj deeply enough threatened by the fact that the Pathans should have had the audacity to come in broad daylight, lift the Stationmaster of Rawalpindi, a town not on the border but inland in the Punjab, and make off with him without any fear of consequences. And what was more, that they should demand a ransom of one lakh of rupees.

  The General Officer Commanding the brigades on the Frontier ordered all brigades to go on route march on the Grand Trunk Road.

  ‘What is the use of the sepoys walking about on the Grand Trunk Road when the Pathans have probably taken the Stationmaster somewhere into the hills?’ my mother said with her redoubtable common sense.

  ‘The Sarkar wants to show its power, to make an impression on the people,’ my father said.

  ‘Well, they can beat the cracked pitcher of their empty power,’ mother said. ‘No one will be impressed …’

  ‘You will see,’ father said.

  ‘Yes, I shall see what shall I see,’ mother replied sceptically. ‘I shall see the uniform of the sepoys getting dustier and dustier.’

  She was proved to be right. For the continuous route marches up and down the length and breadth of the Grand Trunk Road were of no avail, except that they provided entertainment for the children. The panoply of the army’s power became literally coated with thick dust, and not even the bands of the various regiments could drown the agony of the sepoys, who were footsore and weary … And yet there was no trace of the kidnapped Stationmaster of Rawalpindi. Only, ever fresh demands were pasted up on the walls of Peshawar and Nowshera—the ransom money named by the Pathans seemed to have risen to two lakhs.

  I have realized since that the pride of owning the earth is a strange thing, for it makes the owner blind. The Sarkar was so out of touch with the people that it took a long time for it to realize that mere impression-making on the Grand Trunk Road would not make the Pathans yield up the person they had kidnapped. And it was only when the figure mentioned as a ransom was raised to five lakhs that the Sarkar felt it might begin a real search.

  Then the hills and the fields of the Frontier Province began to be scoured by the various units of the army, and expeditions were even led into the heart of Waziristan.

  Not a few companies of my father’s regiment, under the command of Subedar Major Garka Singh, went and camped on the plateaux of the Buner Hills beyond the dry river bed near our house, and from this camp patrols were sent out every day to look into the nooks and crevices of the mountains and to search the villages for the missing man.

  My father sometimes took us with him for a walk when he went to see the Subedar Major. And apart from the spurious childish fantasy I built up about being engaged in a dangerous search, I learned to know and love the changing colours of these hills through our visits to the camp.

  From the beaten gold of the morning haze in which I had seen them roll down to the horizon’s end, from behind the bare garden in which the sun rose like a white flower, and from the clear and pellucid polyphony of brown and red and copper on which the loud skies poured down their anger at noons and during the afternoons, they emerged like tender petal edges of pomegranate buds in blossom during the evenings we traversed them. And, oh so dark and uncanny was their challenge when the sunset was beckoning them to rest in the folds of the night!

  Subedar Garka Singh treated us children to dry fruit and hot milk and to meat roasted on skewers on the camp fires, while whisky flowed down the elders’ throats in great gulps with chunks of meat off the skewers. And it all seemed like a big picnic.

  And as the camp lasted for nearly three months, I came to know the devious tracks of the hills and to appreciate the art of picking up those queer constellations, the mushrooms, which grew among the scanty grasses of the broads. And the secret thought arose in me: how many worlds there were beyond the beaten tracks of the cantonment! And what muscles were necessary to climb the hills and trudge through the dales! And how violent was the big world outside our home, reverberating to the shouts and crude calls of the sepoys and uttering hundreds of sounds of fire on the ranges scattered about for practice among the mountains!

  So enraptured was I with the flaming hills, and with the treasures in them that eluded the grasp of my senses and my mind, that I frequently projected my feet towards the tracks leading to the inner fastnesses, frightened of going too far and yet tempted to master the earth, my soul bent on the inflections of the wind-swept plants.

  These adventures were terminated by the announcement one day of the news that the Stationmaster of Rawalpindi had been handed over to the head of the Frontier Province on the payment of a lakh of rupees as ransom to the Pathans. It filled my childish mind with great admiration for the daring of the Pathans when it became known that, far from taking him into the fastnesses of Waziristan, the thieves had sat with their victim for months under the railway bridge on the river Indus at Attock, while hundreds of sepoys had route-marched up and down the Grand Trunk Road. And they seemed more wonderful still when I learnt that they had negotiated their demand for the ransom by sending their chief without any protection to the head of the province himself!

  Once and for all the fear of the Sahib’s might seemed to evaporate from people’s minds, and even little children like myself mocked at the sepoys for having to eat humble pie from a handful of Pathans who had dared to defy the Angrezi Sarkar!

  But misfortunes in our world never come singly.

  It so happened that a silver spoon was lost in our household, soon after the news of the dropping of the bomb on Lord Hardinge. It was the silver spoon with which we had all been fed during our childhood, so to speak the silver spoon in the mouth with which we had been born. It had, therefore, not only a sentimental value for my mother but real value or what is called estate value, the value of an heirloom.

  In the case of all lost property, it is said, first search your own house. So, at first, my mother made a thorough search of the whole house. She took all the utensils of brass, bronze, copper and silver in the kitchen and scrubbed them with her own hands with the ashes from the oven, in case she might come across this spoon hidden in one of the pots or pans. Then she turned out the whole furniture in the house, beds and stools, pitchers and platforms, carpets and mats, into the courtyard as if she were doing a spring cleaning. But the silver spoon did not fall out from any of these things on to the bare earth. Next, the fuel which lay stacked in a corner of the courtyard was dismantled. Even the foundations of the house, in which my mother kept the jewellery hidden for fear of the robbers, who abounded because of falling prices, were dug up. But it was all of no avail; the silver spoon was not to be found. It was literally like looking for the needle in the haystack to look for a small silver spoon in such a big house as ours.

  As happens on such occasions, after you have searched your own premises you begin to look for a thief.

  Shrewd as my mother was in her judgment of people’s character, it was difficult for her to cast suspicions on any of the people who came to our populous home by merely looking at their faces. Little children can, of course, be harassed with inquisitions quite safely without any fear that they will feel their dignity outraged. So each of my friends had to answer
whether they had seen a silver spoon, the silver spoon with which we were fed when we were children. But there was no question of suggesting by word or deed, or the slightest gesture of the eyelids, that any of the grown-up people who visited our house had taken the silver spoon.

  At that stage the assistant priest of the regiment, Pandit Balkrishan, was approached.

  Tradition had it that Pandit Balkrishan could divine the innermost secrets in people’s hearts, unravel all mysteries, cast the horoscope not only for this life but for ten incarnations of the future life, and, of course, spot all thieves—all this apart from his more mundane duties as leader of morning and evening prayers, master of ceremonies at births, deaths and marriages, and guest of honour at all feasts, especially those given at the ceremonial of offering food to dead ancestors, food which he usually ate as the medium of the deceased. To Pandit Balkrishan, therefore, my mother sent me to seek information regarding the silver spoon.

  ‘Mother says I am to say that we have lost a silver spoon in the house,’ I babbled without much ado. Pandit Balkrishan sat in the lotus seat on the neat floor treated with fresh cow dung. Before him was the little doll’s house on the gaudy, wooden platform where the various brass gods of our religion sat or stood, naked or draped in colourful clothes and adorned with imitation silver paper and glass head ornaments.

  ‘Sh … Sh …’ shooed a devout worshipper who was present.

  But Pandit Balkrishan, himself a small, fat, white-bearded man with glowing red cheeks, beamed at me with a smile and, whispering the names of the various gods, patted my head with a ‘God bless you!’ and asked me to sit down while he retreated to an inner chamber behind the silken curtain.

  There were various conch shells at the foot of the platforms beneath the gods, and I wished I could have one to blow at, as Balkrishan blew it, to call the worshippers to morning and evening prayers.

  But presently the priest returned.

  Sitting down by me he held up a magic nickel ring between the thumb and the forefinger of his right hand and asked me to close my right eye and look with the left through the tiniest tiny hole in its panel into the glass of the signet.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ he said.

  I followed his behests. At first I could not see anything. Then from the blurred glass arose the image of a man with a broom in his hand.

  ‘A sweeper,’ I said.

  ‘Can you see the silver spoon anywhere?’ the Pandit asked.

  ‘No,’ I said excitedly.

  Pandit Balkrishan shook the ring even as he kept whispering the names of God in some magical verses through the toothless gums of his mouth partially hidden in the aureole of his white beard. Then he said:

  ‘Look again and tell me what you see.’

  I applied myself, very thrilled to be engaged in seeing pictures through the tiniest hole in a ring as if it were a miniature kaleidoscope. After a moment, a gardener appeared, with flowerpots arranged as in the bungalows of the Sahibs on the road to the big town, and then a Muhammadan water-carrier with a goat skin slung across his waist.

  ‘A water-carrier in the garden,’ I said.

  ‘Can you see the spoon anywhere?’ Pandit Balkrishan asked.

  I looked intently into the picture, exploring all the dark corners behind the flowerpots, but could not see the spoon.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  The Pandit shook the magic ring again, smiled even as he kept his whispered rigmarole in the hollows of his gums. And then he made a gesture with his head directing me to look again, like a bored elder playing with a smaller child.

  I was only too eager to go on looking at these wonders. How could these enlarged pictures with detailed views of gardens be possible to obtain through the small aperture in that signet ring, I asked myself. And I concentrated the full gaze of my open left eye on the ring.

  This time I saw a large house with a crow seated on the wall.

  ‘A crow on a wall,’ I said.

  ‘Can you see the spoon anywhere?’ Pandit Balkrishan asked.

  ‘No,’ I answered.

  The priest rubbed the ring on his loincloth and deposited it in a little tobacco box, murmuring all the while. Then he fetched another box, took a pinch of snuff from it on the stubby forefinger of his right hand, inhaled it and closed his eyes.

  I felt alone and frightened in the temple, as the other worshippers had gone some time ago and because the Pandit’s eyes were closed and the eyes of the gods seemed to be looking at me.

  But in a moment the priest came to me and said:

  ‘Tell your mother that she will find the spoon on the next full night at her doorstep, if she promises to donate it to the temple.’

  I rushed home and gave this message to my mother explaining at length the visions I had seen in the magic ring, first of a sweeper, then of a water-carrier and last of all of a house with a crow on the wall.

  Working on some hypothesis of her own, my mother had the sweeper who came to our house in the morning searched. The old man Lakha, father of Bakha, had served the house for a generation and submitted without a murmur, even offering to have his house searched if my parents so wished.

  Extending her research along her own lines of detection, but apparently basing it on the visions of the magic ring, she had the Brahmin water-carrier, who came to fetch water from the well and scrubbed the utensils in our house, searched. But the silver spoon was not forthcoming.

  Sceptical and uncertain, my mother, however, took to offering sweet bread to all the crows which came to sit on the walls of our houses, and she insisted on appealing to them with soft entreaties to drop the spoon outside our house on the full moon night. The crows cawed defiance and abuse at her accusations, though they took the sweet bread which she offered them eagerly enough!

  ‘Your mother is mad,’ my father said at seeing her behave like this.

  But she had utter faith in the divinations of Pandit Balkrishan. The only wrench was that if it were ever found it would have to be donated to the temple, and she could not make up her mind to send a message back to him that it would be blessed if the gods would accept the humble gift of the silver spoon. And her mind was racked with doubts and guesses and vague prognostications. At length she could not bear the torture of knowing that the spoon was within reach of her and yet not in her possession: if it were in God’s hand and could only be given to her if she promised to give it to the gods, then let the gods have it. And she sent me with a message to go and tell the priest that she would willingly donate the spoon to the gods if it were found.

  On the first full night after this vow, the silver spoon was discovered at our threshold inside the hall of our house and then duly restored to the temple.

  After a few months of the fearful hush that had prevailed over our household, my father relaxed a little and life began to flow in our courtyard.

  Almost every week the hockey team of our regiment played a match against the team of some other regiment of the Brigade. These matches were mostly held on the level pitch near the Officers’ Mess on the banks of the river Kabul where it runs parallel with the Grand Trunk Road. My father used to go and referee these matches, and we often went with him if he were in a good humour, or sneaked out after him if he was distant and angry in the house. During the days when peace and goodwill flourished in our home, we were allowed a fairly wide latitude to indulge in the privilege of vagabondage. Recently we had passed the exams, I my second primary and Ganesh his third primary, and it was getting on for summer when addiction to books was officially forbidden to us, and, though we were not encouraged to stray far away from the house, we stretched the licence of easy days to appear without much fear at these regimental hockey matches.

  These visits to a world near the Officers’ Mess and the hedged-in bungalows of Sahibs, to the hockey pitch, were exciting for us. For, apart from the reflected glory we enjoyed at seeing our father running about with a whistle in his hand, we basked in the shadow of the more exalted grandeur of the éli
te of the Brigade, the Sahibs, who came on motor bicycles and tongas, in mufti, with their elegantly attired wives in large basket hats.

  ‘Karnel’ Longdon Sahib, the tall, old Officer Commanding my father’s regiment, would, on his rare appearances, smile and draw us into a conversation in his twisted efforts at Punjabi. Between watching the tense game he would give us news of his children, who had been sent to the hills for schooling, and, with kingly generosity, he would press a rupee into the palm of each of us.

  Major Carr, the squint-eyed adjutant of the regiment, who had an object of deep interest to me, a single glass adjusted to his left eye without any visible support whatever, and who always had a fat cheroot in his mouth, sometimes took me on his knees and, much to the amusement of the onlookers, gave me a puff at his cigar, which choked me red with a shaking cough.

  Occasionally some other Sahib held converse with us, or a Mem smiled kindly.

  The Indian officers, the NCO’s and the sepoys, seated in a line watching the match, were highly impressed by the condescension of the Sahibs, for it was a unique enough honour in their eyes for anyone to receive an acknowledgement to a salute and here we were being actually petted. As if impelled by the example of their superiors, they too made a fuss of us.

  Naturally our conceit ran very high.

  I grew particularly cheeky and thought nothing of going up to any of the Sahibs and starting a conversation, so long as the ‘Bola’ (deaf) Cunningham Sahib was not about. I even dared to walk up to where my father stood among the select at the end of the game and demand a bottle of soda water from the khansamah, who was, as usual, opening bottles of champagne and frothing beer behind the buffet table. And I established a premier right, above all the other regimental boys, to the hockey sticks broken during the match that day for, having been seen hobnobbing with the Sahibs I had risen to colossal heights in the estimation of the poor marksmen who from a distance ogled the exalted personages drinking coloured, frothing beverages and git-mitting in the language of the gods.