Seven Summers Read online

  I have darted back across the road. But in the wild happiness of having the flower in my hand, I mix up my steps. My legs get intertwined and I fall.

  A shriek comes involuntarily out of my throat. And I weep with fear as I lie on the warm earth. The sun is moving towards me and I cry more persistently to be heard. I have the taste of dust in my mouth. And the sweat is pouring down my cheeks, I am hot with frustration. Then I hear steps.

  It is the gardener.

  ‘Arré, budmash!’ he says scoldingly.

  I shut my hand tight where I hold the flower, for he is the gardener and he does not like anyone plucking flowers.

  He picks me up in his arms and, swaying me from side to side, tries to drown my weeping with words and whispers and snatches of nonsense rhymes.

  My mother, who has heard my cries, stands at the door.

  ‘Where has he been?’ she asks.

  ‘He fell down, playing,’ says the gardener.

  ‘What, in that dirty ditch? Has he been on the road?’ she says in a panic.

  I am still sobbing.

  ‘Never mind, son, you have only killed some ants,’ the gardener says, metaphorically.

  ‘Show me your leggies,’ mother says. And she takes me in her arms.

  There is a sweet smell about her neck and her face, like milk and sugar. She kisses my knees, saying: ‘That will make them better.’ And she puts me down on the bed by Prithvi and lies by my side, hugging me.

  I am not sobbing any more, only whimpering. Soon, sleep, the sleep of fatigue, steals into my eyes.

  When I wake up in the arms of my father in the afternoon, the rosebud is still clutched tight in my fist, and the scratches of the thorns tell the whole story.

  2

  ‘Where did you go, my little budmash, where?’ he asked in a singsong.

  And he swept my face with kisses while I tried to catch his big, bushy moustache. For that moustache was my most vivid impression of my father. In fact, that moustache was to me the whole of my father. I would see the drops of water sticking to his moustache when he washed his face in the afternoons, even as he crouched in the compound of the mud-walled quarter in which we lived. And I was more fascinated by the bushy growth of hair on his mouth than by anything else about him. Except perhaps by his rich, warm voice, which I could hear long before he entered the house, acknowledging the greetings of the sepoys who passed that way, or the salaams of the gardener, joking with his colleagues or shouting at my two brothers, Harish and Ganesh, who played marbles by the well with the bandboys and the buglers of the regiment as well as with the young sweepers and washermen from the followers’ lines. I would run out towards the door the instant I heard his voice and then I was lifted into his arms and received showers of kisses from under the ticklish moustache, to the tune of jocular, laughing, happy words of endearment which were generally a play upon my nickname, ‘Bully’.

  ‘Bully, oh, Bully,

  Bully, my son,

  Bully, my dog,

  Bully, my pig,

  Bully, my little son, son, son!’

  That was the refrain, the constant refrain, which gathered into itself all the overtones of my father’s affection for me as well as the undertones of that extraordinary partiality towards me, which, I soon realized, was evoked by my general mischievousness and the impudence with which I clutched the ends of his mustachios and pulled at them.

  Already, at the age of four or five, my father had come to be a legendary hero to me, the avatar of Raja Vikram about whom mother told me stories, or of Arjuna, the disciple and friend of the God Krishna, who was said to have shot an arrow through the eyes of a fish revolving on top of a pole, by looking at its reflection in the water below. Apart from the godly qualities which were associated with him in my little mind, there were his earthly virtues. He was the only literate man in the whole regiment of Dogra hillmen, to whom the sepoys brought their letters to read, from whom they requested drafts of their petitions. The indigent sweepers, washermen and bandsmen of the Mian Mir cantonment came to him for loans of money. And he was greeted with joined hands and the words, ‘I fall at your feet’, by our relations from among the coppersmiths and silversmiths who came from nearby Lahore, or our home town, Amritsar, or from various parts of the Punjab.

  Eavesdropping on all the talk that went on in the courtyard of our house, with mother seated by her spinning wheel, and with father seated in an armchair, his legs astride the footrests before him, listening to the plaints, petitions and talk of the visitors, later I gleaned impressions about his adventurous life.

  He was Head Clerk of the 38th Dogra Regiment. He was referee at all hockey matches when the regimental team played, blowing that whistle with which I kept up a terrific din in my mother’s ears if ever I found it where it was hidden in a drawer of my father’s writing table. And he was a kind of pooh-ba to all other men and women, because he was said to have attained to great heights of dignity and power from very humble beginnings.

  I surmised from vague hints dropped by mother during her gossip with the women of the cantonment, or of our brotherhood, who came to see her, that he had come into the world as a gift from a Muhammadan sage. For apparently, my grandfather and grandmother had asked this Fakir to give them some children. And the Fakir had said to my grandfather, ‘If you have a garden planted and a well dug, so that I could come to live there, then if you walk to the well morning and evening with your wife, I will duly grant you two children.’ And my grandfather, whose name I heard mentioned with great hesitancy by the women of our thathiar brotherhood as Chet Ram, had done what the Fakir wished. And in the next year, while my grandmother was at the well one morning, she had found my father seated in an earthen pot on the chain of the well, and the year after she had discovered my uncle in an alcove by the grave of the Fakir who had died by this time. My father had been named Ram Chand and my uncle Pratap Chand. And while the coming of my father had brought blessings to the house of my grandparents, for they grew very rich in that year, the arrival of my uncle had brought ill luck, because my grandfather died.

  I did not know what birth or death meant. I only understood about the existence of jinns, like that of the Fakir whose spirit resided in the well which my grandfather had had dug on the Jandiala Road, outside Amritsar, and like the ghost of Khwaja Khizar, a green-turbaned man, with a white beard and white clothes, who was said to inhabit the well by our house in Mian Mir, and the ghosts of countless Tommies buried at various spots in the cantonment.

  Culled from the gossip and rumours current in the household were various other myths and legends about my father, but the cosmogony of jinns and bhuts and fakirs dominated them all. And only his full moustache accorded him a place in my imagination as distinct from the spirits. For all the stories of his achievements did not soak into my mind till I was nearly seven years of age.

  I recall that my impressions of people, though vaguely gathered, at the age of three or four, from the heads and legs or torsos and the jumble of grown-up talk, began to form connected wholes when I was about five years old, because from that age I can recollect the contours of the history and geography of a fairly comprehensible world.

  3

  Among the human beings whom I came to know then were, of course, my little brother Prithvi, my brother Ganesh and my eldest brother Harish.

  My earliest recollections of Prithvi were of a pale, shrivelled-up creature lying asleep on a small string cot, while my mother fanned the flies off him with a hand fan. His angular face with the high cheekbones was very frightening to me, as his eyes remained half open even while he was asleep. And his withered, wrinkled flesh, like that of an old man, seemed disgusting. I was not told why he was always asleep. Only, I was asked not to make any noise which might disturb him. Occasionally, he would open his eyes and stare at me while he sucked at my mother’s breasts, as though he were saying to me: ‘Hands off my mother’s breasts!’ Mostly I was too frightened by the uncanny look in his face to come near him. But so
metimes, while he sucked at the teat with his eyes shut, I would begin to suck at the other teat. And then he would wake and stretch his hands to scratch me and drive me off his preserves. I was nothing if not persistent and would craftily steal into mother’s lap and begin to suck, until Prithvi began to scratch more furiously and hurt me. Then I desisted for a little time. But I soon forgot and reverted to the charge.

  Now, however, with the two of us sucking hard at her breasts, mother got very tired and irritable. She began soon to paint chilli powder on her teats to keep us both off. Even this could not keep me off. I remember she had to use very drastic methods indeed in subsequent years to make me give up this habit.

  If my attitude towards my little brother Prithvi was a mixture of fear, disgust and jealousy, my attitude to my elder brother, Ganesh, was jealousy pure and simple. I could not bear him to come near my mother at all. And I would see to it that father never picked him up in his arms, because I would make it a point to run out and be the first to greet father. And as both father and mother showed an obvious partiality towards me, I think Ganesh was warned off my monopoly interests and amused himself by sulking or by creeping out to play with the children from the followers’ lines.

  Docile, calm and unperturbed by anything father or mother said, Ganesh seemed to have developed an extraordinarily tough skin to guard himself against being ignored, and this was obvious through the strange hard mask which was his flat, Mongoloid, snub-nosed face—a face which developed a deceptive gentleness in later years and successfully hid the virulence of a fiery temperament behind the outer facade of the saint. His ears were triangular at the tips, and the legend ran that he had been given as a gift to my mother by a Sadhu who came to beg for alms. The dry heat-spots on his cheeks and his absurd ears made him seem diabolical in my eyes. And as he generally ignored me when he went out to play with the bigger boys, I was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to tell upon him, so that father could shout at him or smack him and take my revenge on him.

  Especially did I dislike the put-on, calm, ever meek and mild expression on his face and the seeming gentleness it betokened, which bluffed everyone into believing him to be a gentleman when I was nicknamed Bully the Budmash. Only Owen Sahib seemed to have the right instinct when, as against my appellation ‘Bully’, he called him ‘Brute’, and Prithvi ‘Bitti’, because the baby was so small. I resented the fact that every member of the brotherhood who came brought offers of betrothals for Ganesh, with tokens of sweets and dried fruit, and he alone was allowed to eat them when we all begged for ‘Oh Kuch’, meaning something tasty to eat, which mother kept in a big wooden box in the bedroom. Besides, he had arrogated to himself the ownership and care of the family cat and would never so much as allow me to touch her. And as he was always on the side of the angels and could so successfully hide his malice behind the facade of saintliness, he roused my undying hatred for his person.

  Towards my eldest brother, Harish, I felt more idolatrous. For Harish was tall and lanky and came riding his steel horse in the afternoons all the way from the city of Lahore, laden with gifts of fruit and toys for me. And he always kept promising to take me to his school hockey match, riding astride the bar of his bicycle. Also, I envied him his sleight of hand when he beat the boys from the followers’ lines playing marbles at Khuti, the little hole in the ground. And I admired his proficiency at bat and ball, and the tricks he could perform on his cycle, making it stand absolutely still for half an hour. Also, when he was called upon to play hockey in the regimental eleven, he appeared in a magnificent striped shirt and blue shorts. And as he treated me to milk and sweets at the shop of the confectioner in the regimental bazaar, I was completely won over. I remember how bitterly I cried and sobbed out of sympathy when my father once beat him with a cricket stump for straying and playing about with the bhangi boys when he ought to have been studying and doing his home tasks.

  As, however, Harish lived with my aunt Aqqi in town in order to be near his school, and came very rarely to visit us, I could not develop any deep friendship with him. The difference in our respective ages helped to keep us apart and to sustain my idolatry of him. Certainly, after my father, Harish was the hero of the early years of my life.

  4

  My aunt Aqqi was the youngest sister of my mother. But they looked so different that they didn’t seem like sisters at all. My mother had a dark, oval face, with intense bright brown eyes and a strong chin, while my aunt Aqqi had a pale-moon face with sleepy eyes and silent lips. And not only did they look different, but I noticed, since that was my first instinctive way of getting to know people, that they also smelt different. My mother was, as I have noted before, milk and sugar, but my aunt Aqqi was like the essence of curds.

  My first reaction to aunt Aqqi was a shy withdrawal. I remember standing away, sucking the finger in amazement and looking at her furtively while she crouched in the verandah by my mother and told her her tale of woe. I gathered from the words that dropped from her mouth, like a series of soft breaths, that her husband, my uncle Jai Singh, had been drunk again and had beaten her and turned her out of her home. And that she had trudged all the way from the city to seek shelter with us. And could my father be persuaded to give her some money, so that she could go back and set up an independent house?

  As she told her story, her voice seemed to me to be like the cool, sad breeze that stirred the casuarina trees on the road in the afternoons, like a series of sighs and sobs which came wafted from the plains beyond the cantonment and pressed one’s heavy lids with sleep. But then the even tone rose to the crescendo of a shriek: and for moments, during snatches of talk, tears glistened in her eyes.

  In a little while, my mother let the cotton which she was spinning drop out of her hand, and she also seemed to be sobbing.

  At this, I felt my own eyes tingling. And in the silence that ensued, while my mother was wiping her eyes with the palla of her sari, I drifted towards her because I felt utterly lonely.

  ‘Where is my little Bully going?’ my aunt Aqqi said and snatched me up in her arms before I had got near my mother.

  And she put me in her lap and fondled me and kissed me, singing the while:

  ‘Oh, Bully, my son,

  Bully, my dog,

  Bully, my pig,

  Bully, my son, son, son.’

  And now my nostrils seemed to be filled with a different smell, the essence of curds mixed with the crude sugar that my mother gave me to eat with stale bread in the afternoons. As aunt Aqqi bent down to kiss me, I smelt the acrid smell of her armpits and tried to disentangle myself from the coils of her embrace. But she pressed me to her bosom. And soon I was filled with the sense of a rich, luscious young body, with the perfume of sweet cream cakes which came as gifts from grateful sepoys and shopkeepers to our house.

  How beautiful she seemed to me through the years after this incident! How warm and comfortable! And how rich! For she was always untying the knot at the end of her dupatta and giving me a shining silver rupee, though I knew that as she came begging for money from my parents she could hardly have been prosperous. And her voice, singing the variations on my nickname, became golden. And I began to love her with a nostalgia that had its source in the secret sensual thrill I had enjoyed in being picked up by her. So that nothing my mother could say in deprecation of her altered my attitude to her, neither the fact that she was a poor, dirty wretch, the wife of a low coppersmith who was a drunkard, nor the fact that she had enraptured the heart of ‘our’ Harish by doing some black magic on him.

  I was, indeed, a little frightened when my eldest brother took me, seated on the bar of his bicycle, to her house in the town one day, for we had to go past a black buffalo in the narrow hallway, up some dark, uneven steps, where seemed to lurk the offensive smells of urine and blood which, according to my mother, were the ingredients of the black magic with which she had ensnared my brother. But as she fed me and Harish on sweets and sherbet, all my fear vanished and I longed to go to her hou
se and insisted upon being taken there ever afterwards.

  I even took to Jai Singh, her drunkard husband, who was a fair-complexioned, gracious little personality, with a generous hand which was ever reaching to the folds of his dhoti for silver coins to give to my brother and me. And as he bawled the most filthy abuse, above the din of the copper utensils which he was beating into shape, seated astride the low wooden horse in the Bazaar Kaserian with the most innocent expression on his face, he endeared himself to me and came to represent the free, abandoned life which was such a lure against the remote rather lonely house in the cantonment, where there were no deafening crashes of hammers falling on metal or momentary revelations of cataclysmic disasters through the previous night’s bout of gambling or drinking.

  And the little son of my aunt Aqqi and the drunkard thathiar Jai Singh, whose name was Jhanda Singh, became my friend, because he bought me my first kite and took me to the top of his house, where he flew it high for me to hold in my own hands.

  I felt I had soared to the sky whenever I met any of these three wonderful people.

  5

  Another person I came to recognize and love early was Gurdevi, the wife of Babu Chattar Singh, the Quartermaster’s Clerk in my father’s regiment. She was a demure little woman, with a comfortable presence and a calm, sad face and a voice like that of a cooing dove. She came to our house on alternate days, bringing her sewing or her phulkari work with her, and she sat by my mother while the latter plied her charkha with Prithvi in her lap. And they talked in low, secretive tones about something I could not understand at first, but which I came to know later concerned Gurdevi’s inability to bear a child. I remember how I tried to keep awake during those afternoons, in order that I could hear everything and get to know what ailed Gurdevi and what were the exact causes of her sadness. But the atmosphere was soporific with the soft, sonorous accents of my mother and Gurdevi, the drone of the spinning wheel and the big black wasps which flew round and round in the verandah, so that my forehead was heavy and my limbs were filled with a lassitude which made me wriggle in the effort to get to sleep. But as I could not settle, Gurdevi would put me in her lap and rock me to peace to the tune of a lullaby.