Seven Summers Page 3

  Bathed in the sweat that poured from her neck and yet comforted by the feel of her haunches, I slept soundly till it was time for Gurdevi to go home. And then, even as she had lulled me to sleep with a song, she sang another song for my waking. And I rose, big and strong, to a world from which the sun had shifted, making room for the colours of the evening. Even for so little a child I was conscious of the sensuous pleasure of being fondled by Gurdevi. And, oh, the sweetness of those moments when one woke up, rested after a siesta, and stretched one’s limbs to feel the cool of the summer evening!

  Sometimes Gurdevi would take me home with her, as a kind of chaperon to protect her against the unwanted attentions of sepoys who might whistle or make rude noises to tease her. And as a reward for my chivalry she would give me ‘something’ from a big box, very much like the big box in our own house from which my mother gave us ‘something’ … And, as I sat munching the sweets or the dried figs or dates, Babu Chattar Singh would come back from the office, and pick me up and throw me into the air to the tune of the nonsense rhyme associated with my nickname:

  ‘Bully, Bully

  Bully, my son …’

  Being a Sikh, Babu Chattar Singh had a big, flowing black beard. And, of course, that mop of hair fascinated me as I clutched it in my hands and pulled hard, and I only let go because he promised to give me a piggy ride instead. And thus we played, working up to terrific high spirits, until I heard my father’s voice outside and I ran to greet him.

  Flushed and happy, I was soon riding on my father’s shoulders and almost reaching out to the sky.

  And as I told him the story of my afternoon’s adventures in breathless, choking haste and exclaimed how sweet were the sweets which Gurdevi had given me and how wonderful the piggy ride which Babu Chattar Singh had afforded me, I felt bathed in the radiance of happiness. This was dulled for me by my father’s injunctions not to call Gurdevi by her name but to regard her as my ‘little mother’, and not to call Babu Chattar Singh by his name, but to consider him as my ‘little father’.

  I remember the dim curiosity I felt about the reasons which had persuaded my father to advise me thus, and I later surmised it was something to do with the mysterious conversations which transpired between Gurdevi and my mother about the former’s inability to find a child. And, filled with pride that I should be chosen to be the symbolic son, I saw the need for the reorientation of my attitude towards these elders and straightaway I made the necessary alterations to fit them into the cosmic order that I had been inventing, to understand my little world.

  6

  In the midst of this rich, happy life spent in the green solitude of hot mornings and breathless afternoons by the road on which caravans and men passed ceaselessly, there descended one day the shadow of an invisible, frightening thing called ‘Death’. I did not know the name of this shadow. Nor could I see it. I only heard its name spoken in lowered tones and hisses by the people who thronged at the door outside our house as I came back after a whole morning during which my brother Ganesh and I seemed to have slept on a charpai in the verandah of Babu Chattar Singh’s house, fanned by ‘little mother’ Gurdevi.

  The afternoon sun was leaning across the walls of the mud house and all was still, and neither mother nor father seemed to be within sight as we entered. Ganesh took me by my little finger and led me through the courtyard. As we found the little cot on which Prithvi slept in the verandah empty and the doors of both the residential rooms locked, I sensed some vague disaster and began to cry.

  Ganesh had more courage and made me sit down on my mother’s little stool by the spinning wheel, and began to amuse me by revolving its handle.

  ‘I want my mother,’ I said inconsolably.

  Ganesh took some cotton wool and, making a moustache of it, tried to amuse me by pretending to be father.

  This frightened me the more, until I howled.

  Luckily, just at that moment father came, bearing a brass basin of milk.

  I was glad to see him, though he wore a solemn expression on his face. I even felt a strange security sitting near Ganesh. Father went into the kitchen, fetched two cups of hot milk with dusters under them and gave them to us. Then he fetched himself a brass bowl and began to drink the milk, the tips of his moustache immersed deep in the cup. And in between sips he encouraged us to sip the milk and not gulp it. I felt reassured now. ‘He is my father,’ I said to myself, ‘sitting near me.’ But as I became conscious of the lack of the droning song that the spinning wheel sang, I asked him:

  ‘Where is mother?’

  ‘She will be coming back soon, son,’ he answered. ‘After you have drunk your milk you go and play at “little mother” Gurdevi’s, both of you. She will give you “something” to eat. Come, I will take you there.’

  Then he got up, flung the brass bati aside, lifted me in his arms and called to Ganesh to come.

  He had hardly taken a few steps when we saw mother, with her wet sari sticking to her body, and my aunt Aqqi in wet clothes, entering the house through the hallway. They seemed to be red-eyed and exhausted.

  ‘Why did you bring them back from Gurdevi’s?’ my mother remonstrated with my father.

  ‘Never mind, never mind!’ aunt Aqqi said to her, supporting her tottering body.

  ‘Don’t let them come near me,’ my mother wailed. ‘For I still carry the taint of Prithvi’s dead body about me.’

  ‘Come, come and sit down, Sundariai, and rest and think of the child in your tummy.’

  ‘What has happened to my mother?’ I asked impetuously, while Ganesh went and caught hold of her legs.

  ‘Your mother is not well,’ my father said.

  ‘Let me go to her, let me go!’ I said.

  For I wanted to jump out of his arms and go and hug my mother.

  She voluntarily walked up to the verandah and took me in her lap.

  ‘Oh, what ruin in the death of Prithvi has prospered in our house!’ she howled. And putting me flat on her lap, she began to beat her brow.

  At this my aunt Aqqi bared her breasts and began to beat herself with the tips of her palms to the tune of the phrase, ‘Hai Hai Shera!’

  ‘Don’t do the siapa here,’ my father said. ‘This is not Amritsar, it is the cantonment. And the Sahibs are within earshot.’

  ‘Acha, brother,’ Aqqi said, wiping her eyes. ‘There is one consolation, that though Prithvi is gone she will soon have another.’

  My father sat motionless in his armchair, twisting his moustache the while. And there seemed to be no connection between him and the warm flesh of my mother, whom I could feel next to me.

  ‘Come, ohe Ganesh, I will take you to the Sadar Bazaar for a walk,’ father said.

  Ganesh got up.

  The sparrows chirped and twittered noisily in the shaded part of the courtyard.

  My mother’s eyelids seemed to tremble as she restrained her tears.

  ‘God rest his soul in peace,’ my father said as he walked away.

  ‘The only consolation is the little one who is coming,’ sympathized my aunt. ‘Perhaps it will be a girl.’

  I felt the air spin about me. I could see Prithvi’s body as different from my own, something other than me, with its sleeping form hovering over my mind’s eye. For to me death meant sleep. And as I realized that he often used to be lying where I lay in my mother’s lap, but was not there now, I felt my mother was not my own and I was terribly frightened. I closed my eyes against Prithvi’s face that seemed to be coming towards me from a far land where he had gone, nearer and nearer, for I was sure that he would return. Darkness descended on me. Sleep. There was nothing more.

  7

  The news of Prithvi’s death brought a stream of visitors to our house. Among them, two whose personality was immediately imprinted on my mind, were my uncle Pratap and my aunt Devaki.

  They were a magnificent pair: my uncle Pratap was as handsome as my aunt Devaki was lovely. And under the spell of the charm they radiated, I forgot all the adverse
things which had become associated with them in my mind through the legends and stories current in our household. They made a tremendous fuss over me, intoning the nonsense rhyme associated with my nickname again and again, fondling me, kissing me and embracing me and promising to take me with them to Amritsar on their return. And as aunt Devaki gave me a bone out of the meat which she cooked for the midday meal, because my mother seldom cooked meat with her own hands in her kitchen, I was completely won over to them and longed for the time when I would be transported to their house to live in Amritsar which seemed to stretch, like the golden city of the golden temple, beyond the shimmering frontiers of light.

  In the afternoon, while uncle Pratap had his siesta under the shade of the singing casuarina trees on the roadside, I pestered aunt Devaki with constant inquiries about the time they were to leave. As she could hardly hear herself speak because of my persistent attempts to engage her attention, she asked me to go and assemble my luggage in order to be ready to leave in the evening. At this I made my mother’s life hell by insisting on her giving me my new clothes so that I could tie them into a bundle in readiness for the departure.

  She tried at first to fob me off with the promise that she would give me all I wanted before I left. As I would not wait, she lured me into the inner sanctum of the house and tried to lull me to sleep on the cot on which Prithvi used to sleep. Not only was I frightened of lying down there, but I was never addicted to the habit of having a siesta, for it was well known in my mother’s phrase that ‘sleep never enters the pupils of his eyes’. And on that particular day, I was, of course, too excited to sleep. So mother began to whisper to me, beneath the audible lullabies and sweet nothings which were meant for the ear of Devaki, some of the most awful things about them, purporting to inform me how they ate meat always and drank wine and kept loose company and how unhappy I should be if I ever went to live at their house. This was the surest way of making me more determined than ever to accompany my uncle and aunt, for I had already relished the taste of that bone which I had been given out of the meat that Devaki had cooked. Whereupon my mother smacked me hard and left me to sulk in the corner, enjoining me not to weep, sob or whimper upon pain of her complaining to my father, who would surely apply much sterner remedies to cure me of my stubbornness and mischief.

  I was terror-stricken at the punishment which I received at the hands of my mother, one of the first thrashings that I had ever had. But much as I tried to suppress my sobs for fear of the beating with a cricket stump, which my father would inflict on me even as I had once seen him inflict it on my eldest brother because he had been playing with the bandboys all day and wasting his time, I could not restrain myself from weeping.

  Aunt Devaki came and, picking me up in her arms, swayed me from side to side to the tune of ‘Bully, bully …’ Then uncle Pratap came and made some lassi of milk and water and gave me a tumblerful. This consoled me somewhat. Of course, I blurted out to him and Devaki in faltering accents all the things my mother had whispered to me to support her refusal to send me to Amritsar. These revelations amused my aunt, but they seemed to hurt uncle Pratap. And though mother tried to cover up her insinuations and sought to bring about a cordial atmosphere, uncle Pratap closed up into a grim kind of taciturnity which was the hallmark of his character, while aunt Devaki began to talk of the time when the train was to leave.

  Luckily, just then my father returned from the office and saved the situation by the bluff heartiness which he brought to his treatment of all the guests who came to our house.

  Aunt Devaki took it upon herself to clear me of all guilt, for which I might conceivably have been punished, by declaring, from under the jhund of her head-cloth with which she covered the upper part of her face, loudly enough for my father to hear, that she wanted to take me to Amritsar with her and that mother had said ‘No’, and that I was very distressed in consequence.

  My father, who always pampered me and spoiled me, laughed to hear this story and took me in his arms, shouting the while:

  ‘Why ohe, budmash, so you want to go to live with your uncle and aunt!’

  I had been too frightened by my mother’s thrashing to confess anything at all. But my brother Ganesh displayed one of those rare bouts of courage and gently whispered that he would like to go to Amritsar with uncle and aunt if he could be sent.

  ‘He is yours to do what you like with,’ said my father, pushing Ganesh forward to uncle Pratap.

  ‘He is just about the age when he could be apprenticed to the craft,’ said uncle Pratap.

  I liked to imagine that when during the rest of that afternoon aunt Devaki nursed me in her lap and bent over me with her pink white oval face swathed under the jhund, it was me she wanted to take with her to Amritsar and not my brother Ganesh, but that she had accepted the dictates of my father because her own husband had agreed. I bathed in the glow of her beauty, tense and excited and bound up in a deep love for her. And I felt that neither the milk and sugar of my mother, nor the curds of aunt Aqqi, nor even the sweet burnt grass of ‘little mother’ Gurdevi, could surpass the mixed smell of Motia and Molsari flowers which was my aunt Devaki. And while the elders spoke in lowered tones about Prithvi, I remember having made a secret whispered pact with aunt Devaki that one day she would take me to Amritsar. Gentle as the sound of the breeze which stirred the tops of the casuarina trees was her voice when she said this, hard as two mangoes were her breasts as she pressed me to her bosom to soothe me, thrilling as the cool raindrops were the kisses she showered on my face, and never can I forget the singing voice made hoarse by the way she bent her profile over my forehead.

  8

  Although there was not much love lost between me and my brother Ganesh, his departure for Amritsar with uncle Pratap and aunt Devaki left a gap in my little world. For, after Prithvi’s death, I had no playmate at all, whereas Ganesh used, at least previously, to condescend to play with me sometimes in the mornings when the boys from the followers’ lines were busy helping their parents.

  And I recall that a certain strange sadness descended upon me, a sadness which became associated in my mind with the vacua of the endless time before me and of the vast empty open space of the playing field maidan which lay beyond the grove of the Persian wheel well outside our house. In the light of those days I am now inclined to think that childhood is not altogether the happy, golden time sentimentalists make it out to be as a compensation for the rigours of the grown-up world, but that it is characterized by long patches of loneliness when children are condemned, for good or ill, to the prisons of their own sensibilities, exiled from the adult world and left to their own devices if there is not available a crèche or a kindergarten or swing and the company of other children. It is true that the lonely child develops an almost convalescent sensitiveness under these circumstances and creates fantasies for his own delectation, but the burden of this early effort, though profitable in the long run, is heavy to bear when the tender soul has constantly to jump from the dreamy existence of the garden bower to the world of reality which is made up of the parental routine of meals and siestas.

  Still there accrued to me from this period, apart from the misery of solitude, a peculiar strength of temperament. I learned to live on my own resources and to be in tune with the shade of the dense trees in the grove where I roamed, the grasses and flowers of the Sahib’s garden, where I occasionally strayed, and the ever-changing life of the road—the road which I crossed from the protection of one line of casuarina trees, stirred by the nimble breeze, to the other, the road in whose dust I rolled, the road where I held conversation with men and beasts and birds, the road which dominated my life with its unknown past and its undiscovered future. And, although still slightly timid in the face of the enigmatic, unresponsive silences, where, I had been told, wandered the souls of the dead who had not ascended to heaven, I often became part of the quietude that spread about me, chirping like a parrot all to myself the phrases I had learnt, creeping like a mouse from ditch to di
tch through which the well water flowed, digging up earthworms where I saw any traces of the little congeries of oval earth, marvelling at their elastic, spineless bodies when I did find them, fascinated by the fact that they crawled even though they were dealt heavy, violent blows by Mali Ram Din’s khurpi and enraptured by his stories of how many fish the gardener had caught by using earthworms as bait on the steel hook of his fishing rod.

  In these moments I learned, lying on the charpai in the courtyard of the house, to watch with trepidation and dread the vague figures of gods, jinns and bhuts in the contours of the clouds in the blue kingdom of the sky and to feel an incomprehensible tenderness for the cool which descended on the earth from above at that hour, an almost tangible reality, like a fairy come in answer to the yearnings of my mother, who prayed on her string of beads, seated cross-legged by her mandala like a being from another world, near me and yet afar, distant and remote and rather frightening.

  Thus, though there was no joy in the quietude to which I was forced for lack of the company of other humans, the ultimate result of all this paucity was to encourage in me a habit of silence, a paradoxical contrast to the turbulence of my nature, the other pole of the vitality I exuded and the terrific high spirits in which I was constantly involved. In those days, men’s mouths became grave for me, and women’s voices saddened; in those days, the earth and the sky grew bigger, and heavy shadows descended on my eyelids, and my eyes were consumed by dreads and fantasies.