Seven Summers Read online

  9

  One day a juggler came revolving a little drum in his hand and dragging a huge black bear behind him, a big sack slung across his arm, as I stood at the door of our house.

  ‘Oh nach ke dikha de Ladhia,’ he sang in a throaty voice, seeing in me the would-be spectator. And he stood there, encouraged by the fact that I hadn’t moved away, and began to unload the sack on his arm. Then, with a more vigorous revolving of the hand drum, he prodded the bear with a stick till the huge black beast stood on his hind legs and began to dance.

  As the bells on the bear’s feet tinkled and as he swayed with clumsy, delightful movements, even as he jumped up and down, Ram Din, the gardener, and a crowd of sepoys gathered round to see the fun.

  The madari sang and talked to his hero in absurd musical phrases:

  ‘Oh, show them the dance, the dance celestial, oh, hero! Look how green are the leaves in the grove, and how the light comes streaming on you through the trees, the light of heaven!

  ‘Oh, dance, dance, ohe Baloo, ohe Ladhia, for they will give me a cast-off coat, the Havildars! They will donate me the oil passed over their heads to appease their sins. And they will give me the stale bread which no one eats from their larder! Don’t leer at the skirts of the washerwoman, for that is rude, and I will get you a bride as black and as hairy as you, with a pig’s snout like the one which thrusts itself from your face!

  ‘Oh, dance, dance, ohe Ladhia, and turn your sly eyes away from the sweeper woman and let me earn the reward of a uniform of the Sarkari foj. Ohe, stop your obscene laughter! …’

  All these words seemed so funny that I learned to recite them without grasping the meaning of the sly cunning behind them.

  Below the hissing of the fiery breath of the bear, underneath his majestic black presence, I watched the tinkling of the bells and the motion of his stumpy little legs. And I felt like dancing to the same rhythm as the Baloo. But the cunning juggler, who wanted to assure himself of his reward before giving the full benefit of the bear’s performance to the audience, stopped beating the hand drum. And the hairy monster descended to all fours and the undulating swell of the earth fell back to the squat even surface it usually is.

  ‘Let the misers go and the generous stay to donate to the Fakir-Sain the gifts of food and money,’ the juggler intoned in a flat voice.

  At this, some of the sepoys moved away.

  ‘Let the misers go,’ the juggler said, stressing the word ‘misers’.

  One of the sepoys who was leaving became angry at this and stood for a moment saying he would ask the orderly to eject him—the juggler—if he were insolent again.

  The juggler replied to this threat with filthy abuse. And there was nearly a quarrel, but mother came just at that moment with a bowlful of flour in her hand. The juggler ran and received it in his sack.

  As the bear came with him, I nervously clutched the end of my mother’s sari and clung to her.

  ‘May the Guru Gorakh Nath bless you and your progeny,’ the juggler said.

  ‘Tell me if Guru Gorkath Nath is pleased with us, Fakir?’ my mother asked, demurely drawing the head part of her sari over her eyes.

  I was bored with this kind of talk and asked mother to ask him to make the bear dance again.

  ‘Wait, son,’ she said, evading me.

  But just then my father could be seen coming back from the office. On seeing him I shrieked aloud:

  ‘Father, here is a madari with a Baloo. Ask him to make the Baloo dance.’

  The prospect of further rewards persuaded the juggler to repeat the performance. And he began to move his drum again and to recite his mumbo-jumbo, something like this:

  ‘Come, ohe Ladhia, show them how you dance! Nourished on the breath of the mountains, fed on the flowering stems of the wild flowers, you who hail from the elements, only tamed by Guru Gorakh Nath, show us how you dance! …’

  The bear lifted his forepaws again and, with his tawny flanks shaking to a strangely ridiculous rhythm, his great body swaying, his hair rustling like straw, he thumped up and down on the earth.

  As the bells tinkled on the bear’s feet and the juggler’s incantation proceeded, I was in a sheer ecstasy of amazement, for the power of the madari’s words heightened the spell of the dance in an uncanny manner, making the earth and sky one for me.

  ‘Ohe come, ohe Ladhia, dance, for you are the healer and helper and enchanter of men in distress, for you have power over the hearts of women!

  ‘Ohe dance, ohe, you whose forehead is white, though your body is black, for your heart is white too!

  ‘Ohe dance, ohe Ladhia and dispel the evil and bring the good, send away the misers and only keep the generous here! … For you are sprung from the pure race of beasts, a prince, a black prince!’

  And thus the Baloo danced, panting for breath yet tireless, sweating but unabashed, trampling the earth with an abandon of joy, and I yielded to the wonder and happiness of his dance and laughed as I had not laughed for months since Prithvi’s death.

  Childhood, oh childhood! How easy it is for one to yield to the slightest happiness and the merest breath of sorrow in one’s childhood! And is there any joy as pure or any sorrow as fleeting as that of childhood? What was the magic of those days which is not here today? … Was it the innocence of one’s soul or the sheer vitality of one’s body?

  10

  As an escape from the oppressive loneliness of the vast daylight, against which I could not close my eyes, I made tentative approaches to some of the boys who lived in the followers’ lines beyond the dry earth of the maidan.

  For many days I had stood under the shadow of the grove on the well and looked across the infinite spaces of the sports and parade ground towards the horizon, where stood the crumbling mud huts of the followers’ lines, covered by a pall of smoke issuing from the two red brick chimneys in which the refuse of the nearby sepoys’ corrugated iron latrines was burnt. And, as I stood gazing into the vacancies of the horizon, rapt in the peculiar hum of an occasional beetle in the grove, I knew I was waiting for a playmate to appear.

  One day I espied Ali, the brother of Abdul, the regimental saxophone player, creeping out stealthily to a mound beyond the latrines and lying down under the shade of a kikar tree. I evaded the gaze of the gardener and ran out towards Ali without looking back at the grove. When I got to him, I found him gnawing at a bit of earth, his nose running the while, and sweat pouring down his long neck across his cheeks from under the red fez cap he wore on his head, his grimy striped shirt and his badly washed salwars spotted with dust.

  ‘Come and eat this,’ he whispered in a nasal accent which took point from the sharp, parrot nose which was secreting the slimy liquid almost over his lips.

  I was very flattered at this invitation because Ali was a special friend of Ganesh’s and had always made it a condition for playing with my brother that I should not be allowed to come anywhere near them. I took a bite at the earth and liked the sweet dry, dusty taste of it which had a coherence of its own for my palate.

  ‘Sit down, you fool, or my mother will see us,’ he said, dragging me down by the end of my shirt.

  I too was anxious not to be seen by my mother, so I became a willing partner to the conspiracy of silence and invisibility.

  ‘Promise you won’t tell anybody that I made you eat the earth,’ he said.

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  And he gave me another bite at the chunk of earth he was nibbling at like a mouse.

  ‘Now, let us creep up to the cactus fruit and eat some of that: it makes a good juicy drink after the solid earth.’

  I followed him as he crawled up to the nearby cactus plant. Only, I got up and hopped, whereas he had crept up on all fours.

  ‘Lie down, I tell you!’ And, pulling me on to the earth, he gave me a resounding slap on the face.

  I began to howl.

  He put the palm of his hand on my mouth and whispered:

  ‘For Allah’s sake, don’t cry, Bully, o
r you will be the undoing of me. Look, here, see what I shall give you …’

  And with his left hand he tore down a purple-red fruit which he rubbed furiously on the sides on the earth for a while and then opened on top. A deep-red juice began to spurt out of the fruit. He began to suck it, waving his head with delight almost as though he were sucking a mango.

  ‘Give me some!’ I cried. And he forthwith let me have a suck of the fruit.

  It was luscious and warm, though rather sharp on the teeth.

  ‘Like it?’ he said.

  ‘Han,’ I assented.

  And yet in a moment I was rubbing my lips furiously with my hands and spitting and spattering the juice I had sucked.

  ‘Fool! Donkey!’ Ali cried. ‘You have swallowed the small thorns with it.’

  I fell horror-struck at the calamity and shrieked at the top of my voice.

  ‘Chup raho, salé,’ he abused me.

  But I was inconsolable as the small invisible thorns on the edge of the fruit, which he had not been able to rub off on the earth in his hurry, stung my lips and tongue.

  ‘Look, have another draught.’

  I obeyed implicitly, though I was instinctively more frightened of the thorns than of his anger at my betrayal. But, though I sucked at the cactus fruit again, the pins and needles of the stinging thorns still made me weep bitterly, more bitterly than the powdered chillies, which my mother constantly rubbed on her breasts to keep me off, had ever done.

  Ali had no recourse but to begin dragging me back towards the followers’ lines.

  As my tender flesh rubbed against the hot, uneven earth of the plain, I cried and shrieked more audibly.

  At this, the sweeper boy, Bakha, who happened to be stoking one of the red brick chimneys with shovels full of straw and dirt, came running towards us.

  ‘Why are you dragging the little one like this?’ he said to Ali.

  ‘This sala will awaken my mother and I have crept out of home while she was asleep,’ Ali said. ‘Look, the way he has rewarded me, especially when I gave him the cactus fruit to suck.’

  ‘Brother-in-law, he is obviously hurt!’ said Bakha. ‘Tell me, little one, what has happened?’

  I pointed to my mouth with the five fingers of my right hand and said ‘thorns’.

  ‘You clumsy fool!’ Bakha said, nearly kicking Ali on the shins with his artillery boots. And he hovered over the bandsman’s son, a black colossus with his enormous turban unstuck and his thick khaki tunic and shorts sodden with sweat and dirt.

  ‘I can’t lift you up,’ he said to me. ‘But be patient, little one, I shall go and call Chotta and Ram Charan.’

  ‘He made me eat the earth too,’ I complained a moment after Bakha had left.

  ‘Chup raho, salé!’ Ali shouted and gave me another resounding slap.

  At this, I howled the skies down.

  Bakha stopped short and loudly called Chotta and Ram Charan, who were playing marbles under the shade of the backs of the followers’ line mud huts. And, returning, he got hold of Ali by the ear and asked him to clean his nose first before being properly handled. As Ali did not do this Bakha took off Ali’s fez and wiped his nose with it.

  Chotta, the flute player and Ram Charan, the washerwoman Gulabo’s son, were highly amused at the penances which Bakha was exacting from Ali.

  ‘Come, sala, son of Ali, do as Bakha says,’ Chotta enjoined from a distance.

  ‘Come,’ said Ram Charan, screwing his lashless eyes against the glare of the sun.

  ‘You wait, illegally begotten,’ Ali said, ‘until I can avenge myself on you! First of all this sweeper scoundrel has touched me and polluted me and then he is insulting my religion by using my fez cap to wipe my nose with it …’ And he frothed at the mouth with anger and writhed in Bakha’s grip.

  I was laughing and weeping in turns. But as the stinging thorns of the cactus fruit had become imbedded in my tongue I also let loose loud, throaty howls now and then.

  ‘Chup raho, salé!’ said Chotta. ‘Nobody is butchering you. Pick him up, Ram Charan.’

  At this I began to roll on the earth and refused to be picked up by Ram Charan, who had adenoids in his nose and whose eyes looked like putrid sores.

  As Bakha was conscious of his position as a sweeper and knew he would get into trouble if he handled me and polluted me, especially if my mother got to know of it, he would not pick me up himself. At length he rushed off, stamping in his heavy boots, towards the followers’ lines, saying to me: ‘Be patient, childling. I will bring someone who can pick you up.’

  Hardly had he turned his back when Ali fell like a tiger upon Ram Charan. While they wrestled for mastery on the ground, Chotta tried to separate them, but, being bitten on the hand by Ali, became involved in the scuffle himself.

  I was more frightened than ever now and looked about me at the desolate fields overgrown with cactus and stubble and dodder, oppressed by the fear of the punishment which was to come to me when my mother found the thorns in my mouth.

  At length, Bakha returned with Clayton, the tall, black Christian flute player in the regimental band, who also served sometimes as my father’s office orderly. He picked me up in his arms and, caressing me with soft words and endearing consolations, took me home.

  My mother had been having her siesta and woke up with a start at the knocking of the latch, and she shrieked when she saw me weeping and covered with dust. And then I got the second big thrashing of my life at her hands, from which Clayton alone, being a stranger, could have rescued me. After she had vented her anger, she bathed me and cleaned me patiently and lovingly enough, cursing Ali and Chotta and Ram Charan and Bakha the while for taking her little son on such dangerous sports as earth-eating and cactus-fruit-sucking.

  ‘Look, folks, darkness is descending on the world!’ she harangued. ‘The low ones have raised their heads to the skies!’

  And straightaway, I pictured with disgust the followers’ lines, covered with dung on which the flies whined, the pungent smoke in the air and the uneven earth with dead cats and dogs lying scattered among the dung cakes, left to dry there by the washerwomen and sweeper girls of the followers’ lines.

  11

  After this debacle, my father recalled Ganesh from Amritsar, both to provide me with a playmate and to ensure that he should be put to school, for the idea of apprenticing him to the family craft of silversmithy was just a cover for what I came to know later was a long-range manoeuvre by my father to get uncle Pratap, who had no issue yet, to adopt Ganesh as a son, so that he might ultimately bring back the joint family property to the common pool.

  Ganesh returned, looking brighter and better fed, wearing a new dhoti and sadri in the city Lalla style. And for a few days he showed a good will towards me which won my confidence entirely. For instance, he gave me a muslin handkerchief and a few nickel anna pieces tied up in a knot to keep as my own. And he allowed me to touch the huge earthen toy figure of a horse which he said uncle Pratap had bought him on the way to Durbar Sahib one day. What is more, he told me how many times aunt Devaki had cooked meat and thought of me while tasting the bone. And how many fairy stories she had told him in the evenings seated on the terrace of her house next to our own house in Kucha Faqir Khana, Amritsar. My mother pumped Ganesh for information on all the comings and goings in aunt Devaki’s house, and doubtless she was able to build up a fairly good case against her from the fiction and fact she gathered in this way.

  There was a new warmth in our household almost like a luminous noise, full of our babble and the chirping of sparrows, for since Prithvi’s death the atmosphere had been somewhat subdued and the querulous voices of Ganesh and myself had not joined issue on one of the many moot points about our possessions or shares in ‘something’, or in our sports. Besides, my eldest brother Harish had just passed his Matric examination and came more frequently to see us, while my mother was big with a baby whose movements I was allowed to notice now and then when she put my head next to the pitcher of her b
elly.

  Under the spell of this bonhomie, Ganesh condescended to play with me, as obviously he had not much choice, since father and mother enjoined us to keep away from the boys of the followers’ lines who had been responsible for the accident which had befallen me in his absence.

  This new comradeship of ours, however, ended in a disaster which was far more horrible than that which had overtaken me during my escapade with Ali.

  The cat in our house had given birth to some kittens, but for days she had spat if anyone got near her basket and had kept everyone but my mother away. On the other hand, my curiosity to see the kittens and to handle them had been mounting, since I was scrupulously prevented from going near her basket, until I was desperate to play with them.

  One day, while the mother cat was away, I, who had been eagerly waiting for this moment, went to the basket and saw the five tortoiseshell kittens nestling in the basket, one on top of the other. Three of them had already opened their eyes, while the other two lay blind, limp and helpless beneath them.

  I made a pact with Ganesh that he, being older, should pick up two kittens, and that I should take one. Then I proposed that we should go out into the shade of the grove and show the gardener what we had got.

  Ganesh agreed to this and we duly picked up our respective kittens. And stroking them tenderly as they miaowed and patting them and whispering to them, we bore them out into the grove.

  The gardener was nowhere within sight, so for a while we played at making them walk about.

  As they had not enough life to move we then decided to tie our handkerchiefs round their necks and drag them as the orderlies of the Sahibs dragged dogs and puppies on straps. The kittens, however, would not yield to the manoeuvre and only miaowed the more unhappily.

  At this we decided to go and show the kittens the reflection of their faces in the well.