Seven Summers Page 5
Standing by the low terrace of the well, bending over the projection and holding the kittens out over the water, we saw their moving images. We could hear the echoes of voices from the depths of the well, so we listened intent to see if we could also hear the echoes of the kitten miaowing. There was only a very faint response to the feeble voices of the little things.
Suddenly Ganesh dared me to throw my kitten into the well, for: ‘Then,’ he said, ‘we shall be able to hear the echo of the miaowing more distinctly.’ I asked him to throw his kitten in too, for then there would be more miaowing. He agreed to this, whereupon I asked him to begin, as he had two kittens in his hands. But he claimed the prerogative of the elder brother and ordered me to throw mine first.
Without more ado I let the kitten in my hand fall into the well. The little one went shrieking down and bobbed its head in the water twice or thrice, miaowing for all was worth.
Ganesh, of course, was either too frightened to throw his kitten in or had never intended to throw it in at all. And he withdrew, ran indoors and told mother what I had done.
My mother came running out of the house and beat her breasts in mourning as she had done when Prithvi had died, and she rebuked me for committing such a sin. And she called the gardener and asked him to descend into the well and rescue the little kitten if he could.
The Mali went down by the chain on the wheel of the well, a basket in his hand. But when he came up he said ‘Tiny’ was dead in the basket.
I don’t know how I was saved from the thrashing that was coming to me. But I remember that my mother went on reminding me of the grievous sin I had committed according to our religion in drowning the poor little kitten in the well. And as the mother cat was most distressed and kept on crying and miaowing for days, even as she kept vigilant guard on her surviving little ones in the basket, my mother had to have a golden kitten made to present to the regimental temple of Pandit Balkrishan as an appeasement for my sin.
I did not realize the horror of my deed at that time. In fact, it took me a long time to get over the terror of hearing the kitten miaowing as it struggled for life in the water and the horror of the mother cat crying for its young one. And I could hear God, with many voices, whistling in the dark of my head, his big bearded face craning over me and saying, ‘You will see how I shall punish you for this.’ And the aggressive child in me suffered a sudden collapse. After many years I came to see the clumsiness with which I had let myself be tricked by Ganesh into doing the deed. And I never forgave him for the fraud he had practised on me.
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I was very much in disgrace, especially in my mother’s eyes, after this incident. For not only was she burdened with the consciousness of the sin I had committed, but she resented having had to pay for the gold necessary for the image of the kitten she had presented to the temple as an atonement for my sin. Of course, she did not express her disapproval actively, but she scolded me now and then, when she was reminded by the miaowing of the mother of the little kitten, for having been so thoughtless.
My father, however, still pampered me and spoiled me by flinging me in the air to the tune of nonsense rhymes, by letting me pull his moustache and by making mother the butt of many jokes about her belief in hagiolatry and her superstition. I remember his words and her answers though I did not understand their import.
‘She is a fool, your mother,’ he would say. ‘Fancy spending money on a golden kitten to appease God. The toy will surely go to swell the coffers of Pandit Balkrishan. The kitten is dead and gone. The child is not guilty because he did not know what he was doing. And mad Sundariai is still suffering from a bad conscience.’
‘You need not be so cocksure,’ mother would say to defend herself against this derision. ‘The ways of God are strange and He is looking on all the time to see what we do. He sees even if we hurt a little ant. And He remembers. And I don’t want Him to be angry with us, especially as He has punished us for our bad karma and taken away Prithvi. I want to ensure a long life for these sons of mine and for the child who is coming. And I wish you would stop mocking because I shall have to suffer for your sins.’
‘Strange argument!’ my father said. ‘What an absurd God, who is so vengeful!’
‘Don’t blaspheme!’ mother shouted. ‘I shall have to feast the priest on every full moon day for ten years if you abuse God Almighty like that.’
My father merely screwed up his eyes and laughed and, gathering us together, took us to the well in the grove for a bath.
Increasingly he was entering our lives and taking his share in looking after us, because, I think, he knew that mother was not feeling well and could not attend to us. Naturally, we were very happy and excited, because to us he was a kind of rare demigod who had, in the past, been used to leaving us behind at home, after a little fuss and amusing chit-chat, while mother had borne the whole responsibility for feeding, clothing and entertaining us.
Bluff and hearty, my father’s methods of amusing us were characteristically those which did not cost him much money. For instance, he would take both Ganesh and me with him to the regimental bazaar, when he went shopping, which enabled us to enjoy the huckster’s profit of Gur (crude sugar) at a bania’s shop, of an apple or mango at a greengrocer’s stall and of a cream cake or sugarplum at the confectioner’s. As he was an influential man in the regiment, the shopkeepers willingly offered us this bait of their own accord in order to make it look less like a bribe, and my father affected not even to notice that we were the recipients of these gifts, except after we had left the bazaar behind. Then he enjoined us to tie the fruit or the sweets in our handkerchiefs and save some in the ‘something’ box for the next day and the day after.
He even looked the other way when, having deliberately taken us with him on his inspection tours of the storeroom in the Officers’ Mess across the road from our quarter, he saw the storekeeper clerk fill our laps with bars of chocolate and fruit drops and peppermints. And, having taught us to refuse politely any offer of eatables three times before accepting, he even encouraged us to break this rule when the old, white-bearded khansamah, Ala Bux, offered us a cake or a double roti, hot from the oven of the Mess. And increasingly he waved aside our mother’s taboos against food cooked by beef-eating Muhammadans and Christians, with a noonday pragmatism which considered such objections to be the merest mumbo-jumbo and stupidity.
Naturally, our appetites grew on the gifts upon which we were fed. And the visits to the bazaar and the Officers’ Mess became weekly or even bi-weekly affairs.
Not only that. I entertained more vaulting ambitions. I had set my heart on no less a thing than riding with my father in the gig of the Adjutant, Captain Owen, when he came to our door to pick up father on the way to the hockey maidan, and to drink some of that frothing liquid which I had seen the Sahibs drink during a visit to the pitch with my eldest brother Harish.
My father was not too sure that the Sahib would like the idea of my accompanying them. And he refused flatly to take me with him, asking me to come with Harish, seated on the bar of the bicycle, or walk it with Ganesh. I pretended to accept his advice docilely enough, but cunningly took up a vantage point on the roadside in time for Captain Owen’s arrival. And when the Sahib drove up, I lifted my arms to indicate that I wanted to ride on the gig. Owen Sahib ordered his syce to lift me and put me on the back of his black mare. I think he did this for a joke, and to see if I was frightened. As I did not show the slightest trace of self-consciousness, he had me lifted and planted next to him on the front seat. No one was more surprised than my father at seeing me there, comfortably wrapped up in Owen Sahib’s rug, when he arrived to take his seat in the gig. And he git-mitted to the Sahib about my naughtiness all along our way to the maidan. And all the boys of the regiment whispered to each other to see me thus arrive at the match in glory. My triumph was complete when at the end of the match I was given a bottle of lemonade to drink all by myself.
Now I always disdained Ganesh’s offer to take
me with him and the other boys to the hockey match on foot. And I only accepted Harish’s offer of the front bar of the bicycle if Owen Sahib did not happen to be going to the match on a particular day. Even on such days I preferred to travel in the phaeton which bore the sepoy members of the hockey eleven, on to which I had ascended by striking up a special friendship with Havildar Charat Singh, the captain of the team, during one of his visits to our house. For I loved a buggy ride best of all. And before long I had come to be accepted as a mascot of the regiment on all ceremonial occasions, for I was known to have brought good luck to the regimental hockey team on the first occasion they gave me a lift in their phaeton to the maidan. As suddenly as I had come to be considered an inauspicious child, so suddenly did I come to be regarded as a child of the sun, a lucky, laughing, happy, bright little boy, full of the noonday spirit, vivacious and untamed, a parrot in speech and a lemur in movement.
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Pampered and spoiled as I was, my vanity now knew no bounds. I wanted to be taken out and to be shown off to more and more of my father’s friends as the brightest, ‘bestest’ child they had ever come across, so that later I could show off in my turn to all the envious boys from the followers’ lines what a wonderful little person I was, even though they had despised me for my smallness and refused to include me in their games. The disadvantage of my position as a mascot of the regiment was, however, that I had to be regimented, being advised to behave as a kind of mechanical toy, performing certain discreet movements, but for the most part remaining immobile and static like a much loved, much handled and much admired doll. Nevertheless, I enjoyed being fondled so much that every morning I asked my father and mother: ‘Where am I being taken today?’ They both smiled to each other and, though secretly enjoying the peculiar pleasure that old-world parents seem to feel in living through their children and in flourishing in the bourgeois way, they evaded my childish inquiries with the perfunctory gestures of adults face to face with an enfant terrible.
The more familiar became the routine round of shopping around at the regimental bazar, the visit to the Officers’ Mess across the road and to the hockey match, the more I reached out to newer and more splendid worlds to conquer, and, therefore, the more persistent became my inquiries about all the possible places which could be visited to the north and the south of the road. I had heard in the gossip of the women in the courtyard of our house of wondrous places in and around Lahore, the names of some of which I kept rolling on my tongue all day, so sweet did they sound to my ears: Shahlmi Gate, Shah-Dara, Nila-Gumbuz, Anarkali, Shalimar, Shish-Mahal etc. But to none of these places was I taken; and my imagination could not, for all its straining, grasp the significance of their grandeur or their beauty, except that congeries of pinpoints of light formed together in ever new combinations before my eyes, as in a kaleidoscope or as in the colours revealed to a squinted vision of the sun’s glare in a tropical landscape.
I think my father and mother stole out once or twice to the city, sightseeing by themselves, and pretended to us that they had merely gone visiting some relations, but I never forgave them for not taking me with them. My mother won us over with a few sweets or some fruit from the ‘Oh Kuch’ box, while my father would then console me with the promise that one day, when he had plenty of leave from the office, he would take us all on a pilgrimage to the holy places of Hindustan. This would bring a peculiar light into my mother’s eyes, but meant nothing whatever to us. And I still insisted on visiting Shah-Dara or Anarkali or Shalimar, pronouncing the words with a relish which delighted my father and made him promise me the heavens. Then there was much dangling of my legs in glee and leaping for joy and going round in circles, until my father stopped me from performing the last antic by saying that that was a very ugly movement and only performed by boys called Daule Shah ke choohe, the mice of Daula Sha, a species of village idiots.
One day, father suddenly announced his intention of taking us all to the great exhibition that was taking place in Montgomery Hall in Lawrence Garden at Lahore. And, after a prolonged toilet during which my mother smeared our eyelashes with blacking, put a black mark on my forehead to avert the evil eye, decked us in fine clothes, though no jewels, lest someone should steal them, we were all bundled into a phaeton and transported to the Exhibition Hall, which lay in a garden abounding with flowers and creepers and shady trees.
Curiously, the most important thing I remember of the exhibition was a big boot, the biggest single boot I have ever seen in my life, which lay on a pedestal in a verandah and into which I was lowered with Ganesh. I put up a fight to elbow my elder brother from this extraordinary kingdom, which I claimed as my own by virtue of the fact that I alone had been clamouring for this excursion to rare and beautiful worlds north of the road beyond the barracks of the cantonments. For the rest I remember that we passed through huge halls, filled with boxes containing strange jewels and toys and cloth hangings which I was occasionally lifted to see. And I recall that we met some sepoys of our regiment, whose eyes my mother said were popping out at the sight of wonders they had never seen in the barren hills of Kangra and Hoshiarpur. But I can even now feel the taste of that ice cream, kulfi, the first kulfi I ate seated on my mother’s lap in the garden.
The vendor would put his hands into an earthen pitcher which stood by his side and fetch out small or big tin cones according to the order, erase the dough which joined the cap on to the cone, and then press out the ice cream as though he were milking a goat. And, emptying the lovely contents into a brass cup, he would throw a little faluda on to it, sprinkle a little otto of roses from a silver scent spray and dole it out to the customer. Oh, how my heart has always jumped for joy at the sight or sound of a kulfi-wallah! Oh, how my mouth has watered to see this thick ice cream in comparison with which neither the modern vanilla ice, with the crisp wafers, nor any other can excite the same greed or ardour!
Some of the sepoys said they had been visiting the nearby ‘Sparrow House’ before coming to the exhibition and that the animals were worth seeing for the children. And now nothing would satisfy me but that we all must go to see the animals.
My mother contemptuously said that the sepoys were welcome to go and see their brothers, the monkeys, in the ‘Sparrow House’—what could we want to go and see them for?
And my father thought it would be too tiring for us after the exhibition, that it was getting late, but that we would surely go there another day.
It was only this promise which persuaded me to be picked up from where I was rolling on the earth and crying in my obstinate desire to go to the ‘Sparrow House’.
A little tickling under the chin and then there was joy on my face, joy set free as though I had been transplanted to the heart of the sky.
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I held my father to his promise. And one morning we did duly leave for the ‘Sparrow House’, seated in a phaeton.
My mother seemed now enormously big somehow and could not bear to have me on her lap. So I insisted on being seated next to the driver on that precarious perch from which I could see the whole broad world around me.
We seemed to be travelling on the straight metalled road, the selfsame road that went past our house and had been such a challenge to me at first, with its uncrossable girth and then with its unending caravans of camels and donkeys, and tongas and buggies, the road which now I was beginning to travel. The driver, an imposing man with a Rajput beard, which was parted sideways on the chin, told me that the part of the road we had left was called the Grand Trunk Road and the part which we had entered after crossing the canal was called the ‘Cold Road’.
Somehow that Hindustani word ‘cold’ has always expressed to me the atmosphere of that road better than the drab appellation, ‘The Mall’, which I learned to use later. For the two rows of kikar trees which flank the wide stretches of this highway conduced to that calm which shade implies. And the breezes which came wafting over the hedges from those lovely big gardens outside the bungalows dotted on the two sid
es of the road were significant of the feeling of rest which was in those houses and their bowers.
The traffic increased as we got near the ‘Sparrow House’. And the whole of life seemed to be in a whirl on the crossroads. I was fairly dizzy with excitement as we reached the gates. And no danger of falling off my perch could hold me glued to my seat any longer. My father brought me down and gave me his finger to hold while he gave his other hand to Ganesh.
And then we trooped down through the gangway to certain small roads, flanked by cages of birds and beasts nestling among the trees and the flowers. Oh, the shrill joy with which I greeted my ‘kith and kin’ as my father called all the beasts! Oh, the wild shouts of amazement and curiosity! What can ever recapture the sheer excitement of entering this world!
And what surprised my parents most was that I was not in the least frightened by the growling of the lions or tigers, or of riding on the back of the elephant, seated with the other children in the howdah, or of feeding the monkeys with the nuts that my mother had carried specially for them, ‘to appease the wrath of Hanuman, the monkey God’, to whose army the monkeys were supposed to belong.
There was a monkey group, with the mother monkey searching the head of a baby monkey for lice, while the father monkey scratched the head of the mother monkey for lice. And this amused me no end because I had so often seen the sweeper women in the followers’ lines in the same stance delousing each other.
I was a little nervous of the gorillas, no doubt, because they seemed so near and yet so far from the human, so uncanny as they emerged with the terrifying outsize torso on spindly bow legs and strode upright from one cage to another, with claws outstretched and staring away into the space beyond them, red-eyed and violent as though about to attack.
‘Do the animals speak the same language as we do?’ I asked my father.