Seven Summers Page 6

  ‘No, they have not the gift of speech,’ my father answered. ‘It is only parrots like you who “cutter, cutter” speech.’

  ‘Then do the parrots speak the same language as we do?’

  ‘Yes, but they do not understand what they repeat.’

  I was very puzzled with this answer, and in my naive mind I guessed that some queer mystery filled everything around me, that something I did not know and could not understand must be revealed to me. And eager, impetuous, reaching out to the answers which I could not get, I went on wondering and surmising and building up fantasies about the things I did not know, piling up dream-clouds of the most varied shapes and forms above my head.

  I saw a long-necked zebra and could hardly trust my sight.

  A couple of kangaroos with their little ones seated securely in the pouches next to their bellies were more reassuring.

  The bears I remembered as old friends I had seen with the juggler.

  The mother rabbit and the little rabbits I could even caress.

  And the little sparrows in the cages, feeding their chicks with their bills, filled me with a peculiar tenderness for the miraculous way in which they put food from their mouths into those of their young. The way they darted about from one corner of the cage to another, the yellow canaries, in the shimmering light that percolated through the dense trees, made me rock my head in wonder.

  As my limbs grew heavy with the fatigue of walking and looking, my mother asked my father to pick me up again. How beautiful she seemed in that moment, my mother, how pale as she stooped over my head and asked me whether I would like to be picked up!

  I walked along stubbornly, fascinated by the animals in their cages and the oldness of the roots of the banyan trees which towered over the cages, listening to all the luminous voices of the wild doves cooing, the parrots’ scissoring speech and the eternal singing of the koels which I knew so well, and I would not give up. For there was in those days the fire of unquenchable light in my eyes and the energy of volcanoes in my little being.

  Realizing that I was tired out by the long trek on the pavements of the ‘Sparrow House’, my father ignored my plea that I was not tired and lifted me up. Then, sensing the confusion of my soul at the shock of this otherness through which we had been passing, and disturbed by the one question which I repeatedly asked, whether I could come to live here with my ‘kith and kin’, my father began to tell me a story:

  ‘You see,’ he said, ‘one day the animals and the birds in the jungle met together in a maidan. And the king of the jungle, who is the lion, told them that a man had come to live among them, and that surely he would gobble them up if they did not gobble him first.’

  ‘Why should he gobble them up?’ I asked, excited by the word ‘gobble’.

  ‘Because man can shoot and kill the beasts and gobble them as you gobble a boni,’ my father said.

  I was in a frenzy of fear at the sound of the word ‘gobble’. But I said:

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘Man was hearing what the king of the jungle said,’ proceeded my father. ‘So he took out his gun and shot all the animals. So if you come and live here you will have to fetch a gun, otherwise the beasts will gobble you up.’

  Suddenly I began to cry.

  ‘Don’t frighten him with such tales,’ my mother said.

  And my father laughed and smiled and tried to console me with ‘Acha, acha, I won’t frighten you, son.’

  I instinctively put the thumb of my right hand in my mouth and, lulled by the even sway of my father’s gait, I fancied myself not in the garden before me but in the caverns of a large forest at dusk. The crowds of men and women were rambling in a curious silken haze up and down the asphalt on my sides. Soon I could hear nothing except the isolated groans and cries of animals and the itinerant rhythm of a parrot’s speech. And I suddenly felt lighter than air. I had the sensation that I was floating upwards into the sky. Then the dark whorl of the evening descended upon me and closed my eyes, and I felt as though I were climbing higher and higher as though the light of the spark lit into me by my father’s sing-song had lifted me on high with its strange raucous music and transported me to a city beyond the sky …

  15

  I don’t remember exactly when we left Mian Mir: but I can recollect that during the days when the regiment was preparing to leave, and its enormous baggage was being carried off to the Lahore Cantonment station in the iron carriages of the local mule corps, I lingered by the roadside for hours fascinated by the unending stream of traffic that passed on the highway. And in that strange way in which certain casual impressions become more indelibly imprinted on one’s memory than others, and are later transfixed by the imagination into the shape of dominant obsessions, that road, which had been my first vivid memory as well as the last impression of Mian Mir, became for me later an ever-present reality. So that I could always shut my eyes and see almost each particle of dust that flew across it in the wake of carriages and camels and goats and horses and men; feel the red hot burning surface of its middle heights as well as the cool dusty fringes on its sides, over which the casuarina trees sang and danced with ever so gentle a rhythm; sense the warmth of the crowded life that poured across it from horizon to horizon. And, above all this, there floated on the surface of my child’s mind certain myths and legends, told me by my mother, of the people who had travelled up and down this road:

  Once upon a time, the Sun God, Surya, had come down to earth this way. And, after he had dried up the land, the Rain God had poured down. And then the various Gods of the River had arisen by the sides of this road … And then the Wind God had swept down. And then the ancient kings had ridden up and down in their chariots: the Kurus and the Pandus and Rama and Krishna and Sikandar and Rasalu and Vikramaditya and Akbar Badshah … And many saints and fakirs had begged for alms, as they had travelled towards the holy places of Hindustan down this road; sages like Valmiki and gurus like Nanak and Bhakta Kabir … And the fojs and lashkars of the Mughals had marched down. And then of the one-eyed Sikh maharaja, Ranjit Singh, and his general Hari Singh Nalwa. And, later, the armies of the Ferungis had route-marched here, even as the Dogra Regiment to which we belong, to the shouts of ‘lef-right, lef-right’ given by the sergeants and havildars …

  I picked up, from under the pupils of my eyes, vague visions of these fabulous figures like the giants and demons into which the clouds formed and reformed over my head as I was put down to bed in the courtyard of our house. And sometimes I contemplated with an immobile stare, filled with wonder and horror, the immobility of one of these almighty chimeras, with heads like the stumps of carrots or pumpkins. And there were no standards to check my imaginings about the humanity which had passed down this road, except that the outlines of the figures were suggested by the medley of sights and sounds that I had experienced up to the age of five years. And yet there was no confusion in my muddled fantasy world.

  For I meditated on all the facts in snatches between the elders’ conversation, or in between the games which I played in the grove over the well, building up kingdoms and destroying them to the tune of the nursery rhymes which my mother had sung to me. And no footsteps on the road could choke the song without words that I sang about it; no call from mother, ‘Krishna, where are you, come here!’ could disturb it; no admonition from the gardener Ram Din not to disturb the classic shapes of the vegetables could prevent it, no snap of the fingers from my father could stop it. It was as if I had become possessed by the giant Jinn of the road and by all the Jinn-Bhuts which had accrued to me through the tales and the fables told to me and the eavesdropping into the family talk that went on in our home …

  And so intense was the effect of these meanderings that during the nights I had dreams in which my dead brother, Prithvi, figured prominently, and nightmares of battling demons woke me up in cold sweats; and I babbled in my sleep.

  Outside, the preparations for the exodus to the cantonment of Nowshera went on, and the road ran,
teeming with life, dusty and trodden underfoot by hard boots and crude Indian shoes, unhonoured, ignored, unworshipped, except by me who was watching its flow to my own rhythm, as though the road were in me and the whole world all about me, stretching for miles and miles and miles into nebulous lands uncharted by my mind … The forefinger of amazement was in my mouth as I stood there, and my eyes were wide open with a boundless curiosity which was later to become the greed, the lust and the desire for good things and beauty.

  Obviously, in those days I was my own master, supreme ruler of the phantasmagoric kingdom of my strange visions and stranger dreams.

  Part II

  The River

  … like the rivers that break down old landmarks, destroy habitations and crops and human beings in their torrential course, carving out other channels to irrigate, and make fruitful other tracts, hitherto barren and spreading over all the wasted lands new alluvial soil to enrich them. Such phenomena one does not blame or praise, one merely records their actions and tries to understand their causes …

  —Anonymous

  1

  ‘Where did you find me, mother? Where did I come from?’ I asked as I lay by my mother on the afternoon of a summer’s day on the verandah of our quarter in Nowshera cantonment while she plied the spinning wheel.

  My mother looked at me quizzically. Then she smiled and with a pout of her lips began half-humorously, half-seriously, to invent an explanation in a long sing-song fairytale manner.

  ‘You were in my soul, my darling, hidden like a secret. You were in my body like a pearl in a mother of pearl. You were my innermost desire. And I tried to find you. But I searched and searched and couldn’t see you anywhere. So I prayed to God to give you to me. And God being a very kind person made you for me and put you in a little alcove in our house at Peshawar …’

  ‘Who made God, mother?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, child, but your nurse knows,’ mother said casually, smiling but rather impatient now. Then she affected the intonation of sentiment again and continued: ‘Your fairy godmother. God sent her to our house and she took you from the alcove and laid you in my arms.’

  ‘My fairy godmother? My fairy godmother?’ I cried in a childish sing-song. ‘Where is my fairy godmother, mother?’

  ‘She has gone back to her home, son,’ my mother said. ‘She has gone back to Vilayat beyond the seas.’

  ‘My fairy godmother! My fairy godmother!’ I sang again heedlessly, even as I played with the iron slide of her spinning wheel. But then my curiosity became insistent again and I said, as if I were crying for the moon: ‘I want to see my fairy godmother, mother! I want to see her!’

  ‘Acha, child, you will see her one day,’ mother said to divert my attention, ‘when you go to Vilayat beyond the seas. Now go to sleep, or if sleep will not come to those eyes of yours, go and play.’

  I got up and, acting as though I intended to sleep, I came and sat down in her lap. I liked to sit in her lap even when she sat down to cook, eat or spin. And I followed her about while she was attending to other jobs in the house, holding on to the lower end of her sari. I wanted to suck her breasts and to clasp her close to myself. But as during the past years, she seemed to be irritated by my clinging to her. I knew it was because of my baby brother Shiva, as in the old days it had been due to my dead brother Prithvi. Also I was now a big boy, for I was over five. So she had been resorting to the grim expedient of painting her breasts with a paste of powdered chillies and vinegar in order to keep me off. And that design had worked. But there was no way of keeping me from her lap, except a show of anger. She had recourse to this sometimes, but mostly she indulged me. And now when she had asked me to go to sleep or play, I knew that she really did not want me to go and play but wanted me to go to sleep in her lap, because she loved me for my prattle … I was a spoilt child. And there was no sleep in my eyes.

  ‘Go to sleep, child, go to sleep,’ she urged. And, clasping me close to her, she began to hum the tune of a hymn.

  The soft, sighing music of the chant flowed indolently at first, breaking here and there like the incense wafted in a censer. Then it seemed to fill the whole room, richly, suffocatingly, and to steal through the open doorways to the verandah and the courtyard of the large mud house.

  I looked at my mother open-eyed. I did not know whether she really wanted me to go to sleep or whether she was angry because I was pestering her with my whys and wherefores. The mixture of fearsome exaltation and kindliness in her voice made it difficult for me to appreciate the measure of her irritation. And I continued to stare at her with the whole of my face, my eyes dilating and my cheeks hot and puffed up.

  There was a peculiar sort of light about her dusky visage, half playful and half serene, which made her triangular profile fascinating to me. And she had a curiously evasive smile, which stood more upon the tip of her straight nose than on her lower lip, which danced more on the point of her determined chin than on her cheeks and by which I always recognized her fondness for me. When she was angry, of course, I did not like her dark-coloured, tapering face, preferring my aunt Devaki’s fair oval. But in her pleasanter moods there was a warmth about my mother which I loved, and there was a smell about her limbs which was in those days like the smell of the baby Shiva, and there was a frank naturalness about her manner which always made me feel nearer to her than to anyone else.

  As the slow, long-drawn curve of her chant fell, she seemed to be overcome by the heat of the early autumn afternoon and, with her right hand still on the handle of the spinning wheel and the cotton in her left, she had dozed off.

  I wanted to open her eyes with my hands, as I always wanted to do when she fell asleep during the day, because I felt alone and wanted her to play with me. But I felt afraid of her just because her eyes were closed. Slowly, fearfully, I got up and ran out of the room lest the God of her song, or the ghost in her head, should catch me and strangle me.

  I went to the corner of the verandah where the firewood was kept, picked up a bamboo pole which was used for my father’s mosquito net, got astride it as though I were getting astride a horse and ran.

  ‘Krishna!’ came my mother’s sudden call.

  I had just begun to gallop across the verandah astride the bamboo stick as if I were riding one of those big horses on which the orderlies from the 44th Cavalry came to deliver letters to my father. So I did not answer.

  ‘Krishna!’ she called again in an anxious, startled voice, for apparently she had awakened from her fitful snooze and found that I had evaporated.

  ‘I am here,’ I answered shrilly and went towards her.

  ‘Acha, child,’ she shouted. ‘I didn’t know where you were. Go and play. Only don’t go in the sun and don’t wake the baby …’

  But by this time I had come up riding my high horse and was about to gallop on to the blue army carpet on which she sat, with my dusty bare feet.

  ‘Go and play on the verandah, child,’ she said, ‘and let me get on with the spinning wheel a little longer before your father comes home … Go and see if your brothers are coming, and your sister-in-law. They have been gone to the bazaar a long while.’

  But now I was not so eager to play horses as I was to watch the thread being drawn out of the cotton in her hand as the iron slide revolved with the propulsion of the wooden wheel.

  ‘Go and play, son,’ my mother said, half coaxing, half angry.

  At that instant, I negotiated my horse into a circular movement with such violence that the whip in my hand broke the thread on the spinning wheel and I emerged triumphant into the open, leaving death and destruction in my trail and a mother in agony who cursed as she sought to connect the thread and the cotton wool with her spittle …

  Hardly had I come into my field of battle, the verandah, however, when I heard footsteps in the hall of the house which stood across the courtyard. I hurriedly dropped my stick of a charger and ran shouting: ‘Bhapaji! Bhapaji!’ for I had sensed the approach of my brothers, Harish and
Ganesh.

  But they did not seem as eager to see me as I was to meet them. I knew that I was unwelcome from the mumbled monosyllables of caution, irritation and impatience that issued from the contorted, knotted face of my eldest brother as I rushed to his legs. Tall, thin, pale, almost livid with a mask of suppressed rage, Harish did not relax the scowl on his face. But I had caught hold of his legs as he entered the courtyard and clung to him with an eagerness that made it impossible for him to advance any further.

  ‘Come, child, let go!’ he said irascibly, acknowledging my outburst of affection with a click of his tongue, a half-expressed remonstrance and the warning, ‘it is hot in the courtyard, child, and you are barefoot.’

  ‘First give me what you have brought for me, brother,’ I insisted, unmindful alike of my brother’s irritation and of the burning earth under my feet, since it was a question of the sweets he might have got for me.

  ‘Come away, child, come away!’ called my mother, rushing up to the verandah as she had scented trouble.

  But I would not stir.

  Thinking to persuade me by adding the prospect of a bribe to the plain entreaty, she said, ‘Come, child, come, your brothers may have brought you a toy or some nice sweets. They will give them to you if you let them come in.’

  I relaxed my hold on Harish in view of this assurance.

  My mother had noticed that I was barefoot and she called to Harish:

  ‘Child,’ (we were all ‘child’ to her and remained so even when we grew up) ‘pick him up and bring him into the shade. Where is your wife and your younger brother?’

  Harish lifted me clumsily under his arm and whispered in answer to mother’s question, head bent, lips tightly shut: ‘They are coming.’

  ‘May I be your sacrifice,’ mother said to relieve the tension which prevailed when Harish came to the verandah and dumped me on a hemp-string bedstead. ‘Did you get tired, walking?’