Seven Summers Read online

  Draupadi, however, was born not only after the Sat-yug, the Age of Truth, but long after the Treta-yug, in the Kaliyug, the Iron Age, when the ferungis held sway. It is true that she had not been taught to read or write. Nor did she know anything of European life. But she used Pears’ soap to wash her hands, eau-de-cologne to scent herself with, and she parted her hair like Englishwomen on the side. Her father, Bhagat Ram, who like my father was descended from a family of coppersmiths, was a Babu in the Canal Building Section of the Public Works Department. She wanted to be married to a Babu. Then she would go away with her husband to wherever he was posted. She did not know how these posts came about, except that a man had to be ‘entrance pass’. She did not know what ‘entrance’ meant. She had learned the alphabet of Sindhi, the language in which the religious code of the Aga Khan’s sect was written, because her family followed this spiritual leader devoutly, but she did not know how to read or write even this language. She had been indulged by her parents, who thought it immodest for girls to learn anything. She was a sentimental, humourless girl, obstinate and stupid. She was indeed a child of the ill-fitting Babu class of the early Iron Age in India. My mother had lived in a fool’s paradise if she expected this girl to live up to her dream of an obedient daughter-in-law to her matriarch in the joint family.

  Dark, tender woman, tormented by her hatred of the girl, she always looked frail and old and disillusioned in the face of her daughter-in-law, the even stretch of her brow weighted by lines of care, the light of her sharp eyes dimmed, the passionate determination of her chin robbed of its ardour by a droop, her face set in a mould like a mask that would break at the slightest touch of sympathy if anyone offered it to her.

  In these years, my mother, too, often used to tell us the story of her life. She herself had been married early. She had been a wild child in the village home of her parents, head bare and feet unshod, till the responsibility of helping her mother to look after younger brothers and sisters fell upon her, as she was the eldest child of the family. Then the shadow of her impending separation from her family had descended on her, for she was engaged to be married to my father before she was eight, and the responsibility of preparing for the marriage weighed heavily on girls in those days as they had to make their own trousseau. But she had borne the burden of all her duties quietly enough, because hers was a home of perfect worship. Her father was a devout Sikh peasant-craftsman, lost in the love of God. He always had holy men come to stay in his house, and as the personal care and service of these, the feeding and tending, devolved upon the household, my mother had learnt many a sage truth before she was in her teens. The domestic atmosphere alone in that world of mud homesteads, built on high plinths with verandahs and courtyards, clustering together beside the green fields, under the silver white sky, from the milking of cows at early dawn, the churning of curds for butter, the sweeping, the treating of the courtyards with antiseptic cow dung, the cooking, the serving, the spinning, the weaving and the washing, was an experience so intensely hard that only the ritualization of it lifted it above the taint of slavery and utter, long-drawn monotony and sordidness …

  ‘Be like Savitri,’ had been her father’s blessing, ‘be like the suttees of the gurus, loyal to your husband unto death.’ And her mother had told her stories and sagas of gods and goddesses and devoted wives. She had been imbued with the sense of responsibility that has been customary to inculcate into the minds of young brides. She was to go to her husband’s home as to a temple. And she had promised to live up to all this advice when she took her bridal farewell between tears, except that she had felt then what she had never told anyone else, a sense of strangeness at going to the house of a man whom she had never seen, mixed with the fear that he might hate her because she was not beautiful and leave her to bear the consequences of his desires. Only her mother’s injunctions about serving her lord and master without any expectation of reward and living by the happiness of having children and bringing them up, had smothered that feeling till now; she had forgotten that she had ever been a young girl who wanted to live by love and not by the duty to the unborn.

  Coming with all the shyness of the rustic from the open skies and landscapes of Daska to the four-storied house of her husband in the narrow alleyway of Kucha Faqir Khana at Amritsar, she had been disillusioned, first by her environment, then by the treatment of her mother-in-law and her husband. My father was still at school. His father was dead and his mother ruled supreme, a strong-willed woman who had come from the hills and whom everyone believed to be a magician. Because she was angry with her eldest son for leaving the traditional craft of silversmithy and going to school, and because she was self-willed, the old woman vented her spite on my mother. My father’s younger brother, Partap Chand, was the favourite, because he obeyed the old woman and learnt silversmithy, though he spent her fortune in debauchery. But my uncle’s bad ways the old woman blamed on to the ugliness of Kunti, his first wife, who was then dying of consumption.

  Nevertheless, since her marriage had been arranged by her parents with the parents of my father, because the parents were supposed to look after the interests of their children better, my mother had slaved for her mother-in-law from dawn till past midnight, and even suffered the beatings which my father gave her at my grandmother’s instigation. She had been horrified the first time he had hit her, belabouring her with hard fuel sticks. But she had effaced herself completely. She would sit, her apron drawn over her face, fanning my father when he came home from school or from cricket and sat down to his meal till my grandmother, who hated to see her children at peace, abused her wantonly, rebuked her for some trifle and asked her to go and work in the kitchen. The food she got was a loaf of bread, a ladleful of lentils and, if she could steal it, a slice of mango pickle.

  Hard, cruel taskmistress, my grandmother would get her and Partap’s wife to work phulkaris for various cloth-sellers and keep the wages for this piece-work to herself, though she had thousands of rupees stored away in brass pitchers and hundreds of gold ashrafis hoarded in the corners of her room, and though she collected the rent on half a dozen houses.

  My mother used to talk of the beautiful phulkaris she had done, of the fine diapering in gold floss silk in the madder-dyed homespun cloth. Especially she recalled one which she had done, a fine fabric which she covered with silk of varying colours and did not want to part with but was too afraid of her mother-in-law to ask to be allowed to buy off the dealer. ‘Nowadays girls don’t do the delicate work on phulkaris,’ she used to say, torn between her pride at being a mother-in-law and her revulsion against her snub-nosed daughter-in-law. ‘And if they do, the cloth on which they work is dyed in European bottle dyes.’ The days had indeed gone when the steeping of cloth in oil and all the hundred different processes of extracting the colours from the soft, harmonious and multi-coloured flowers was the delight of the village women. The days had surely changed.

  She had stood the treatment of my grandmother only wishing, hoping, praying that the old woman would relent, but obedient and uncomplaining. Then at last my father had passed his ‘entrance’ examination and taken service in the cantonment at Sialkot as the big Babu of the newly founded 38th Dogras. The year father entered the army, my eldest brother, Harish, was born. Mother felt a slight relaxation in the stern attitude of grandmother. She did not know why it was. She had only noticed that the old woman was kinder, loving the baby, getting clothes made for him, loading him with jewellery. This had pleased her and she remembered how much more zestfully she had entered into the service of her mother-in-law, tending her through the nights, as the old woman was constantly ill, tottering under the weight of separation from her elder son and bitterness about the bad ways of the younger, who brought courtesan after courtesan and enthroned them in the rooms on top of the shop while his consumptive wife sat grinding corn at the millstone on the threshold.

  Then, after lingering on the sick bed for months and fighting hard, the old woman had died: people said she
had only been able to secure her release when she had breathed her spirit into the ears of a cat. Kunti had died not long after, consumed by her mother-in-law’s iron will to dominate the household, and through the neglect of her husband.

  Mother had stayed on at Amritsar to see Partap remarried to Devaki, his present wife, though he repaid her and my father for their kindness and solicitude by quietly taking possession of all the family estate and by spending a good portion of it away on whoring and drinking, within the course of a year.

  When mother had gone to live at the cantonment of Ferozepur where the regiment had been transferred, Ganesh had been born. I had arrived at Peshawar, two years later. Prithvi, born a year after my appearance, had died at Lahore aged four. Shiva, the baby, was the youngest.

  ‘Is your mother-in-law’s womb going to flower again?’ Draupadi’s mother was said to have asked her, adding, ‘It will make the patrimony of your husband smaller.’

  And if the rumours were true, they had been gossiping about her and her family, asking whether all these children were mistakes, born because she could not have an abortion each time she was expecting. ‘The bitches! They are envious!’ she said. ‘The filthy bitches! Why, I meant some at least of my boys to come! What about their own wombs that bring forth a litter every year! Aren’t their own progeny the result of their husband’s drunken fits? The dirty coppersmith’s brotherhood! Gossiping about me, just because we are prosperous. And, anyhow, I have had my womb removed!’ And, after such a burst of indignation, she glossed over the secret fact that, like the children of most other people around her, her own were the results of carelessness, and that she had really had the operation on her womb performed in disgust at the idea of bearing the consequences of her husband’s constant demands on her.

  ‘Let them just dare to say a thing about my family,’ she would say with fire in her eyes. ‘I will eat them alive.’ And she sought to surround her life with an aura of perfection by ignoring all the flaws and exaggerating the more favourable circumstances. For she wanted her family to flourish. This was easy enough as there was a strong basis of common sense between her and my father, because of father’s vaulting ambition to pile up money and mother’s assumption of the position of a matriarch to a large family. And as there could never have been any idea of divorce between them, because there was then no divorce in the laws of the Hindus and because the most ill-matched couples compromised and accepted the fate which willy-nilly put them together, my mother and father had accepted the prison in which they were involved, as they were not quite so ill-matched: she obeyed her lord and master; he recognized her homage by taking her for granted, so that she was lifted from complete servitude and placed on a kind of fictitious throne.

  Father was then lord and master only in name. For, actually, mother ruled the house, though nominally he was the capricious god whose will revolted in wild tempers and terrible scenes when she became too overbearing. There was thus an alternation of mastery and servitude between them, sometimes father lording and sometimes mother occupying the supreme position, though if the sum of their lives together be resolved, father submitted like a child most of the time. For there is no race of men in the world more henpecked than the Hindus!

  Now this girl, Draupadi, the daughter-in-law, had turned up long before she was expected and had upset all the family plans. Mother had believed in the old idea of early marriage as a sort of betrothal, the consummation of which was not to happen till four years after the ceremony of going round the fire, by which time Harish would have got through his Medical School. No thought of the presence or the lack of an emotional connection between the boy and the girl had ever occurred to her. So she did not know what to do about this marriage, what to think or feel. She could not get out of the grooves of her own narrow peasant ideas. When she tried, she found Draupadi superficial and more ignorant than the girls she had known in her village. And this conduced to an exaggerated belief in herself and her own family’s superiority.

  ‘My family is splitting through the coming in of this stranger,’ she said. And she felt that if only she could provide wives for her sons from somewhere in her own family, she would do it, for then she would not have to go to other people for daughters-in-law. All that she wanted from these daughters-in-law were sons who could be her grandsons. These girls did not matter. There were so many of them who could be had for the asking. And they should suffer and learn what life was like. Why, hadn’t she herself suffered? And now it had all been worthwhile. For she had had sons. And now her race would continue and nourish. True, she had known misery in doing her duty, been browbeaten and broken, but what was happiness, anyhow? …

  From the regimental temple came the song of gongs and bells and the dithyrambic incantations of worshippers. The sky was lit with a few tremulous stars.

  Mother closed her eyes, bowed her head, and joined her hands as she crouched on a little mat among her pots and pans in the open-air kitchen in a corner of the courtyard by the verandah, as the last rays of the setting sun lay polishing her brass utensils. And she began to murmur a prayer.

  This irritated me as she seemed to become remote from me and go far away, as when she slept in the afternoon. For a moment I tried to make out the possible shapes of men and animals in the patches of the fleecy and wool-like white clouds as I lay on the cot. But then I tired of it and looked at her. But she was still involved in her half-empty stare.

  ‘Mother,’ I whined, tired and sleepy.

  She did not answer, but from far away came my father’s voice again.

  Mother broke her prayers and began to see if the lentil curry was tender by dipping a big brass ladle into the green-coloured earthen saucepan on the fire. She rubbed a grain between her fingertips.

  ‘It is soft for garnishing,’ she mumbled.

  And she withdrew the sticks of fuel out of the fireplace a little and then looked at the dough she had kneaded for baking chapatis.

  My sister-in-law still sat huddled in the corner with her head cloth drawn over her face. Perhaps she was crying.

  Father came in noisily, followed by my two brothers, and shouted in his big, sonorous voice: ‘Mother of Harish, is the food ready?’

  ‘Yes,’ mother answered coolly. ‘The dal is boiled. I shall garnish it and begin to bake the chapatis when you have bathed.’

  ‘Acha, we will go and bathe,’ said father, exhilarated by the heat. ‘Come, Ganesh, come, Harish, we will go and bathe at the well outside. Where are you, Krishna? Where is my mischievous Bully son? You come too … Mother of Harish, I have brought a big melon for the children. Draupadi will like it. Where is she? But!!!—Why is she sitting huddled up like that? Can’t you ask her to sit away from that corner, in the air? It is stuffy there and the insects might be about!’

  ‘She is angry,’ mother said slowly.

  ‘What did you say?’ roared my father. He was really feeling the warmth, was disturbed about Draupadi, and ever so slightly deaf in one ear.

  ‘She is angry,’ repeated mother, stressing each word and yet feigning a vacant, unconcerned look as if she were bored with the whole affair.

  ‘Angry?’ said father vehemently. ‘Why is she angry?’

  ‘She says she wants us to give her her husband,’ informed mother.

  I did not know what all the talk was about, but I listened to the words and sensed the tension in the atmosphere.

  Mother reported everything that happened in the household or outside to him when he sat down to a meal on a sackcloth in the kitchen. He knew what Draupadi was feeling without ever having seen or exchanged a word with her. As the whole business simmered through his mind and he touched the edges of the tension that was in the air, he was furious. His eyes became bloodshot.

  ‘Let her take him then!’ he burst out. ‘Let her take him. I was only going to do my duty by him. I wanted him to become a doctor. But since his wife wishes otherwise, let it be so. I didn’t tell you that I had an offer through the “Karnel Sahib” from the Inspect
or General of the Jail Department, for an Assistant Jailor’s job for Harish. I have told him that he can take it. It is thirty-five rupees a month, but there is great izzat attached to it.’

  Mother was silent.

  ‘Well, Harish, what do you think about it?’ asked father, turning to him angrily.

  Harish was silent as ever and sat on the cot in the verandah, his head still hanging down, his hands pressed over each other, his shoulders stooping, his legs and his torso submerged in the darkness.

  ‘I have done my duty,’ father said, throwing up his hands in despair after he had waited for an answer. ‘As it would really be difficult for the girl to live here and as she does not want to live with her parents till he finishes his medical studies, she had better take her husband and go to Lahore to this job I have secured for him.’

  Everyone was silent. Everything was still. Only the deep, resonant whine of a beetle and the croaking of frogs in the vegetable garden, which my father had planted outside the house where the kitchen water seeped through a drain into a swamp, disturbed the quiet of the night.

  ‘Come, Ganesh, come and have a bath,’ said father, going towards the sitting room to change into his loincloth. ‘And wake up Krishna too,’ he continued, ‘he should have a bath.’ For I had simulated sleep at the mention of being soaked in water.

  Ganesh had begun very ostentatiously to get his satchel ready for the school the next day, because during summer and early autumn nights we all went to bed after the evening meal and he had to hurry to school in the mornings.

  Father stood by him for a moment on his way back to the sitting room and, as if to get rid of his agitation by changing the topic, he said, ‘Ohe, child, take Krishna to school with you from next week. I think he is old enough to go, the pig! …’