Seven Summers Read online

  2

  I was pleased to be going to school as I came out of the house, holding my brother Ganesh’s little finger with my right hand and sucking the thumb of my left. I had been dressed with elaborate care in a pair of new cotton salwars and a khaki twill tunic. A bright-coloured Peshawari silk handkerchief was tied round my head and the pair of black rubber shoes, which I had worn on Harish’s marriage and which had since been kept for special occasions, protected my feet against stones and splinters on the way. I was, indeed, very excited and hot.

  For to go to school had been the ambition of my life during the whole of the previous year. Every day I had seen my elder brother go off to school, I had wished to go too. I had heard of the adventures which Ganesh and the other boys of the regiment had on the way to school, eating berries which grew wild in the bushes, catching grasshoppers and insects and playing games of which the rules were kept secret. And my devouring curiosity and the desire to be in the seething cauldron of things had filled me with enthusiasm. I had pestered my father for months to send me to school.

  ‘You are not old enough, son,’ he would always say. And I had argumentatively insisted that I was. Though, really knowing that I was not, I had secretly wished and prayed to God to make me grow to the same height as my elder brother somehow, except that I was afraid that if my prayer was granted and I did grow up overnight to be like Ganesh I might find that I had acquired his flat nose, his shapeless ears and his general angularity into the bargain. But I had not seen any appreciable change in my height corresponding to my prayers to God. So I had cried.

  ‘You are crying to be allowed to go to school now,’ father had said, ‘you wait, you will cry to be allowed to stay at home once you have been there.’

  I could not see why that should be so. And I went about to secure my end in quite another way. I began to imitate Ganesh as he did his home lessons with father in the evenings, and I would meddle about with his books, his slate and his notebooks, pretending to do what he did. Father laughed as I sat repeating the contents of the first Urdu primers or the elementary numerals after Ganesh like a parrot. And whenever my brother floundered, out I came egotistically with the phrase. Father was very amused and petted me and flattered me, giving me a gigantic conceit of myself.

  One day, father seemed to have decided that my capacity to remember by rote was as pronounced as my eagerness to learn, and he began to teach me at home. After a few months I could read the first primer and set about tackling my brother’s second year courses. At this stage Ganesh’s jealousy was aroused and he refused to let me handle his books, and there were frantic scratchings and bitings and tears and howls between the two of us.

  There was nothing for it but to send me to school.

  But my elder brother was not too eager to take me with him on the morning when I issued forth. He was unhappy at being burdened with the responsibility of me.

  ‘Walk quickly, you swine, walk quickly!’ he shouted, extricating his little finger from the grasp of my hand as soon as we had proceeded out of audible distance of home. ‘Be quick, you affliction, with your small legs and feet!’ he said peevishly till his flat face was contorted. ‘I am already late.’

  I was mortally offended at this rebuke. The abuse did not matter. But the sudden severance of my hold on Ganesh’s little finger seemed to me like a betrayal! I felt I was being left behind and would never be able to find my way to school. My happiness at going to school gave place to instant tears. And, weeping, sobbing, with burning ears, I ran after my elder brother.

  Afraid that my howls might be heard by father, Ganesh had stopped for a moment. Then, seeing me following him, he had capered away.

  I ran a few yards and then, seeing Ganesh run, gave way to despair, and shouted for father: ‘Ba ji!’

  Ganesh turned and saw that the house had been left too far behind for my cries to reach it.

  I was about to roll in the dust to spite Ganesh. But my elder brother was not in sight and I realized that that kind of sulking would have no effect. So I ran after Ganesh with a more deliberate effort.

  This time I succeeded in getting abreast of him after a good deal of sweating and straining.

  ‘Rape-sister!’ I abused, trying to catch hold of Ganesh’s index finger. ‘Why are you leaving me behind?’

  ‘Let me go, don’t catch hold of me,’ Ganesh protested, his high cheekbones covered with a flush of anger and fear. ‘Ali and the other boys must have gone. But for you I wouldn’t have missed them.’ And then he wrested his finger from my grasp again and began to run.

  ‘Ohe wait, take me with you,’ I sobbed hopelessly, and ran effortfully as the wind was caught in the expansive folds of my salwars. ‘Ohe wait,’ I shouted. ‘Pig! Dog! Brute!’

  When Ganesh had run about fifty yards ahead of me, he seemed to have seen Ali going into his house, from where he had been basking in the sunshine. So he stopped to wait for me.

  I came up weeping by the corner of a small lane which divided the low mud wall boundary of the barracks from the long row of small one-roomed houses in which lived the bandsmen, the few married sepoys who were allowed to bring their wives with them, and the followers of the regiment, the washermen, the barbers, the cobblers, the sweepers.

  ‘Ali’s mother, has Ali gone to school?’ Ganesh asked, lifting the ragged jute cloth curtain which hung at the door of the mud house, obliquely wishing for permission to enter because the Muhammadan bandsmen kept their women in purdah.

  ‘No, he is still here, this illegally begotten!’ came the sharp voice of Ali’s mother from within. ‘He has just awakened and then he has been out sunning with no thought of school. Come and wait for the rascal for a little while.’

  Ganesh seemed relieved. He lacked the confidence which Ali’s company on the walk to school gave him, being weak-minded and afraid to be the only one to suffer the Master’s rod for being late at school. For if the other boys from the regiment were also beaten then they were less ashamed in each other’s eyes.

  My brother led the way into the house.

  I followed, afraid and shy to be entering a strange house. But any fear I had was soon dispelled by the sight of a brilliantly coloured cock who was kukru-kruing away on the wall of the house, and all my shyness evaporated as I saw dozens of little chicks in the middle of the poultry farm of a courtyard which led to the dusty, bare verandah of this one-roomed house.

  ‘Look! Look!’ I exclaimed, pulling at Ganesh’s tunic. ‘Look at those little chicks!’ And I ran to catch one, thus creating a sheer palaver; for the hens ran, flapping, flopping, squeaking through the house, followed by the endless trail of their chicks.

  ‘Arré, leave them alone,’ cried Ali’s mother with a shrill good-humoured voice in Hindustani, as they were from near Aligarh in Oudh. ‘You Hindus must not kill little chicks; they are for us Musulmans to eat.’

  I stood, however, in the porch of the verandah, fascinated by the chicks going in and out of the little box of a house in the right hand corner of the courtyard in which they nested.

  Ganesh stood talking to Ali, who crouched on the dust, gingerly sprinkling water on his hands and his face from a big kettle-like copper jug, as if he were afraid of the water, which he was, for, unfortunately, Islam does not enjoin daily ablutions as a religious duty.

  ‘Come in, boys,’ said Ahmed, Ali’s father, who sat smoking an enormous hubble-bubble as he lay wrapped in a thick, greasy quilt, on a huge bed which occupied half the dark, congested little room that was the living room, bedroom, kitchen and store of this family of five.

  Ganesh and I walked into the room and stood inclined against the posts of the bed.

  Ali now sat with his sister Ayesha and his little brother, Akbar, eating out of a bowl full of steaming-hot mutton curry and a basketful of chapatis. They would break a piece of bread from the basket with the five fingers of their right hand, dip it into the gravy, which was plentiful, and put it into their mouth. Ali was in a hurry. So he stuffed his mouth with bre
ad and meat till one or the other of his cheeks was stuffed round like a ball and he had to swallow the mouthful without chewing it.

  Trained to the snobbery of a daintier code of manners by mother, who was overscrupulous about cleanliness, I looked away from this community meal.

  But the smoke rose in furious spurts from the fireplace by which Ali’s mother sat blowing through a wooden pipe for all she was worth, because the fuel sticks recently gathered by Ali’s father were wet and wouldn’t burn quickly enough. And there was a pungent smell of garlic and onions in the air. I felt giddy.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Ali’s mother as she saw me.

  I was proud of my new clothes and hesitated.

  ‘Here you are, clean one!’ said Ali’s mother, pushing a worn-out mat towards me. ‘Sit down, you too, Brute,’ she continued, addressing Ganesh by his nickname.

  Both of us sat down, shy and noiseless, as was expected from ‘better-behaved’ children.

  I had never been here before and was specially interested in the squalid contrast which this house presented to our own, which was a regular Indian officer’s quarter with two huge rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a latrine and an enormous courtyard, given to my father because as a ‘shadow Colonel’ he enjoyed the ‘prestige’ of a commissioned officer. There seemed a curious lack of brass utensils in the cooking place, most of the pots and pans being of clay and aluminium, while my mother’s kitchen was lit up by brass and bronze and even silver. And I felt contemptuously superior, because my parents spoke of the bandsmen as ‘low southerners’.

  ‘Will you have something to eat?’ asked Ali’s mother, swaying her rotund body which was swathed in bright-coloured rags and richly laden with silver jewellery; earrings, nose-rings, necklaces, bangles and bracelets.

  ‘No, we have had our meal,’ Ganesh and I said in unison, for that was the parrot cry we had been taught to utter when we were offered food anywhere, particularly at the house of a beef-eating Muhammadan.

  ‘I can’t offer you a betel-leaf because you are going to school,’ said Ali’s mother as she took a heart-shaped green leaf from a wet cloth, treated it first with a red and then with a white paint from a round copper box, and, spitting some scarlet juice across the wall from a mouth already full of a previous betel leaf, stuffed the new leaf between her dirty, decaying brown teeth. ‘Even the betel leaf,’ she continued, ‘involves the use of water and your mother will be angry if she gets to know that you ate anything touched by our water.’ But she heaped a plate with jalebies, cream cakes and sugarplums and said, ‘Take these, they are dry.’

  We waved our head to signify our conventional refusal.

  I would certainly have liked a betel leaf, but the taboo stood and, besides, I felt sick to see the scarlet spittle trickle down before me across the wall.

  ‘Acha, you pure, pure Hindus!’ said Ali’s mother, a little hurt.

  I felt uncomfortable at her plaintive remonstrance and tried to forget the feeling of nausea which the sight of the spittle had started in me. I remembered that my mother had particularly warned Ganesh against eating in Ali’s house. I did not know why. But now that I was tempted I would have liked to eat some of the meat curry which lay before Ali. I could not see the difference mother had told us that there was, between eating dry things from the hands of a Muhammadan, and eating things in the making of which water had to be used. Why could not one eat out of the hands of a Muhammadan anyway? Was it because, as mother said, the Mussulmans ate the meat of the Mother Cow, or because they took their shoes into the kitchen? Ali had trod on the mess which the hens made in the verandah and had then sat down to his meal in the kitchen. That was dirty.

  As for the meat, how could you tell the difference between the cow’s flesh and the meat of a goat? Perhaps my mother did not like the Muhammadans because they ate together out of one basket and one bowl, I thought. Also, they did not wash their hands before beginning to eat. But I saw the spittle of Ali’s mother on the wall, standing like a crystal precariously hanging from its base, then swaying with the smoke and falling on the edge of the pot on the fireplace. That decided me. That was bad. My own mother would not do that. She cleaned her teeth and gargled in the bathroom. And my father chewed the twig every morning outside the house.

  ‘Hurry up, son of a prostitute!’ shouted Ali’s mother to her son angrily.

  I felt that she was angry because Ganesh and I had refused to eat the sweets which she had offered us and that she was venting her spite on her son.

  ‘Take this,’ she continued to her son, more kindly, giving him a small parcel. ‘Eat them at recess time, since these Hindus won’t have them. And it is in lieu of your pocket money. I haven’t a pice to spare for you today.’

  I was noticing her every word and gesture and contrasting her with my own mother. My mother had said before sending me to school that I was not to get into the habit of eating anything at recess time. It was not nice, she had said, to spend money on sweets outside. When you come back I shall give you ‘something’ from the box inside. But she had not said she had no money to spare. My father had lots of money, especially at the end of the month when he brought his pay and put it on the table after counting it. Yes, both father and mother had lots of money. For did they not lend it to the washerwomen, bandsmen, the sweepers and sepoys, against securities of silver jewellery? I recalled that Ali’s father had come to borrow money from my father once. Ali’s mother must be poor, I thought. But how generous she was in giving money to her son, and how mean were my own parents, putting us off with a lame excuse and a promise of ‘something’. I would have liked to have a copper to keep if not to spend.

  Ali dropped some crumbs of bread into the basket where the loaves of chapatis lay. And he got up sulking with the paper parcel of sweets in his hand. He had a red fez cap on his small head and a long cotton tunic and baggy trousers of the same material, very uncouthly cut and apparently tailored at home.

  ‘Hurry up or you will be late,’ shouted his mother irascibly as she saw him looking vacantly around. ‘What are you looking for? What? Your satchel—what, again this morning? You spoiler of my salt! What can you learn if you throw away the satchel as soon as you come back from school. Look under the bed, illegally begotten!’

  Ali fell on his hands and knees, ducked his head and explored the darkness for a moment or two. It was evidently to no purpose, for he sat back and glared at his mother most impertinently.

  ‘Ohe!’ she shouted. ‘Look in the corners behind. It must have been dragged away by the rats!’

  The boy rolled down again and, stretching himself on his belly, swept the ground with his arm and presently brought out a cotton bag stuffed with books and slates and boards.

  ‘Hasn’t it been chewed up by the rats?’ cried his mother. And, seeing that his tunic and his trousers were covered with dust, she lost her temper completely: ‘Arré, I washed those clothes for you and on the very first morning you have besmeared them with dust.’

  Ali confronted her like an animal at bay and shouted back: ‘Shut up, bitch! Prostitute!’

  She got up with a smouldering stick of wood from the oven in her hand and ran after him, cursing and swearing. But he had rushed out of her reach into the compound and out of the main door.

  Ganesh and I followed him, somewhat frightened at all this violence and not forgetting to be polite ourselves as we salaamed Ali’s father, who had sat with his equanimity undisturbed all this time, and said salaam to his mother, even though rather nervously.

  ‘May you live long, my sons,’ said Ali’s mother, modulating her angry tone to a tired evenness. And she added distressfully: ‘My liver has turned to water.’

  Out in the sun, I felt relieved. And the fact that I was really on my way to school at last reassured me.

  But, by a stagnant pool of scum-covered filth into which the gutters of the followers’ lines trickled, some bandsmen were sunning themselves. There was Havildar Maula Bux, ‘the black God’, as my father called him affecti
onately, because they had joined the regiment about the same time; there was Jimmie, the grass-cutter turned Christian who played the saxophone, and there was Clayton, the jet black, eunuch-faced flute player who took female parts in the amateur regimental theatricals, and who was Harish’s friend and a constant visitor to our house whenever he happened to be on duty as an orderly in the office. They caught hold of me and teased me, singing: ‘Ohe, Bully, Bully, Bully, my son.’ I struggled and secured release from their grasp, because I was feeling very grown up and respectable this morning and pretended that I did not know them, though previously I had let myself be their plaything.

  Ali had been calling for Abdulla, the bandmaster’s son, and Ganesh had gone round to collect Akhtar, the son of the regimental tailor, Ramzan. They both came back disappointed, because those two had gone to school already. So, collecting me, they hurried.

  For a while the three of us walked together.

  But Ali seemed resentful of me, because as a stranger I came in the way of their talk.

  And I was fatigued by the time we got to the old river bed, which lay halfway between the regimental lines and the town; and I began to be a drag on my brother’s finger.

  Seeing the sun soaring higher in the sky, Ganesh felt that we were late for school. And he and Ali began to trace the footprints of Piare Lal, the son of Dr Ghaseeta Ram of 44th Cavalry and of Rahmet Ullah and Ismat Ullah the sons of Mistri Sadr-Din, the lame regimental armourer. If the footmarks were visible in the dust of the track, then they had just gone and it was not late; and if there was no sign at all, then they had not yet gone and it was surely quite early.

  As my companions could see no marks they feared the worst and quickened their pace, while my steps lingered and my eyes wandered across the vast stony ravines to the rugged, red rocks of the Swat range. Through the dull-white haze of the ascendant sun, the angry landscape, barren except for an oak or a cactus, seemed gigantic to me and empty and forlorn and I felt small and lonely.