Seven Summers

by Mulk Raj Anand

  All signs of self-will in me had been levelled out by my illness, and whatever independence remained was plucked out of me by the sternness and severity which my father began to show me after my adventure into the hills. I had been subdued and I was genuinely concerned about the shame and ignominy that would descend on me if I failed. I became conscientious and even slavishly obedient. I would come home and, often without eating the stale bread and the lentils, sit down to do my homework. I was, of course, not allowed to go and play lest I court another disaster somehow, for the accident through which I had been laid out had by this time been converted into just retribution for the crime of loafing about. So I worked till dusk, only occasionally breaking off to tease baby Shiva, whose testicles had swollen with hernia and looked to me like a goat’s teats which could be milked. Sometimes I would go out to see the regimental band practising as usual behind our house.

  After the evening meal, which finished about seven o’clock, father began coaching me and Ganesh by the light of the small kerosene oil lamp which hung on the wall of the sitting room, with a paper shade on it.

  My father’s method of teaching arithmetic to me was a little odd. He would explain the principle to me and ask me to try to solve a sum from the new chapter which he was to go through with me because, having been too busy at the office all day and at hockey in the afternoon, he was afraid of not being able to solve the sum himself at first shot and wanted to benefit from the mistakes I might make. If by some miraculous ingenuity I succeeded in resolving the sum, my father casually asked me to go on to the next. But if I failed then he began to teach me in real earnest.

  ‘Come, rape-mother,’ he shouted, wresting the slate out of my hand. ‘Come, you good-for-nothing scoundrel! You go and bring calamity upon calamity upon this house! You will never be able to pass the examination this year!’

  I already had tears in my eyes and was too nervous to assimilate what my father began to show me on the slate. I nodded comprehension after every word that my father uttered, though my mind had strayed away from the figures to a story which I had read in the Fauji Akhbar, the Army newspaper.

  When my father wiped out the sum from the slate with copious spittle from under his big military moustache, I lingered on the problem.

  ‘Have you done the sum?’ my father asked a little later. ‘Why are you taking so long about it?’

  ‘I am doing it,’ I said in a voice full of the false eagerness of bravado, hoping that some sudden ray of illumination would penetrate my brain or some way would open itself to me to delay or avert the ordeal of having to tell the truth.

  But my father wrested the slate out of my hand and, seeing that I had not developed even half the solution, he burst out:

  ‘Where is your attention, son of a pig? You can’t understand anything!’

  ‘I can do it, Baji!’ I lied without wanting to tell an untruth.

  ‘What is it, then? How do you go about it? Tell me!’ my father shouted, turning to me harshly with eyes which were bloodshot under his heavy, dark brows.

  I was dumb.

  Down went a kick in my back, because from where father sat, reclining against the cow-tailed cushion stuffed with horsehair, it was easier to hit with his feet than with his hand.

  I began to weep, sobs lingering on my trembling lower lip.

  ‘Don’t cry at the least little rebuke! Don’t make your eyes sore!’ said my father. ‘Come and look at it again. And mind you, be attentive this time, or I shall eat your life!’

  Shaking and frightened, this time I listened carefully through fear of another beating.

  The sum was easy enough. So that when my father rubbed it off the slate, I rendered it immediately.

  Then I was asked to get on with the next sum.

  By this time, however, the sheer strain of the evening had tired me. I waited to see if the harshness on my father’s face had relaxed.

  ‘Baji, I feel sleepy,’ I said on seeing that my father’s heavy visage was not contorted.

  ‘It is only nine o’clock and you are feeling sleepy, swine!’ my father shouted. ‘Go, then, and eat your masters!’ Then he turned to Ganesh and continued, ‘And you, scoundrel, what are you doing?’

  The loud tone of my father’s voice had set me trembling again, while Ganesh edged away instinctively in anticipation of his doom.

  ‘What is it? What is the matter?’ my mother inquired, coming in after washing up and clearing away in the kitchen.

  ‘Do you think?’ my father said to my mother, self-righteously indignant. ‘Do you think these dogs are a bit grateful to me for all the brain-fagging I do for them? This one is self-willed and unlucky, that one is a dunce. They have been indulged. I was brought up on nothing. I had hardly any clothes to wear and my mother never gave me a pice. I had no one to coach me. Instead, I coached other boys and earned my fees that way. And all I got to eat was four shells worth of roasted gram from the bhunja’s shop and a glass of water from the charity water stall. Here we give them good food and look after them in every way in spite of the fact that I have to pay their school fees, buy their books and what not out of my small pay. But do you think they would be grateful to me for it? I shall have to celebrate their initiation ceremonies and their marriages—and get nothing in return!’

  ‘What reward has that big one given us, eater of his masters?’ my mother chimed.

  ‘Han, what has he given me for all that I have done for him?’ agreed my father. ‘I educated him, spent five thousand rupees that I had saved on his marriage and now what have I got for it? I wanted him to become a doctor and, there, he falls under his wife’s influence and leaves college. Is he grateful for the job I have got for him? But for the recommendations which the Karnel Sahib sent to the Inspector General of Jails he would never have got the position of Assistant Jailor because there were sixty other candidates. And to think that I never got one jot of help from anybody but myself!’

  ‘To be sure, your father is right,’ my mother said to us.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he went on about Harish, ‘I have done my duty to him and he can do what he likes. Thank God that I and his mother don’t stand in need of any help from him. As for these ruffians, I shall do my duty by them. If I am not dismissed or asked to retire, I shall see them through their schooling. But I shall not spend myself on their education as I did for their brother. The expense of their education is enough. They will have to justify it. They will have to work hard and pass their examinations. And if I actually go to the trouble of coaching them they ought to be grateful and not whine every time they are told to do a sum or to read a page. They will have to pass their exams every year. I shall turn them out of my house if they don’t …’

  ‘They are our progeny,’ said my mother reflectively. ‘Perhaps we should not expect any comfort from them. But everytime I think of that eldest one, Harish, eater of his masters, my heart burns to think of his ingratitude! Did he once ask his wife to serve me? Has he even thought of sending me a present, of saying to me, “Well, mother, you used to meet me with a glass of whey in the heat of June when I was coming back from school, so take this month’s pay I have earned and get yourself a new skirt or something.” It turns my liver to water to think that he has fallen into his wife’s hands in such a way that he never thinks of us. I believe she has practised some magic on him.’

  ‘Let them go and die,’ my father said sympathetically. ‘We don’t want anything from them. We have enough for our old age. Let them be wastrels like their uncle Pratap.’

  And he pushed aside the paper he was reading and, relaxing from the detachment of months, began to talk to her warmly, laughing, joking and involved in a rare oneness with her, and they sat like an old couple who had accepted life and glossed over all their differences, built up a small savings account, reared a family and were just getting ready to celebrate the silver jubilee of their wedding.

  By this time I had tied my satchel in readiness for school and retired to bed.

  As
I lay under the thick, ochre-coloured quilt I was warm and comfortable, but I could not sleep because I felt guilty about going to bed early, knowing that I had only been allowed to do so because I had been ill recently.

  Applying my ears to what was going on in the next room, I could hear Ganesh getting into trouble about his reading lesson, for he could not recite a poem by Maulana Nazir Ahmed.

  ‘Here is my opportunity,’ I said to myself, and I began to recite the poem which I had remembered by rote from my brother’s book.

  ‘Keep quiet, ohe swine,’ my father called in an easier tone. And I knew that I was not altogether out of favour.

  But I heard Ganesh being abused and my heart throbbed with fear and with a kind of uneasiness which was more the apprehension of possible trouble for my own limbs if father became very annoyed than any sympathy for my elder brother. For in spite of the fact that Ganesh had looked quite sorry for me when I was harshly spoken to, I felt a curious antipathy towards my elder brother because he had preferred to play with other boys than with me. Also, with a snobbery which my parents had done everything to encourage, I still despised his flat face, the rectangular lobes of his ears, his lustreless eyes and his insidious, secretive manner which was repellent to me because he saved every pice he got and won favour with people by saying and doing the right thing always and parading as a gentle soul, which I knew not to be his real character, while I was always foolish and impudent and consequently appeared to be a budmash.

  ‘Don’t be hard on him,’ my mother was interceding on his behalf with my father.

  ‘The thick-headed one!’ my father exclaimed. ‘He is a dunce!’

  ‘He will learn the poem tomorrow, the dead one!’ she said in extenuation of his default, more out of pity than love. ‘He goes about playing with the low sons of bandsmen, washermen and sweepers and gets tired.’ She did not like this child of hers, she liked him less since he had fussed about Draupadi, my sister-in-law, when she had been with us. But for that very reason my mother tried, very unsuccessfully, to be extra kind to him.

  When I heard mother taking Ganesh’s side, I was furious and wanted to assure myself that my mother belonged to me completely. Not daring to shout for her, I whispered to Ganesh, who had been dismissed from the sitting room in ignominy: ‘Is mother coming?’

  ‘No, she is in the kitchen,’ Ganesh answered.

  ‘Tell her I want her,’ I urged.

  More willing to do my bidding for the moment because of his humiliation and because we were at home, he shouted: ‘Mother, Krishna wants you.’

  ‘Let him go to sleep,’ she replied. ‘I am busy in the kitchen. And don’t let him shout lest he wakes up baby Shiva!’

  ‘Shiva has wet the bed!’ I tried to alarm her and to draw her near me.

  ‘Ohe, go and persuade him to sleep and don’t make such a row,’ my father said, disturbed in his perusal of the Civil and Military Gazette. ‘That pig doesn’t know any arithmetic, the elder one can’t recite a poem. They will surely fail this year!’

  ‘They will pass, they will pass,’ answered mother. ‘You get into a panic about everything. You are so fainthearted. You lose your faith in a moment. The gods will come to their help, surely. I shall pray for them …’

  On the day of the examination, my mother sat before the altar of her godlings, invoking them to help us to pass. But we urged her instead to cook the meal a little earlier so that we should not be late, and to drop the prayers. She was incorrigible, however, and insisted on our coming to join hands to her deities, too, and on reciting a still longer prayer. And when, after all, she had been forced by a loud word from our father to get on with the meal and we had hurriedly swallowed hot morsels and were going to rush out in newly washed tunics and trousers, she insisted on mixing the soot of the griddle with oil and on rubbing it ceremonially on our eyelashes by means of a slide, so that we should not be subject to the evil eye on the way.

  Not content with this merely negative and defensive ritual, she sought now to augment good luck by imprinting on our foreheads big daubs of her thumb dipped in a red oxide as an auspicious mark. Then she made sure that the little silver amulets containing the elephant hair, the musk from the deer’s head and the painted scroll were safe on the black thread round our neck. And as if even all this were not sufficient to ward off evil and secure us good luck in the examination, she ordered the water-carrier to come with a pail full of water on his head and meet us as we issued forth from the house. Unfortunately, however, Pandit Jay Ram, a very sacred person at other times but supposedly inauspicious if you were going out on some important business, happened to be hurrying past our quarter to the regimental latrines with a little brass jug in his hand, and crossed our path before the water-carrier. My mother was very worried but she could not call us back, as that would be more inauspicious. Anyhow we would not have turned back even for fear of the Lord’s striking us dead, as the fear of being late at school on this day of all days was giving us diarrhoea, and we went ahead.

  She believed, however, that it was the charms, the amulets, the black marks and the red saffron marks which, by cancelling out the sight of the Brahmin, had brought us good luck when we returned from school, flinging our caps and our satchels in the air and shouting ourselves hoarse with joy as we announced that we had both passed.

  Now there was much boasting and self-congratulation on my father’s part.

  ‘You see, I coached them thoroughly at home,’ he said to the gathering outside Subedar Major Garka Singh’s house, where Havildar Surjan, Pandit Jay Ram and various other officers, NCO’s and sepoys were present and where, seeing our father, we had rushed up in the afternoon. ‘Of course, that Bully had to fight against heavy odds, covering the work of a year in four months, and with his wound not completely healed yet …’

  ‘Clever father, clever children!’ commented Subedar Garka Singh, which was what my father wanted to hear.

  ‘May God bless them and give them a long life!’ my father said, but he did not add: ‘so that they may increase the prestige of the family’, a fact which, he had insisted at home, was the real goal of the children’s endeavour. And in public he was also much kinder to us and less grudging than he would have been in private.

  I took advantage of the profusion of praise bestowed on me to say, ‘There is only one thing I want now: I hope and pray that my elder brother, Ganesh, may fail one year so that I may be in the same class with him.’

  The company laughed at that and some pulled my ear affectionately, some patted me on the back and called me a ‘budmash’, which all made me feel very proud and self-important.

  Realizing, however, that my elder brother was present, I quaked with fear inside me at the prospect of the trouble I would have to face after such an open declaration of my secret wishes.

  But Ganesh had begun to resign himself to an inferior public place beside me since my illness, and I was developing a colossal egotism due to my success in the examination.

  8

  An episode which has almost come to seem idyllic in my later imaginings was the visit I paid, along with my mother and brothers, during holidays after the examination, to the house of my maternal grandfather in the village of Daska on the occasion of the marriage of my eldest maternal uncle, Sharam Singh. The latter had come in person to fetch us and also to borrow some money from my father to meet the expenses of this auspicious event. And we children sensed a certain tension between our parents and uncle Sharam Singh because, as my mother said, ‘Her people were always coming shamelessly to ask their son-in-law for money.’ (This was a thing which, I learnt later, was ‘not done’.) Ultimately, however, the blood-is-thicker-than-water theory prevailed.

  Father thought that we required a vacation after our hard work for the examination and that mother needed a rest from Shiva, who had been ailing lately. So the baby was put in the care of ‘little mother’ Gurdevi. And our most beautiful clothes and jewellery being packed in trunks, we were safely put into the night t
rain for Gujranwalla whence we were to proceed to Daska by yekka.

  The first thing that impressed my naive mind was the tumbledown and hotch-potch character of the outskirts of Gujranwalla town as against the clear-cut, neat and official world of Nowshera Cantonment, especially of its Lal Kurti, where the English Tommies’ barracks were situated. The congested, narrow streets of Gujranwalla, bordered by dilapidated houses, decorated with cow dung cakes and overlooking gutters full of rubbish and decay, congealed my little soul and made me sulk until we had negotiated fares with the shouting, raucous yekka drivers at the carriage stand outside the railway station and were on the way to Daska. Even so I was inconsolable, though my mother tried to explain to me that Gujranwalla, being a town which took its name from Gujars, cowherds, was dirty because cattle abounded in it.

  After the town had been left far behind, the air of the fields began to intoxicate me and I fell asleep in my mother’s lap, aided by the jolting of the carriage on the rutted kucha road. But when I woke up an hour or so later I felt soothed to find the earth around us one mass of green. And my childish imagination tried to figure out how many lakhs of the blades of green grass, and how many crores of the stalks of green plants, and how many green leaves of trees must be there to make the land that vast stretch of green. Apparently it had rained the night before, and there was no dust, and the mud of the road was bluish green too, and all things seemed wrapped in the dense warmth of that spring day which was so unlike the hot days of the bare stony landscape under the shadow of Buner Hills at Nowshera that had been the background of my childhood.