As we neared the village the prospect changed and all round us spread yellow fields of mustard flower stirred by the light afternoon breeze, while the sun burned overhead out of a clear blue sky. The yellowness of that earth and the blueness of that sky struck me so vividly that whenever I have thought of those two colours subsequently, the contours of those rich fields in the Central Punjab have always come back to me. Especially is this so, perhaps, because they framed my first view of a really big village, a cluster of mud houses, so different from the isolated fortress-like houses of the North-Western Frontier villages and because it was the village where my mother had been born, the village associated with all the stories which she had told us and the village of her father, Nihal Singh, whose audacious deeds in the last Sikh War against the English had become imprinted on my mind like tales around the legendary hero Raja Rasulu of the nearby town of Sialkot.
At a single glance, my big eyes, dilating with curiosity, could see tall, swarthy Sikh peasants digging the ditches with their hoes or trotting away barefoot with huge bundles of grass on their heads, while their women carried freshly cut baskets of mustard spinach, even as they honked the cattle forward.
My uncle Sharam Singh, who had been quiet and taciturn during the journey, seemed full of pride as he told us children how fat he would make us in a few days by feeding us on the milk of the household buffalo. Mother seemed not to like his talk because she felt that the implication of his words was that we were not well enough fed at home. Sharam Singh then changed the subject and began to tell his sister about the various people in the village whom she had known in her youth. But Ganesh and I became very excited about the buffalo and plied our maternal uncle with questions about her, asking him what her name was, how much milk she gave and what she ate. And I was so bold that I insisted on exacting a promise from him that I should be allowed to milk her, to take her out to pasture and to take her back with me to Nowshera.
At length the highway ended in a by-lane off the crossroads outside the police chowki of Daska, and the yekka crawled through a narrow, straggling bazaar, full of peasants, who greeted uncle Sharam Singh and my mother and blessed us, into an alleyway outside the haveli, the big house of grandpa Nihal Singh. Some oil was poured on the corners of the doorway and we shyly entered a courtyard, being made more shy because, according to custom, mother wept as she embraced the tall, fair woman whom we came to know as grandma Gujri, and as she knelt before grandpa Nihal Singh, who emerged from an inner sanctum, a wiry old man dressed in white, with a hawk nose and hawk eyes and a beautiful, small, white beard.
‘Say, “I fall at your feet” to your grandma and grandpa,’ mother coached us.
And we two brothers duly joined hands and touched the elders’ feet.
Grandma kissed us demurely, while grandpa patted our heads and, holding our faces in turn between the palms of his hands, asked us how much of his fiery and daredevil spirit we had inherited.
As I was cheeky and unabashed, we climbed into his lap and asked him whether we should be allowed to take the buffalo, about which uncle Sharam Singh had told us much, back to Nowshera with us. Whereupon grandpa Nihal Singh burst out laughing and invited us to come and see if we liked the look of the buffalo anyhow. And, as he entered into the spirit of the make-believe that Suchi was to go with us, we adored him and listened intently to the continuous narrative, full of little anecdotes and homely proverbs, with which he explained the points about the buffalo, Suchi, and the other cattle in the big shed where they were tied up. We became spontaneous friends in a few seconds, as it were, and felt as though we had known him and seen him ever since we had been born.
An utter hush seemed to have settled over the flat-roofed mud houses of Daska as we emerged from the dense dark of the cattle shed into the twilight which was descending now from the blue sky. And then, as though from far away, from beneath the houses, emanated a rumbling sound of whispered prayers, incantations and gongs and bells. Grandpa Nihal Singh added to this with a diathrambic undertone of his own as he recited some muted Sikh prayer in his throat, even as he told the beads and talked to us intermittently in large gasping staccato sentences while he superintended the washing of our faces and afterwards fed us on the fat rotis and meat and vegetable dishes, with ladlefuls of butter in them.
And then we were lifted one by one up the precarious wooden ladder to the terrace on the main barn of the house, where beds had been laid out in rows. And when grandpa Nihal Singh had just settled us on his own bed, came our maternal uncles, Dayal Singh and Sardar Singh, who had been to a nearby village.
‘Here are your nephews,’ grandpa said to his sons.
‘Ah, they look more like their mother’s than their father’s children,’ said Uncle Dayal Singh, a huge, smiling, benevolent giant. ‘So we must keep them here.’
‘Perhaps they would like to eat some sweets,’ said Uncle Sardari, whose face glowed like a red apple. ‘I will go and fetch some burfi.’ And off he darted.
I don’t know if it was the simplicity of these villagers’ approach to us, or their generosity, or the warmth with which they responded to us which endeared them to us. I believe it was more the warmth they exuded and the abundance of their hospitality which won us over so completely. For, as we had been growing up into little boys, our relations with our parents had been growing not only hostile but increasingly tame and matter-of-fact, and the sudden glow of these simple and beautiful souls warmed us to the core, filled us with a new excitement, as though we had found a secret treasure on a rubbish heap.
And the coveted prize jewel of this treasure was Nihalu, as grandpa was called even by his sons, on such familiar and informal and affectionate terms did they live in this joint family.
‘I have fought for the Khalsa,’ the old man told us the story of his soldiering in the last Sikh War against the British. ‘And I know your mother is a rebel like me, for I filled her with hatred for the ferungis, who bought us off through the traitors rather than beat us into submission … I have fought for the Khalsa, and I hope when you grow up you will be like me and your mother, rebels against the ferungis. You must not become their servants like your father …’
After exhorting us to believe in rebellion, the old man would lapse for long moments into a trance and get wrapped up in the spirit of his own whispered refrains in praise of the gurus and go on telling the beads. And, then, as Ganesh and I were just dozing off, he would startle us with another bold speech.
‘I fought for the Khalsa, sons, but there were some like my cousin, Harbans Singh, who sold out to the ferungis and became landlords and grew rich by seizing other people’s lands. Do not forget, sons, though, that the bread of the poor may be dry, but their days are long …’
And he fell to brooding again on his memories and imaginings and recited the monotonous sing-song of his creed, even as he told the beads. And his white beard and white clothes shone against the pitch dark of the night, while an occasional firefly darted down the roof of the barn by the edge of the beds as though it were descending towards the end of the night, never to be seen again, till another firefly came up and dazzled my eyes into keeping awake.
‘Fortune comes at random, sons, but ploughing or beating copper cannot fail one,’ grandpa Nihalu began again. ‘And I have kept this big house together. And I and your uncles have worked hard. But we are happy, for the men who work hard eat like kings. And your grandma—how shall I tell you? Old grain, new butter and a good wife are the three pillars of Heaven!’
‘Is the heaven in the sky, grandpa?’ I asked impetuously.
‘According to our Guru Nanak Dev,’ grandpa began, ‘Heaven is that state in which all the dreams of man are realized. It is the ideal life …’ And he went on to explain the dicta of Guru Nanak with copious quotations from the Guru Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs, which soon lulled us to sleep with the archaic strains of the verse and the abstract nature of the doctrines enclosed in them. I remember, however, that I tried hard to fight sleep t
hat night, because, just as the darkness about us had been getting denser and denser, the housetops seemed to be buzzing with activity, vibrating with laughter and prayers and suppressed whispers, as though the whole village were quivering with the excitement of more and more people, returning after the day’s work into the comfort of the night, ebbing and flowing on the surface of life …
We were awakened early in the morning by uncle Dayal Singh, who asked us if we wanted to go out into the fields and to the canal for a swim before sunrise. And though we were gummy-eyed with still unquenched sleep, the mention of the word seemed to act like a magic spell: somehow, ever since the days when we had got used to going for a walk by the river Lunda, especially to learn swimming in the hands of our father, the idea of swimming had an excitement for us as few other things had except the ‘oh kuch’ sweets and dried fruit in mother’s special wooden box. And Ganesh and I jumped up, rubbing our eyes and stumbling but eager, and we followed uncle Dayal Singh—grandpa Nihalu, uncle Sharam Singh and uncle Sardar Singh having, we were told, already repaired to the fields at dawn for ‘jungle-pani.’
‘What is “jungle-pani”, uncle Dayal Singh?’ I asked, as I was eager to see grandpa again, so intimate and contagious was the feeling of warmth which the old man had inspired in me.
‘Son, here in the village we go to the fields to relieve ourselves and bath by the wells or the canals, and that is called “jungle-pani”.’
I was amused at the sound of the words and went capering along as soon as we emerged from the gulley and got on to the narrow footpaths that flanked the fields. The dew of the night lay heavily on the grasses and the plants, so heavily in fact that it was a wonder to my naive mind how such a miracle could happen, this extraordinary assemblage of little drops of water on the tips of each blade or in the cups of the flowers; and, not understanding, I tried to collect the dew in my hands roughly, which was, I suppose, my way of tackling the mystery.
As I was left behind while I was playing this game, uncle Dayal Singh got busy cutting the branches of a neem tree for datans, the indigenous toothbrushes which were supposed to be medicinally good for the gums. When he had cut and shaped enough of these he called me and we proceeded, already part of a throng of men, women and children who were heading for the canal.
The sun had risen by the time we had relieved ourselves and traversed the field to the banks of the small canal. And, now, each dewdrop was like a lance against which a sword had to be plied. I took uncle Dayal Singh’s axe and fought a battle with the dagger-edged cacti. And, engaged in this fray, I ran round so wildly that even the benevolent uncle Dayal Singh, who had not yet admonished me, was constrained to ask me not to get so excited.
I was not to be curbed, however, for my war on the plants was only a prelude to the excitement of fresh adventures in the canal, especially as Ganesh had already stripped and gone in and was splashing the water about. I hurriedly undressed and waded in near the bank and from there began mischievously to throw water on Ganesh, ignoring all his protests. My brother was irritated by this and tried mildly to restrain me. But I would not desist from the game till he lost his temper and asked me abusively to stop it. Whereupon I fell on him and we grappled with each other and were nearly drowning when uncle Dayal Singh jumped in and separated us.
‘Why do you want to fight your elder brother?’ uncle Dayal Singh said to me.
‘Because he is a killjoy and won’t join me in my play,’ I said.
‘You must not fight anyone,’ counselled uncle Dayal Singh.
But, though I let Ganesh be, I recall that in my forthright answer to my maternal uncle about my hostile attitude to my elder brother, I had somehow instinctively come upon my main differences with him. And as these words had been uttered in the wild, free, open atmosphere of the village, where the air itself infected one with the contagion of a peculiar warmth and an almost spontaneously playful response to life, they came to express my judgement of him for ever afterwards.
After the swim in the canal we repaired with uncle Dayal Singh to the grove over the well which was situated in the midst of the family land, not far from the village, and where grandpa Nihalu was holding court as he sat on a string bedstead, half in the shade, half in the sun.
Yellow and green were the mustard fields that stretched around him, grey-green the leaves of the trees over his head; mellow gold the earth which sat firmly beneath his gaze; and he seemed so like one of his gurus as I had seen them figure in the pictures of the sages of the Sikh religion on the walls of Babu Chattar Singh’s house in Nowshera, with his fair, smiling face fringed by the white beard. And, more now even than on the previous evening, I felt the contagion of his warmth, the natural gaiety through which he accepted everything and made one easy, so that it was not necessary for me to be mischievous in order to attract attention.
As we settled on the string bed by him, uncle Sardari brought a pitcher of whey and some fried puris and mango pickle for breakfast.
Hardly had these delicious things been distributed to us and to our uncles, Sharam Singh and Dayal Singh, who left work in the fields to come and eat, than there came a lean, wizened, funny-looking man, with large, bulging eyes and a goatee on his pointed chin, though there was no moustache on his upper lip. He sat down by grandpa Nihalu.
‘Sat Sri Akal, uncle Nihalu,’ he said with a twinkle in his eyes, ‘I thought I smelt some food and so I came along.’
‘Come, Fazlu, come on our heads, come on our eyes,’ said grandpa. And then he signed to uncle Sardari to give Fazlu a share of the breakfast.
‘Ah,’ said Fazlu, ‘test a friend in trouble, a cow in February and a housewife when there is nothing left in the barn.’
As grandpa was not eating but telling his beads even as he mumbled his morning prayers, there was a certain tension after Fazlu had delivered his wisecrack. The old man noticed this, lifted his eyebrows and smiled benignly. But Fazlu seemed to become more uncomfortable and shuffled his shoulders and said ‘no, no, no’ with his head to the food even as he stretched his hands out to receive it.
‘These boys be your grandsons, uncle,’ Fazlu said, sweeping us both with the protruding cock’s head he had, an ochre turban for his comb; and he began to crow even as he tore at the food. ‘To be sure, they are gentle boys,’ he said swallowing two puris at a time, ‘though the little one seems a rascal, the way he belaboured his elder brother in the canal up there, true son of Sundariai, who used to be very quarrelsome when she was young … But may Allah Mian grant them a long life … They are going to be Babus, I suppose, with a literate father. That is only natural. I wish he had come, too, the husband of Sundariai, because he could have written an application for me. For I hear that the Dipty Collator Sahib Bahadur is going to reduce the land revenue of all poor peasants this year and I thought I might put in a plea …’
‘Where did you hear this, Fazlu,’ asked uncle Dayal Singh.
‘Brother, I am an Arain by caste and many of our brotherhood have risen very high. You have surely heard of Chaudhri Shahab-ud-Din, the Thanedar. And there is Sheikh Abdul Qadir, the Barishtar. And there are many more … And news comes my way which doesn’t come to you, because I keep my ears cocked …’
‘And your eyes open!’ said uncle Sardari ironically.
‘Ah, you may laugh at me, little brother, because I have only an onion patch, while you belong to the family of Haveliwallas; but I have a lot of brains which have never been used.’
‘To be sure,’ said uncle Dayal Singh, ‘you should have used your brains rather than your body.’
‘If he had damaged his brains with use as he damaged his body,’ said uncle Sardari, ‘he would have been worse off.’
‘So you think I would have gone off my head if I had become a Babu?’ Fazlu said indignantly.
‘Ohe, don’t mock an older person,’ Sharam Singh admonished his brothers.
‘A diamond, our Fazlu!’ said grandpa to appease his guest.
‘To be sure, a diamond in the
rough!’ commented uncle Sardari.
‘I do not like the kind of mendacity which hurts a person’s feelings,’ said Fazlu in an injured voice, ‘though I quite like a bit of humour myself, as you know.’
‘Have some whey and cool yourself,’ said Sardari to appease him.
‘Wait till I go and get my thortha,’ Fazlu said. And, collecting his tehmut, he rushed away like a lame duck.
‘Who is he—this Fazlu, grandpa?’ I asked.
‘Son, he is a peasant who has lost most of his land through debt, till now he cultivates a vegetable patch and has become the laughing stock of your uncles.’
‘Not only of your uncles but of the whole village!’ said Sardari.
‘Fear the wrath of God, Sardari,’ said grandpa.
‘Baba, some fellows have been waiting so long that they have got into the habit of bemoaning their fate: one of these men is Fazlu,’ said Sardari. ‘Look at the way he talks …’
‘In spite of all his talk,’ said grandpa sadly, ‘he is unable to say what is in his heart. There are things which you young ones cannot understand. And no one can unravel the mute soul of Fazlu behind his many words.’
I did not understand what grandpa Nihalu meant and why he was so sad when he spoke of Fazlu, for the ‘Aram’ seemed to me as comic as he obviously seemed to uncle Sardari.
‘There he is with his thortha!’ said uncle Sardari.
Seven Summers Page 21
