Seven Summers

by Mulk Raj Anand

  But the midday meal did not interrupt the idyllic life which we had built up for ourselves. And soon we were swinging high on the swing attached to the two wooden girders of the verandah of Durgi’s house, with my cousin seated on a cushion and me nestling in her lap, holding her tight, half in fear of falling and half with the sensuous delight I felt at being next to her. And as the swing went up and down, Durgi sang an unending song with the most haunting refrain:

  ‘The spring has come, sisters,

  The spring has come,

  And the bees go sucking

  The honey out of the flowers, sisters …’

  And before I knew where I was, I had fallen asleep, having been drugged into a stupor by the activities of the morning, the copious food at midday and the drowsy warmth of the afternoon.

  I woke up late in the afternoon to find that my elder brother Ganesh had taken my place by Durgi and was playing pebbles with her.

  At first, heavy with the effects of the siesta, I merely watched their sport. One of them would throw the pebbles in the air and catch them on the back of the hand; catching them again after another throw, on the palm; claiming these as won, and picking up the rest of the pebbles from the floor to the rhythm of one pebble thrown up from the hand and catching it back with the rest.

  Excited by the sleight of hand which Ganesh and Durgi seemed to be performing, I wanted to join their game.

  But Ganesh would have none of it.

  And, what was shocking and wounding to my naive soul, even Durgi was reluctant that I should join.

  Impetuously, I interrupted Ganesh’s play by snatching at the pebbles.

  Ganesh’s face twisted with impatience and anger and he slapped me hard.

  Whereupon, of course, a flood of tears coursed down my face and I sobbed.

  Ganesh and my fickle ‘bride’ went to another corner of the room and resumed their game, while I rolled on the floor, weeping loudly so that someone should hear and take notice of me.

  When no one seemed to come my way, I ran out to the courtyard rubbing my eyes and sobbing and told my mother that Ganesh and Durgi had beaten me.

  Mother, who was perhaps feeling nerve-worn after her own battles of the previous day, flared up against Durgi: ‘What is this little daughter of a widow up to, this Durgi, to beat my son?’

  ‘Don’t you call me a widow!’ Durgi’s mother, Amrit Kaur, answered back. ‘If I were you, I should look after your sons.’

  ‘Was it that eater of his masters, Ganesh, who beat you?’ mother asked.

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘It was Durgi.’

  ‘You see,’ said my mother to Amrit Kaur. ‘It is your daughter. She has obviously taken after you!’

  ‘Ni ja ni ja!’ Amrit Kaur cried. ‘Leave my daughter alone. You can’t bear it that you have no daughter of your own, that you only produced sons!’

  At this jibe my mother was indignant.

  ‘Why do you want to make this little children’s quarrel the excuse for attacking me again?’ she said. ‘Yesterday you ate my life up with insinuations about my husband and my house. And today you are trying to take it out of me for having produced sons. Just because you didn’t give birth to a boy! How can you be so mean?’

  ‘Who is mean?’ said Amrit Kaur. ‘You, not I. One can’t be mean if one has no money. It is only people who have as much as you have who are mean.’

  ‘Ni, what have I done to you that you are so hard to me!’ mother protested.

  ‘Ask other people what they think of you! Denying even a loan to your own brothers! Persuading your husband not to give more than a paltry two, three hundred!’

  ‘Ni, darkness has descended upon the earth!’ mother cried. ‘Hai, ni, look at these ungrateful ones! And I who have given always my husband’s hard-earned money and never asked for a pice back. How can you accuse me of not giving?’

  ‘All this shouting to justify yourself won’t help,’ Amrit Kaur said. ‘The truth is that you don’t belong to us! You left the village and became a city woman. And you now despise the brotherhood in which you were born. Our old father does not know that you are not his helper, but have acquired the habits of the lallas and merchants and babus among whom you have gone to live.’

  ‘Hai Hai!’ mother cried. ‘How can you say things like that?’

  ‘But they are true,’ answered Amrit Kaur.

  ‘What a homecoming I have had!’ mother said with tears in her eyes. ‘Always when I come to Daska I have to leave with a sorrowing, broken heart.’

  ‘You might come with a sunnier smile and then you could go with a happy heart,’ said grandma Gujri.

  ‘If you loved the brotherhood more than you love your own family,’ said another old woman who was seated nearby, ‘you might be happier.’

  These rebukes were too much for mother. She hid her head in her dupatta and began to sob.

  ‘I wish we hadn’t come!’ she cried.

  As the quarrel I had had with Durgi had now matured into bitter recriminations between my mother and her relations in the village, I felt sad that I had been the cause of these outbursts. And yet I recalled the angry voices in which my mother and aunt Amrit Kaur had spoken to each other the previous day, and I knew that I was not to blame for the whole of their quarrel.

  ‘Where is that dead one, Ganesh?’ mother said. ‘Ask him to come and get ready. We will go home.’

  ‘Don’t you taunt us with this kind of threat!’ shouted Amrit Kaur. ‘Why did you come if you wanted to spoil everything by going away?’

  The way aunt Amrit Kaur’s dark face twisted when she said this frightened me. Also, her eyes were bloodshot. And there was a copious froth at the corners of her lips. So that I have never been able to forget the fury with which she assailed my mother. And even at that early age, I recall that I sensed the bitterness and resentment behind her attack on our family. And I remember the prejudice I suddenly developed immediately against her and the village, even as I had reacted with a natural warmth towards grandpa, his big house and his open fields. And I did not know, as I stood there, whether to feel nicely towards Durgi because she had befriended me in the morning or hate her because she had jilted me in the afternoon.

  But I began to feel a strange sense of the uncertainty of life.

  My mother wiped her eyes and got up to go into the barn to pack.

  I followed her and could see her sobbing even as she collected our belongings into a bundle. At moments she seemed demented, because she talked to herself in whispers as she wept. And perhaps because she wanted to have a good cry, she caught hold of me and hugged me to her bosom and broke down.

  Then she pulled herself together and asked Ganesh, who had come up, to lift the bundle on his head, while she herself lifted the little trunk. And we began to walk away.

  Some of the women of the brotherhood said to mother, ‘Don’t go, Sundariai! It is not auspicious to leave like that! Sisters often quarrel with each other!’

  But grandma Gujri and aunt Amrit Kaur kept silent.

  ‘They wish me to go,’ mother said, pointing to her mother and sister with her head. ‘They were not happy at my coming. So what is the use of my staying on?’

  I wished at that moment that grandpa or one of my maternal uncles would come and persuade mother, as I was frightened in my heart of the oncoming dark. But no one came. And we trooped out of the haveli, sad and forlorn as an orphaned family.

  ‘It is too late to get a yekka to Gujranwalla.’ mother said. ‘We will go and stay at the temple.’ And she got an assistant of the tailor, who was working in the hall, to lift our baggage and transport us there.

  The men and women of the village looked askance at our little procession. And some people asked mother questions: ‘Sister, why are you going away so soon? And before the marriage? What has happened?’

  Mother only wept and did not answer.

  But we had not gone further than the end of the lane when uncles Sharam Singh, Dayal Singh and Sardar Singh all came and bent down and he
ld mother’s feet.

  ‘Forgive us,’ they said. ‘These women are mad. They have annoyed you, sister. And you are right to be angry. But how shall we be able to bear the shame of your leaving before the wedding?’

  ‘But how can I stay when I know that my own mother has turned against me and does not want me?’ mother said.

  ‘Baba will tell her a thing or two today,’ said uncle Sardar Singh. ‘She turned me out of the house, too, because I went to play with my friends. You come and stay in my room, eldest sister.’

  ‘No,’ mother said. ‘I will stay the night at the Dharamsalla and take the yekka to Gujranwalla in the morning.’

  ‘We will not let your feet advance,’ they said, ‘till you turn back.’

  And for a few minutes there was a complete deadlock.

  At length the villagers gathered together and began to add their pleas to those of my uncles; and mother’s voice was drowned.

  Our little procession returned to the big house again.

  Only, uncle Sardar Singh took us all to his room, a small low-roofed place he had on top of the hall of the haveli, with small carved wooden windows and lovely old paintings on the wall, figuring the ten Gurus of the Sikh faith.

  Ganesh and I sat down by the windows and watched the pageant of villagers passing through the lane. And we had soon forgotten about the horrible quarrel, while our mother fell asleep through the fatigue and misery of the afternoon.

  Uncle Sardar Singh took us to his heart and won us two brothers over with the most luscious of sweets. And, though he could not persuade mother to eat, he brought meat cooked at the best cookshop in the village for us.

  And after the meal was over, some of his young friends came and at their bidding he recited portions of Waris Shah’s long poem ‘Hir and Ranjha’ in the most melodious voice.

  From the red heat of some strange power his voice seemed to come. And it travelled on the curve of a marvellous song in the simple sweet Punjabi speech of the peasants. And soon it seemed to set all the hearts in the room on fire, so that they shouted, ‘Wah! Wah!’ to encourage the singer. And, as it gathered the anguished refrains of the poet Waris Shah on the curve of the heroine Hir’s longing for the hero Ranjha, a stilled rapture filled the room only made more cosy by the twilight.

  I have never forgotten that evening. For although I did not understand the full meaning of Waris Shah’s epic poem about the love of Hir and Ranjha, the contagion of my uncle Sardari’s voice made my hair stand on end and affected my little soul finally and for ever with a love for Punjabi speech which I have never lost. So resonant and catching were its rhythms that it seemed to my child’s mind, nurtured hither to on respect for the angrezi git-mit of the cantonment and contempt for the crude Punjabi spoken by the townsfolk, that I had been sinning gravely in not worshipping every word my mother said. Somewhere in me I realized that, in spite of my own dependence on my mother, we had so far been much more our father’s children than our mother’s. I also saw vaguely the reason for uncle Sharam Singh’s jibe against us for being ‘townees and Babus’. And I could sense the nature of grandma’s and aunt Amrit Kaur’s hostility against mother and the family into which she had married …

  Anyhow, from that evening dates, I think, a new love for my mother, whom I came to regard, in spite of the fact that her relations thought her a traitor to her village, as the very soul of this village of Daska. And from now, all the stories and fables she told us, or the songs she sang, were to assume in my secret mind a fascination superior to the charm of the stories and poems in my school books. In fact, the simple ditties of the Punjab, sung in the melodious voice of uncle Sardari, broke the walls of the quarter in the cantonment in which we lived, demolished the barracks of Lal Kurti and the bungalows of the Sahibs by the river Lunda, and led me, across many deserts of hills and stones, along the Grand Trunk Road towards a country where there were no horizons, but only the vast and endless landscapes of Central Punjab, with an open sky above which receded further and further into hills and mountains that I did not yet know.

  So excited was I about the village and all the joys it could afford that when uncle Sardari paused for a while in between his recitation, I asked my mother whether Raja Rasalu of Sialkot, the story of whose adventures she had told me in Nowshera, had ever lived in Daska or been here, considering this village was said to be only ten miles away from Sialkot. She told me that many kings and heroes had been to Daska.

  And, while I pondered on the fringes of my curiosity, I saw vague figures shrinking beneath the burning suns in the great hollows of older days or fading into the indeterminate dark dense nights of the past. Uncle Sardari sang other haunting verses at the request of his friends. One of these was by the poet Bullhe Shah. The reason why it stuck to my memory was that it was also about the love of Hir and Ranjha. It ran like this:

  ‘My heart longs for the beloved, my heart longs for the beloved,

  Some lovers laugh and laughing talk, others

  Cry and, wailing, wander in this blossoming spring,

  My heart longs …’

  Was it the sentiment of yearning in this, or the fact that the village of Daska had been bathed in spring when we came that kept these particular verses in my mind when the original verses of War is Shah only lingered as a refrain? I suppose it was the simplicity of this poem, whereas the narrative of Waris Shah was intricate and difficult. I remember, for instance, that in talking about Waris Shah and what he meant, uncle Sardari said that the poet had described a horse’s hoof in twenty different ways. But sometimes one gets to know beauty by touching the hem of a girl’s skirts. And the flowering of a child’s mind is as uncanny a process as the bursting of buds and the ripening of fruit: a little touch of warmth can make it effulgent like the sun!

  When everyone had gone that night and we had eaten a meal specially brought for us from the cookshop in the village by uncle Sardari, we went up to the terrace on top of his room to sleep. So touched had I been with the refrains which he had sung about the love of Hir and Ranjha that I pestered him to tell me the story of that love before I would sleep. And though my mother rebuked me for being so difficult, and asked me to let my uncle go to sleep, saying how much he had done for us, I was not to be dissuaded from pressing him.

  Uncle Sardari was young and warm of heart and generous. And he told me and Ganesh the whole story, to which I listened attentively even though my eyes blinked, heavy-lidded with fatigue, and the mist of sleep came and went under my pupils and my head nearly fell back three or four times. He told the story vividly, and I remember the words though I did not then understand much else.

  ‘They say Hir was the daughter of Cucak, chief of a small kingdom in northern Punjab. While she was still a young girl, her father betrothed her to Saida, the son of Khera, chief of a neighbouring kingdom.

  ‘Hir grew up to be a very beautiful maiden. And the fame of her beauty spread far and wide.

  ‘Another chief nearby had eight sons. The youngest of these, Ranjha, was very handsome. And his father loved him. This aroused the jealousy of his brothers. So when their father died they exiled Ranjha without giving him any part of the kingdom.

  ‘After wandering for a long time in the wilds, Ranjha reached the banks of the river Chenab. As he looked round for a ferry boat to take him across, his eyes fell on a lovely boat. He asked the ferryman if he would take him across. The boatman refused. Ranjha was very tired and asked the man if he could rest in the boat for a while. The ferryman took pity on the youth and agreed. Ranjha went in and, lying down on the soft, cool bed, fell asleep.

  ‘A little while later he was awakened by a noise.

  ‘Ranjha opened his eyes and saw Hir standing by the bed.

  ‘Now Hir was at first very angry with the ferryman for allowing a stranger to come into her boat.

  ‘But as Ranjha spoke to her and rebuked Hir for being so inhospitable to a weary traveller, she smiled. And then their four eyes met. And they fell in love with each other.

>   ‘The lovely Hir gave Ranjha a job as a cowherd to keep him near her. And every day, in secret, she used to meet Ranjha.

  ‘The secret meetings between Hir and Ranjha were discovered. And at once Cucak married off his daughter to Saida.

  ‘Hir was sad at being parted from Ranjha and would not even talk to her husband.

  ‘Ranjha was banished from Khera’s kingdom. So he went to live in Rangpur, where Hir had been taken. And he went about disguised as a Sadhu.

  ‘He got in touch with Hir. And through the help of Sahti, the sister of Saida, he ran away with his beloved one night. Sahti also eloped with her lover that night.

  ‘Saida sent his men to pursue the lovers. But, while Sahti and her lover escaped, Hir and Ranjha were caught and brought back.

  ‘They were brought before the judges. And Ranjha was exiled, while Hir was kept well guarded.

  ‘After the lovers had been punished, the town of Rangpur caught fire. And it was said that this had happened because the hot sighs of Hir and Ranjha had burnt its foundations.

  ‘The marriage of Hir was broken. And she was allowed to join Ranjha, who was called back.

  ‘The lovers returned to the house of Hir’s parents. And now they were welcomed.

  ‘Ranjha went away alone to his own home, so that he could come back with his brothers and celebrate his marriage to Hir.

  ‘Meanwhile, the brother and the uncle of Hir, who hated Ranjha and had feigned courtesy, told her that Ranjha had been murdered.

  ‘Hir fell unconscious.

  ‘And while she was in her swoon, her brother and uncle gave her some poison to drink. And before long she was dead.

  ‘A messenger was sent to give Ranjha the news of Hir’s death.

  ‘Ranjha rushed back to know the truth.

  ‘He was taken to Hir’s tomb.

  ‘He could not bear the shock and died as he wept on the tomb of his beloved.’

  There had hardly been a reconciliation between grandma and Amrit Kaur and mother, when trouble broke out between them again the next morning.