Partly out of his affection and respect for mother and partly to promote conciliation in the household, grandpa Nihalu suggested that Ganesh should be made ‘best man’ to uncle Sharam Singh and that the boy should be put on the horse behind the bridegroom that afternoon when the bridal party was due to proceed to the bride’s house in another part of the village. Because the old man said this, everyone listened in silence and seemed to acquiesce. And as long as grandpa sat on the cot in the courtyard telling his beads, we were particularly favoured and were given sweets to eat and whey to drink. But as soon as he went away to the well in the fields, aunt Amrit Kaur began her offensive against mother.
At first she went about mumbling to herself. Then she did some kana-phusi whispering in the ears of grandma. And later, as mother was asking Ganesh to go and have a good bath at the well, aunt Amrit Kaur spoke out aloud with great bitterness:
‘Han, go and scrub your body clean, monkey-face, since you are to ride behind the bridegroom. What an inauspicious thing it will be for Sharam Singh to have a lemur like you sitting behind him!’
‘No, darkness in darkness—darkness has come over the world! How dare you talk like that to my son!’ said mother.
‘There is no darkness,’ answered Amrit Kaur. ‘It is clear to everyone that if one has money in this world one can buy anything. In this Kaliyug the moneylenders and the Babus are on top. And peasants are just being reduced to serfs. Our children are naked and sunburned at birth; and naked and sunburned they remain all their lives.’
‘Those who are full of hatred make difficulties for themselves,’ mother said.
‘Shall we then swallow our saliva and sit waiting for the deluge?’ Amrit Kaur cried.
‘Sister, I didn’t ask Bapu to say that my son should ride behind Sharam Singh,’ mother said meekly.
‘The more you feign gentleness, the more you reveal yourself,’ Amrit Kaur bullied. ‘You have become so soft-spoken since you went to live in the town. You put on such a mock gentlewomanly air!’
‘Hai Rabba!’ mother sighed. ‘What am I to do? This world is so venomous!’
‘We are true of heart and speak the truth here, sister,’ said Amrit Kaur disdainfully. ‘Serpents need not pretend to be aggrieved!’
‘Sons, let us go,’ mother said, turning to us in her despair where we had been sitting on grandpa’s cot in the shade, shy in the face of this quarrel, peeling the dirt off our hands by rubbing one palm against the other.
For a moment everyone was silent. And I, who was looking forward to the sweets which I knew would be given by the parent of the bride to the marriage party, felt my whole dream-world in danger of collapsing if mother did decide to leave.
‘Don’t go on spoiling the auspicious atmosphere,’ said grandma Gujri. ‘Threatening us every moment! Go if you want to. You were spoiled by your father and you still think you are his wife and not I—’
‘Hai! Hai!’ mother shrieked. ‘How can you, my mother, say things like that? How can you hate me so? How can you be so venomous?’
‘Don’t pretend now,’ answered grandma. ‘You brought venom with your wisdom teeth. I well remember …’
‘And yet she is always whining that she is innocent,’ added aunt Amrit Kaur.
Mother could not bear it any longer and, lifting her dupatta to her face, she began to weep.
‘Don’t cry, mother,’ I said, creeping up to her, while Ganesh sat pale with fear and sorrow on the cot.
‘Come, sons, we will go,’ mother sobbed.
And I knew that this time her decision was irrevocable.
‘You can go on weeping,’ said aunt Amrit Kaur, hardening. ‘You have only yourself to blame. Don’t think that you can put this on our head.’
‘Hey Ishwar, teach me patience!’ mother cried.
I put my arms round her and asked her not to cry.
Encouraged by my sympathy as though the touch of me had filled her with some strength, she looked towards grandma and aunt Amrit Kaur and shrieked, ‘We will go, we will go, but you two will pay for driving me away if there is a God in Heaven!’
‘Go, and don’t start cursing us with your evil tongue on this auspicious day,’ challenged Amrit Kaur.
Mother got up from where she sat and, weeping bitterly, collected me and Ganesh.
Our baggage had remained ready packed in uncle Sardari’s room since the previous attempt at going away.
Mother went and fetched a weaver boy she knew next door. And our procession started homewards.
At that time of the morning, grandpa being at the well and our maternal uncles busy with a hundred different jobs in anticipation of the ceremonies in the afternoon, no one came to take us back.
And now it was our turn to start weeping. For we felt sad at not having seen grandpa or uncle Sardari before leaving. And the thought of the quarrel between grandma and aunt Amrit Kaur and mother began suddenly to oppress us, with the fear of what father would say when he heard of it; for father was well known for taking other people’s side against members of his household in all quarrels. And in the secret places of my little heart I felt that the animosity between aunt Amrit Kaur and my mother would never now afford me another chance of playing and fondling my cousin Durgi as I had done the previous morning …
We were bundled on to a yekka at the stand by the police chowki of Daska, after mother had bargained for a long time with the driver. And as the carriage rattled off, my last hope of returning to Daska was blackened in the night of a deep slumber.
9
After the hectic blaze of the transient enthusiasm which I experienced in the village of Daska, life settled down to its normal course of happy and sad days in Nowshera.
When I look back upon this period of my childhood, the tendency is to see it, as most people tend to do in after life, with a wistful longing for the happy, innocent days of the past when ‘Heaven lies about us’. To some people the life of a child is ‘a golden age’, a short, ecstatic experience, too short in view of the disenchantment that comes in the wake of growth and responsibility. This may be true of the childhood of the more favoured by God, though there is plenty of evidence to show the falsity of this view of enchanted littleness and the insincerity and artificiality of those who hold it. Nor would it be true to say that every child is a martyr. So much of the despair and loneliness of a child is due to the eagerness to grow up to dignity and respectability, like the sapling trying to spread out like a full-grown tree before it has developed branches; also, the struggle of the small to know, to know everything about life, as they fancy it, is difficult.
A great deal of this abject misery is due to the lack of understanding of children by the elders who have forgotten their own childhood and ignore the young or apply standards derived from their own peculiar adult experience, mixed with pompous notions of what is good for those who are growing up … But in the vast prison of the India of those days, especially in ‘the prison of the armed camp’, as my father used to call the cantonment, both the utter happiness and the extreme misery of childhood alternated with a peculiar sordidness, ensuing from a local snobbery, encouraged by the toughness which one had to acquire in order to survive among the hardened sepoys, all struggling to guard their skins against a court-martial and hourly seeking to ingratiate themselves in the favour of the inflexible, inscrutable, superior white Sahibs.
I was vaguely conscious of my father’s position. Of course, we all like to feel a bit superior, and out of the kind of pride that derived from my hero-worshipping attitude to my father I took it for granted that ours was the most distinguished family in the brotherhood of silversmiths and coppersmiths in Amritsar, and that my father was a highly esteemed and influential Babu, a learned man. But with that naive, frank eye of the observant child, quick to see the hypocrisy of our prestige, I noticed the contrast between the poor standard of life in our household and the comparatively luxurious fare which even the bandsmen in the followers’ lines enjoyed. And, even against express advice not to t
alk to anyone about our domestic economy or anything that went on in our house, I quite often prattled, to whomsoever won me over with a sweet or a pice, quite freely about all that was said and done by my parents.
I was aware of a slight contempt in which our family was held because we were originally craftsmen and not combatants and because our ancestors had believed in the Aga Khan. And I had listened inadvertently to gossip at Babu Chattar Singh’s house and at Pandit Jay Ram’s temple about how to get my father to retire by taking such and such a Sahib into confidence. But all that did not concern me so much as did the meagre and scanty fare that was provided in our house, the frustration of all my absurd and romantic wishes to cultivate Englishness and the injunctions not to play with low-class children and to begin working for the next examination immediately after the expiry of the last, because not a day nor an hour must be lost to earn ‘izzat’ for the family by passing the Matric. I wanted to play with the paint-box and brushes which Colonel Longdon had sent us for Christmas, but I was smacked for wasting my time. I could not go off to play on my own, or be seen wandering about in the house doing nothing. I must do the sums.
All my wild dreams and fancies, all the fugitive emotions that welled up in my mischievous frame were suppressed, and the hours stretched into days, days into other days, long, long and interminable, and it seemed it would be ages before I would grow up to be tall and free … Of course, in spite of the fear of being taken to task, I did not obey the injunctions strictly. For, not being given pocket money, I would break the family code and easily put my hand out to receive a pice if I was offered one, or went off to the regimental bazaar with a sepoy and accepted the gift of sweets or milk in spite of mother’s warning that the hillmen were untrustworthy and might ‘spoil’ me. Especially did she forbid me to take anything from the munshi, the orderly of Subedar Garka Singh, who had once tried to ‘spoil’ me by kissing me and biting my cheeks. My impressions of the surreptitious adventures on which I went were some of the most intense of my life, yet they were all baulked by an inner fear, by the oppression of that home discipline which derived not a little of its severity and harshness from the effect of the British Army code on my father’s mind.
The food cooked in our house had always been coarse and simple. My father was entitled, with his allowance of eighteen rupees, the NCO ‘Colour’ Havildar’s pay, to a daily ration of flour, lentils, salt, clarified butter and sugar from the regiment through the Banias attached to the various companies; and he never bought any extra foodstuffs for the household because of the expense it would entail. So the family had to subsist on the ration, except that it was supplemented by the huckster’s profit of a maund of flour and some other things which the shopkeepers willingly gave as bribes for securing them licences and for other services rendered. My mother was a good housekeeper and the family had enough to eat of the essentials. But there was scarcely ever any variety of dishes, much less delicacies: it was always bread and lentils with occasional vegetables. We waited eagerly for the rare present of a fruit basket which came to our house. Even to these, however, we were frugally treated, and I never forgot the beating I had got from my father for stealing a mango.
If ever any meat came with the ration or from the house of some Pathan or Muhammadan bandsmen at the Id Festival, when the sons of the Prophet butcher goats as a kind of sacrifice, then my father had the largest share of it, because he was big and supposed to spend a great deal of energy sitting at his desk in the office, while we, ‘good-for-nothing scoundrels’, who did nothing else but play, play and wander all day, had a bone each with some gravy. And my father had the exclusive right to a rare basket of eggs that arrived from some well-wisher or applicant in Nowshera or Peshawar: he would fetch a couple of eggs, which he kept perched high up on a shelf in the verandah, away from our reach, and he would give one to my mother to fry for him every morning and eat it as we sat by with our mouths watering and our eyes fixed on his dish. Sometimes my mother fried an omelette of two eggs after my father had gone to the office, and gave us portions. But as my father might have kept a count of the eggs in the basket, she did it full of the fear of being found out and of being accused of eating them herself when she was a vegetarian. Of the seer of milk that my father could afford to buy we did, indeed, each have a cupful every night.
No wonder that none of us grew to be the Eugene Sandow we longed to be from looking at the pictures of this giant in my father’s dumb-bell exercise book, except that Shiva, when he grew up, stole money from home and ate well and attained the size and proportions which made him look as if he were our elder brother.
As in the dispensation of food, so in regard to clothes: my father’s attitude was governed by notions of ‘simplicity’, as he preferred to call his frugality, and by the wish to save money. The last articles of clothing he had had made for us were at the time of Harish’s marriage, except for sets of tunics and trousers which my mother sewed for us out of such lengths of cotton or khaki twill as ‘Holdar’ Surjan could show as missing from his receipts and issues in the Quartermaster’s Store, on the new Singer sewing machine which Subedar Garka had brought for her as a present from Vilayat, where he had gone as an ‘aidicong’ to George Panjam.
Our clothes were always deliberately made on the large side, but in spite of everything our bones were growing and these garments shrank or were torn by the regimental washermen, whose art of cleaning consisted in the device of beating them on slabs of stone. When we clamoured for new clothes, father kept on putting us off till such time as he should have an opportunity to oblige Surjan, the Quartermaster’s Havildar, so that his friend could oblige him in return with a length of cloth from the Stores. Usually, my father and Surjan were always busy trying to build up a united front against Babu Chattar Singh, the Quartermaster’s Clerk. As, however, it took months for my father to find the opportunity, we wept and ‘ate our mother’s life’. She put her hand on her sinking heart and, after all, fetched out some cloth which she had saved up in one of her boxes. She cut it and made us some new tunics and trousers. But we wanted fashionable, professionally made garments, though we accepted the home-made one for home wear; and, of course, my mother’s peasant intuition did not exactly conduce to the kind of skill which could cut winter coats and sew them into shape on her machine.
So we clamoured and waited and clamoured again, until my father had had the opportunity of obliging Surjan, and the Quartermaster’s Havildar had to return the obligation and actually gave us some khaki drill or serge. Now we had to wait till Ramzan, the ‘master tailor’ of the Regiment, had a debt of gratitude to pay back to my father, so that he could cut and sew a suit of clothes for each of us gratis. Ramzan had duly measured us for our garments because our father had taken us to him: the respect for the burra babu could easily exact the tribute of the will to render service. But no workman, even in a land inured to payments in terms of favours, could afford to spend his time on making suits for children when he was paid by the Sarkar to make and mend soldiers’ uniforms, when he had to earn a little extra by making mufti for the sepoys, and when he had so much work in arrear that in coping with it the ‘master tailor’ had lost all his eyelashes!
For weeks Ganesh and I called and pestered uncle Ramzan. The kindly tailor showed his goodwill to us by asking us to thread his needles for him, but most of our inquiries and appeals were lost in the roar of his own and his staff’s machines. It was only when Ramzan’s payments were held up in the office and it needed a word of recommendation from my father to the Adjutant Sahib to expedite matters, that the ‘master tailor’ took our lengths of cloth in hand and devoted a little of his spare time to these. Having been cut under such emergency conditions, the clothes lacked the finish and the stylish excellence on which we had set our hearts. Especially the jackets! They were a cross between the English and the Indian styles, being the length of a Norfolk jacket though they had closed collars a l’indienne. I was woefully disappointed, as my whole ideal of anglicism seemed to col
lapse, and I had to be bullied into wearing these clothes at all.
It was more or less the same story in the matter of shoes, though an extraneous element entered this. My father could not, of course, have got his numbria, Surjan, the Quartermaster’s ‘Holdar’, to supply us either with ammunition boots or ordinary Indian-style shoes from the stores as he supplied him, because the standard army shoes, even for the bugler boys, were several sizes too large for our feet. Saudagar, the old regimental cobbler, had failed to implement his promise. He had actually measured our feet for a pair of English boots each, a year ago.
While Ganesh knew that it was useless, I went and pestered Saudagar day after day as he sat sweating over the gaiters and tall boots of the English officers. He would put on his glasses and, affecting a look of deep concern on his wise, bearded face, look about for the measurements, and after a vain search say that he had lost them. He would measure me again and ask if I would come again tomorrow to see him actually start on the job. And, of course, when I called the next day he would put forward the same or a similar excuse and make me a small purse to go on with. And the next day, while he was still busy clearing arrears of work, he would beguile me by telling me a weird story of animals in the hills whose skins could be cured to make the most wonderful shoes, boots and coats, which miraculously rendered the wearer immortal. He would talk to me of the snakes he had pickled and the frogs he had curried, and other devious wonders, and he would put me off till the next day.
For months we walked about barefoot on the stony paths because our old shoes were torn to shreds and Ganesh thought that if we went about thus our feet would soon be large enough for the regulation ammunition boots. But the hot sun baked the earth at noontime so that our feet blistered and cracked.
Then, however, there came from a nearby village a shoemaker who had apparently sought permission from the Officer Commanding the Regiment to sit at the crossroads outside the barracks and mend the shoes of the passers-by, and my father helped him, in spite of the official regulations, to secure the privilege. In gratitude for this favour, the shoemaker measured Ganesh and me for a pair of gold-embroidered Peshawari-style shoes. But the man had had to purchase a licence, and the necessity of defraying the costs of this, and of eking out a living from the few people who passed by him, stood in the way of our shoes being finished.
Seven Summers Page 24
