But just as Lalu was exciting his will on Subah’s behalf, he saw him catch a third girl who was coming towards the group and it seemed he was quite capable of dealing with the lot of them.
‘Come Diwan, arrange it for me,’ Subah said, as another girl came up to him. ‘With this fair one who is tall and is stroking my cheeks.’
‘They like the Jemadar Sahib,’ the Baluchi said, respectfully submitting to the monopoly of the girls by the superior officer. ‘But huzoor, let us have a turn after you.’
The tall girl who had come last said something to the Diwan and, extricating herself from Subah’s grasp suddenly came and sat on Lalu’s knee, stroking his chin to the accompaniment of short, pitying sounds, while the boy looked at her thickly painted, small, irregular face and blushed. Lalu lifted his eyes to her and he contemplated for a moment the loneliness behind the mockery of outraged innocence in her eyes, lustreless and dull with cynicism as if they had seen too much, known too much, and were now empty and didn’t know anything at all. And yet, he felt happy to be near her.
The two other girls also got up and came round Lalu, talking among each other all the while, even as they brushed the crumpled shiny satin dresses which they wore.
‘What are these sisters-in-law saying to each other in their own tongue?’ said Subah, insistent and angry. ‘And why don’t you arrange one for me?’
‘How much money have you got?’ asked the Diwan, ‘for the first money you gave me is finished.’
Subah fumbled in the pockets of his trousers whereupon the fat girl, who was hewn in the image of Madame, jumped on to his lap affecting an air of raped modesty, crying, ‘Oooi…Oooi… lala…’
‘There is no question of money because I can give you some tomorrow,’ said Subah, finding his pockets empty.
‘I am afraid you can’t have anything in this place for less than fifty francs,’ said the Diwan in a bored, impersonal voice.
Subah glared at him for a moment from the liquid of his bleary eyes. Then he shot two sun arrows of hard glances at him and, kicking him on the shins furiously, shouted: ‘Son of a pimp! Thief! Dog! Illegally begotten! Where is the money I have given you already! Thieving son of a dog, fleecing me with your tales and soft words!’
And he got up and struck the Diwan right and left, slaps, fisticuffs, kicks, and then rushed at him with the ferocity of a madman. The girls ran shrieking, crying, shouting with the most piercing voices.
The Baluchi separated Subah from the Diwan, counseling him the while: ‘Cool down! Be calm! Jemadar sahib! Leave the rogue! Leave the rascal!’
But the Madame came rushing, shouting and flinging her arms in the air, uttering a flood of invectives, which sounded doubly powerful in her hoarse, querulous voice.
Before the sepoys knew where they were, they and the Jemadar were being collared, pushed, dragged and pulled, and kicked and driven out of the brothel into the abyss of the night.
The corps practiced route-marching during the next few days, first in full service order with all transports, then on a small scale, the companies of the various regiments in the Division being taken out under their respective company commanders.
And then there was a constant drilling, which broke the sepoys up, as the conditions for hard training in the camp at Orleans were far from satisfactory. This rigorous work left very little time for pleasure. Indeed, apart from the fact that parades kept them warm in the fast-gathering cold, the intensive routine seemed to the sepoys the harbinger of arduous times to come. For, it was rumoured that
the Germans had made a big attack and driven the Allied armies back, inflicting great losses on the Sarkar, and that the Commander of the Indian Corps had been summoned to the General Headquarters as soon as he landed at Marseilles and that he had been told by Sir John French that the British Army was to be transferred to Flanders, and the Indian corps was to hurry and join it.
They waited anxiously, therefore, stealing as much rest from their duties as they could, making occasional expeditions to the cafes near the camp as they were beginning now to acquire the taste of cafeole and cane and French cigarettes.
But, after days of this, they began to grow more and more tense and expectant for the orders, which were soon to come.
At length on the evening of 17 October, orders came for the Lahore Division to entrain the next day, while the Meerut Division, with the Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade and the Jodhpur Lancers, were to stay behind and follow at short intervals later.
There were fevered preparations for the departure. Lal Singh was harnessed to fatigue duty since, after the scene at the brothel, Jemadar Subah Singh seemed displeased and, what was remarkable after their previous uncordiality, very much ‘You whisper in my ear and I whisper in yours’ with Lance-Naik Lok Nath. The only consolation was that every other man in the regiment seemed to be on fatigue duty of one kind or another on the day of departure, packing his kitbag and giving a comrade a hand if not doing any heavier work. And the camp was busy as an anthill: here, a sepoy sitting by a line of unpacked luggage, wondering how to fit all the things into his kitbag, while a pair of boots lay outside beside a pan and a waterbottle; there, some of the men sat on ammunition boxes, shouting for an NCO to ask what to do with themselves; next, horses of the artillery neighing and coughing and stamping nervously while their riders polished the skin of their flanks; and there were orders, shouts, cries and laughter and the babble of an army speaking a hundred different tongues.
Uncle Kirpu and Daddy Dhanoo had been sent to pack the kit on general service wagons. These were to be loaded on the train.
Lalu had been with a party set to rolling tents, which were to be handed over to the Ordnance department, and he was just finishing this job.
As he tightened the ropes round the poles and strained to pull the fabric into shape, he sweated and sat back, contemplating the empty ground from which the tents had been removed as if he were sad to leave the place where he had first begun to feel the pulse of the land, and where he had begun to taste the life of France. He lingered for a moment as if he were preoccupied by a superstition and looked at the bare space, cleaned of everything except the camp smell, a mixture of wood-smoke, chapatis, leather, oil and horsedung, which seemed to hang in thick layers over the chilly air before the jaundiced eye of the autumn sun.
An NCO from No.4 company put him in charge of a party carrying two days’ cooked rations, which were to be taken for the men in supply wagons on the train. As the cooks raced against time serving the meals and preparing extra food for the journey, Lalu gave them a helping hand.
Seeing that he and the other sepoys were going freely about the kitchens with their boots of cowhide skins and leather belts, and handling food without washing their hands, he thought that if Dhanoo and Kirpu needed any more proof of the spoliation of their religion, they could see it here. But everyone went about casually, and he marvelled at the ease with which the men were forgetting their customs. Perhaps it was a concession to the difficulties of cooking Indian food in a strange country, but he hoped that it was the air and water of Franceville.
There was not much time for idle reflection, however, as the mule carts were almost ready, loaded with the cooked food, and the contingent with which Lalu was going to the station was ready. After the long and wearisome activities of the whole morning, the boy was happy to be off, though he would have to come back and do another round.
The sun was shining a transparent white as Lalu rode away by the side of a dark South Indian Sapper, and there was a melancholic breeze in the copper-coloured branches of the trees, which had shed a profusion of pink leaves on the wayside and excited the mules in the long caravan. He felt strange riding past civilians, who stood to stare and smile.
Where was the war? How was it being fought and what would the sepoys be asked to do? The questions flashed through his eager mind. But there was no answer. And, as there was a dread about the future, he sought to drown this train of thoughts in a melody. The thoughts seemed t
o return, however. If only there was not this discreet veil of silence drawn over the movements of the troops by the Sarkar, which left everything to rumours and legends!
As they got to the station, the scene was one of complete turmoil. Some of the sepoys on fatigue duty were hauling things into the supply wagons, shouting and swearing as they strained to lift the weights, and being shouted and sworn at by the NCOs Some stood by sacks and rifles and others sat on collections of kitbags, apparently waiting for orders. Everywhere there was the wild confusion of loud talk and furious gesticulation, the rustling of clothes, the movement of forms. But there was a glow of warmth among the sepoys, a strange sense of fellowship, as if they felt that they ought to hang together because they were going farther into the Unknown. He felt he was nothing without them.
The NCO in charge of the foodstuff came with a group of sepoys who were to unload the carts before they returned to camp for the second contingent.
And now he suddenly felt isolated from his cronies. So, he took advantage of the temporary respite to slink off in search of Kirpu and Dhanoo. He made his way through the helter-skelter of the crowd, pretending to be doing something very important. They had originally been put on duty at helping to remove the luggage in the officers’ mess. But it seemed hopeless to find them among the uniformly dressed sepoys of even his own regiment, while here the men were mixed up anyhow.
He went back and helped to unload the wagons, to share the labour.
He was tired and did not want to go back to the camp with the carts for the next round. But he felt guilty like a criminal, hovering around aimlessly, thinking of an excuse to avoid the return journey. As he was procrastinating, he caught sight of Babu Khusi Ram, the small, beady-eyed, button-nosed head clerk of the regiment, supervising the loading of the office chests into a wagon. He ran to greet him. But the Babu was too preoccupied and flurried to accept or reject courtesies.
‘Come and help with those boxes, don’t stand staring at me, son,’ he said to Lalu.
The boy felt guilty about not belonging and went to the aid of an orderly who was heaving a boxful of documents up to the men standing in the wagon.
‘Oh falling, falling, oh save, someone, help Dhanoo!’ Kirpu stood shouting at the door of the wagon.
‘Don’t you worry,’ said Lalu, as he took the weight off the shaking head of old Dhanoo and pushed it to Uncle Kirpu’s feet.
Daddy Dhanoo stood back, his face uplifted to Lalu like that of a bullock who had been relieved of the weight of a plough on his neck.
‘Where are you? What?’ asked Kirpu tensely, in a panic of pleasure at seeing the boy.
‘Where are you?’ Lalu asked. ‘I am lost.’
‘We have already occupied places in the train there,’ Dhanoo said with the air of a child, pointing towards the outlying platforms. ‘We have kept a place secure for you.’
‘Ohe, you can talk later, get on with the job in hand,’ said Babu Khushi Ram impatiently. ‘Lift those three last boxes and then you can renounce this world.’
Lalu hurried and helped Dhanoo. He guessed that the Babu had given them this easy job to save them from more arduous fatigue. And, since had ordered Lalu to give a hand here, Lalu craftily thought that he had a good excuse to evade his other duty. If Lok Nath came to know, Lalu would have hell to pay, but the boy looked round, became busy and drowned all thoughts of the future in the fatigue routine.
‘Good!’ Daddy Dhanoo was saying as Lalu lifted the next box on to his back, while the old man just held the rope by the side.
And, after Lalu had thrown it at Kirpu’s feet, he stood back and saw Dhanoo staring at him with admiration in his big eyes.
‘You are a hero, son!’ the old man exclaimed.
Lalu thumped Dhanoo’s back and smiled at him. He was radiant with happiness at being with his comrades again, almost like an orphan who had found the parents he had lost.
They waited in the oppressive dark of the unlit cattle truck, which was their compartment, for the train to start, some dozing, some half-asleep, some shaking or shuffling uncomfortably. They had gone off to the outer fringes of the town after dark, walked round and bought cigarettes and drunk coffee mixed with brandy to warm themselves, and they had been waiting for the hour of eleven-thirty when the train was due to start. And now, the hundreds of lights that illuminated the city had been extinguished and they stared with sleepy eyes at the red and green lamps of the signals and the silver sheen of the rails, as if these could tell them when the train would move. For the most part, the doors of the compartments were closed, and they were stewing in the sweat of their bodies, packed almost on top of each other, so that there was no room to move an inch without treading on someone’s foot. The smoke of endless cigarettes had made the atmosphere dense and hot and suffocating.
‘The raper of his sister, this train, it is worse than the train from Amritsar to Pathankot during Diwali fair,’ said Uncle Kirpu, coughing after several vigorous puffs at his cigarette.
‘You have never been to the Kumbh fair at Hardwar,’ Daddy Dhanoo ‘burrburred’ from where he lay, mindless of the heat. He seemed to be able to doze off anywhere.
‘You should be happy at your good fortune,’ said Lalu with a certain impatience, which gained intensity from the heat of the truck. ‘Some regiments on the other sidings are loaded in open cattle trucks.’
‘I’d rather be in the open trucks,’ said Uncle Kirpu peevishly, fanning himself with a rag.
The bitterness in Kirpu’s remark seemed to express the general mood. And, for a moment, everything was still. Then, hoarse chatter could be heard from the platform and the confused whispers of the sepoys sunk in the apathy of all-pervading gloom.
Lalu reclined in a corner. He could hear his heart beating as a kind of undertone to the brooding layers of heat that streamed out from the tense, tight-stretched senses of men, in invisible, intangible masses of clouds, which hovered before the heavy-lidded eyes of the cooped up sepoys, thundery and electric.
‘A strange fair,’ the boy muttered. ‘Havildar Lachman Singh!’ interrupted an authoritative voice, the stern ring of which was one of Lalu’s earliest memories of the army.
‘He has already gone to the fair,’ Lalu whispered.
‘Of course, it is a fair we are going to,’ said Lok Nath, the tall, lanky, tyrant lance corporal, entering the truck.
‘Some of us eat the salt of the Sarkar and are not even prepared to do a little fatigue for it. Who is this whining?’ And he craned to look so that the prominent Adam’s apple of his long neck moved up and down.
‘No one, no one, Havildar Lachman Singh is not here,’ Kirpu intervened to avert the unpleasantness which he anticipated.
Lalu felt the imperceptible shudder of a warm horror arise from the back of his head. He knew that Lok Nath had been waiting for days for an opportunity to get at him. Having been transferred to another platoon by Subedar Major Sahib’s orders, because Arbel Singh wanted his own son to get a direct commission and supersede all other claimants in the Dogra Company, the Lance-Naik had no direct contact with his old platoon, which was under Lachman Singh. Lalu, who had once been the object of Lok Nath’s spite, felt that the corporal was insinuating all that about betraying salt for his benefit. He hoped that the bit about fatigue duty was not a reference to his default today when he had suddenly left the food wagons and helped to get office chests into the train.
‘Would you like a pull at my cigrut, Holdara?’ Kirpu said in a tone that sought to disguise the inexpressible mockery of his manner in exaggerated courtesy.
‘Ohe, stop smoking,’ said Babu Khushi Ram peevishly. ‘It will create more smoke in the stagnant air.’
‘There is no talk of that,’ said Kirpu. ‘Let us entertain the Lance-Naik. He is, after all, our officer and comes so seldom to our platoon.’
‘No, I will not have a cigrut,’ Lok Nath said, ‘but Kirpu is right. Officers and men belong to one family. In the English regiments, they play their games together,
work together and share all the discomforts together. The difficulty with our Hindustani regiments is that the ranks lose all sense of respect for their superiors as soon as the officers begin to mix with them. I learnt drill instruction from a sergeant-major sahib in a Gora regiment, and the thing which impressed me was the devoted and fatherly care every English officer, from the second lieutenant to the Karnel sahib, had for all the men under his charge. Just father-mother. And from the fact that they are all equally white, eat the same food in the same way with forks and knives, you might think that the Tommies do not respect their officers. But, this was a revelation for me for which I was hardly prepared. They did. They always recognised the status of an officer. They may look small and insignificant, but they know how to observe discipline: they click their heels and salute as if they were machines. Our sepoys are lazy and inefficient and disrespectful.’
‘The French soldiers seem like us,’ young Kharku said from somewhere in the dark.
‘That’s why I have been hard on you at times when you were recruits,’said Lok Nath. ‘I learnt a good deal from that sergeant-major, Hudson Sahib his name was. And I don’t mind telling you that he sometimes slapped my face. Of course, I did not get angry like our recruits because I knew it was for my good, I have always respected a strong-handed man who will make a man of you and teach you how to fight…’
At that stage, Havildar Lachman Singh came up, shouting,‘Ohe where are you, ohe Kirpu, ohe Bapu, ohe Lal Singha?’
‘Here we are,’ the men shouted in a chorus. ‘Here Holdara…’
‘Subedar Major Sahib wants to see you,’ said Lok Nath, standing up as Havildar Lachman Singh came in.
‘I have been to see him,’ Lachman said.
‘God, what is the time, Lachman? We are dying of this congestion!’ exclaimed Babu Khushi Ram, puffing and blowing to express his anger at Lok Nath’s blusterings.
The Great War Page 13
