The Eighteenth Parallel

by MITRAN, ASHOKA

  The look that Nasir Ali Khan gave Chandru was not the friendliest. Sundar Singh was there. So were Nizam Yar Khan and several others whose faces were familiar but whose names were not. These boys had high-schooled at the Madras-e-Aliya, the school for princes, right there on the college campus, a school run specially for the sons of nobility. Two of the Nizam's grandsons were in the school now. For boys such as these, college did not mean a break from school. They all wore white shirts and trousers and cricket shoes. A boy from the history department was batting now. Three boys bowled to him in turn so that there was no break in the bowling, and they had three balls to bowl with.

  Nasir said, 'You're very late, dost,' but he didn't look cross at all. Then he picked up a ball and handed it to Chandru. Chandru hesitated for a moment, then he returned it. 'I'd rather not bowl today,' he said.

  Nasir passed the ball on to someone else. He said something to Chandru which he didn't quite catch. He had already resigned himself to an evening of nothing but fielding. Nasir repeated what he said, this time in English. 'I said pad up.' Chandru was taken aback. He picked up a pair of pads from the cricket gear piled there and buckled them on to his legs. Then he chose a bat, the best seeming of the lot, and stood waiting his turn. Most of the players must have felt that the captain unduly favoured the newcomer. Just arrived, and he gets a chance to bat already!

  2

  Before I embark on a history of my cricket, let me tell you something about the place we lived in. Moving house was an annual ritual with us until I was twelve. It was then that we finally settled down in a house which, unlike the ones we had lived in until then, was situated quite far from the centre of the town. A mile or a bit more lay between us and the railway station, the market and the nearest school. The fact of the matter was that my father had at last been allotted government quarters. The place was called Lancer Barracks. At first I found this name with its faint ring of a swear word an embarrassment. A vast stretch of rugged terrain, more than ten acres, with a three-foot brick wall to mark off its boundaries and two long tile-roofed structures in the middle, each partitioned into twelve sections one behind the other, thus making twentyfour houses in all—well that was Lancer Barracks for you.

  Although I can't say for sure when these barracks were built, there's one thing I know. They were meant for giants ten foot tall. You had to stand on a chair or a stool to fasten the top bolts of the doors. The roof must have been a good twentyfive feet at its peak from where it sloped down on either side. The walls couldn't have been an inch less than two feet thick. Just to look up at the roof in half-light gave one the shivers.

  I found out the following from the dictionary:

  lancer : a soldier of a cavalry regiment armed with lances

  barrack : permanent building(s) in which soldiers are lodged

  Lancer Barracks must therefore have been built for the British soldiers armed with lances. I wondered if these soldiers were expected to carry their' lances all the time. Quite likely. And their lances must have been rather long. Perhaps that explained why they needed such high roofs. The lances would otherwise have scraped the roofs. These barracks must somehow have come into the possession of the Railway Department and been converted into living quarters for their employees. And here was my father, settled at last in this haven. It turned out he had waited fifteen whole years to move into these houses.

  For that matter, all the other occupants of Lancer Barracks had been on the waiting list equally long before they were allotted houses there. Our line of barracks housed two Tamil families including ours, three Anglo-Indians, four Muslims, one Parsi and two Naidus. There was only one Tamil family in the row behind ours. The rest were again Anglo-Indians, Parsis, Muslims and Naidus. The Naidus had me speculating. Could it be that all those who spoke Telugu were called Naidus? .

  Our barracks, as I said, was quite far from the city, though there were a few buildings even beyond ours. There was a church and a few small houses in a large compound next to ours. Further afield were four large bungalows in a row. A Christian cemetery lay separated from the church by half a mile. None of us had ever seen this cemetery being used. The gravestones and memorial slabs were thickly overgrown with weeds. My little brother and I sometimes climbed over the wall and explored the place, our hearts racing. Most of the graves belonged to the nineteenth century, though an occasional tombstone spoke of the twentieth, and all the dead had been in the British army. Apparently soldiers had died in large numbers in our barracks, which meant that they had lived there in large numbers to begin with. Some of the inscriptions had more than thirty names. All fallen in battle perhaps, or fallen prey to the plague or smallpox which were endemic to Hyderabad-Secunderabad in those times. But for our barracks, the church, the row of bungalows and the cemetery, this stretch of country" was deserted, rugged moorland. There were a few hills and hillocks in the far distance. It was a place for ghosts rather than humans. It wasn't a bad place for grazing cattle though.

  Now, there was no dearth of wide open spaces within our barracks compound, but very little of it was level ground and the only stretch that was somewhat even had already been appropriated by the adults for badminton. And so when Santanam and I went looking for a pitch for our first ever game of cricket, we had to be happy with a patch of bumpy ground, comparatively less up and down than the rest. Santanam, you see, was the boy from the last house in our row. He was in my class and like me, he had a younger brother. I had sisters who were both older and younger, but Santanam had only a brother. Only the three of us – Santanam, his brother and I – played cricket. My brother was too young for the game.

  We drew vertical lines on the walls for our wicket. A strip of wooden board served us for a bat, and our ball was a tennis ball. These descriptions can be quite misleading, I know. In case you've gained the impression of many years of cricket played this way, let me hasten to set the record straight—we played this sort of cricket for no more than two months at the most.

  Though we were only three players, we drew lots as to who should begin: Number 1 or Number 2. Santanam's brother was the permanent third man. When Santanam won the draw and went in to bat first, his innings would be over in half an hour. If I batted first, however, we would still be playing to the end of the day with the end of the game nowhere in sight. This is not to say that I played exceedingly well. Rather, it could be put down to the quality of Santanam's bowling.

  A map of India would be useful to illustrate Santanam's bowling graphically. As you know Delhi is due north of Secunderabad. Imagine me then batting from Delhi. Secunderabad is the other end of the pitch that Santanam is bowling off. Santanam's run up was an outrageously long affair. When he finally did release the ball, it would take off east towards Calcutta or west towards Karachi; never north to me. He favoured Karachi mostly, perhaps owing to some built-in bend in his physique. To hit the ball, I had to chase it all the way to Karachi. Then the ball would soar in the direction of the African continent, and Santanam would begin to haul his brother over the coals: 'Here I am, straining every nerve, bowling my life away, and there you stand rooted to the ground. Can't you do some fielding, you fool?' He didn't seem to care about my predicament of having to bat my life away after his bowling. It was beyond the realm of possibility that his ball should ever strike those black coal lines that served for wicket. The only way then to dismiss me was to catch me out. A catch was a catch even if the ball struck the ground before it was caught. Actually, it qualified for a catch even if the ball had been pitched a number of times. Our game had only a vague resemblance to cricket. Santanam's long pre-bowling sprint followed by my running after his ball, followed still later by Santanam's brother's run in a third direction to retrieve the ball—it was altogether more like a track event. Only, instead of starting simultaneously, the runners ran in sequence. True, I found Santanam's Karachi-ward bowling extremely irksome, but I wouldn't have stopped playing with him for just that. There were other reasons why we couldn't continue for long, namely
, the other boys in Lancer Barracks.

  There were ten or fifteen Muslim and Anglo-Indian boys in our own line of the barracks, but my problem was that I couldn't speak their languages, Urdu and English. Santanam and I became play companions mainly because he was a Tamil boy like me, and like me, he spoke no Urdu or English. For the first two days our strange cricket proceeded without a hitch. Then the Anglo-Indian boys along with the Muslim boys started to watch our game, sitting on the compound wall of the Barracks. They found every bit of our show uproariously funny. Santanam's tortuously long run, my pursuit of the ball, the loud abuses showered on Santanam's brother—everything was a rare treat for them. It has to be said that I would have found it a rare treat too if I'd been sitting with them. They would yell 'Bomman! Bomman!' at us. Anyone who spoke a different language was a bomman. Santanam was 'Bada Bomman' and I was 'Chota Bomman'. As the jeers rose higher and higher, Santanam's performance plummetted to new depths until even I who had never protested until then, shouted at him—'Try to bowl straight, will you?' To which he replied, 'Don't you see me bowling my life away?' But the more he stepped up his efforts in this 'bowling-unto-death', the greater was the harassment from the Anglo-Indian boys, mainly Morris. Morris was the resident bully who even dared to smoke within the barracks premises. Morris would imitate Santanam; he would twist himself into knots and bowl a stone at me. One day he snatched the ball from Santanam and bowled it himself. As if on cue, the other boys ran in and tried to snatch the batting board from me. I raced round the Barracks, but the boys were bigger and had little trouble wrenching it from me. Then they started to play. I must admit though that they played a better game than we did.

  For a few days Santanam and I played where they couldn't get at us. But a game like cricket is not easy to conceal. Finally our bat and ball were confiscated by Morris' group. The bat didn't last long under Morris' savage strokes.

  Santanam came home and threatened me—I must replace the bat or else he would ask his father to beat up my father. I would ask my father, I said, to kick his father. Our fathers never ever came to blows, but that marked the end of my relationship with Santanam. After that day we never spoke to each other, though we continued to be neighbours for several years. In fact I didn't see Santanam play any game after that. He started to wear spectacles. That could have been one of the reasons why he didn't play, though there could be several others.

  Unlike Santanam, I found it impossible not to play. I joined the Anglo-Indian boys in their games of marbles, monkeys-on- trees and tip-cat. I went with Morris to every Tarzan film that came to town. I swung through the aerial roots of the two banyan trees in Lancer Barracks with a jungle yell like Johnny Weismuller's. And sometimes I played badminton and carrom with the adults.

  Two new factors now emerged on the scene to effectively dampen the exuberance of those times. The first was a she-buffalo we bought; the second was the boys of a Tamil family which lived in the second row of Lancer Barracks.

  It was not as if Father had ever wanted to buy a water buffalo. It so happened that he once gave our milkman Chotu a loan of sixty rupees of which he barely managed to collect fifteen. Chotu disappeared shortly after that, but presumably on his instructions, his wife brought us an old water buffalo, hitched it to our gate and left. Within the next half hour, the buffalo had moved on with the gate in tow. Father and I went round asking if anyone had seen a buffalo with a gate attached to it. Most people found the question a little beyond their comprehension. Then fallowed a wide-ranging search which led us to the church compound, and we entered it for the first time in our lives. We were given our buffalo back along with some advice from the padre that a rumbustious beast like ours was not meant to be hitched to a gate. After a great deal of trouble, we managed to drag the animal home and shut it up in our bathroom. 'Ayyayyo!' cried Mother in panic, 'We forgot to take the boiler out!'

  'A water buffalo is not likely to eat your boiler,' Father pointed out.

  The mooing set in at three in the morning. The buffalo hadn't been fed or milked the evening before. Even Father must have had second thoughts about his remarks concerning the boiler. The man who brought us our milk said he didn't know how to milk a buffalo. Father was afraid even to open the bathroom door, but then the . daily habits of a household couldn't be postponed indefinitely. It was Mother who finally let the buffalo out, and eventually milked it too.

  The addition of a water buffalo to our household effected a drastic change in our eating habits. It dropped down generous quantities of dung which we learnt to collect into heaps once we'd overcome our initial disgust. Mother acquired milking skills without any instruction or training, and I followed after as the oldest child of the family.

  For quite some time, we didn't give the animal a name. We began to feel rather guilty about this, particularly because the milk had greatly enhanced the quality of the coffee at home. We began to call her Lakshmi. This caused many jokes to be made about us. Imagine calling a buffalo – a buffalo, mind you, not a cow – after the goddess of wealth! Meanwhile the animal was shaping nicely in her new surroundings and was beginning to take liberties. She would climb the half-dozen steps that led from the kitchen to the backyard and eat the blackgram dal and rice left soaking to be ground for dosais. This was easily forgiven. Not so the other predilection she had of snapping herself free of the stake and visiting the church, thus sorely trying the padre's principles of Christian charity. The name Lakshmi soon yielded place to 'Crooked Horns', which stuck.

  We employed a boy to take Crooked Horns to graze near the hillock. The grass was thin in these parts and fodder had to be bought. Hay was not to be had as this was not paddy country. Only guinea grass and maize stalks were available. The grass could be fed to the animal as it was, but the stalks had to be chopped up. Since Lancer Barracks was very far from the city, the grass carters did not come there often, which meant that we had to buy in great quantities when they did, and we needed to have a good store of fodder at home. Despite all our care, emergencies such as not having a blade of grass in the manger, were not uncommon. A frugal feed would tell at once on the girth of the animal, and there she would stand, restless and flustered, the pathetic moistness of her translucent eyes making you want to look away. Whenever Crooked Horns went without her feed, we – Father, Mother and I – ate little and slept even less. We would wait all day in the hope of seeing a grass cart. If it didn't turn up, I would ride two miles to Monda and carry back twentyfive bundles of grass. Twentyfive bundles didn't last more than half an hour for the buffalo, but that was all I could fetch on my small bicycle. It was impossible to persuade any grass carter to come home because they were reluctant to come a whole three miles on the strength of a boy's word. Now the changes effected by the buffalo and its successors – buffaloes, cows and calves – on this chapter of my life which I might call playdays would require some telling indeed. Summing it up in a few words is impossible. Briefly, a water buffalo was trying its best, unwittingly of course, to dislodge an international game from my consciousness where Santanam had placed it. There were those young scions of a Tamil family in Lancer Barracks, Krishnaswamy and his two younger brothers who, together with the buffalo, robbed me of much of the joy of playtime during my school days. I owed them my first serious thoughts of murder and suicide.

  Krishnaswamy's house was the last in the second row of houses in Lancer Barracks just as mine was the last in the first row. His father wore a white uniform and took a train every second day—whether as a guard or a ticket-examiner, I couldn't say for certain. Anyway, in my eyes, he was a very high official. Krishnaswamy was older than me and was my senior at school. Balu, the first of his younger brothers, was in my class but in another section. The youngest, Goku, was in the next lower class. The brothers' sing-song speech with no final elisions sounded curiously precise. People from Palghat in Kerala spoke Tamil with this special accent, my mother said.

  The person I came across most was Balu. In school, Balu was like any other Tamil boy
among the hundreds of Telugu and Muslim boys, a lost sheep. But when he had his brothers with him, he was a terror.

  How the whole thing began eludes my memory, but Balu and I had somehow become 'enemies'. Once this 'enemy' status was formalised, Balu started to both come to school and go back with his brothers. One evening, on my way home, the three brothers walked beside me and kept nudging and jostling me to the edge of the road. First to the foot-track along the road, then to the verge overgrown with thorny bushes, and finally into the ditch. Since our city never got much rain, and there was no traffic on the road, I just got up from the dry ditch, dusted off my shirt and shorts and began to walk again, taking care to keep a good fifty yards behind them. But a tiger that has tasted blood once must of necessity taste it again. Krishnaswamy and his brothers pushed me into the ditch a second time. I was still alone but not entirely unprepared this time. I scratched Krishnaswamy and Balu on their faces. That was the end of the fight for the day.

  I didn't attract much attention at home as a rule. But now glances of suspicion began to spring out at me. In the mornings, I would get ready quickly and start out for school at nine, which was much too early. In the evenings, I would be home within ten minutes of closing time, all this in an effort to avoid Krishnaswamy and his brothers on the road. Escaping them in the morning wasn't too difficult, but the evenings posed a problem because school was out at the same time for everyone and the front gate was never opened before the bell rang. You could try as hard as you could to squeeze your way through the milling crowd at the gate, but it wasn't easy to avoid students who were going the same way as you were. So I began to avoid the main gate altogether. Instead I clambered up the school wall at a lonely spot and climbed over it. This way, I managed to leave school a couple of minutes ahead of my enemies. Soon, a sizeable group of boys began to follow my example. It wasn't long before I took to climbing over the wall even to get to class in the mornings. I began to jump out and hurry away compulsively, even when it was not strictly necessary, as on those days when the dreadful three were absent from school. I used to be in a constant state of alert those days, a fact which didn't escape the family, particularly my mother, for long. Mother told Father, and Father asked what the matter was. I said nothing, not even after the beating I got from him. This was because I felt Krishnaswamy and his brothers were my problem and it was for me to tackle them in my own way. But I had no idea how.