I drew up elaborate plans. One was to get hold of the brothers one by one, stuff them into boxes, transport them by rail upto Bombay and finally put them on a boat to Africa. Murder was not an integral part of these detailed and meticulously drawn schemes, but I was quite prepared to handle incidental death. I had a contingency plan for the disposal of the bodies and the stuffing of their clothes up the ship's chimneys and so on. Occasionally I wondered if it would be better to wait for twenty or thirty years and plot revenge in the tradition of the Count of Monte Cristo rather than mete out immediate retribution. The trouble was that this scheme called for my incarceration in the dungeons of an island prison in which I would dig a tunnel in order to reach a fellow prisoner. An escape from prison, the acquisition of a large hidden treasure followed by several more exploits incognito, these were all essential. I thus lived simultaneously in two worlds. The real world where I was in constant dread of the Krishnaswamy brothers, and the imaginary scenario of the nineteenth-century novels where intrepid exploits were always possible.
There were times when all my schemes appeared futile and impracticable. It was at such times that my thoughts turned to suicide. How did one organise a suicide? Was it possible to commit suicide without anyone's guessing that it was one? Yes. Only, my body should not be seen by anyone. And how could that be man-aged? Bury it, of course. For this part of my plan I chose the British military cemetery. I took a small crowbar to the cemetery and began to dig in secret. After nearly ten days' digging, I found that I wasn't even a foot deep. The place scared me a bit. Also, the prospect of living with English-speaking ghosts after death wasn't an attractive proposition. So I moved to the foot of the hills in search of a better place for my grave. Opportunities for such investigation offered themselves in plenty once we acquired that water buffalo. On the pretext of looking for the buffalo, I explored the hillock looking for a cave. My plan was to eat poison and die at home, then bring my body myself and secret it in some hollow. A place sufficiently pleasing to my fancy never presented itself, but during these trips I accumulated a fund of knowledge about the place for miles around. I could now divine with reasonable accuracy the hideouts of scorpions which abounded in the red earth. I knew exactly which stone to move to uncover a few. But the creatures seemed so utterly defenceless and miserable when their shelter was disturbed that after the first few times I gave up.
It was then that Santanam entered the scene. It was brought home to me quite early in our acquaintance that in the matter of tackling the Krishnaswamy brothers, Santanam was not to be relied on. One evening, emboldened by the presence of Santanam with me on the road, I walked at a more moderate pace than usual. Finding me within reach after a long time, Krishnaswamy came up and knocked me down. Santanam was the first to charge away, before I could. I never brought up the subject of his desertion with Santanam. In point of fact, it was after this incident that we began to play cricket. The game was the only link between us. Soon, even that link was broken.
I slowly got used to the loneliness of living with people who spoke alien languages. One reason was that the Anglo-Indian and Muslim boys of Lancer Barracks accepted me as one of them. They used to kill garden lizards. Their speech was generously sprinkled with swear-words. It was swear-this and swear-that all the time –tripping on a stone, losing a game of tip-cat or tops, climbing a tree or passing a cow. If you stood in a queue at the Plaza cinema for a John Hall – Maria Montez film and didn't get a ticket, that also merited a wholesome swear-word. Morris freely used these words to indicate any disagreement with his many brothers and sisters. He had three sisters, two of them older, and all of them flung these words around with ease. The eldest sister was a little restrained in her use of such ammunition, though.
This sister was the only one in Morris' family who was somewhat fair. With the advent of the World War and the arrival of the British soldiers in Secunderabad, she metamorphosed into the likes of the women we saw in the English films. Her English, which we normally followed quite well, took on unintelligible accents whenever she spoke to the soldiers. Once, when a soldier called on her at her house, she made me sit beside her and proceeded to kiss me every five minutes throughout the conversation. I wasn't in the least troubled by this, but the soldier looked terrible. His eyes, face, hands and feet were all pink. He was hairy all over and had a foul smell issuing from his mouth, all of which could have led her to hold me as a kind of protective shield. Morris winked at me.
Two more persons now came to live in Krishnaswamy's house, his uncles who had come looking for jobs in Secunderabad. Their Tamil was even rougher than Krishnaswamy's. Almost immediately following their arrival, they got jobs in the ordnance factory. Those days the factory employed anyone who was sixteen and could write a little English. They worked from eight in the morning but went on only till three-thirty in the afternoon. Now that there were five willing players in their family, they formed a cricket group. The harassments that had bedevilled Santanam's and my cricket did not feature with Krishnaswamy since his group had adults.
As for me, I became the darling of the Anglo-Indian families in Lancer Barracks. In the Muslim homes, I was among the few admitted behind the sackcloth screens where I steeled myself to watch without flinching when the chicken was wrung by its neck. I was often to be found at Morris' house at a game of Monopoly with Morris, his elder brother Terence and his sisters. Their parents would be engaged in a drunken brawl throughout in the same room. I learnt all the popular film songs of the day sung by Khurshid, Johra Begum and Noorjahan. After much persuasion, I got Father and Mother to finally let me have pyjamas made. Then, through Janardanam, a Naidu boy, I got to know his brother Sundar, and Sundar's friends Venkat and Appa Rao. I learnt to play carrom with them. They were also obliged to include me in the badminton for the simple reason that the net belonged to me. This net had been lying unused at home, and I had no idea how it came to be there.
The risqué humour and laughter of these Naidu boys were of a different category from Morris' and his Anglo-Indian friends' swear-words. I never felt uneasy with the Anglo-Indians, but the Naidus had me squirming. The worst offender was Venkat. There was a convent close by from where women of all ages, some in skirts and blouses and others in saris filed past our Barracks. Venkat contrived to throw the badminton ball in their direction and would send me to get it. I got my own back the day our buffalo swished him with her dung-soaked tail. It fell to me to carry a bucket of water to him to wash with. When I poured the water on his trousers, it was of course in a more generous quantity than was strictly required by the occasion.
Krishnaswamy and his brothers played cricket near their house with a few more Tamil boys from outside the Barracks. I pretended to enjoy the badminton but it went against the grain with me to have to run after the girls and women from the convent just to satisfy Venkat's and Appa Rao's suppressed cravings. Apart from badminton, the only outdoor games open to me were marbles, tip-cat and monkeys-on-the-tree, all of them primitive games, fit for the uncouth when compared with cricket. Whether or not I fully recognised these nice distinctions, they certainly aggravated the supercilious disdain of the Krishnaswamy brothers. There was one occasion when Krishnaswamy fell foul of Morris, Sajad and Wahab, and I had to watch him being rolled in the dust. After that incident, I was careful on my way to and from school.
I'm aware that as I tell you all this, you may get the impression of the passage of years. In fact, these episodes – the buffalo, Morris, the state of war with Krishnaswamy and his brothers, monkeys-on-the-tree, films like Tarzan's New York Adventures, Venkat's and Appa Rao's obscene laughter, the search for a grave in the cemetery, exploring the hills for a place of refuge, Morris' eldest sister's advances – all this took place within a short span of time, certainly not more than a year. When I entered the sixth form, the World War had ended. By then Morris' second sister had also undergone a transformation. The girl was a little dark. And she was large. Her name was Laura. I have for some reason forgotten the eldes
t sister's name. Try as hard as I might, the name still eludes me. The human mind is still so utterly unreliable. Several years can be rubbed off from your consciousness without the slightest trace, while the tiniest nuances of a random five minutes may be on call instantly as if they were a stretch of eternity. The mind seems to have a special clock and calendar. Or maybe it has neither.
Well, Morris' eldest sister who had been bubbling over with high spirits all through the war years had now fallen into despondency. The British soldier who had been a frequent visitor till now had stopped visiting her. They had all been hoping that he would marry her and take her away to England. Nothing came of it, and now all she could look forward to was an Anglo-Indian life like any other girl in Secunderabad. She stayed home when we went to the cinema. Only Laura would come with us. We – Morris, his brother Terence and I, together with Laura and sometimes the other younger sister – used to go to the Plaza cinema. The ticket money for the cheapest class for the matinee show was just four annas, but British four annas, which was equal to five annas in Hyderabad's 'halli' currency. If tickets were not available at the Plaza, we moved on to the Tivoli and on the rare occasion when we drew a blank there as well, it was Dreamland. Terence always made a nuisance of himself at the cinema, kicking the chair in front of him with his booted feet, and striking a match and lighting up the moment he lowered himself into a seat. Morris could be equally troublesome but every single act of Terence's had the stamp of the savage on it, which Laura found rather attractive. All of them cold-shouldered me when they were with their Anglo-Indian friends, but when the family was alone, I was accorded the status of an insider. I was Laura's favourite. Her elder sister liked me too, though in a different way. She found my presence comforting somehow. She would take out the English magazines the soldier had given her and explain them to me page by page. One day while she was doing this, she suddenly stopped in her tracks, broke down sobbing and threw her arms round me. Moved by all this, I began to cry as well. The noise brought Mr Mannas, her father, there and he pushed us off the sofa. Enter the mother. Three or four pictures on the wall were smashed in the fight that ensued between the mother and the father.
There came a time when all these things changed—'changed' is not the word for it; every bit of it just slipped away from my life. Morris, his eldest sister, the large Laura, Terence, Mannas, Mrs Mannas, all of them. Together with the Muslim boys, my Naidu friends, Janardanan, Appa Rao, the lot. And something else came to pass, something that had seemed most unlikely. I became a close friend of Krishnaswamy and his brothers!
Ranga Ramanujan deserves credit for this.
Well, now I have heard it said that my father suffered a big loss when the Arbuthnot Bank collapsed. For a long time afterwards, he was often accosted by people with a 'What absolute idiocy, putting your money there!' I also saw some people commiserating with him. 'Poor man, he seems to have lost everything.' What my father had lost was eight hundred rupees, roughly the equivalent of fifty gold sovereigns in those days. By a stroke of coincidence it turned out that the Arbuthnot Bank a thousand miles away, had crashed at the same time as my father was returning from the tailor's with two newly sewn alpaca coats. The strange simultaneity condemned the unlucky coats to limbo for years. It was during my cricket days with Santanam that Father retrieved them for use. For several years after that, these two jackets were in constant use, worn on alternate days. They looked a shiny green one minute and turned a dazzling purple the next. Green, purple, green, purple, green here, purple there. A few places became worn threadbare and began to show patches of scarlet. When they were first taken out after ten years of storage, they were a bit moth-eaten, but otherwise there was no cause for any hesitation or embarrassment in wearing them. The reason lay in a propensity which originated with the tailors of Hyderabad who were conservative to the core. The passage of ten or even twenty years could not make them change their age-old styles. Neither did the general populace find it necessary to change their mode of dress. Schoolboys wore open collar shirts. This style of garment was favoured by most adults as well. It was only if you happened to have some cloth of superior quality or of sufficient length that you went in for a closed collar or 'tie-collar' shirt. Though this ensemble of shirt and trousers permitted of little variation, there were still nuances that gave you a clue to the wearer's communal identity. Muslim boys wore their shirts falling over their shorts, pyjamas or trousers. Among the Tamils who had migrated to Hyderabad, all adults wore the same kind of dress. It was as if they had evolved a uniform by consensus. This comprised a full-sleeved shirt tucked into a dhoti, worn with a coat and a cap. The dhoti was worn with a length of the cloth passing between the legs and separating them. Whatever his caste, Mani Iyer, Raghavachari, Govindaswami Naidu or Pinakapani Mudaliar, a Tamil migrant never went out without his regulation headgear. Lawyers and professors sported a turban.
My shorts were always made two inches wider and longer than necessary as I was a 'growing boy'. Even after tightening the buckles to the last possible millimetre, the shorts would be loose at the waist and slip down. To prevent this, I used to roll up the shorts all round the waist, much in the same way that a petticoat or sari is tucked up. This would not show; however, since I wore my shirts falling over my shorts. My tuck-up at the waist also had the incidental advantage of reducing the unwanted length of the shorts. It was on this scene that there now descended two boys whose sole mission in life, for all intents and purposes, was to effect a change in the sartorial habits of the boys of Secunderabad, Raj Kumar and Ranga Ramanujan. Belonging as they did to the new influx into Secunderabad after the end of the war, both these boys had innumerable relatives in the army—a father, a few assorted uncles and brothers.
Raj Kumar wore a new kind of shirt to school which was neither shirt nor coat. The shirt-coat had huge pockets and a stitched-on belt. This garment, Raj Kumar told us, was called a bush coat. Ranga's shirt was open in front and had buttons running up the whole length. While the rest of us had to push our heads through the necks of our shirts, he could put his shirt on like a coat, from the back. This meant that when the process was over, not a hair on his head would be out of place, while we could never get into our shirts without mussing up our hair. Ranga came from a school with a different system of education. Our school authorities must have found themselves in a quandary choosing a class to put him in. After he had sat in a higher class for a few days, he was assigned to our class for a week. He sat bemused throughout the Tamil lesson which went completely over his head. He didn't ever sit a Tamil exam.
One day during Ranga's stint in our class, our English teacher decided to test our grammar. He wrote a long sentence on the blackboard for analysis. Pointing to a part of the sentence he asked, 'What clause is that?' The boys stood up one after the other without answering. Then someone said, 'Noun clause.'
'No, next.'
'Adjectival clause,' ventured another.
'No, next.'
'Adverbial clause,' said the next boy.
These were the only three clauses we'd been taught. The whole class, not just I, was never quite sure which was which. To answer questions on grammar we always depended on our gambling instincts. Now that all these options had been exhausted, we wondered what clause it could be.
The teacher continued to call out 'Next', 'Next', till he came to me.
The teacher now looked like a veritable Shakuni of the Mahabharata, and the class took on the features of the Kaurava assembly. Then I cast the dice.
'Parenthetical clause,' I said.
There was a moment's silence in the class, a deadly silence.
'Next,' called out the teacher. The next boy happened to be Ranga who sat first on the bench behind me. He stood up and said, 'Parenthetical clause.'
At the end of the class the two of us exchanged smiles as befitted two geniuses at English. He wanted to know my name. And I felt the texture of his shirt.
Two days later, Ranga was shifted to the next higher class, to
Krishnaswami's section. We didn't speak to each other again until after he finished school and I had also got through my tenth without a hitch, and both of us entered the same college, Nizam College, which was five miles away. Ranga used to come to our barracks to play cricket with Krishnaswami's group, but for all they cared, they may as well have been playing in another country.
The bush coat and the full-open shirt. Soon Secunderabad was also full of them. Tailors charged only a little more for these styles. However when worn with pyjamas these garments posed a problem. If you sat down in a chair, the front ends of the shirts parted to reveal the drawstrings of the pyjamas. A solution was soon found in the shape of pyjamas without drawstrings, a kind of trouserish pyjamas. I too had a pair of these made out of MS 55 cloth which was scarce in Secunderabad at the time. I pestered quite a few people to get this fabric for me. When at last I was able to go about wearing these trouserish pyjamas and a full open shirt, I felt like Janab Jinnah. Jinnah, you see, had the reputation of being the first among the world's best-dressed men.
One day as I was entering Lancer Barracks, Ranga accosted me.
'Which is your house?'
The Eighteenth Parallel Page 3