Harish moved his head in negation as he sat down on the edge of the bed. I was too innocent to understand his mood then, but I recall the atmosphere, since illumined by the things I came to know as I grew up.
Mother looked at him lovingly and pityingly. She had known her eldest son to be quiet and reserved since his infancy. But the reticence of his childhood and boyhood was the index of a docility which my father’s constant scolding, abuse, slappings and sometimes ferocious beatings with canes and cricket stumps had produced. This new silence which made him pale and livid seemed strange to her; it was surely due to some insidious rage which refused to come to a head and to burst out. Why was it? she wondered. What was it? But as I learnt later, really she knew. He had said that it was all her fault, because she had married him off while he was only fifteen and had ill arranged his marriage. His wife, he said, was ignorant and stupid. He had had to leave his studies at the Medical School for his wife’s sake. And now he had come home with the weight of her responsibility on his shoulders. And he did not know how to bear it.
My mother could not see how she was wrong. It was the custom to betroth children at seven or eight. In fact, it would have been a shame upon such a well-to-do family as her husband’s if offers of brides for the boys had not begun to arrive immediately after their birth. And it was appropriate to celebrate their marriages at fourteen or fifteen, because it was nicer for young maidens to be about the house, doing honour to the old ones, and because no house is blessed without sons, and son’s sons, and no memory left in the world without them. Of course, she had heard that nowadays fashionable, educated boys did not like to get married early. She did not know why that should be. In the village from which she had come, the peasants married off their sons late because they were too poor to afford the expense entailed in the ceremonies associated with marriage. And surely the trouble was not that Harish was married early, for fifteen was by no means too early even for educated boys, if she was to go by the example of the sons of the lawyer of her village. It was only because of the kind of girl Harish’s wife had turned out to be.
I also realized when I grew up by what devious and involved arguments she deceived herself, into a feeling of righteousness. For although she was not consciously aware of all the implications of this arranged marriage, she had a sound enough instinct about what had gone wrong with it, and about her own responsibility in that wrong. But she had inherited the stubborn pride of her village ancestors, a pride which had been exaggerated by her own marriage into a family with ‘prestige’ in the brotherhood. And she adhered to this pride, and felt sorry for herself, resented the alienation between herself and her son, and, putting the entire blame for the trouble on the girl, tried to take her son into her confidence. So that the family, of which the other members were with her, the matriarch, in everything, might be united to cover up her mistake by a concerted effort at denouncing the outsider, the bride, and make a scapegoat of her. For the family, the unity of the joint family, must be preserved.
As if her tenderness were not enough to soothe him she sought to define an attitude of hatred towards Harish’s wife in order to establish a pervasive connection between herself and him.
‘Where is the she-elephant?’ she asked.
Harish did not answer.
Presently the girl came in, indeed a veritable miniature elephant of a woman, led by the pale, angular Ganesh with the flat nose, high cheekbones and curious ears.
Mother looked across the courtyard at my sister-in-law, fiercely, malevolently, hating with all the intensity of the jealous mother in her. If she had been a spark of lightning she would have struck this enemy of hers dead. Instead she smouldered away like charcoal, dark, dark and fuming, because she could neither scorch nor burn, but could only turn to ashes.
My sister-in-law came and sat down in a heap, her face covered modestly with her head cloth.
Mother glared at her.
The mother-in-law was face to face with the daughter-in-law …
Soon, however, the tension was somewhat relieved.
For, from outside the mud house came the voice of my father, the familiar roaring, thunderous voice, hilariously joking with someone.
‘There is your father,’ mother said.
I had heard father’s voice almost as soon, or a little sooner, than did mother. I was still the idol of my father’s love, his pet. I had struggled wildly to secure release from mother’s embrace at the merest echo of his voice and had run through the courtyard to the hall and out.
My father’s throat burst in the loud, rhyming nonsense strain, which rang through the whole sun-soaked neighbourhood:
‘Bully, Bully,
Bully, my son,
Bully, my dog,
Bully, my pig,
Bully, Bully,
Bully, my son, son, son …’
I liked my nickname being sung like that. And, of course, father was still my chief hero. I could not have run fast enough to his legs.
Genial, hearty, flushed and round, father lifted me in his arms, and kissing me from under his big mustachios and still playing on my nickname in the rhythmic strain, he entered the courtyard of the house, almost like a child himself, a big boy, in his frank naïveté and spontaneous exuberance.
As I recall him in the light of my subsequent knowledge, he was slightly less than middle-aged about this time, also of middle height, and dressed in wide baggy cotton pyjama trousers, a white cotton shirt with a starched collar, a khaki sports jacket cut to a Victorian pattern, a round chocolate-coloured Christi cap, a pair of sepoy’s Indian-style shoes, which Surjan Singh, the portentously fat Quartermaster’s Havildar, had given him—a queer motley of English and Indian habiliments such as has been the dominant note in the fashionable dress of India, neither purely Indian nor even adequately imitative, but just anyhow, sadly lacking in form for all its studied effort at a respectable compromise, assimilating as it does some items of the superior, foreign English dress into the scheme work of Indian styles, and yet somehow symbolic of modern India, which is nothing if not a patched-up compromise of mechanistic Europe and feudalist Asia.
So happy was he, so elated and lost in the sing-song greeting which he extended to me, that for a moment he did not notice the other members of the household, who were now settling down to breathe the cool late afternoon air on the shady verandah.
‘Bully, Bully
Bully, my son.’
The nonsense rhyme finished for the fifth time since its first utterance outside the hall. And, after much kissing and petting, father sat me down on the cot.
I flew to mother, elated with the happiness which I was always seeking, with an instinct for self-prominence and glorification, with the joy of being fondled and admired, with a vanity which I had acquired early in Lahore, but which was now mixed with the feeling of genuine affection that I felt for everyone.
‘Have you been to the town, child?’ said father to Harish, carefully putting his cap on the bedstead.
‘Han ji,’ murmured Harish, with lips which compressed after the whisper. He was still self-enclosed, downcast, oppressed and bound up in a knot.
Father did not seem to notice subtleties of feeling. Apart from the mental diplomacies of the ‘shadow colonel’, the Head Clerk of the regimental office, I found, as I grew up, that the life of the army, with its crudities, had bred in him a gruffness which sustained him for long periods on the level of a merely rudimentary experience. I believe he knew Harish was suffering, but he knew it in the round. He could not analyse his son’s feelings, because, for that matter, the struggle for existence had left him no time to analyse his own. He himself had accepted the conventions of English routine in the office, but he had retained the belief in the customs of the brotherhood of coppersmiths and silversmiths of his inheritance, without making a synthesis.
It is true that he cultivated the company of educated men and was President of the local Arya Samaj in Nowshera, a society which stood for widow remarriage, the abol
ition of caste, the raising of the age of consent etc. But, then, most of the literate men of that time said one thing and, enmeshed in the net of their original caste brotherhoods, bound up by ties of sentiment with communities of illiterate cousins, they did another. And progressive societies composed of such men always tended to become fashionable meeting places, social clubs and even dens of drunkenness, debauchery and gambling where the professional men, the respectable compromisers, could find an occasional escape from their large families and larger responsibilities. My father was called ‘Uncle’ by most of his friends in the cantonment and the Arya Samaj and, therefore, typified the accepting character. So, though he read the Tribune and the Civil and Military Gazette, and English novels from the library of the Officers’ Mess, he merely regarded them as a pleasant escape from the routine of office and shelved hedonism, as well as religion, when it came to a question of what was the thing to do in family and caste brotherhood affairs.
The only thing which seems to have been important to him with regard to Harish was that the boy could not get on with his studies at the Medical School at Lahore, because he was married, and could not get the Diploma. For, like most people ever since Lord Macaulay gave to Hindustan the gift of his Lays of Ancient Rome, as well as the British Indian scheme of education for manufacturing Babus inured to the English tongue, my father thought of education in terms of degrees, by securing which one could secure a safe job in some government department. Since the boy had been persuaded by his father-in-law and his wife not to go on with his medical studies, he must be got a job. He was angry with Harish for ruining the prospects and the ‘prestige’ he would have enjoyed if he had persevered for three years and become a Babu doctor. He could not deal with him directly, however. His own guilt in acquiescing to the boy’s marriage lurked somewhere at the back of his mind, and he would not face that. So he refused to be sensitive to Harish’s present bent-head sadness.
‘Have the boys had “something” to eat?’ he asked, turning to mother.
My heart brightened at the mention of ‘something’.
‘I want “something” I want “something”!’ I said.
‘Wait, child, wait,’ said mother, getting up to serve. ‘Wait, your elder brothers must have “something” to eat first. They have been busy in the Sadar Bazaar all day.’
‘Haven’t I been busy?’ I answered with a pout.
Father laughed and, turning to me, said, ‘Come here, you rogue, what have you been busy with? What have you been doing?’
‘He has been asking me funny questions,’ said mother, smiling. ‘He asked me where he came from, where we found him.’
‘Ho, ho, ha, ha, ha,’ father laughed, his eyes lighting up, and he came and caught me.
‘You are a big budmash, you are a devil, you are a little monkey!’
‘He is a bad boy, worrying me all day with his questions and tampering with my spinning wheel,’ mother said accusingly, even as she gave me a cream cake and a few nuts and raisins.
‘What did you tell him, mother of Harish?’ father asked according to the customary Hindu manner in which husbands and wives often adopt an inverted mode of address out of respect for each other.
‘I told him that a Mem brought him to us,’ she said. ‘But he is a very persistent child. He wanted to be shown her. So I told him he would see her one day, one day when he goes beyond the seas to Vilayat.’
‘He is a lucky child,’ father mused vaingloriously, ‘to have had an Angrezi nurse. You remember what a feast we had when he was born. All the big Khans of Peshawar came and the Sahibs. He is an auspicious child. He might go to Vilayat …’
‘Indeed, he is an auspicious child,’ said mother. ‘The Aga Khan took him into his lap and kissed him and gave him his blessings, you remember, when I took him on the eleventh day after his birth to see the Sahib who was then in Peshawar. “He will be my true follower,” he said. “He will be a man of destiny …”’
At the mention of the Aga Khan, father sniffed at the air and turned away. Having joined the Arya Samaj he did not regard the Aga Khan as his spiritual leader any more, as his cousins of the coppersmith and the silversmith brotherhood regarded the Aga Khan.
‘You talk strange talk, mother,’ even Harish burst in an impatient whisper. He had attended the Dayanand Anglo-Vernacular School at Lahore where the Arya Samaj was the strongest. ‘How absurd you are to put any value on the blessings of the Aga Khan.’ And he frowned and hung his head down.
Meanwhile, the irrelevance of the phrase about Vilayat gained from the repetition and from the flattery of my parents, and, in the silence that followed, the words seemed to assume the air of an echo-augury for the impetuous, impressionable child that I was. It was one of those moments when a chance word, a stray thought, an odd feeling, however ridiculous, sends the imagination flying in an absurd flight of fancy, and one soars to the atmosphere of a world other than, and different from, the ordinary, when the most naive and irrelevant mood becomes the dominating impulses of a lifetime. Among the other things I remember of that fateful day, I remembered most the phrase about Vilayat. It became a keynote to the history of my later life. For as I grew up from the impetuosity of my childhood to school and college and the wide open world I looked westwards, not only in the sense in which one looks from the contingencies of familiar, awkward and frustrating circumstances at the ‘blessed Isles’, but I tried naively to emulate Europe through an exaggerated respect for hats, top boots, hockey sticks, cricket bats, shorts, trousers, push bikes, cigarettes, books, revolvers and such other gifts of the West which are the true heroes of modern India.
‘Has the girl had any food?’ my father asked my mother.
‘I haven’t got ten hands,’ mother snapped, abruptly changing from the fond mother to the not-so-fond mother-in-law. ‘She will have some after the boys have eaten.’
And now the house was plunged in silence, into the brooding silence of hate that fills space when everyone is on edge.
Father left baby Shiva, whom he was patting to sleep on the string bed, and proceeded to do his toilet. He was in the habit of relieving himself twice a day, morning and afternoon. And each time he went to the lavatory he sat there at least for half an hour, reading the Civil and Military Gazette of the previous day which the post-orderly brought for him from the Officers’ Mess, and perhaps also taking a primitive, instinctive delight in the act of excretion, in spite of the fact that he suffered from piles.
During his absence in the lavatory, silence, utter silence, prevailed in the house. Mother crouched and patted my head as I felt sleepy. Harish was dumb as ever. Ganesh sat seeking to give an air of assiduity as he inclined over his school primer, though he stared furtively from side to side with a vacant, half-afraid look in his eyes. And my sister-in-law, Draupadi, sat huddled in the shroud of her head apron in a corner by the bed on which baby Shiva slept.
Then father emerged.
‘Come and watch the hockey match, Harish, if you are not too tired,’ he said, knowing that the boy would come because he was very fond of the game. ‘Come,’ he continued, ‘it is stiflingly hot here and you want some fresh air.’
‘Acha ji,’ Harish murmured and he stirred in his seat a little, looked up, turned round and then relapsed into his silence.
Father became busy scrubbing his ink-stained fingers and hands on the dust after soaking them in water from a small brass jug, as he believed in a natural toilet and seldom used soap on his hands. When he had finished swilling his hands and face with water and towelled himself briskly, he took his silver-mounted regimental stick and, calling Harish, walked away.
Ordinarily I would have wanted to go with him, insisted on it and cried if I had not been taken. Today the tense silence had frightened me and I did not dare to stir.
Ganesh, however, slunk out behind them like a sly dog with his tail between his legs.
After the last echoes of father’s voice, laughing, joking, crackling and casting epigrammatic wit, died down, my
mother got up, deliberately arranged an elaborate tray with sweets and fruit and laid it before Draupadi as she would before a guest. Then she went to the baby, who was stirring, and began to feed him. I sat on the cot, blue-pencilling the Civil and Military Gazette with a freedom I have often wished to possess later.
After a while when mother had fed Shiva and lulled him to sleep again, she turned towards her daughter-in-law and saw that Draupadi had not stirred and that the food lay untouched before her.
‘Why don’t you eat the food, my girl?’ she remonstrated. And she continued with obvious malice: ‘Is it too simple and coarse for you?’
There was no reply, neither yes nor no. This infuriated mother. So she went and brought the tray back from where it lay.
‘Come and sit in the open, child, don’t sit in the corner in this autumn heat,’ she now said with deliberate kindness. ‘You will fall ill.’
Draupadi neither moved nor replied.
‘What is the matter? Why are you so obstinate?’ coaxed mother. ‘Tell me! I am your mother-in-law. I shall help you.’
‘Nothing,’ came a whisper. ‘I want my husband. I can’t wait while he finishes college. Get him a job and give him to me.’
I heard the querulous words, though I did not know their meaning.
In later years, however, I realized that no newly married girl in the whole of Hindustan could have outraged the limits of modesty by so open a demand as this. Mother had dreamed all her life about the day when, with a young bride in her home, she would exercise the function of mother-suzeraine. That was one of the reasons why she had rushed Harish’s marriage. She had calculated all the normal considerations which precede an arranged marriage. She had had the girl seen by the official go-between, the barber’s wife. She had had her horoscope read by the pundits. It had not occurred to her that a little money can make a barber’s wife declare an ugly girl the most beautiful houri, and that the priests can so fix the positions of the stars in a horoscope that there is no more propitious and highly destined bride in the whole world. But mother believed in the priests, who believed in the sanctity of custom, for, surely, age-old considerations, as they were evolved by the great sages of the past, among them so great a sage as Manu, could not be wrong.
Seven Summers Page 7