As the relentless summer mellowed into the autumn and opened the folds of bright, cold days, my mother would bring me into the open air and, putting me in her lap, rub me with mustard oil to put more life into my emaciated body. Sometimes I cried from the excess of pain in my head.
‘Do not weep, don’t cry, my child,’ she would say. ‘This is only a small hurt, there are worse still to come. Don’t cry, my babe.’
And as she felt the cold mountain air and saw birds fly home in the hallowed light of the day, she was so grateful that I was recovering that she would begin to mention the names of her numerous gods and pray.
For during the long-drawn process of my illness the pantheism of my mother’s belief had tended to become a kind of unbalanced henotheism! The gods of each religion as well as the minor tokens, images, symbols and signs of faith, had each been temporarily exalted to the position of the supreme God who was to help to heal my wound. Indeed, she was so obsessed with these respective deities that she murmured their names with every breath, weaving such vivid fantasies that while she was going about her ordinary work she would often stop and hold a long conversation with one of them, falling upon her knees and offering imaginary oblations to their imaginary shapes, repeating, ‘if only my son will live’, as a kind of running refrain.
And, besides the invocation of these deities, she had yielded to all kinds of superstitious beliefs in charms, tricks and magical potions which are encouraged by the priest-craft in India.
The clean-shaven, white-apparelled chief regimental priest, Pandit Jay Ram, who was so high in the Sahibs’ favour, came and sprinkled some holy water on me and some clarified butter and rice on a sacrificial fire, even as he recited some incantations, all in consideration of five rupees, which were supposed to go to the coffers of the gods but actually bought him a nice new suit of Chinese tussore.
Gurdevi, my ‘little mother’, who had forgotten her grievances against us and rallied to my mother in the hour of her need, visiting us daily, recommended that if the Guru Granth were recited by the Sikh priest in the city who had quite unusual powers of healing, and if kara prashad (semolina pudding) were distributed, my recovery would be speedy. This was done to the tune of fifty rupees, though none of the audience of women understood a word of the holy book and were merely content to wave a horsehair fly on the Sikh Bible in turns, while the priest eagerly partook of the first share of dedicated food, rubbing his greasy hands on his beard so as not to waste even a particle of butter.
The mother of Ali came to see me, her fat, cumbersome body enshrouded in a thick cotton veil with gauze for the eyes, and declared that, according to Islam, if mutton waved over my head were offered to the eagles, the curse would be lifted from my head and I should get well.
With the implicit credulity of a woman who was half demented by her anxiety, my mother not only threw mutton to the eagles, but gave oil touched by my hand to the mendicants, food to the beggars and charities to the temples, and vowed a pilgrimage to Hardwar on the Ganges.
No miracle seems to have healed me but surgery. My wound mended in the course of five months … Of course, my mother’s interpretation was that the medicines and potions of the doctors were compounded of Indian herbs and that the ferungis had learnt their skill from our barbers; for her attitude to the English had been stiffening into an unshakable prejudice ever since Cunningham Sahib had shot a stone at me from his catapult and hurt my arm—the harbinger of the disaster from Ram Charan’s stray stone.
6
It seemed as if I had risen from the grave when I got up from bed, shrivelled up and lifeless as I had become, hardly able to walk and fainting if I did so. I would be dazed into a sort of numbness as I sat, helpless and weak, with an insipid taste in my mouth.
But, slowly, with emulsions and tonics, the hated cod liver oil and the essences of chicken that the doctor prescribed, and the oil baths and massage in which my mother believed, strength came slowly back into my bones.
The illness left a permanent mark on me, however. I felt a curious dread of everyone and everything, and became touchy, like a sensitive plant, so that tears would spring to my eyes at the least little thing. I was never to be the bonny, healthy child again and was always overshadowed by the fear of death, a kind of horror which this illness left as a black mark on my soul, intensifying my eagerness, my impetuosity and zest for experience, making me grasp at life with both hands and yet leaving my nerves taut, my body unequal to manual labour.
During my convalescence I found myself reaching out to everything with the naive enthusiasm of a child at the sight of a bright-coloured toy. I would be sitting on the verandah on a cot in the mornings, reclining on a pillow, my legs covered with a blanket, and the sun rose and set fire to the sunflowers and yellow chrysanthemums in the little garden at the lower end of the courtyard which my father had planted with samples of Sutton’s seeds that came to the Sahibs in the mail from England. I wanted to rush out and play in the garden, to take a spade and help my father dig the earth, or pluck the roses for my mother to put on the altar of her gods and godlings. I broke most of Shiva’s toys for him. But that did not content me. I wanted to go and play with the boys as soon as I heard voices outside the hall calling for Ganesh. I was ever impatient to go to school.
My curiosity became devouring. After the earlier phase of my life when I had been more or less egocentric, regarding the whole world as an extension of my wishes, when people and things outside were grasped with the natural warmth of the hand and the eye, through the stage when I had begun to cultivate the gift of speech, but exercised it only to express myself, I now began to evolve a cocoon of self-intoxication by absorbing the outside world more intensely through my whys and wherefores. I was going to leave nothing to chance.
All day I pelted questions at my mother. And while she sat immersed in her long, silent broodings, I became more of a spoilt child in my demands upon her affection and attention than I had ever been before. ‘What are the stars, mother?’ ‘And how can the sun move all day without any feet?’ ‘Where do the clouds go?’ I worried her. And as she only said, ‘Go to sleep, child, and rest,’ I would begin to trace shapes of men and women and animals in the specks of cloud and work up my own cosmogony of gods and demons in the firmament. Only once do I remember my mother answering such a question. I had asked her, ‘What is beyond the sky, mother?’ And she said, ‘Child, the God Brahma sits there with a host of angels and fairies.’ This confirmed my own impressions of shapes in the clouds. And for many years to come I was unable, even when I had read geography at school, to shake off an involuntary fear of clouds, especially in the afternoons and in the silent evenings.
One or two other impressions of those days are indelibly printed on my mind.
For instance, I have never forgotten the queer, inexplicable feeling of sensuous pleasure I got when Rukmani, the twelve-year-old daughter of Balmukand, the new ‘babu doctor’, picked me up in her arms. She was a slender, fawn-like creature, with an unwashed neck but with a heart-shaped face which shamed the warmth of gold with its tender bloom. And her long black hair fell in two plaits on her shoulders, matching the colour of her almond eyes. It was curious that I should have become conscious of physical desire so early, but, as I clung to her neck and felt the pressure of her budding breasts, as I rested my cheek against her cheek and felt the touch of her long hands, I became suddenly aware of a strange and wild rapture such as I had faintly felt in being fondled by my aunt Aqqi and Devaki.
When I was able to run about again, we would go and play hide-and-seek in the hall at the end of the courtyard, I hiding and Rukmani searching. I did not want to be concealed too long, however, and allowed myself to be found, for every time she discovered me she would lift me up in her arms, laughing, tickling and shrill, and I felt again and again the secret thrill of which I did not understand the meaning till a long time after.
Rukmani would take me back to where our respective mothers sat in the winter sunshine, sewing or spi
nning, doing phulkaris, eating radishes and gossiping. And here she would start another game, pretending to cook food for me in an imaginary kitchen. The utensils were symbolized by Shiva’s toys, the bread was symbolized by a dough of earth, and pebbles and flowers and leaves made the various vegetables. And I would have eaten them but for the timely warnings of my mother to Rukmani.
Excited by a complete belief in this illusion, I improvised a whole house by adjusting two worn-out hemp string beds which stood in the courtyard into a sort of tent, improved the setting by hanging loose sheets on their sides, and elaborated complex strategems to fill this life with details drawn from my parents’ life, mostly quarrels, rendered with such dramatic insistence, especially in pulling her by the hair, that Rukmani completely refused to be my wife or play at living together in this dream palace. Anyhow, one day my mother wanted these charpais and the whole doll’s house came toppling over, so that I had to invent an imaginary school instead, with myself now as the master Din Gul, now as the munshi Trilok Chand, now as the drillmaster, and with poor Rukmani as the pupil who had to bear the brunt of it all.
Another sport which Rukmani and I played together was the dyeing of sparrows. This is a traditional game played by lovers in the dalliances immediately after marriage, and I fancy it takes its cue from the need to find a vehicle to encourage tenderness among the newly wed. Of course, I did not know anything about its deeper significances, but perhaps Rukmani did, though she seemed quite innocent when she suggested it. Perhaps it was this simplicity of ours which made our mothers look on amusedly without warning us not to indulge in it. For me, however, it was one more flight into the new kingdom I had established away from the mundane realities of the sickbed.
The game consisted in first catching some sparrows. Rukmani and I would sit down by the threshold of the verandah and sprinkle some lentils before us, first a little way away to tempt the sparrows, then, when they came to peck at the grains, a little nearer us, and, when we had won their confidence, still nearer, till the sparrows became so unafraid as to come and eat out of our hands. In this way we would ensnare a sparrow and dye it in a little cup of liquid dye we kept ready by us. Then we would release it and it would fly away, coloured a vivid green. Next day we would use a deep crimson dye and the next day yellow or blue. In the seven days of the week we would colour the seven sparrows we caught in the seven colours of the rainbow. And our happiness knew no bounds as we saw these sparrows, transformed by our hands, fly all over the barracks, confusing the sepoys, who looked with hands over their eyes at the queer phenomenon of sparrows which had become different overnight. And when these little coloured birds alighted in our own courtyard, we shrieked with joy and our mothers affected to share our pleasure in the colours that we had set free in the heights of the sky.
But my laughter and that of Rukmani were not confined to the sunlight. Timidly kneeling by her, with my hands stretched out with grains of lentils on the palms, tense with the breathless suspense of waiting to win the confidence of the sparrows, my eyes would fall on her ivory hands, coloured with henna and on the little gems of sweat which bedewed the tip of her nose, and I was overcome with an unbearable urge to demolish the restraint of the hunter and to embrace her. Seated by the threshold, still as a statue, her mouth flowering in jests which she could not utter, she would lean her head over my face and give me good counsel in whispers gentle as the song which half closes the eye: ‘Childling, don’t stir, otherwise they will never come.’
And the perfume of her body drugged me into a silence that trembled on my lips like a tremor at the shame of a thing said in profile, and I would bend my hoarse soul towards her.
And then if a sparrow came into her hand and she gently closed her grip on it, she would lift its shrill bill to my face and caress me with the back of her hand with an exquisite tenderness that was half meant to quieten the bird and half in admonition of my impetuous desire to catch hold of the little thing.
Among the onrushes of silence, ebbing and flowing over our foreheads, I was allowed to caress the sparrow in the henna-dyed scarlet chasms of her hands, before the bird flew in a sweep overhead and our eyes met in a joy inexplicable except by the light which filled them.
As the swift wings of the twilight covered the limitless sky, as the shades of darkness deepened and I had to go to sleep, I would insist on my mother telling me a fairy story.
My mother had a vast fund of folk tales, having heard them in her childhood from her own mother, as legends, fables, myths and other narratives of gods and men and birds and beasts have been told in endless variations for thousands of years on the flat roofs of the mud huts in the villages. But since the irksome drudgery of cooking with damp firewood, cleaning utensils with ashes and a hundred other domestic concerns dominated her life, she needed a great deal of persuasion to break off the housework and recite a tale.
‘Oh, mother, tell me a story!’ I coaxed her importunately.
‘Vay, go to sleep! Haven’t you gone to sleep yet?’ she invariably answered.
And then after she had been continually pestered, she would sit down and tell me the story of the queen who was turned into a rose by a witch, or the tortoise who talked too much, or about the wicked moneylender who was outwitted by the shrewd farmer.
So sure was my mother’s gift for storytelling, so vivid her manner, so wonderful her sense of character that sometimes I found myself rapt in her tales with an intensity of wonder that precluded sleep and left me tossing in bed from side to side with excitement for long hours afterwards. And I would look out through the chinks of the doors to the sky where the stars stood silent, without a gleam, a glitter or a throb, and felt enchanted and afraid with the memories of monsters and fairies, laughed to myself over the folly of the tiger who let himself be deceived by the jackal and the crocodile who came to grief through the sly cunning of a fox, lay spellbound by the adventures of the daredevil heroines, till the weight of fatigue closed my eyes even against my will, while my mother was still halfway through her tale.
One of the stories which my mother told me was about the adventures of Raja Rasalu, a bloodcurdling narrative of how a young prince issued forth from his palace against the wishes of his parents, fought the demons, became an ascetic and finally won the hand of a fairy princess by defeating her father at chess.
The heroic character of this tale, with its mixture of exalted and noble passions, refined thought and actions, had kept me breathless and tense with excitement as various episodes of its long narrative were told to me. It fired my imagination so that when on subsequent evenings my mother asked me which tale I should like her to recite, I would generally choose the story of the adventures of Raja Rasalu.
And some days later, buckling the wooden sword which Godu, the carpenter, had made for me, to a band round my waist, I set out exactly as Rasalu had done, without asking my parents’ permission, and adventured into the hills across the old river bed, a quarter of a mile away from home.
I was talking to myself as I sped along, hopping over splinters and stones in the desolate river bed. The brownish-ochre hills towered there beyond my gaze, sun-kissed and soaked in a vast quietude, like the remote fortress homes of the Pathans. And, ascending the hills by a pathway that had been cut by the Pathan goatherds through the bushes and the cacti, the scrub and the grey osiers which grew in sheer abundance over the crags, I reached the summit of a minor incline. Then I descended the slope of a dell, exerting myself on my own in a highly dramatic, imaginary fight with every monstrous cactus that came my way, cutting and slashing with a fine, absorbed bravery of which the towering purple hills were the silent and awestruck witnesses. I stood here for a moment, the panting and triumphant master of all that I surveyed among the summits of the copper-coloured crags, and, with a dull ache at the back of my head, waited to think of the possibility of further adventures.
Through the deeps of stillness about me, disturbed only by a soft breeze in the hot sunny afternoon, I could hear the sound of wa
ter. I looked round and on the slopes of the dell at my feet I saw a crystal-clear pool issuing from some natural spring. I descended towards it through a little valley full of lush, tall grass, poppies, mushrooms and wild anemones. My heart pulled back with a sudden fear as I approached the water. But, recalling that Rasalu was very bold and not at all afraid of the wilds and forests, I took a palmful of water and drank to quench my thirst.
Then, still bound in the spell of my fancies, I capered here and there, exploring for the nest of a bird which I heard cooing with a deep, resonant voice. But I could not locate it and sat down to rest under the scanty shade of a berry tree. The shrill cries of vultures haunted the landscape and filled it with the dread of a terrible desolation, especially as I had heard that vultures fed on corpses and lived in lonely places, haunted by jinns.
I got up and ran.
Hardly had I gone three steps when I heard a sudden, sinister whistle and saw, on one side, a long cobra creep out of a bush with its terrible, glistening black body and push its hood up with a flicker of its split tongues, as if it were full of a merciless anger and hate.
I stood transfixed for a moment and could not even shriek.
But the snake dipped its head and went its way into the bush grass where the frogs croaked.
I ran, shaking, terror-stricken and dumb.
A little way up the hill my trembling knees seemed to stiffen with a cramp and I slowed my pace, looking back the while to make sure that the snake was not following me and talking to myself, cursing, blaming and reassuring my frightened will by turns.
As I proceeded ahead, my father stared me in the face ten yards away, angry and sullen and hard.
I began to whine in anticipation of the beating I would receive. But my father only abused me and lifted me up in disgust.
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