Seven Summers

by Mulk Raj Anand

  No one having seen me for five hours, the family had been in a panic and people had gone out in different directions to look for me. A sentry at the Quarter Guard near our house had apparently noticed me and directed my father across the river bed.

  ‘I am afraid, the mother of Harish,’ said my father when we came back, ‘the brain of this child has been affected by the hurt.’

  ‘Hai! Hai! it cannot be,’ my mother cried, half demented. ‘No, it cannot be! My child, my beautiful son!’ And she gathered me in her arms protectively.

  ‘I am afraid,’ my father said, ‘if he is not insane, he has turned into an idiot. For I found him talking to himself as he was wandering about alone in the hills, unaware of the danger of being carried away by a wolf or a bear …’

  But there was a kind of secret understanding between my mother and myself, for she could enter the fairy world of my imaginings with the naive faith of the peasant woman. In fact, she was building this world up for me every day, with stories and legends and myths.

  One of these myths turned upon the meaning of my name, and I remember it vividly as she told it to me again and again:

  ‘Of the god Krishna, after whom you are named, my son, there are many stories,’ she began. ‘He was a prince brought up by a cowherd. And he played with the other cowherd boys as he took the cattle to graze in the pastures of Brindaban. The milkmaids sang and danced with him. And Krishna was their lover …’

  ‘How could the prince come to live with the cowherds, mother?’ I asked.

  ‘It all came to be this way,’ said my mother. ‘Once upon a time, there was a king of Mathura named Ugarsen. He had a beautiful wife. A demon fell in love with her and she had a son by him, who was called Kansa. Even as a child Kansa was nasty and horrible. And when he grew up, he put his father in prison and ascended the gaddi. Kansa was a very cruel king. And under his rule, even the patient earth groaned. The earth took the form of a cow and went to the gods to complain about Kansa. The gods conducted her to Brahma, who sent them all to Shiva, who in turn took them to Vishnu. The god Vishnu promised to deliver the earth from the oppression of Kansa. And he decided to come to the earth as a human being. And then he came …

  ‘Kansa had a sister named Devaki. While she was being married off to a noble called Vasudev, Kansa heard a strange voice say: “The eighth child of this woman will destroy you.” Voices like that often spoke to people in the past, son, and men acted on these voices.

  ‘Upon this, Kansa wanted to kill Devaki. But her husband promised that he would give any children she had to the king. Kansa spared her, but put Vasudev and Devaki under guard. For Kansa was frightened, very frightened, my child, frightened of God’s wrath …

  ‘Six children were born to Devaki. And Kansa destroyed one babe after another, so cruel was he.

  ‘When Devaki was going to have her seventh child, the godVishnu arranged for the seed to be taken from Devaki’s womb and put into that of Rohini, another wife of Vasudev. This child was called Balram.

  ‘When Devaki was going to have her eighth child, Vishnu appeared to Vasudev and said, “Tonight Devaki will deliver her child. Take it to Yasoda, wife of Nanda, the herdsman. She too will bear a child. Place your child by her side and bring hers to Devaki.”

  ‘Now, it happened as Vishnu had said, and at midnight Krishna was born, son, Krishna was born …

  ‘Kansa’s guards were fast asleep. Vasudev took the child and bore it to Nanda’s house. The great serpent Seshnag went before him as a guide. As it happened, the river Jumna was in flood. But the miracle was that the river cleared a way between, on Vasudev’s approach. And he reached Nanda’s house. And, very cleverly, he got into Yasoda’s room. And, exchanging the baby, he returned home.

  ‘When the guards woke up next morning and heard the baby’s cry, they seized the child and called King Kansa. He threw it in the air to kill it with his sword, when lo! the child flew up to the sky and said, “Fool! I am Yogindra, the great illusion. The child that is destined to kill you is born and is alive and well!”

  ‘Kansa was full of fear and retired to a dark room. But, thinking that no more harm could come from Vasudev and Devaki, he set them free. He was a fool, son, a stupid imbecile …

  ‘Vasudev sent his son Balram also to live with Nanda. And he asked the cowherd to take both Krishna and Balram from Mathura to Gokul. Nanda took the children to Gokul and lived there among his kinsmen grazing his cattle on the rich pastures. And they were well and happy.

  ‘Kansa could not find the child Krishna. So, tyrant that he was, he ordered all the children of his kingdom to be killed off. He got hold of the ugly Putana, a female demon, on sucking whose breast, children died. This demon gave Krishna her breast to suck. But Krishna took it and sucked so hard that Putana died instantaneously …

  ‘Now, after this news reached Kansa, he knew that Krishna was destined to kill him. So he sent a demon to catch Krishna and put him to death. Kansa lived on sucking people’s blood! Some people are evil, son, and Kansa was one such.

  ‘Krishna was wandering in the woods when the demon appeared. He caught the demon by the leg and dashed his head against a rock. For the gods are more powerful than evil men and demons …

  ‘Another demon was then sent by Kansa. This assumed the form of a huge raven and caught Krishna in his beak. The boy grew hot and the bird had to let go. Then Krishna crushed the raven’s beak with his foot and turned it inside out with his hands, thus destroying it, the fiend! …

  ‘Now, still another demon was sent by Kansa. This time it was a snake. Krishna deliberately expanded inside the snake’s body, till the snake’s stomach became bigger and bigger. And it burst and died. Your namesake, my son, was terrible in his wrath!

  ‘And Krishna grew up, a handsome lad, the colour of the clouds. And he played pranks with the milkmaids. For he stole the curds and the milk at home and said someone else had taken them. And he would go into the gardens of the cowherds with the other boys. And once, while the milkmaids were bathing in the river, he stole their clothes, the naughty boy, and crept up a tree till they came out naked and had to beg him for their clothes. And he used to play on his flute ever so sweetly. And then he danced with the gopis, especially favouring Radha, the young wife of a Brahmin. He fell in love with her …

  ‘And as he grew up, he defeated all the demons in the countryside, including the serpent Kaliya, which used to kill the cowherds and their cattle.

  ‘And one day he lifted the mountain Govardhan and held it like an umbrella over Gokul to save the village from the heavy rains caused by the god Indra, the god of thunder and rain …

  ‘Now Kansa, who heard of Krishna’s exploits, thought of a plot to kill the boy. He sent a nobleman, Akrura, who was known for his goodness, to Gokul, to ask Krishna and Balram to come and see a festival of sports he was holding. Akrura gave the boys the message, but advised them not to go. Krishna assured the messenger that all would be well and decided to go.

  ‘The two brothers then started off towards Mathura amid the tears of the gopis who were loth to part with them.

  ‘A demon named Kesin waylaid them in the shape of a horse. But Krishna thrust his hand into the horse’s mouth, till the animal swelled and burst. And then they went on their way again.

  ‘As they got near the city, they felt that they must borrow some clean clothes, for they were poorly clad. They met the king’s washermen on the banks of the Jumna and asked them to lend them some clothes. The washermen were on Kansa’s side and refused. So Krishna thrust the washermen aside, took the clothes of Kansa and, dressed in this finery, entered Mathura.

  ‘Two strong wrestlers had been told by Kansa to be ready to kill Krishna and Balram. And, just in case they did not succeed, a mad elephant was kept ready to trample them to death. But Krishna slew the wrestlers and the elephant. Not only that, he also slew the soldiers of king Kansa and the demon-king as well. He was strong, strong and terrible in his wrath.

  ‘Then he released Ugarsen,
the old father of Kansa, and put him on the throne.

  ‘And after this, Krishna and Balram took up their abode in Mathura. And their parents, Vasudev and Devaki, joined them …

  ‘After some years, Mathura was attacked by two demon kings, who were friends of Kansa. Unable to defend the city, Krishna took his people to Dwarka, and Dwarka was the land by the sea …

  ‘Here he built a fort and gathered a large army, with which he went and recaptured Mathura, the city by the dark Jumna.

  ‘And then he defeated all the bad kings and married Rukmini, the daughter of Bhishma, king of Vidarbha.

  ‘And when the war between Kurus and Pandus broke out, he was on the side of the good Pandus against the evil Kurus. And the advice he gave to the Pandu Prince, Arjun, is in the book Bhagavad Gita, which I read daily and which all of you laugh at me for reading …’

  Inspired by my mother’s stories of gods and goddesses, I was more keen than most boys on that strange spectacle called the Ras, which was performed by itinerant players who came to the cantonment.

  An open tent, shamiana, was generally put up near the regimental bazaar on a maidan, and large durrees were spread underneath, and a couple of wooden divans from the shop of Ramanand, the bania, were improvised into the form of a stage, a small tent being pitched nearby for use as a green room. As soon as we saw these arrangements being made, we knew that the Rasdharis, the itinerant players, had come. And we would besiege the small tent in which they were making up for the performance. The players generally shooed us off, because they did not want to reveal that some of them were boys who were dressing up as girls.

  So we would go and roll about on the carpet or mount the platform built for the stage, until the orderly was within sight.

  Then we ran home and pestered mother to give us the evening meal quickly, so that we could rush and take our seats nearest to the stage. Usually mother was not amenable to any persuasion, and it was only because our father had a place reserved for him in the front row that we got a look-in at all, the bandsmen’s sons, the washermen’s children and the sweeper boys having to peer in from a distance as best they could.

  But everyone knew the story of Rama and Sita and Lakshman from having heard the tale narrated by their mothers or uncles and aunts, or from the previous year’s enactment of the pageant of the Ramayana by some other group of itinerant players. So everyone was absorbed and made up with his imagination what he could not see or hear.

  For, seated as the audience of sepoys on the even ground, with the chairs of the white Sahibs and Indian officers obscuring their view, and with talking or whispering all the time, the seeing and the hearing was nowhere near perfect.

  Somehow it did not seem so essential that people should see and hear as that they should be sitting there, all together. And a warmth and an atmosphere of happiness was worked up which was contagious—the appearance of the comic pierrot with red nose and spotted costume causing laughter and amusement of a kind such as even the frowns on the faces of the ‘Karnel’ Sahib or the ‘Ajitan’ Sahib could not suppress. Similarly, the antics of Hanuman, the monkey god, made everyone happy. The defeat of Ravana, the ten-headed king, worked the sepoys up to a frenzy. And a song sung by Clayton, the bandsman, dressed up as Sita, seemed to go straight to everyone’s heart!

  The atmosphere relaxed considerably after the ‘red faces’, as the English officers were called, departed. But by that time most of us children had fallen asleep and had to be carried back home by an orderly.

  I glimpsed enough, however, from behind my blinking eyelids to recognize most of the characters of the Ramayana, connected as they were with the background of the myths and legends which my mother had told us from the old epics and the folk tales. And, impressionable as I was, I felt I was qualified to act merely by seeing the itinerant players do their charade.

  So that when, after a few days, the amateurs of the regiment put on the same play at the time of Dusehra, the festival which commemorates Rama’s victory over Ravana, King of Lanka, I insisted on playing the role of a little angel who had to stand next to Sita.

  My father’s influence exerted itself successfully and I was allowed to assume that role. But my excitement at being allowed to act was so intense that I don’t remember much about the actual performance. Except that I recall how I was dressed up in finery and had a couple of wings attached to my arms, and had powder and paint put on my face, with bright golden stars stuck all over my forehead and cheeks; and how, immediately I entered, with Clayton dressed up as Sita on the platform, I sat down, put my head on his lap and went to sleep. As the angels were supposed to keep close guard on Sita and remain near her all night, my unconscious slumber seemed, I was told later, to be a very realistic display of histrionic ability.

  Naturally, I thought myself a very superior being indeed for days afterwards and was also accepted by the other boys at my own valuation.

  Encouraged by the boys’ friendliness, I even ventured out to play with them.

  But as their games had grown no less violent since the time when I received the chance blow on my head which had levelled me out for months, and as they were very careful not to draw me into any of these games lest I should get hurt again and draw upon them the wrath of my father, I could only hang around while they played.

  Of course, most of the games in their repertory were fairly well known to me and I could reconcile myself to the role of distant spectator. But one day I saw Ganesh stealing out towards the empty river bed with Chotta, Ali, Ram Charan and company. My curiosity was aroused by the furtive manner in which they had stood about discussing how to evade me. So, as soon as they began to sneak away in different directions, I surmised that they were up to some new, exciting and hazardous game.

  After they had been gone for a few minutes, I followed them in the direction in which I imagined they had proceeded. They had not got far and, afraid to evade me any longer in case I should tell upon them to father, they made no attempt to run away.

  Only, when I got near them they tried to persuade me to stay out at a safe distance from them in the river bed, for, they said, they were going to play at war with bows and arrows, with one of the nearby hillocks as the fort to be conquered. I agreed to play the passive role of the spectator, as there was nothing to do but to yield to their advice after the last disaster.

  But oh! the ache in the childish heart, the torment of anger at being refused and the fear of my father’s wrath lest something should really happen to me again!

  With tear-dimmed eyes, with my head swirling with the excitement of the mock fight in which the boys were going to engage, with my body already allied to their violent gestures and movements, and with my voice hoarse with shouting what they shouted, I persuaded myself to believe that I was the general with the red tabs on his uniform ordering them into battle.

  They were not fighting with imitation rifles, however. And they were not repeating the shouts of the ordinary sepoy’s drill. They seemed to have invented some weird slogans of the Red Indian tongue, as I learnt afterwards, and they were fighting with a ferocity which I had never seen in their wars before.

  All was frenzy and sweat in this new kind of battle under the glare of the late afternoon sun. For the boys of the attacking team ran from stone to stone, their bows uplifted, manoeuvring to get near the hillock, while the defending team just shot down their symbolic arrows and felled the attackers. And according to the agreed rules of this war, the victims of the cataclysm lay down dead as soon as an arrow came near them.

  The contagion of the warmth and hysteria built up by the warriors was too much for me. I stood there enacting the whole battle in my fiery soul. I swayed with each body and inclined this way and that. I shouted at the top of my voice imitations of their weird war cries. And then, unable to bear the isolation from the game, I ran impetuously through the battlefield up towards the hill. A little stick poised towards my uplifted arm was my arrow and the arm itself was the bow. And I advanced fleet foot, as tho
ugh distance were nothing to me.

  The boys stopped their game and shouted at me, dissuading me from entering the arena. But I was heedless, and my soul cried, ‘I shall go, I shall go alone and conquer the fort …’

  And, with an alliance with the wind which I seemed to have established, with an alliance with the ramparts of stones in the dry river bed that accrued to my feet, swallowing my spittle, I struggled towards the high sanctuary of the fort’s peak.

  All the boys, whose war had been prolonged amid the clamour of their voices and their intricate manoeuvres, looked on at me dazed and still, afraid to continue their game and yet bitterly hostile at having to lose their battle, not to the opposing team but to that stupid little Bully, whom they dared not prevent from conquering their fort.

  I rose to the crest of the hill, my ambition poised in the rhythm of my body, though my limbs were heavy with fatigue and my breath came and went quickly. And as I stood on the top of the hillock I shouted: ‘I am the conqueror, I am the conqueror!’

  The boys looked aghast but did not speak. And then they began to drift away, leaving me there alone, monarch of all I surveyed.

  At that I fell to crying and ran after them. But they had dispersed and I was left shouting: ‘You will see that I will conquer all of you.’

  7

  When I had almost recuperated from my illness, my father began to coach me at home in the evenings to enable me to make up for the ‘five months of idleness’, as he called my enforced absence from school. For if there was one thing which my father hated, it was the thought of his sons being late by one precious year in their progress towards the goal of his ambition for us—the diploma of the Matriculation Examination of the Punjab University. ‘I never missed a year at school,’ he would say, ‘nor did your eldest brother. You must work hard and not bring disgrace on my name by failing to pass any year.’

  My main difficulty after my illness lay in arithmetic. I had been well grounded enough in the elements of this subject in my first and second primary classes, and even the most difficult multiplication, subtraction and division had been easy work, but I had been absent from school when the intricate question of calculating compound interest had been explained in the third primary class and the formulae of ratio-proportion expounded. The schoolmaster beat me for not knowing anything about compound interest, and the fear of his rod made me a dunce so far as arithmetic was concerned. The master would not take the trouble to go over them again in the class because he wanted to be engaged as a private tutor to me. But to my father the extra fee of five rupees for an hour’s tuition seemed preposterous. And as my father was in a panic at the thought that I might miss a year, he began to help me with the courses in view of the impending examination. ‘You do the home tasks given by the master when you come back in the afternoon,’ he said, ‘and I shall go through the arithmetic course with you from beginning to end in the evenings.’