My Days (5 page)

When my father came home we stopped playing and shouting and became restrained. Having finished our dinner, we lay on a row of beds in the living-room carrying on some quiet game—such as enumerating, without looking, all the pictures on the wall. The enumeration started with “God Vishnu on His Eagle” and ended with the sixteenth picture, entitled “Vanity”—a woman decked in brocade sari and scintillating jewellery, the only non-god in the series. My mother's hobby was to decorate litho prints of gods and goddesses with gold lace and sequins and hang them on the walls. We conducted our sport in whispers and suppressed giggles as long as Father's voice was heard in the dining-hall. Mother always kept him company at dinner. He would describe to her his day at school, or criticize the food, or argue some point with considerable heat. Eventually, when we were sure that he was back in his room upstairs, we became riotous and flung about blankets and pillows. Mother, after putting the youngest one to sleep upstairs and after seeing Father settled in his chair with his reading lamp and books (he read until after midnight), came down to give us each a tumbler of milk, and then sat down in the corridor for a while to converse with my grandmother (who would already be planning to leave me behind and return to Madras). From time to time Mother warned us, “You must all sleep now, Father is reading. You will disturb him if you talk.”

It was my brother who taught me how to acquire and train grasshoppers. All afternoon we wandered on the outskirts of the town, peered into every ditch and culvert, stirred up the weeds and trapped the grasshoppers in little cannisters and brought them home; he always let me keep the green ones, and the large brown variety was reserved for his own pleasure. We kept them each in a cardboard box perforated for air, and stuffed in green leaves, sugar, and what not for their nourishment, and tried to teach them tricks, but invariably found them dead two mornings later. Although puzzled, we never wasted time in trying to unravel the mystery of their death, but sallied forth to collect fresh ones in the afternoon.

When the eight weeks of my vacation were over and I had to go back to Madras, I felt desolate. Having got used to the company of my brothers and sisters, to my mother's attention, and to servants, it would seem an impossibility to go back to the drab street companions, the abusive schoolmasters, the scrabby benchmates from the Boarding, and above all the loneliness of the Madras home. But I had no choice. A postcard from that end in my uncle's clear-cut calligraphy intimated the date of my school's reopening and the fact that I was promoted to the next standard. (I have no doubt that I was pushed up by devious means, as the old school clerk who noted down passes and failures in the register was a constant visitor to our house and received many small favours from my uncle. Later he became my private tutor at home for many years and navigated me through the perilous seas of arithmetic and geography in particular, sometimes flourishing his cane as an aid to his teaching; occasionally he promised me solitary and starving confinement, in a cell supposed to be right under the crucifix atop the Lutheran Mission School; yet he was helpful at the time of promotions.)

My mother prepared several types of sweets to last me for weeks, and saw me off in the company of someone going to Madras. During my departure, my father hovered about to give me parting advice: “Try not to become a Madras vagrant,” he said jocularly and gave me pocket money.

I remember being taken to Chennapatna unexpectedly again when Madras was bombarded from the sea by
Emden
in the First World War. Madrasis, not being used to any war since the days of Robert Clive, did not really realize that the city was being shelled from the sea. They noticed the searchlight beams sweeping the sky from the sea followed by explosions, and, watching from their terraces, wondered at the phenomenon of thunder and lightning with a sky full of stars. One shell hit the High Court building and shattered its compound wall; shrapnel were found in the Law College verandah next day; another shell hit the oil storage at the harbour and set it ablaze—a fire I could see from the roof of our house three or four miles away. The Crown Prince of Germany, commanding
Emden
, was roaming the high seas and sinking Allied ships, and while passing the Indian shores had shelled Madras just for amusement—without any serious feeling of hostility, perhaps, with the friendliest feeling at heart. Such is the complex stuff that warriors are made of; they destroy (or try to) for fun. It seems incredible that a commander of a battleship should come all the way, take all that trouble, to knock off a few feet of a High Court compound wall and set a tank of oil on fire. It scared the citizens who dwelt in the eastern part of the city—in George Town, nearer the coast—but left indifferent those who lived just a couple of miles in the interior. Many who lived in George Town harnessed their carriages and moved westward in the direction of Kilpauk. It was in keeping with an earlier move, when the sea was rough with cyclone and it was prophesied that the world would end that day, and many had their carriages harnessed and all valuables packed in readiness to drive off to Conjeevaram, forty miles away, the moment the sea should be noticed to rise and advance towards the city.

W
hen my third brother was three months old, my father was transferred from Chennapatna to a high school at a place called Hassan. He was advised by his friends to tell his departmental heads at Bangalore that his child was only three months old and could not yet be moved. But he was a disciplined officer and would not dream of asking for any special favour.

So for my next vacation, I had to go through a more complicated journey; an all-night trip up to Bangalore, a change of train for part of another night, a stop-over at a small station called Arisikere, a few hours of sleep on a desk in the waiting-room before joining a caravan of bullock-carts starting at dawn. At the proper time, I was awakened and put into a huge mat-covered waggon drawn by a pair of bullocks; I sat on a bed of straw covered over with a carpet; a stalwart peon from Hassan high school was seated beside the driver. Manja was his name. He was my sole escort from this point on (someone else travelling in this direction had brought me up to Arisikere from Madras). Manja kept talking in Kannada, which I had yet to pick up. He had a long moustache, and wore ear-rings, and chattered away with news of the Hassan home. Much of what he said was above my head, but he took a lot of trouble to explain in broken Tamil, “The first thing you must promise me is to prostrate yourself at the feet of your parents the moment you see them. Otherwise I will never speak to you.” I didn't know why I should have cared whether he spoke to me or not, but somehow I felt intimidated, and vowed that I would prostrate myself at my parents' feet, although the notion was repulsive (as it still remains) that one should fall at the feet of another. But there was no contradicting him, as I was at his mercy completely.

Part of the way as we travelled along, Manja got off and walked ahead of the caravan, carrying a staff menacingly. Some spots in that jungle and mountain country were well-known retreats of highway robbers; one form of protection was to travel in a closely moving caravan with Manja waving a staff at the head of the column, uttering blood-curdling challenges. That was enough to keep off robbers in those days. We passed along miles and miles of tree-shaded highway, gigantic mango and blueberry trees and lantana shrubs in multicoloured bloom stretching away endlessly. A couple of times the bullocks were rested beside a pond or a well. The road wound up and down steep slopes—the sort of country I had never known before, for Hassan is actually a hill-station. (They continue to call it Poor Man's Ooty—Ooty being a hill-resort at a height of eight thousand feet to which government officials and affluent persons retreat in summer.) The overpowering smell of straw in the waggon and the slow pace of the bullocks with their bells jingling made me drowsy, although I was troubled at the back of my mind by Manja's injunction. It was a twenty-seven-mile ride. After hours of tossing on straw, we came to a bungalow set in a ten-acre field. Even before we turned into the gate Manja warned me to remember my vow. But the moment I was received into the fold at the trellised ivy-covered porch, I totally ignored Manja, and never looked in his direction, while he carried my baggage in. He never mentioned the matter again during my stay of three months; and I am certain that I would have shocked my parents if I had done anything so theatrical as prostrate myself on the floor.

My younger sister and brother were respectively seven and five—old enough now to be taken seriously by me. We played endlessly in the vast compound. The air was clear and a gold mohur tree in front was always in bloom. The house was of the colonial type, with arched doorways and high ceilings and Venetian shutters. The trellised front porch was full of some purple winged flowers, constantly parachuting down. The gold mohur yielded enormous quantities of flowers. We plucked the long stamens out of each bud, hooked up their heads from opposite sides and tugged, and whosoever lost the head, lost a point. We could sit under the tree and play this game for hours.

My elder brother gave me his company whenever he could—but he was extremely busy, being involved in various sporting and athletic activities and in great demand among his friends; he spent most of his time outside our home and came in late every day through a gap in the lantana hedge, slipping into his room unobtrusively from a side door. He had to adopt this device since he was constantly admonished to return home before dark (an impossible condition for him). Hassan fields and roads swarmed with cobras, and the hedges were particularly dangerous, but he did not care. Once a tiger had escaped from a jungle and was seen here and there, and the town was in a panic; people shut the doors in the evenings, never venturing out after dusk. But my brother continued to come home at his own hour, bringing in fresh tales of the tiger's depredations—how someone was mauled here, a cow carried away there, and so forth. My father also continued his habit of club and tennis after school and never came home before nine in the evening. But he had the protection of Manja, who took a hurricane lantern and his bamboo staff to escort my father home safely. If there were more tigers and cobras to be feared, Manja only turned the wick of the lantern a little brighter and carried a heavier staff. As usual, we children were all in bed with blankets drawn to our chins before Father arrived, Hassan being so cold as to make my teeth chatter even in summer.

Some days my elder brother would take me out with him. We would go to a reddish, muddy pond to be reached from the back part of our vast compound, stand ankle-deep in the water, and fling stones to create ripples. Pieces of hollow reeds would come ashore riding on the ripples. I think we often risked being drowned when we sneaked out there, the only precaution my brother could take being a warning to me not to tell anyone at home. We needed a retreat like this because he brought cigarettes with him and we smoked. He had peppermints also at hand to cover our tobacco breath when we returned home. While smoking we were afraid of being seen by someone and denounced to the police, but this pond was a secure place; except for some insignificant young goatherd, no one came that way. We also smoked at home, under a zinc shed at the edge of our spacious compound. My brother used to tuck away the matches and cigarette packets under the eaves of that shed beyond the well. One afternoon my elder sister caught us red-handed, and we let her go after extracting a solemn promise that she would tell no one; we also gave her peppermints. But the moment she went in, she reported the matter to my mother, who later in the evening took me aside and asked, “Is it true that you smoke cigarettes? Is this what you have learnt at Madras? I'm going to tell your father and he will, I am sure, take the skin off your back.” I had never been addressed so roughly by my mother at any time. I quailed and did not know what to say, but stood blinking stupidly until she said, “Go and eat your dinner, you scamp. Where is the other fellow?”