The Eighteenth Parallel (3 page)

'A water buffalo is not likely to eat your boiler,' Father pointed out.

The mooing set in at three in the morning. The buffalo hadn't been fed or milked the evening before. Even Father must have had second thoughts about his remarks concerning the boiler. The man who brought us our milk said he didn't know how to milk a buffalo. Father was afraid even to open the bathroom door, but then the . daily habits of a household couldn't be postponed indefinitely. It was Mother who finally let the buffalo out, and eventually milked it too.

The addition of a water buffalo to our household effected a drastic change in our eating habits. It dropped down generous quantities of dung which we learnt to collect into heaps once we'd overcome our initial disgust. Mother acquired milking skills without any instruction or training, and I followed after as the oldest child of the family.

For quite some time, we didn't give the animal a name. We began to feel rather guilty about this, particularly because the milk had greatly enhanced the quality of the coffee at home. We began to call her Lakshmi. This caused many jokes to be made about us. Imagine calling a buffalo – a buffalo, mind you, not a cow – after the goddess of wealth! Meanwhile the animal was shaping nicely in her new surroundings and was beginning to take liberties. She would climb the half-dozen steps that led from the kitchen to the backyard and eat the blackgram dal and rice left soaking to be ground for dosais. This was easily forgiven. Not so the other predilection she had of snapping herself free of the stake and visiting the church, thus sorely trying the padre's principles of Christian charity. The name Lakshmi soon yielded place to 'Crooked Horns', which stuck.

We employed a boy to take Crooked Horns to graze near the hillock. The grass was thin in these parts and fodder had to be bought. Hay was not to be had as this was not paddy country. Only guinea grass and maize stalks were available. The grass could be fed to the animal as it was, but the stalks had to be chopped up. Since Lancer Barracks was very far from the city, the grass carters did not come there often, which meant that we had to buy in great quantities when they did, and we needed to have a good store of fodder at home. Despite all our care, emergencies such as not having a blade of grass in the manger, were not uncommon. A frugal feed would tell at once on the girth of the animal, and there she would stand, restless and flustered, the pathetic moistness of her translucent eyes making you want to look away. Whenever Crooked Horns went without her feed, we – Father, Mother and I – ate little and slept even less. We would wait all day in the hope of seeing a grass cart. If it didn't turn up, I would ride two miles to Monda and carry back twentyfive bundles of grass. Twentyfive bundles didn't last more than half an hour for the buffalo, but that was all I could fetch on my small bicycle. It was impossible to persuade any grass carter to come home because they were reluctant to come a whole three miles on the strength of a boy's word. Now the changes effected by the buffalo and its successors – buffaloes, cows and calves – on this chapter of my life which I might call playdays would require some telling indeed. Summing it up in a few words is impossible. Briefly, a water buffalo was trying its best, unwittingly of course, to dislodge an international game from my consciousness where Santanam had placed it. There were those young scions of a Tamil family in Lancer Barracks, Krishnaswamy and his two younger brothers who, together with the buffalo, robbed me of much of the joy of playtime during my school days. I owed them my first serious thoughts of murder and suicide.

Krishnaswamy's house was the last in the second row of houses in Lancer Barracks just as mine was the last in the first row. His father wore a white uniform and took a train every second day—whether as a guard or a ticket-examiner, I couldn't say for certain. Anyway, in my eyes, he was a very high official. Krishnaswamy was older than me and was my senior at school. Balu, the first of his younger brothers, was in my class but in another section. The youngest, Goku, was in the next lower class. The brothers' sing-song speech with no final elisions sounded curiously precise. People from Palghat in Kerala spoke Tamil with this special accent, my mother said.

The person I came across most was Balu. In school, Balu was like any other Tamil boy among the hundreds of Telugu and Muslim boys, a lost sheep. But when he had his brothers with him, he was a terror.

How the whole thing began eludes my memory, but Balu and I had somehow become 'enemies'. Once this 'enemy' status was formalised, Balu started to both come to school and go back with his brothers. One evening, on my way home, the three brothers walked beside me and kept nudging and jostling me to the edge of the road. First to the foot-track along the road, then to the verge overgrown with thorny bushes, and finally into the ditch. Since our city never got much rain, and there was no traffic on the road, I just got up from the dry ditch, dusted off my shirt and shorts and began to walk again, taking care to keep a good fifty yards behind them. But a tiger that has tasted blood once must of necessity taste it again. Krishnaswamy and his brothers pushed me into the ditch a second time. I was still alone but not entirely unprepared this time. I scratched Krishnaswamy and Balu on their faces. That was the end of the fight for the day.

I didn't attract much attention at home as a rule. But now glances of suspicion began to spring out at me. In the mornings, I would get ready quickly and start out for school at nine, which was much too early. In the evenings, I would be home within ten minutes of closing time, all this in an effort to avoid Krishnaswamy and his brothers on the road. Escaping them in the morning wasn't too difficult, but the evenings posed a problem because school was out at the same time for everyone and the front gate was never opened before the bell rang. You could try as hard as you could to squeeze your way through the milling crowd at the gate, but it wasn't easy to avoid students who were going the same way as you were. So I began to avoid the main gate altogether. Instead I clambered up the school wall at a lonely spot and climbed over it. This way, I managed to leave school a couple of minutes ahead of my enemies. Soon, a sizeable group of boys began to follow my example. It wasn't long before I took to climbing over the wall even to get to class in the mornings. I began to jump out and hurry away compulsively, even when it was not strictly necessary, as on those days when the dreadful three were absent from school. I used to be in a constant state of alert those days, a fact which didn't escape the family, particularly my mother, for long. Mother told Father, and Father asked what the matter was. I said nothing, not even after the beating I got from him. This was because I felt Krishnaswamy and his brothers were
my
problem and it was for me to tackle them in my own way. But I had no idea how.

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.