Another person I came to recognize and love early was Gurdevi, the wife of Babu Chattar Singh, the Quartermaster’s Clerk in my father’s regiment. She was a demure little woman, with a comfortable presence and a calm, sad face and a voice like that of a cooing dove. She came to our house on alternate days, bringing her sewing or her phulkari work with her, and she sat by my mother while the latter plied her charkha with Prithvi in her lap. And they talked in low, secretive tones about something I could not understand at first, but which I came to know later concerned Gurdevi’s inability to bear a child. I remember how I tried to keep awake during those afternoons, in order that I could hear everything and get to know what ailed Gurdevi and what were the exact causes of her sadness. But the atmosphere was soporific with the soft, sonorous accents of my mother and Gurdevi, the drone of the spinning wheel and the big black wasps which flew round and round in the verandah, so that my forehead was heavy and my limbs were filled with a lassitude which made me wriggle in the effort to get to sleep. But as I could not settle, Gurdevi would put me in her lap and rock me to peace to the tune of a lullaby.
Bathed in the sweat that poured from her neck and yet comforted by the feel of her haunches, I slept soundly till it was time for Gurdevi to go home. And then, even as she had lulled me to sleep with a song, she sang another song for my waking. And I rose, big and strong, to a world from which the sun had shifted, making room for the colours of the evening. Even for so little a child I was conscious of the sensuous pleasure of being fondled by Gurdevi. And, oh, the sweetness of those moments when one woke up, rested after a siesta, and stretched one’s limbs to feel the cool of the summer evening!
Sometimes Gurdevi would take me home with her, as a kind of chaperon to protect her against the unwanted attentions of sepoys who might whistle or make rude noises to tease her. And as a reward for my chivalry she would give me ‘something’ from a big box, very much like the big box in our own house from which my mother gave us ‘something’ … And, as I sat munching the sweets or the dried figs or dates, Babu Chattar Singh would come back from the office, and pick me up and throw me into the air to the tune of the nonsense rhyme associated with my nickname:
‘Bully, Bully
Bully, my son …’
Being a Sikh, Babu Chattar Singh had a big, flowing black beard. And, of course, that mop of hair fascinated me as I clutched it in my hands and pulled hard, and I only let go because he promised to give me a piggy ride instead. And thus we played, working up to terrific high spirits, until I heard my father’s voice outside and I ran to greet him.
Flushed and happy, I was soon riding on my father’s shoulders and almost reaching out to the sky.
And as I told him the story of my afternoon’s adventures in breathless, choking haste and exclaimed how sweet were the sweets which Gurdevi had given me and how wonderful the piggy ride which Babu Chattar Singh had afforded me, I felt bathed in the radiance of happiness. This was dulled for me by my father’s injunctions not to call Gurdevi by her name but to regard her as my ‘little mother’, and not to call Babu Chattar Singh by his name, but to consider him as my ‘little father’.
I remember the dim curiosity I felt about the reasons which had persuaded my father to advise me thus, and I later surmised it was something to do with the mysterious conversations which transpired between Gurdevi and my mother about the former’s inability to find a child. And, filled with pride that I should be chosen to be the symbolic son, I saw the need for the reorientation of my attitude towards these elders and straightaway I made the necessary alterations to fit them into the cosmic order that I had been inventing, to understand my little world.