8

Although there was not much love lost between me and my brother Ganesh, his departure for Amritsar with uncle Pratap and aunt Devaki left a gap in my little world. For, after Prithvi’s death, I had no playmate at all, whereas Ganesh used, at least previously, to condescend to play with me sometimes in the mornings when the boys from the followers’ lines were busy helping their parents.

And I recall that a certain strange sadness descended upon me, a sadness which became associated in my mind with the vacua of the endless time before me and of the vast empty open space of the playing field maidan which lay beyond the grove of the Persian wheel well outside our house. In the light of those days I am now inclined to think that childhood is not altogether the happy, golden time sentimentalists make it out to be as a compensation for the rigours of the grown-up world, but that it is characterized by long patches of loneliness when children are condemned, for good or ill, to the prisons of their own sensibilities, exiled from the adult world and left to their own devices if there is not available a crèche or a kindergarten or swing and the company of other children. It is true that the lonely child develops an almost convalescent sensitiveness under these circumstances and creates fantasies for his own delectation, but the burden of this early effort, though profitable in the long run, is heavy to bear when the tender soul has constantly to jump from the dreamy existence of the garden bower to the world of reality which is made up of the parental routine of meals and siestas.

Still there accrued to me from this period, apart from the misery of solitude, a peculiar strength of temperament. I learned to live on my own resources and to be in tune with the shade of the dense trees in the grove where I roamed, the grasses and flowers of the Sahib’s garden, where I occasionally strayed, and the ever-changing life of the road—the road which I crossed from the protection of one line of casuarina trees, stirred by the nimble breeze, to the other, the road in whose dust I rolled, the road where I held conversation with men and beasts and birds, the road which dominated my life with its unknown past and its undiscovered future. And, although still slightly timid in the face of the enigmatic, unresponsive silences, where, I had been told, wandered the souls of the dead who had not ascended to heaven, I often became part of the quietude that spread about me, chirping like a parrot all to myself the phrases I had learnt, creeping like a mouse from ditch to ditch through which the well water flowed, digging up earthworms where I saw any traces of the little congeries of oval earth, marvelling at their elastic, spineless bodies when I did find them, fascinated by the fact that they crawled even though they were dealt heavy, violent blows by Mali Ram Din’s khurpi and enraptured by his stories of how many fish the gardener had caught by using earthworms as bait on the steel hook of his fishing rod.

In these moments I learned, lying on the charpai in the courtyard of the house, to watch with trepidation and dread the vague figures of gods, jinns and bhuts in the contours of the clouds in the blue kingdom of the sky and to feel an incomprehensible tenderness for the cool which descended on the earth from above at that hour, an almost tangible reality, like a fairy come in answer to the yearnings of my mother, who prayed on her string of beads, seated cross-legged by her mandala like a being from another world, near me and yet afar, distant and remote and rather frightening.

Thus, though there was no joy in the quietude to which I was forced for lack of the company of other humans, the ultimate result of all this paucity was to encourage in me a habit of silence, a paradoxical contrast to the turbulence of my nature, the other pole of the vitality I exuded and the terrific high spirits in which I was constantly involved. In those days, men’s mouths became grave for me, and women’s voices saddened; in those days, the earth and the sky grew bigger, and heavy shadows descended on my eyelids, and my eyes were consumed by dreads and fantasies.