I held my father to his promise. And one morning we did duly leave for the ‘Sparrow House’, seated in a phaeton.
My mother seemed now enormously big somehow and could not bear to have me on her lap. So I insisted on being seated next to the driver on that precarious perch from which I could see the whole broad world around me.
We seemed to be travelling on the straight metalled road, the selfsame road that went past our house and had been such a challenge to me at first, with its uncrossable girth and then with its unending caravans of camels and donkeys, and tongas and buggies, the road which now I was beginning to travel. The driver, an imposing man with a Rajput beard, which was parted sideways on the chin, told me that the part of the road we had left was called the Grand Trunk Road and the part which we had entered after crossing the canal was called the ‘Cold Road’.
Somehow that Hindustani word ‘cold’ has always expressed to me the atmosphere of that road better than the drab appellation, ‘The Mall’, which I learned to use later. For the two rows of kikar trees which flank the wide stretches of this highway conduced to that calm which shade implies. And the breezes which came wafting over the hedges from those lovely big gardens outside the bungalows dotted on the two sides of the road were significant of the feeling of rest which was in those houses and their bowers.
The traffic increased as we got near the ‘Sparrow House’. And the whole of life seemed to be in a whirl on the crossroads. I was fairly dizzy with excitement as we reached the gates. And no danger of falling off my perch could hold me glued to my seat any longer. My father brought me down and gave me his finger to hold while he gave his other hand to Ganesh.
And then we trooped down through the gangway to certain small roads, flanked by cages of birds and beasts nestling among the trees and the flowers. Oh, the shrill joy with which I greeted my ‘kith and kin’ as my father called all the beasts! Oh, the wild shouts of amazement and curiosity! What can ever recapture the sheer excitement of entering this world!
And what surprised my parents most was that I was not in the least frightened by the growling of the lions or tigers, or of riding on the back of the elephant, seated with the other children in the howdah, or of feeding the monkeys with the nuts that my mother had carried specially for them, ‘to appease the wrath of Hanuman, the monkey God’, to whose army the monkeys were supposed to belong.
There was a monkey group, with the mother monkey searching the head of a baby monkey for lice, while the father monkey scratched the head of the mother monkey for lice. And this amused me no end because I had so often seen the sweeper women in the followers’ lines in the same stance delousing each other.
I was a little nervous of the gorillas, no doubt, because they seemed so near and yet so far from the human, so uncanny as they emerged with the terrifying outsize torso on spindly bow legs and strode upright from one cage to another, with claws outstretched and staring away into the space beyond them, red-eyed and violent as though about to attack.
‘Do the animals speak the same language as we do?’ I asked my father.
‘No, they have not the gift of speech,’ my father answered. ‘It is only parrots like you who “cutter, cutter” speech.’
‘Then do the parrots speak the same language as we do?’
‘Yes, but they do not understand what they repeat.’
I was very puzzled with this answer, and in my naive mind I guessed that some queer mystery filled everything around me, that something I did not know and could not understand must be revealed to me. And eager, impetuous, reaching out to the answers which I could not get, I went on wondering and surmising and building up fantasies about the things I did not know, piling up dream-clouds of the most varied shapes and forms above my head.
I saw a long-necked zebra and could hardly trust my sight.
A couple of kangaroos with their little ones seated securely in the pouches next to their bellies were more reassuring.
The bears I remembered as old friends I had seen with the juggler.
The mother rabbit and the little rabbits I could even caress.
And the little sparrows in the cages, feeding their chicks with their bills, filled me with a peculiar tenderness for the miraculous way in which they put food from their mouths into those of their young. The way they darted about from one corner of the cage to another, the yellow canaries, in the shimmering light that percolated through the dense trees, made me rock my head in wonder.
As my limbs grew heavy with the fatigue of walking and looking, my mother asked my father to pick me up again. How beautiful she seemed in that moment, my mother, how pale as she stooped over my head and asked me whether I would like to be picked up!
I walked along stubbornly, fascinated by the animals in their cages and the oldness of the roots of the banyan trees which towered over the cages, listening to all the luminous voices of the wild doves cooing, the parrots’ scissoring speech and the eternal singing of the koels which I knew so well, and I would not give up. For there was in those days the fire of unquenchable light in my eyes and the energy of volcanoes in my little being.
Realizing that I was tired out by the long trek on the pavements of the ‘Sparrow House’, my father ignored my plea that I was not tired and lifted me up. Then, sensing the confusion of my soul at the shock of this otherness through which we had been passing, and disturbed by the one question which I repeatedly asked, whether I could come to live here with my ‘kith and kin’, my father began to tell me a story:
‘You see,’ he said, ‘one day the animals and the birds in the jungle met together in a maidan. And the king of the jungle, who is the lion, told them that a man had come to live among them, and that surely he would gobble them up if they did not gobble him first.’
‘Why should he gobble them up?’ I asked, excited by the word ‘gobble’.
‘Because man can shoot and kill the beasts and gobble them as you gobble a boni,’ my father said.
I was in a frenzy of fear at the sound of the word ‘gobble’. But I said:
‘Then what happened?’
‘Man was hearing what the king of the jungle said,’ proceeded my father. ‘So he took out his gun and shot all the animals. So if you come and live here you will have to fetch a gun, otherwise the beasts will gobble you up.’
Suddenly I began to cry.
‘Don’t frighten him with such tales,’ my mother said.
And my father laughed and smiled and tried to console me with ‘Acha, acha, I won’t frighten you, son.’
I instinctively put the thumb of my right hand in my mouth and, lulled by the even sway of my father’s gait, I fancied myself not in the garden before me but in the caverns of a large forest at dusk. The crowds of men and women were rambling in a curious silken haze up and down the asphalt on my sides. Soon I could hear nothing except the isolated groans and cries of animals and the itinerant rhythm of a parrot’s speech. And I suddenly felt lighter than air. I had the sensation that I was floating upwards into the sky. Then the dark whorl of the evening descended upon me and closed my eyes, and I felt as though I were climbing higher and higher as though the light of the spark lit into me by my father’s sing-song had lifted me on high with its strange raucous music and transported me to a city beyond the sky …