I don’t remember exactly when we left Mian Mir: but I can recollect that during the days when the regiment was preparing to leave, and its enormous baggage was being carried off to the Lahore Cantonment station in the iron carriages of the local mule corps, I lingered by the roadside for hours fascinated by the unending stream of traffic that passed on the highway. And in that strange way in which certain casual impressions become more indelibly imprinted on one’s memory than others, and are later transfixed by the imagination into the shape of dominant obsessions, that road, which had been my first vivid memory as well as the last impression of Mian Mir, became for me later an ever-present reality. So that I could always shut my eyes and see almost each particle of dust that flew across it in the wake of carriages and camels and goats and horses and men; feel the red hot burning surface of its middle heights as well as the cool dusty fringes on its sides, over which the casuarina trees sang and danced with ever so gentle a rhythm; sense the warmth of the crowded life that poured across it from horizon to horizon. And, above all this, there floated on the surface of my child’s mind certain myths and legends, told me by my mother, of the people who had travelled up and down this road:
Once upon a time, the Sun God, Surya, had come down to earth this way. And, after he had dried up the land, the Rain God had poured down. And then the various Gods of the River had arisen by the sides of this road … And then the Wind God had swept down. And then the ancient kings had ridden up and down in their chariots: the Kurus and the Pandus and Rama and Krishna and Sikandar and Rasalu and Vikramaditya and Akbar Badshah … And many saints and fakirs had begged for alms, as they had travelled towards the holy places of Hindustan down this road; sages like Valmiki and gurus like Nanak and Bhakta Kabir … And the fojs and lashkars of the Mughals had marched down. And then of the one-eyed Sikh maharaja, Ranjit Singh, and his general Hari Singh Nalwa. And, later, the armies of the Ferungis had route-marched here, even as the Dogra Regiment to which we belong, to the shouts of ‘lef-right, lef-right’ given by the sergeants and havildars …
I picked up, from under the pupils of my eyes, vague visions of these fabulous figures like the giants and demons into which the clouds formed and reformed over my head as I was put down to bed in the courtyard of our house. And sometimes I contemplated with an immobile stare, filled with wonder and horror, the immobility of one of these almighty chimeras, with heads like the stumps of carrots or pumpkins. And there were no standards to check my imaginings about the humanity which had passed down this road, except that the outlines of the figures were suggested by the medley of sights and sounds that I had experienced up to the age of five years. And yet there was no confusion in my muddled fantasy world.
For I meditated on all the facts in snatches between the elders’ conversation, or in between the games which I played in the grove over the well, building up kingdoms and destroying them to the tune of the nursery rhymes which my mother had sung to me. And no footsteps on the road could choke the song without words that I sang about it; no call from mother, ‘Krishna, where are you, come here!’ could disturb it; no admonition from the gardener Ram Din not to disturb the classic shapes of the vegetables could prevent it, no snap of the fingers from my father could stop it. It was as if I had become possessed by the giant Jinn of the road and by all the Jinn-Bhuts which had accrued to me through the tales and the fables told to me and the eavesdropping into the family talk that went on in our home …
And so intense was the effect of these meanderings that during the nights I had dreams in which my dead brother, Prithvi, figured prominently, and nightmares of battling demons woke me up in cold sweats; and I babbled in my sleep.
Outside, the preparations for the exodus to the cantonment of Nowshera went on, and the road ran, teeming with life, dusty and trodden underfoot by hard boots and crude Indian shoes, unhonoured, ignored, unworshipped, except by me who was watching its flow to my own rhythm, as though the road were in me and the whole world all about me, stretching for miles and miles and miles into nebulous lands uncharted by my mind … The forefinger of amazement was in my mouth as I stood there, and my eyes were wide open with a boundless curiosity which was later to become the greed, the lust and the desire for good things and beauty.
Obviously, in those days I was my own master, supreme ruler of the phantasmagoric kingdom of my strange visions and stranger dreams.