I was pleased to be going to school as I came out of the house, holding my brother Ganesh’s little finger with my right hand and sucking the thumb of my left. I had been dressed with elaborate care in a pair of new cotton salwars and a khaki twill tunic. A bright-coloured Peshawari silk handkerchief was tied round my head and the pair of black rubber shoes, which I had worn on Harish’s marriage and which had since been kept for special occasions, protected my feet against stones and splinters on the way. I was, indeed, very excited and hot.
For to go to school had been the ambition of my life during the whole of the previous year. Every day I had seen my elder brother go off to school, I had wished to go too. I had heard of the adventures which Ganesh and the other boys of the regiment had on the way to school, eating berries which grew wild in the bushes, catching grasshoppers and insects and playing games of which the rules were kept secret. And my devouring curiosity and the desire to be in the seething cauldron of things had filled me with enthusiasm. I had pestered my father for months to send me to school.
‘You are not old enough, son,’ he would always say. And I had argumentatively insisted that I was. Though, really knowing that I was not, I had secretly wished and prayed to God to make me grow to the same height as my elder brother somehow, except that I was afraid that if my prayer was granted and I did grow up overnight to be like Ganesh I might find that I had acquired his flat nose, his shapeless ears and his general angularity into the bargain. But I had not seen any appreciable change in my height corresponding to my prayers to God. So I had cried.
‘You are crying to be allowed to go to school now,’ father had said, ‘you wait, you will cry to be allowed to stay at home once you have been there.’
I could not see why that should be so. And I went about to secure my end in quite another way. I began to imitate Ganesh as he did his home lessons with father in the evenings, and I would meddle about with his books, his slate and his notebooks, pretending to do what he did. Father laughed as I sat repeating the contents of the first Urdu primers or the elementary numerals after Ganesh like a parrot. And whenever my brother floundered, out I came egotistically with the phrase. Father was very amused and petted me and flattered me, giving me a gigantic conceit of myself.
One day, father seemed to have decided that my capacity to remember by rote was as pronounced as my eagerness to learn, and he began to teach me at home. After a few months I could read the first primer and set about tackling my brother’s second year courses. At this stage Ganesh’s jealousy was aroused and he refused to let me handle his books, and there were frantic scratchings and bitings and tears and howls between the two of us.
There was nothing for it but to send me to school.
But my elder brother was not too eager to take me with him on the morning when I issued forth. He was unhappy at being burdened with the responsibility of me.
‘Walk quickly, you swine, walk quickly!’ he shouted, extricating his little finger from the grasp of my hand as soon as we had proceeded out of audible distance of home. ‘Be quick, you affliction, with your small legs and feet!’ he said peevishly till his flat face was contorted. ‘I am already late.’
I was mortally offended at this rebuke. The abuse did not matter. But the sudden severance of my hold on Ganesh’s little finger seemed to me like a betrayal! I felt I was being left behind and would never be able to find my way to school. My happiness at going to school gave place to instant tears. And, weeping, sobbing, with burning ears, I ran after my elder brother.
Afraid that my howls might be heard by father, Ganesh had stopped for a moment. Then, seeing me following him, he had capered away.
I ran a few yards and then, seeing Ganesh run, gave way to despair, and shouted for father: ‘Ba ji!’
Ganesh turned and saw that the house had been left too far behind for my cries to reach it.
I was about to roll in the dust to spite Ganesh. But my elder brother was not in sight and I realized that that kind of sulking would have no effect. So I ran after Ganesh with a more deliberate effort.
This time I succeeded in getting abreast of him after a good deal of sweating and straining.
‘Rape-sister!’ I abused, trying to catch hold of Ganesh’s index finger. ‘Why are you leaving me behind?’
‘Let me go, don’t catch hold of me,’ Ganesh protested, his high cheekbones covered with a flush of anger and fear. ‘Ali and the other boys must have gone. But for you I wouldn’t have missed them.’ And then he wrested his finger from my grasp again and began to run.
‘Ohe wait, take me with you,’ I sobbed hopelessly, and ran effortfully as the wind was caught in the expansive folds of my salwars. ‘Ohe wait,’ I shouted. ‘Pig! Dog! Brute!’
When Ganesh had run about fifty yards ahead of me, he seemed to have seen Ali going into his house, from where he had been basking in the sunshine. So he stopped to wait for me.
I came up weeping by the corner of a small lane which divided the low mud wall boundary of the barracks from the long row of small one-roomed houses in which lived the bandsmen, the few married sepoys who were allowed to bring their wives with them, and the followers of the regiment, the washermen, the barbers, the cobblers, the sweepers.
‘Ali’s mother, has Ali gone to school?’ Ganesh asked, lifting the ragged jute cloth curtain which hung at the door of the mud house, obliquely wishing for permission to enter because the Muhammadan bandsmen kept their women in purdah.
‘No, he is still here, this illegally begotten!’ came the sharp voice of Ali’s mother from within. ‘He has just awakened and then he has been out sunning with no thought of school. Come and wait for the rascal for a little while.’
Ganesh seemed relieved. He lacked the confidence which Ali’s company on the walk to school gave him, being weak-minded and afraid to be the only one to suffer the Master’s rod for being late at school. For if the other boys from the regiment were also beaten then they were less ashamed in each other’s eyes.
My brother led the way into the house.
I followed, afraid and shy to be entering a strange house. But any fear I had was soon dispelled by the sight of a brilliantly coloured cock who was kukru-kruing away on the wall of the house, and all my shyness evaporated as I saw dozens of little chicks in the middle of the poultry farm of a courtyard which led to the dusty, bare verandah of this one-roomed house.
‘Look! Look!’ I exclaimed, pulling at Ganesh’s tunic. ‘Look at those little chicks!’ And I ran to catch one, thus creating a sheer palaver; for the hens ran, flapping, flopping, squeaking through the house, followed by the endless trail of their chicks.
‘Arré, leave them alone,’ cried Ali’s mother with a shrill good-humoured voice in Hindustani, as they were from near Aligarh in Oudh. ‘You Hindus must not kill little chicks; they are for us Musulmans to eat.’
I stood, however, in the porch of the verandah, fascinated by the chicks going in and out of the little box of a house in the right hand corner of the courtyard in which they nested.
Ganesh stood talking to Ali, who crouched on the dust, gingerly sprinkling water on his hands and his face from a big kettle-like copper jug, as if he were afraid of the water, which he was, for, unfortunately, Islam does not enjoin daily ablutions as a religious duty.
‘Come in, boys,’ said Ahmed, Ali’s father, who sat smoking an enormous hubble-bubble as he lay wrapped in a thick, greasy quilt, on a huge bed which occupied half the dark, congested little room that was the living room, bedroom, kitchen and store of this family of five.
Ganesh and I walked into the room and stood inclined against the posts of the bed.
Ali now sat with his sister Ayesha and his little brother, Akbar, eating out of a bowl full of steaming-hot mutton curry and a basketful of chapatis. They would break a piece of bread from the basket with the five fingers of their right hand, dip it into the gravy, which was plentiful, and put it into their mouth. Ali was in a hurry. So he stuffed his mouth with bread and meat till one or the other of his cheeks was stuffed round like a ball and he had to swallow the mouthful without chewing it.
Trained to the snobbery of a daintier code of manners by mother, who was overscrupulous about cleanliness, I looked away from this community meal.
But the smoke rose in furious spurts from the fireplace by which Ali’s mother sat blowing through a wooden pipe for all she was worth, because the fuel sticks recently gathered by Ali’s father were wet and wouldn’t burn quickly enough. And there was a pungent smell of garlic and onions in the air. I felt giddy.
‘Sit down,’ said Ali’s mother as she saw me.
I was proud of my new clothes and hesitated.
‘Here you are, clean one!’ said Ali’s mother, pushing a worn-out mat towards me. ‘Sit down, you too, Brute,’ she continued, addressing Ganesh by his nickname.
Both of us sat down, shy and noiseless, as was expected from ‘better-behaved’ children.
I had never been here before and was specially interested in the squalid contrast which this house presented to our own, which was a regular Indian officer’s quarter with two huge rooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, a latrine and an enormous courtyard, given to my father because as a ‘shadow Colonel’ he enjoyed the ‘prestige’ of a commissioned officer. There seemed a curious lack of brass utensils in the cooking place, most of the pots and pans being of clay and aluminium, while my mother’s kitchen was lit up by brass and bronze and even silver. And I felt contemptuously superior, because my parents spoke of the bandsmen as ‘low southerners’.
‘Will you have something to eat?’ asked Ali’s mother, swaying her rotund body which was swathed in bright-coloured rags and richly laden with silver jewellery; earrings, nose-rings, necklaces, bangles and bracelets.
‘No, we have had our meal,’ Ganesh and I said in unison, for that was the parrot cry we had been taught to utter when we were offered food anywhere, particularly at the house of a beef-eating Muhammadan.
‘I can’t offer you a betel-leaf because you are going to school,’ said Ali’s mother as she took a heart-shaped green leaf from a wet cloth, treated it first with a red and then with a white paint from a round copper box, and, spitting some scarlet juice across the wall from a mouth already full of a previous betel leaf, stuffed the new leaf between her dirty, decaying brown teeth. ‘Even the betel leaf,’ she continued, ‘involves the use of water and your mother will be angry if she gets to know that you ate anything touched by our water.’ But she heaped a plate with jalebies, cream cakes and sugarplums and said, ‘Take these, they are dry.’
We waved our head to signify our conventional refusal.
I would certainly have liked a betel leaf, but the taboo stood and, besides, I felt sick to see the scarlet spittle trickle down before me across the wall.
‘Acha, you pure, pure Hindus!’ said Ali’s mother, a little hurt.
I felt uncomfortable at her plaintive remonstrance and tried to forget the feeling of nausea which the sight of the spittle had started in me. I remembered that my mother had particularly warned Ganesh against eating in Ali’s house. I did not know why. But now that I was tempted I would have liked to eat some of the meat curry which lay before Ali. I could not see the difference mother had told us that there was, between eating dry things from the hands of a Muhammadan, and eating things in the making of which water had to be used. Why could not one eat out of the hands of a Muhammadan anyway? Was it because, as mother said, the Mussulmans ate the meat of the Mother Cow, or because they took their shoes into the kitchen? Ali had trod on the mess which the hens made in the verandah and had then sat down to his meal in the kitchen. That was dirty.
As for the meat, how could you tell the difference between the cow’s flesh and the meat of a goat? Perhaps my mother did not like the Muhammadans because they ate together out of one basket and one bowl, I thought. Also, they did not wash their hands before beginning to eat. But I saw the spittle of Ali’s mother on the wall, standing like a crystal precariously hanging from its base, then swaying with the smoke and falling on the edge of the pot on the fireplace. That decided me. That was bad. My own mother would not do that. She cleaned her teeth and gargled in the bathroom. And my father chewed the twig every morning outside the house.
‘Hurry up, son of a prostitute!’ shouted Ali’s mother to her son angrily.
I felt that she was angry because Ganesh and I had refused to eat the sweets which she had offered us and that she was venting her spite on her son.
‘Take this,’ she continued to her son, more kindly, giving him a small parcel. ‘Eat them at recess time, since these Hindus won’t have them. And it is in lieu of your pocket money. I haven’t a pice to spare for you today.’
I was noticing her every word and gesture and contrasting her with my own mother. My mother had said before sending me to school that I was not to get into the habit of eating anything at recess time. It was not nice, she had said, to spend money on sweets outside. When you come back I shall give you ‘something’ from the box inside. But she had not said she had no money to spare. My father had lots of money, especially at the end of the month when he brought his pay and put it on the table after counting it. Yes, both father and mother had lots of money. For did they not lend it to the washerwomen, bandsmen, the sweepers and sepoys, against securities of silver jewellery? I recalled that Ali’s father had come to borrow money from my father once. Ali’s mother must be poor, I thought. But how generous she was in giving money to her son, and how mean were my own parents, putting us off with a lame excuse and a promise of ‘something’. I would have liked to have a copper to keep if not to spend.
Ali dropped some crumbs of bread into the basket where the loaves of chapatis lay. And he got up sulking with the paper parcel of sweets in his hand. He had a red fez cap on his small head and a long cotton tunic and baggy trousers of the same material, very uncouthly cut and apparently tailored at home.
‘Hurry up or you will be late,’ shouted his mother irascibly as she saw him looking vacantly around. ‘What are you looking for? What? Your satchel—what, again this morning? You spoiler of my salt! What can you learn if you throw away the satchel as soon as you come back from school. Look under the bed, illegally begotten!’
Ali fell on his hands and knees, ducked his head and explored the darkness for a moment or two. It was evidently to no purpose, for he sat back and glared at his mother most impertinently.
‘Ohe!’ she shouted. ‘Look in the corners behind. It must have been dragged away by the rats!’
The boy rolled down again and, stretching himself on his belly, swept the ground with his arm and presently brought out a cotton bag stuffed with books and slates and boards.
‘Hasn’t it been chewed up by the rats?’ cried his mother. And, seeing that his tunic and his trousers were covered with dust, she lost her temper completely: ‘Arré, I washed those clothes for you and on the very first morning you have besmeared them with dust.’
Ali confronted her like an animal at bay and shouted back: ‘Shut up, bitch! Prostitute!’
She got up with a smouldering stick of wood from the oven in her hand and ran after him, cursing and swearing. But he had rushed out of her reach into the compound and out of the main door.
Ganesh and I followed him, somewhat frightened at all this violence and not forgetting to be polite ourselves as we salaamed Ali’s father, who had sat with his equanimity undisturbed all this time, and said salaam to his mother, even though rather nervously.
‘May you live long, my sons,’ said Ali’s mother, modulating her angry tone to a tired evenness. And she added distressfully: ‘My liver has turned to water.’
Out in the sun, I felt relieved. And the fact that I was really on my way to school at last reassured me.
But, by a stagnant pool of scum-covered filth into which the gutters of the followers’ lines trickled, some bandsmen were sunning themselves. There was Havildar Maula Bux, ‘the black God’, as my father called him affectionately, because they had joined the regiment about the same time; there was Jimmie, the grass-cutter turned Christian who played the saxophone, and there was Clayton, the jet black, eunuch-faced flute player who took female parts in the amateur regimental theatricals, and who was Harish’s friend and a constant visitor to our house whenever he happened to be on duty as an orderly in the office. They caught hold of me and teased me, singing: ‘Ohe, Bully, Bully, Bully, my son.’ I struggled and secured release from their grasp, because I was feeling very grown up and respectable this morning and pretended that I did not know them, though previously I had let myself be their plaything.
Ali had been calling for Abdulla, the bandmaster’s son, and Ganesh had gone round to collect Akhtar, the son of the regimental tailor, Ramzan. They both came back disappointed, because those two had gone to school already. So, collecting me, they hurried.
For a while the three of us walked together.
But Ali seemed resentful of me, because as a stranger I came in the way of their talk.
And I was fatigued by the time we got to the old river bed, which lay halfway between the regimental lines and the town; and I began to be a drag on my brother’s finger.
Seeing the sun soaring higher in the sky, Ganesh felt that we were late for school. And he and Ali began to trace the footprints of Piare Lal, the son of Dr Ghaseeta Ram of 44th Cavalry and of Rahmet Ullah and Ismat Ullah the sons of Mistri Sadr-Din, the lame regimental armourer. If the footmarks were visible in the dust of the track, then they had just gone and it was not late; and if there was no sign at all, then they had not yet gone and it was surely quite early.
As my companions could see no marks they feared the worst and quickened their pace, while my steps lingered and my eyes wandered across the vast stony ravines to the rugged, red rocks of the Swat range. Through the dull-white haze of the ascendant sun, the angry landscape, barren except for an oak or a cactus, seemed gigantic to me and empty and forlorn and I felt small and lonely.
‘Walk quickly, you swine!’ shouted Ganesh, turning back from a mound a hundred yards ahead. ‘Don’t you know that we will be flogged for being late?’
‘Leave the sala behind,’ said Ali, indulging in an abuse which, because I had no sister on whose marriage to him I should be placed in the awkward position of being a brother-in-law, did not trouble me except that it was just the abuse that I resented.
I hurried a little. But I soon subsided into a tortoise speed, my body sagging as the sand, the stones, the railway bridge over which the trains were said to pass from Nowshera station to Peshawar, the thorny berry trees and bushes swept by before my eyes in phantasmal flowings, without troubling my thought.
As they got near the new brick-built flat-roofed building by the firewood stall, which had been pointed out to me as the school by my father once or twice while I was borne in an orderly’s arms to the Nowshera Sadar Bazaar, they seemed to get into a panic. For the school compound was still and empty, and from this they knew that the bell had struck and they were late.
I followed, unafraid.
Ali hurried away as if in fear of his life.
Ganesh kept turning back to see how far I had lagged behind. He had to wait because he had to get me formally admitted to the school.
‘Come, little brother, hurry,’ he called coaxingly.
I knew that he was kinder now because he had this business of the admission to negotiate on my account, and since he would have to present my father’s note to the Headmaster, that would give him an excuse to put before his own master if he were threatened with a flogging for being late. After all I was no encumbrance but a help.
‘Why did you leave me behind?’ I said as I came up to him. And I made as if to go on strike.
‘Come, come, are you not my little brother?’ he appealed, offering me his little finger to hold.
But I was too spoiled and pampered at home and felt independent of him now that I had got to school, especially because I had my father’s note to the Headmaster in my pocket.
‘Ohe, forgive me,’ said Ganesh, abjectly joining his hands.
At that I let him guide me to the chaprasi outside the Headmaster’s office.
Bude Khan, the old, scarlet-coated chaprasi of the Government Primary School, took the note which my father had written and crept silently on his bare feet into the office where Abdul Gafar Khan, the Headmaster, could be seen seated on a high chair behind a writing table.
In a while he came back and beckoned us to follow him.
Ganesh seemed frightened as he saluted the Headmaster in the military fashion which he had learnt from seeing the sepoys salute their officers. I was too interested in the map of Hindustan which hung on the wall to be dutiful.
‘Say Salaam to the Headmaster Sahib,’ Ganesh whispered, nudging me with his bony elbow as was his wont.
‘Salaam Masterji,’ I blurted out just as the Headmaster became absorbed in the letter which the chaprasi had handed him.
‘Salaam,’ he said genially as he twirled his fine moustache. He was a tall, imposing, dignified Pathan, pleasant-looking, though stiff and unapproachable with the pomp of the peacock-crested lungi on his head, his well-starched trousers and shirt and the English style jacket he wore.
But I was not afraid of him and fearlessly scanned the picture of the Viceroy of India inset in a calendar which hung on the wall behind the Headmaster’s chair.
‘Take the little boy to Master Din Gul,’ said the Headmaster to the chaprasi, ‘and tell him to put his name down on the register.’ Then he turned to Ganesh and said, ‘Come here at recess time, Nadé, and take my reply to the Babu Sahib.’
Ganesh nodded respectfully, salaamed again, military fashion, which irritated me, and turned to follow the chaprasi.
The Headmaster came to the door and, bending over me, pulled my cheek and said, ‘You are not as respectful to your elders as your brother is, are you? I shall tell your father!’
I knew that Abdul Gafar Khan knew my father, as they both belonged to the small fraternity of literate men in the town of Nowshera. I felt very proud at this peculiar mark of favour which he had done me and, smiling, ran to catch up the chaprasi.
Ganesh lingered ostentatiously outside the door of the second primary class and purposely asked me if I would be all right, so that his teacher might see him engaged on an important errand and exonerate him from all blame, not only for being late but for any mistakes which he might commit during the day.
The chaprasi took me into the room of the first primary class, but the master, Din Gul, was engaged in caning Ali and some other boys for being late.
Din Gul was a ferocious looking Afridi, shaven-headed except for two curly whiskers, eagle-eyed though not hawk-nosed like most of his tribe, and clad in a tunic of rough homespun cloth and a pair of salwars of the same material. His thick cow-hide shoes, with turned up noses and with crude steel nails on their soles, were lying by the side of a small blue carpet where he sat, wrapped in a blanket of coarse sheep wool, wielding the rough branch of a tree for a cane, and striking the boys before him mercilessly on their palms.
A sudden terror gripped me as I stood in the tense silence of the room watching the boys being beaten. It was Ali’s turn to be flogged next, and the poor, thin boy with the fox-like face stood, his arms crossed, pressing his hands under his armpits, weeping out of sheer fear, long before the cane approached him.
‘Show your hands, son of a dog!’ the master shouted.
‘O spare me, spare me, Masterji, forgive me, I will never do it again!’ Ali cried, pressing his hands deep into his sides and trying to contract his body so that by some miracle he might become invisible.
‘Show your hands, illegally begotten,’ insisted Din Gul.
But the boy retreated out of fear.
Upon this the master jumped out of the folds of his blanket and struck the retreating Ali, right and left, on his biceps, on his triceps, on his hips, shins and shoulders, in fact, wherever he could, shouting the while, ‘Show me your hands, son of an ass!’
The boy was persuaded to show the tips of his fingers, but the fear of the hard, cruel blows made him withdraw involuntarily. This made Din Gul strike him the harder and the more cruelly. At length he forcibly pulled out the boy’s palms, one by one, and, holding them by the tips of the fingers, he struck sharp, clear blows on them.
‘Go now and prepare your lessons!’ he roared.
The boy turned towards his seat, his hands pressed deeper into his armpits, his face writhing with pain and twisted into an ugly, jackal-like expression, but strangely enough there were no tears in his eyes.
‘Prepare to be examined in yesterday’s lesson!’ announced Din Gul to the class which sat lined against the four walls of the room on the bare earth.
Then he turned round to the chaprasi and me.
The chaprasi conveyed the Headmaster’s message to the master Din Gul and went away.
‘Sit down here!’ shouted the master to me, pointing to a place immediately on his right. Then he took a green register which lay before him and, taking a reed pen from the socket of a grimy papier maché pen box, he turned sharply towards me and asked, ‘What is your name, ohe Nadé?’
‘Krishan Chander,’ I answered.
Din Gul put the name down in the register.
‘Where is your satchel?’ he then asked. ‘Your primer? I want to see if you are fit to join the school so late in the session.’
‘I haven’t got a primer yet, Masterji,’ I answered. ‘My Babuji said that he would buy me one this week. But I learnt the lesson on my brother’s old primer which is torn.’
‘Tell your Babuji to buy you a new primer tomorrow, or I shall thrash you,’ said Din Gul. ‘Now, look into your neighbour’s book and get ready for the examination.’
The boys had begun to recite yesterday’s lesson at the master’s bidding, but had now languished, their minds wandering into the kindergarten designs, maps, pictures of rabbits, rats, cats, dogs, horses, cocks and other educational charts which hung on the walls. The master lifted his cane and struck it a rap on the mat beyond his durree, and stirred some dust into the air. Almost automatically the boys began to sway their heads up and down, reciting their lessons to themselves at the top of their voices. This constituted the real test of our attention. Meanwhile, Din Gul began to write something.
Only a moment had passed since his vigilant eye was withdrawn from the class, however, when the heads of the boys gradually ceased to sway and the noise of the recitation died down into the broken stillness of inattention. Snap went the master’s rod on the mat again, raising a big cloud of dust. The babble of the children’s tongues began anew.
But the master had not settled down to his writing long, when a sudden shriek arose from the farthest corner of the room.
I looked up and saw two big boys fighting each other like goats with their heads.
The master rushed to the corner on bare feet, cane in hand, and, catching hold of the two offenders from the backs of their necks, dragged them out into the open space before him.
‘Hold your ears, donkeys!’ he shouted, with bloodshot eyes.
Stooping, each boy passed his arms from behind his legs and caught his ears with his hands. They had to sit, adjusting themselves like that over feet which would slip if the body were either top-heavy or bottom-heavy. The blood soon rushed to their faces and the strain of the uncomfortable position swelled the veins on their foreheads and brought perspiration trickling down their faces. From their respective places a yard apart, they, who had been enemies in a quarrel a moment ago, now joined in a sort of friendship and sympathy with each other.
‘Close your books, all of you misbegotten!’ shouted the master. ‘And, you, Dost Muhammad, get up, you son of a Khan, and recite yesterday’s lesson. Look sharp because your Tehsildar-father won’t help you to escape my rod if you can’t.’
The boy at the head of the line got up. His face turned suddenly pale and he repeated aloud the first line of the poem. But the second line eluded the grasp of his memory, overshadowed by the impending descent of the rod. And because cramming with swaying heads was a surface operation, there was nothing of the subsequent verses in the layers of his mind which could be evoked through the racking of his brain.
‘Come out and hold your ears, seed of a donkey,’ said the master, Din Gul, coolly. And then he vigorously signed to the next boy to begin.
Dost Muhammad, a tall, well-dressed chap, came like a calf and held his ears near the two stalwarts who were being punished for fighting like goats.
The next boy got up and stood dumb, open-eyed, struggling to stammer, but incapable even of reciting the first line. He had apparently never attended to the lessons at all. After a few moments’ effort he gave up the attempt and, as if to extenuate his guilt by voluntarily undergoing punishment, he walked up to the open space before Din Gul and held his ears.
The next boy anticipated the master’s pointer and stood up. Then, as if under the spell of some demon, he recited three lines. But the fourth was not forthcoming. He too came and held his ears.
And so the next, the next and the next, each boy reciting one or two lines, or at the most three, and then relapsing into silence. A stray boy with a keen memory succeeded in reciting nine lines of the poem, but none of the others ever touched that standard of excellence. Except for the boy who had recited nine lines, all came and held their ears. Those who had come to hold their ears before were, by now, quaking under the weight of their own buttocks and some were sobbing and crying, their tears mingling with their sweat.
I sat pitying my classmates and almost on the verge of sympathetic tears, not because of sympathy for them so much as my fear of the master.
‘Come, you little lentil eater, son of Babuji,’ called the master suddenly and startled me while I contemplated the boy’s suffering in its possible relation to myself. ‘Recite the poem if you say you have done the lessons at home!’
The words of that poem about mother and child had been constantly on my tongue since I first began to mimic Ganesh. Ever since I had read it in the primer with my father I had dinned it into everyone’s ears in season and out. And yet I was so dazed with terror that I could not utter a word.
‘Come and hold your ears, Babuji!’ ordered the master grimly.
At that, as if inspired by the instinct of self-preservation, I said to the master that I knew it and struggled to start. Once I had got going, my words toppled over each other and I recited the poem in the sentimental lisping sing-song which too much fondness at home had encouraged in me, missing three lines which the master did not notice, and slurring over the pronunciation of words and phrases in my queer, hasty accent of those days.
Master Din Gul motioned me to sit down. Himself, he got up and, picking up one of his steel-nailed, thick shoes went shouting among the ear-holders: ‘Up, up with your bottoms, up with your behinds, donkeys, seeds of dogs!’ And he went past the lines of boys, striking the backs of those who did not hold them up high enough with the sole of his cow-hide shoes.
I had sat back with a half-smothered sigh of relief. For a moment I did not notice anything outside myself hypnotized as I was with the thrill of my success and grateful that the master had not noticed the lines which I had missed out in my recitation and which I now remembered. All the troubles, tribulations and sufferings of the morning had been washed clean out of my mind and I felt flooded with waves of enthusiasm and pride.
‘Come, little Hindu,’ called the master, interrupting my contemplation of my own importance and rudely dismembering me from the vague and beautiful realms of vainglory into which I had soared.
I got up rather clumsily, frightened, wondering what new affliction was going to befall me.
‘Strike those boys five slaps each,’ came the announcement, accompanied by a general order for the boys: ‘Get up, and go to your seats, donkeys. This little lentil eater will shame you, so that you come better prepared with your lessons tomorrow.’
I hesitated. I was half thrilled by the prospect of increasing my self-importance by slapping the boys and yet half afraid. I had never slapped anyone before, having instead always been slapped by Ganesh and sometimes by my mother if I was obstinate.
‘Go and slap them,’ urged the master.
I approached Dost Muhammad, but could not screw up courage to slap the boy. I looked this side and that with a tremor on my lips.
‘Strike!’ roared Din Gul.
I struck the first boy’s face, one, two, three, four slaps with my palm and moved hurriedly on.
‘Five,’ shouted the master. ‘Don’t you know how to count or must I teach you!’
I returned and struck Dost Muhammad one more slap. Then I went to the next boy and struck him five slaps, and the next boy, who happened to be Ali, as the boys were ranged in the classroom according to size.
‘Strike slowly,’ Ali whispered, looking at me, half appealingly, half challengingly.
I struck him four easy blows and one which, even against my will, fell on Ali’s eye. Then I went on to the next boy and gave him five slaps. But by this time my hand was tired and I merely brushed the faces of the boys with my palms.
‘Let go! Come here!’ called the master suddenly.
I returned to the master thinking that I was being relieved of this duty.
But Master Din Gul had other thoughts. ‘Shap, shap,’ he struck me two smart slaps on my cheeks, saying, ‘Let me teach you how to strike hard, hard.’
I shrieked aloud and fell tottering at the master’s feet. A river of tears flowed down my face, smarting where the five fingers of the master had imprinted themselves on my cheek, my blood boiling with anger and fear and resentment and pain.
‘Hai Ma! Hai my mother!’ I shrieked as I lay in a heap, so loudly that even the master, Din Gul, seemed embarrassed. For he picked me up by the ears and pushed me back to my place, saying, ‘All right, your mother has not died!’
Then he got up and struck the boys who had not received their share of the slaps. The whole room was soon full of sobs and tears and howls.
‘Stop weeping, or I shall give you three stripes each of the cane,’ the master threatened. ‘And get ready to take today’s lesson.’
When the school bell rang that day, the boys seemed in a hurry to leave the classroom. There was no question, of course, of their leaving before Din Gul was out of sight. But they lost no time in flying to the door as soon as he showed his back.
I waited for Ganesh to come and fetch me as I came to the door.
‘Come, salé, lentil eater, come!’ Ali greeted me from the verandah where he stood with Dost Muhammad and a group of other big boys. ‘You come out of the school compound and I shall show you what it is to slap your classmates.’
I was frightened out of my wits at this sudden challenge and ran back to wait for my brother. But I could see Ali and his gang and I was in a panic. I felt trapped in the empty classroom by myself and I wished Ganesh would come. The fear of their words gripped me, fear and hatred for them all. What had I done to Ali that he was hovering there so menacingly? I slapped them at the master’s bidding and even got slapped myself for not hitting them hard enough. But I recollected that Ali had been hostile to me ever since my escapade with him in Mian Mir.
‘Ganesh will be here soon, though,’ I said to myself. ‘And he will protect me.’
But it occurred to me that Ganesh was Ali’s friend. He had abused me that morning, as he was afraid of missing Ali’s company on the way to school.
‘If only I can get home I will teach him a lesson,’ I vowed. ‘I shall tell Baji that Ganesh abused me and that Ali wanted to beat me and I shall tell Baji about the master too. Han, I shall tell him about them all. And I shall not come to this school any longer if I am to be beaten every day …’
Two little boys came to sympathize with me.
‘Come,’ one of them said, consoling me. ‘You come with us.’
This, of course, started tears of self-pity in my eyes.
At that instant Ganesh came in.
I began to sob at the sight of him.
‘Ohe, what is the matter? What has happened?’ Ganesh asked.
‘Masterji asked him to slap all the boys,’ one of the sympathetic children reported, ‘because they could not repeat their lessons. And because he did not hit them hard enough, the master slapped him. And now the boys are waiting to revenge themselves on him.’
‘Come,’ said Ganesh timidly. He seemed to be embarrassed.
I got up and, catching his finger, went out rubbing my eyes with my left fist as they were sore with weeping.
There was no sign of Ali and the crowd of boys.
Ganesh encouraged me to hurry, saying that there was no danger.
The two sympathizers walked away towards their homes.
Ganesh and I crossed through Abdul Rahman’s fuel stall which stood on the right-hand side of the school, on the edge of the track leading to the regimental barracks.
As we emerged into a piece of flat land, Ali, Dost Muhammad and two other Pathan boys descended upon me from a hiding-place and ambushed me.
‘Why did you slap us?’ Ali asked, wresting me from Ganesh.
I started screaming, struggling and kicking to get away.
Ali struck me a sharp blow on the face. A Pathan boy struck me another slap.
I got hold of Ali’s leg and dug my teeth into it deep, as behoved my reputation as a little bulldog.
Ali veered round and dealt me a heavy blow on the head, while Dost Muhammad kicked me in the belly.
I wheeled round at the impact of the last, staggered and fell.
‘Give him another,’ said one of the Pathan boys.
Ali came towards me, but Ganesh warded him off.
‘Give him another, another!’ the boys were shouting as Ali stood grinding his teeth with a still-unexpressed fury.
Ganesh stood pale with fear, protesting weakly, appealing.
An office orderly on his way from Lal Kurti, the English Barracks, to the Malakand lines, where our regiment was stationed, heard my shrieks and ran to my help.
Ali and his gang had bolted.
The orderly recognized Ganesh and me as he used to come to our quarter to deliver messages from the office to my father.
He dusted my clothes and carried me home, followed by Ganesh who, from the information he gave the orderly, now seemed very sorry for me.
After more howls, shrieks and sobs, exaggerated by sympathy, I lay still, enjoying the pleasure of being carried on the sepoy’s shoulder. Before long, exhausted by the day, I had fallen asleep.