I rarely see a child nowadays without wondering on what mysterious course or violent act his mind is drifting, what strange and unforeseen adventure he is deliberating, how the colours of his soul are changing. For, as I look back upon the first seven years of my own half unconscious and half conscious childhood, I see myself, despite the rigours of the restricted, narrow routine world of the cantonment with all its taboos, flowing like a stream, now bright and vivacious with the sunbeams which played upon it, now gloomy with the tears of my sorrow, but always flowing, trickling through the dams and barriers placed in my way, or charging across them so as to demolish them and sweep them aside, lean and starved by the majesty of the sun or swollen and blustering, but unstayed. I did not, of course, know the direction in which I was going, and often I was apt to change my course, but in the main I flowed with the other streams which flowed by me, as if I, and the deep creative urges in me, were drawn by some inner magnetic attraction to each other and to the big broad river of life which flowed not far away.
It was in the driving force of these creative impulses that I found compensation for all the deprivations of those drab, commonplace days during which one was growing from an embryo to childhood. Thus when I think of the armed camps of Miarmir and Nowshera, I recall the enchantment of many adventures not only in the heart of my own dreams and fantasies but in the broad outer world. And certain moments, which are usually called the highlights, make these days glow till the first playgrounds of my childhood seem the happiest part of my life, because perhaps it is the most innocent and sensitive.
In what enchanted hours my senses and my heart opened to the beauties and terrors of the frontier landscapes I do not remember. But I know that when I was nearing the age of seven, certain sights and sounds became indelibly fixed on my mind and formed the stable background of all my memories of later years. So vivid, indeed, are these impressions that even now, if I close my eyes, I can beckon the exact texture of the atmosphere at noon in the Nowshera cantonment, with all the minute rainbow-coloured particles of light revolving before my eyes almost as though in a kaleidoscope. And, of course, the bigger things in that landscape are to me now like fables of my early imaginings which can never grow old with repetition.
The world was certainly abundant in those days. But in the vast profusion of the objects of sense I recall some heroes which were dominant.
For instance, there were the ladders of heaven, the bare, copper-coloured and ochre-brown mountains which stretched beyond the dry river bed on the edge of the Malakand Barracks, protuberant near at hand but rising to dizzy, rugged heights, with steep climbs and descents until they were lost in the mists of what I was told were the ranges of the Hindu Kush. And in the small hollows of the grey ridges nestled stone huts that seemed part of the ochre hills, the hovels of the Pathans, dark, dark and emitting smoke of fuel fires through the dingy doorways. Between the edges and the crags of the mountains, on little bits of level ground, grew scanty harvests of wheat or maize, while a scarecrow always stood frightening me with its bamboo neck crowned by a torn western hat; for I had been told that the Pathans put into these scarecrows the ghosts of the Tommies they killed in the wars.
Along the Lunda river, on the road, flowed always the caravans of donkeys and camels and men, loaded with hides and skins, bricks, sacks of grain or cloth, leaving clouds of dust behind them as the caravan drivers with their torn tunics honked the animals with their big sticks. And the hard-working Pathan women strode along in their red salwars and black tunics, firewood or pitchers of water on their heads, seemingly as ferocious as their men, with their hawk-eyed and hawk-nosed visages, but tender to their own young and to others like me who remember receiving from them big chunks of bread and pickles to eat many a time during their wanderings. The old men bent double with age and work, who tended flocks of sheep and goats, were my favourites, because they seemed too feeble to hurt, though I was always being warned at home that I would surely be kidnapped one day if I hobnobbed unaccompanied with the shepherds.
Beyond the primitive landscape of the hills and mountains, beyond Peshawar where I was born and the Khyber Pass where father had been, in my cosmogony of that time ruled the Badshah of Kabul, to whose kingdom of Afghanistan we were connected by the metalled Grand Trunk Road. At the base of this road, before the big railway bridge, across the Lunda by the timber yards, the mushroom misery of the urban areas betrayed the breath of another world which was to make permanent dents on my memory.
There, on an empty rutted corner from which a side road led to the Sadar Bazaar, stood the tonga carts in higgledy-piggledy confusion, redolent of the acrid smell of horse dung and straw but gay with the loud haggling of the drivers and the customers, the neighing of the horses and the din on the anvil of the smith who hoofed all kinds of beasts of burden outside his little booth of a shop. I remember that as we passed by and showed the slightest sign of fatigue on our faces, the waiting tonga-wallahs would come shouting and dragging father each towards his tonga, clamouring for a fare even as they bargained. Only very rarely did father respond, however, and we trudged home in the name of exercise or of the need to do some more shopping in the bazaar, though actually, I suspect, it was the cost of a fare to Malakand Barracks which decided the question.
So to the bazaar we sped. And there my heart burst with happiness at the sight of the heaps of fruit rising in tiers, basket upon basket, on the stalls in the little alleyways—the rose-cheeked apples, the luscious bunches of purple grapes, with the white ones resting in cotton wool in flimsy round wooden boxes, the red pomegranates and the dried peaches, plums, figs, almonds and walnuts! And with my jumping heart was my lisping maudlin tongue, with its chorus of: ‘I want! I want …’ And how I shouted with pleasure if father occasionally conceded a demand, and how I hung on to the prize gift, eagerly bearing it home all the way!
I shall never forget the closed meat market into which crowded Muhammadans, jostling carcasses of sheep which hung down from iron hooks. Our family, though Hindu, still retained its loyalty to the Aga Khan Ismaili sect and only took in meat killed by a Muhammadan butcher to the appropriate recitation of the verses from the Koran. As we endeavoured to conceal this fact, only I was sent to the Sadar Bazaar meat market in the company of the office orderly, Clayton, or some Muhammadan bandsman, because meat was my manbhatta khana or favourite food.
And on these excursions I got to know the world of the tandurs or cookshops in the bazaar, where lay huge nans made of wheat flour, pyramids of pilaus and sweetmeats, all covered with flies and the soot of oven fires and yet smelling so sharply of the condiments used in their preparation that my mouth still waters everytime I pass by one of these shops anywhere in India.
I can imagine that I had big eyes and that these eyes of mine never closed, because I can see everything, everything—all those barbers squatting on little booths shaving the heads of the Pathans clean, trimming their beards and moustachios or cutting their nails with dangerous-seeming cuticle knives; because I can recollect clearly the faces of the wayside whores, their cheeks painted with crude rouge and their ears and necks loaded with silver jewellery, because I was already conscious of the swarms of filthy, ragged lepers and seminaked beggars, wizened and thin, wilking for the gift of a pice, drawling out continuous blessings on the heads of the passers-by, even as they waved the clusters of flies off the sores on their faces and hands.
The sheer contrasts of the squalor in the meandering lanes and alleyways with the big blocks of Parsee shops on the Grand Trunk Road where the European Sahibs went, and the Hindu shops in the Sadar Bazaar patronized by the sepoys and other clean, well-to-do people, impressed me then with the grandeur of our own lordly existence as that of a superior race who were privileged because of our high caste and the capacity to read and write. And I worshipped posters of Dunlop Tyres and Singer Sewing Machines and Pears’ Soap, as well as Gillette Razor Blades and all the paraphernalia of the Sahib’s and Babu’s existence in my aspiration towards the higher birth to be earned with the doing of good deeds …
Childhood is an age of acceptance and I had nothing to do but to yield to the happiness of the soldiers looting the stalls, the fervours of stalking down the little town as though I owned it, the radiance and warmth of the greeting and exchanges between the local merchants and my father, and the favours and gifts heaped on us, the children of the cantonment Samurai …
These happy, rich, hilarious and sad days, however, were not to be for very long.
For one day as my father took us all to a picnic arranged by his town friends on the banks of the Lunda by the boat bridge with my mother, Ganesh and Shiva, and as we sat devouring the luscious midday meal and ‘eating’ the fresh, cool snow-breeze that came to the grilling plains, wafting on the waters of the Lunda, an orderly came from the regiment, perspiring and breathless with haste, and said to my father that the ‘Karnel’ Sahib wanted him at the bungalow.
‘Oh, this bitch of a Sarkar!’ my father growled. ‘It will not let you rest for a moment even in this heat! What does he want me for at this time of the evening?’
‘They say war has broken out in Vilayat, Babuji,’ said the orderly lamely.
‘What war?’ my father exclaimed with a strained look in his face.
‘Jang! Jang! Larai!’ the sepoy said.
My father jumped to his feet, pale and red, took leave of his friends and hurried away, saying to my mother, ‘Mother of Harish, you take the boys home.’
‘We are undone,’ my mother cried as she collected us, bade farewell to her friends and hurried homewards.
As we came to the dusty white fringes of the road from amid the thick traffic of braying donkeys and neighing horses adjusted to tongas, from amid the creaking, croaking, squeaking, unoiled bullock-carts, from amid the smoke of smothered wayside fires lit by rugged Pathan caravan men and their red-cheeked wives for filling hubble-bubbles, came the sinister beat of a tom-tom followed by a chorus of calls: ‘Jang! Jang! Jang chir gaya! Jang! Larai!’
My mother looked towards the sun going down after an orgy of murder on the western sky and said, ‘The end of the Kaliyug has come.’
The report which the orderly had brought us while we were ‘eating’ the air on the banks of the Lunda was confirmed by the ‘Karnel’ Sahib and by orders from Army Headquarters the next morning. One half of the 38th Dogra Regiment was to be attached to the 41 st Dogras, a sister regiment, and to go to the war as part of the Lahore Division, the other half was to proceed to Malakand in Chitral, an outpost further up in the North-Western Frontier, to fortify the border against the menace of an attack through Afghanistan.
A sudden pall of sadness seemed to spread over the whole of the regiment with the arrival of these orders, and everyone waited anxiously for his fate to be decided, to know where he was to go. For it took some time for the companies which were to proceed abroad to be shunted off from those which were to stay at the Depot.
Almost one half of the men in the regiment had diarrhoea and fell ill, either naturally or with the artificial drugs they took to get themselves passed medically unfit for active service. And a few of them sought to sell what little land they or their relations had, to collect enough money to bribe themselves out of the contingent bound for the lands of death.
My father was also in a panic, because he did not know his fate. Babu Chattar Singh had fever and the relationship between our two families became suddenly very cordial, our parents visiting Gurdevi’s house twice a day. We children secured heaps of ‘oh kuch’ from the boxes in both homes.
‘The Karnel Sahib is staying with the Depot,’ my father told my mother one day as he sat in the kitchen eating his morning meal and speculating on his lot. ‘And he likes me. So the probability is that he will ask me to stay with him. On the other hand, Major Carr, the Ajitan Sahib, has volunteered to go to the war. And he likes me, too, and may persuade the Karnel Sahib that I go with him …’
Unlike the time after the outrage on Lord Hardinge, when he had wished and prayed that he might not be out of favour with the Sahibs, he now earnestly wished that they might dismiss him or ask him to retire.
But ‘if wishes could rain farmers would be kings’. And he lived in suspense for days. And, as he was the first recipient of orders and despatches from Army Headquarters, he was in an extremely nervous state, not knowing how to square his own and the sepoys’ fears with the optimism of the civilians in the country.
‘All the Rajas and Maharajas are falling over each other to offer themselves and their resources to the Sarkar,’ he told my mother. ‘The Aga Khan has offered himself as the first recruit and one Raja who is seventy years old has volunteered to go and fight. It is strange.’
‘Baji, where is the war?’ I asked as I sat listening intently to this solemn news.
‘Child, it is near Vilayat,’ my father said.
‘Why is it?’ I persisted in my inquiries.
‘Son, the Kaiser of Germany, the Sultan of Turkey and the Badshah of Austria, are on one side and the Angrezi Badshah and the whole world are on the other side.’
‘It is the Pandus and the Kurus again, as in Mahabharat,’ said my mother, brightening the fire in the fireplace by striking one fuel stick with another. She paused a moment, wiped the smoke from her eyes, sighed, shook her head and continued, ‘Isn’t it terrible for all this destruction to be! But if the Sahib, the Aga Khan, has really joined the Angrezi Badshah, as they say he has, then the Angrez log are bound to win. For he is the incarnation of Sri Krishna ji Maharaj …’
‘Hun, the Aga Khan—as if he is God! …’ my father protested.
‘You must not blaspheme,’ my mother said. ‘Who knows what miraculous powers the Aga Khan has? And who knows what invisible forces are at work in this war? …’
‘But, mother, the Pandus were only five and the Kurus a hundred,’ I argued according to the bent of my own logic. ‘Now if the Aga Khan is an incarnation of Sri Krishna, surely he would be on the side of the Kaiser and his colleagues rather than with the Angrezi Badshah and his allies!’
My father smiled at this irrefutable argument.
‘Holdar Maula Bux says,’ began Ganesh, speaking effortfully to bring himself into this discussion, ‘that the Sultan of the Toorks is like Tamerlane and has proclaimed a holy war to spread Islam in the world …’
‘Ohe, don’t go about listening to gossip in the regiment,’ father bullied him. ‘The Sahib logs are very strict in time of war against rumours …’
‘Acha, don’t shout at him everytime the boy opens his mouth,’ my mother protested. ‘There may be something in what he says.’
‘Oh don’t be a fool,’ my father said impatiently.
‘Whatever you say,’ my mother continued, convinced of her metaphysical explanations, ‘the world is rocking on the horns of the bull which supports it. Sri Krishna ji Maharaj will show his invisible hand. There will probably be an earthquake. For vice is flourishing over virtue. It is all the fault of these ferungis who have invented these injans … and who defy God …’
‘You are mad,’ said my father. ‘It is nothing to do with God.’
‘You may think that I am mad,’ said my mother, ‘but people don’t fight unless they are evil. This war was prophesied in the holy books: it was said that in the age of untruth, a conflagration of fire will sweep the world and then a new cycle will begin and then there will be more good.’
‘Is it right, what mother says?’ I asked my father.
‘No, son, she is barking,’ he replied.
‘Acha, you will see when you are engulfed in the fire,’ she said.
Apparently her prognostications seemed not to come true, for my father received orders that he was to stay with the depot at Malakand in the Frontier. As my father knew that his war service would be an important asset when he returned from abroad, he was a trifle disappointed. In fact, however, he did not seem to care about anything as he seemed relieved to get the news and to end the suspense. And he resigned himself to all the readjustments necessitated by this event.
I sensed something of the great events which were impending in the world, but mostly through the myths and legends in which mother wrapped them. For the rest, we stared wide-eyed and uncomprehending at the troop movements and the packing of our own luggage in the strong light of the relentless sun which seemed to be laughing while everyone else was weeping. And our as yet timid, unawakened souls were bent, like our heads, in sadness. Amidst all the misery there was only one hope of happiness: we looked forward to seeing our home in Amritsar where we were to go with our mother and join a school. I, who longed for playmates of my own age, fancied I was going to a glorious new world, where aunt Devaki lived, and uncle Pratap, who had given me a taste for eating meat, and where our house was situated. And in my mind I traced the glorious curves of the wonder city of Amritsar, mixing the joy of anticipation with a taste for the new, the immense and the marvellous that stretched before me.