It was my brother who taught me how to acquire and train grasshoppers. All afternoon we wandered on the outskirts of the town, peered into every ditch and culvert, stirred up the weeds and trapped the grasshoppers in little cannisters and brought them home; he always let me keep the green ones, and the large brown variety was reserved for his own pleasure. We kept them each in a cardboard box perforated for air, and stuffed in green leaves, sugar, and what not for their nourishment, and tried to teach them tricks, but invariably found them dead two mornings later. Although puzzled, we never wasted time in trying to unravel the mystery of their death, but sallied forth to collect fresh ones in the afternoon.
When the eight weeks of my vacation were over and I had to go back to Madras, I felt desolate. Having got used to the company of my brothers and sisters, to my mother’s attention, and to servants, it would seem an impossibility to go back to the drab street companions, the abusive schoolmasters, the scrabby benchmates from the Boarding, and above all the loneliness of the Madras home. But I had no choice. A postcard from that end in my uncle’s clear-cut calligraphy intimated the date of my school’s reopening and the fact that I was promoted to the next standard. (I have no doubt that I was pushed up by devious means, as the old school clerk who noted down passes and failures in the register was a constant visitor to our house and received many small favours from my uncle. Later he became my private tutor at home for many years and navigated me through the perilous seas of arithmetic and geography in particular, sometimes flourishing his cane as an aid to his teaching; occasionally he promised me solitary and starving confinement, in a cell supposed to be right under the crucifix atop the Lutheran Mission School; yet he was helpful at the time of promotions.)
My mother prepared several types of sweets to last me for weeks, and saw me off in the company of someone going to Madras. During my departure, my father hovered about to give me parting advice: “Try not to become a Madras vagrant,” he said jocularly and gave me pocket money.
I remember being taken to Chennapatna unexpectedly again when Madras was bombarded from the sea by Emden in the First World War. Madrasis, not being used to any war since the days of Robert Clive, did not really realize that the city was being shelled from the sea. They noticed the searchlight beams sweeping the sky from the sea followed by explosions, and, watching from their terraces, wondered at the phenomenon of thunder and lightning with a sky full of stars. One shell hit the High Court building and shattered its compound wall; shrapnel were found in the Law College verandah next day; another shell hit the oil storage at the harbour and set it ablaze—a fire I could see from the roof of our house three or four miles away. The Crown Prince of Germany, commanding Emden, was roaming the high seas and sinking Allied ships, and while passing the Indian shores had shelled Madras just for amusement—without any serious feeling of hostility, perhaps, with the friendliest feeling at heart. Such is the complex stuff that warriors are made of; they destroy (or try to) for fun. It seems incredible that a commander of a battleship should come all the way, take all that trouble, to knock off a few feet of a High Court compound wall and set a tank of oil on fire. It scared the citizens who dwelt in the eastern part of the city—in George Town, nearer the coast—but left indifferent those who lived just a couple of miles in the interior. Many who lived in George Town harnessed their carriages and moved westward in the direction of Kilpauk. It was in keeping with an earlier move, when the sea was rough with cyclone and it was prophesied that the world would end that day, and many had their carriages harnessed and all valuables packed in readiness to drive off to Conjeevaram, forty miles away, the moment the sea should be noticed to rise and advance towards the city.
CHAPTER FOUR
When my third brother was three months old, my father was transferred from Chennapatna to a high school at a place called Hassan. He was advised by his friends to tell his departmental heads at Bangalore that his child was only three months old and could not yet be moved. But he was a disciplined officer and would not dream of asking for any special favour.
So for my next vacation, I had to go through a more complicated journey; an all-night trip up to Bangalore, a change of train for part of another night, a stop-over at a small station called Arisikere, a few hours of sleep on a desk in the waiting-room before joining a caravan of bullock-carts starting at dawn. At the proper time, I was awakened and put into a huge mat-covered waggon drawn by a pair of bullocks; I sat on a bed of straw covered over with a carpet; a stalwart peon from Hassan high school was seated beside the driver. Manja was his name. He was my sole escort from this point on (someone else travelling in this direction had brought me up to Arisikere from Madras). Manja kept talking in Kannada, which I had yet to pick up. He had a long moustache, and wore ear-rings, and chattered away with news of the Hassan home. Much of what he said was above my head, but he took a lot of trouble to explain in broken Tamil, “The first thing you must promise me is to prostrate yourself at the feet of your parents the moment you see them. Otherwise I will never speak to you.” I didn’t know why I should have cared whether he spoke to me or not, but somehow I felt intimidated, and vowed that I would prostrate myself at my parents’ feet, although the notion was repulsive (as it still remains) that one should fall at the feet of another. But there was no contradicting him, as I was at his mercy completely.
Part of the way as we travelled along, Manja got off and walked ahead of the caravan, carrying a staff menacingly. Some spots in that jungle and mountain country were well-known retreats of highway robbers; one form of protection was to travel in a closely moving caravan with Manja waving a staff at the head of the column, uttering blood-curdling challenges. That was enough to keep off robbers in those days. We passed along miles and miles of tree-shaded highway, gigantic mango and blueberry trees and lantana shrubs in multicoloured bloom stretching away endlessly. A couple of times the bullocks were rested beside a pond or a well. The road wound up and down steep slopes—the sort of country I had never known before, for Hassan is actually a hill-station. (They continue to call it Poor Man’s Ooty—Ooty being a hill-resort at a height of eight thousand feet to which government officials and affluent persons retreat in summer.) The overpowering smell of straw in the waggon and the slow pace of the bullocks with their bells jingling made me drowsy, although I was troubled at the back of my mind by Manja’s injunction. It was a twenty-seven-mile ride. After hours of tossing on straw, we came to a bungalow set in a ten-acre field. Even before we turned into the gate Manja warned me to remember my vow. But the moment I was received into the fold at the trellised ivy-covered porch, I totally ignored Manja, and never looked in his direction, while he carried my baggage in. He never mentioned the matter again during my stay of three months; and I am certain that I would have shocked my parents if I had done anything so theatrical as prostrate myself on the floor.
My younger sister and brother were respectively seven and five—old enough now to be taken seriously by me. We played endlessly in the vast compound. The air was clear and a gold mohur tree in front was always in bloom. The house was of the colonial type, with arched doorways and high ceilings and Venetian shutters. The trellised front porch was full of some purple winged flowers, constantly parachuting down. The gold mohur yielded enormous quantities of flowers. We plucked the long stamens out of each bud, hooked up their heads from opposite sides and tugged, and whosoever lost the head, lost a point. We could sit under the tree and play this game for hours.
My elder brother gave me his company whenever he could—but he was extremely busy, being involved in various sporting and athletic activities and in great demand among his friends; he spent most of his time outside our home and came in late every day through a gap in the lantana hedge, slipping into his room unobtrusively from a side door. He had to adopt this device since he was constantly admonished to return home before dark (an impossible condition for him). Hassan fields and roads swarmed with cobras, and the hedges were particularly dangerous, but he did not care
. Once a tiger had escaped from a jungle and was seen here and there, and the town was in a panic; people shut the doors in the evenings, never venturing out after dusk. But my brother continued to come home at his own hour, bringing in fresh tales of the tiger’s depredations—how someone was mauled here, a cow carried away there, and so forth. My father also continued his habit of club and tennis after school and never came home before nine in the evening. But he had the protection of Manja, who took a hurricane lantern and his bamboo staff to escort my father home safely. If there were more tigers and cobras to be feared, Manja only turned the wick of the lantern a little brighter and carried a heavier staff. As usual, we children were all in bed with blankets drawn to our chins before Father arrived, Hassan being so cold as to make my teeth chatter even in summer.
Some days my elder brother would take me out with him. We would go to a reddish, muddy pond to be reached from the back part of our vast compound, stand ankle-deep in the water, and fling stones to create ripples. Pieces of hollow reeds would come ashore riding on the ripples. I think we often risked being drowned when we sneaked out there, the only precaution my brother could take being a warning to me not to tell anyone at home. We needed a retreat like this because he brought cigarettes with him and we smoked. He had peppermints also at hand to cover our tobacco breath when we returned home. While smoking we were afraid of being seen by someone and denounced to the police, but this pond was a secure place; except for some insignificant young goatherd, no one came that way. We also smoked at home, under a zinc shed at the edge of our spacious compound. My brother used to tuck away the matches and cigarette packets under the eaves of that shed beyond the well. One afternoon my elder sister caught us red-handed, and we let her go after extracting a solemn promise that she would tell no one; we also gave her peppermints. But the moment she went in, she reported the matter to my mother, who later in the evening took me aside and asked, “Is it true that you smoke cigarettes? Is this what you have learnt at Madras? I’m going to tell your father and he will, I am sure, take the skin off your back.” I had never been addressed so roughly by my mother at any time. I quailed and did not know what to say, but stood blinking stupidly until she said, “Go and eat your dinner, you scamp. Where is the other fellow?”
My brother sensed the atmosphere and had somehow made himself scarce, and did not answer when called. For my part, I bolted down my dinner, went to bed, drew the blanket completely over my face, and lay still when I heard Manja’s staff pounding the gravel outside. I expected, watching and waiting through the suffocating blanket, to hear Mother’s denouncement of us and to have Father come swooping down on us, but nothing happened. I waited to be summoned, long after everyone had gone to bed and all sound had ceased, and only the night lamp was burning. But nothing happened; we had obviously been protected by Mother although betrayed by the sister.
Back to Madras. I had completed the final year at the Lutheran Mission School. The last group photo was taken after a farewell party, with our headmaster sitting in the middle, and the four teachers who were considered to be the cream of the teaching staff flanking him, a dozen or so of the classmates standing up in two rows behind. I have an old print of it—the one group photo which has not yellowed, browned, or dimmed with years, but remained remarkably fresh. It has a brilliance and glow which I find uncanny and embarrassing. It has stood up to the ravages of time, resisting every process of decay. The gloss and sepia tone are not a whit lost. Its freshness saves one from the natural depression that an old photograph provokes. Occasionally I try to amuse myself by recollecting the names of the figures in the photograph. Starting with the headmaster, in his perfect turban edged with a thin lace, and a silk coat buttoned up to his throat, an elegant moustache turned up at the corners with the utmost artistry—I never knew what his name was: one never thinks that a headmaster could have any other name. He was the perfect picture of a headmaster. He was a good man, soft-spoken, but rather inclined to using the cane at the slightest chance; he always prowled around with it in hand but had the good sense to put it away while sitting for the photo. He delivered a regular quota of cane cuts on my upturned palm on most Monday noons, in respect of absence from drill class on the preceding Friday evening. I skipped the class with reckless indifference; Monday the day of reckoning seeming far away and unreal. Six whacks on one’s palm (with the choice of taking all the six on one or three on each palm) were less painful than the drill on Friday. On the right-hand side of the headmaster sat Guruswami, who taught us English, Tamil, and mathematics, and who tucked in a thick tuft of hair under a woolen cap, which was constantly popping up owing to the springy action of his tuft. I viewed him as a friend since he sent me on minor errands from the classroom, such as buying him pan or a packet of tiffin from the shops across the street, and I felt honoured by such assignments. His face was pock-marked and he was a homeless man, living in the school lumber-room off the upstairs verandah. The other teacher by his side was a soft buttery-faced man whose tuft stuck out of a short, felt headgear known as Christy’s (London) cap. He was a mild, mumbling man who taught us history and geography, and was easygoing and more afraid of us than we were of him. He had the craziest name one could devise—Mrityunjayam—which we could neither spell nor pronounce. At the two rows of standing classmates I look hard and long but can’t get their names except the one in embroidered cap over his tuft—what a lot of tufts in those days!—Kapali, our monitor, a supreme being, in my view, of dignity and authority. I hung upon his words and felt thrilled when he spoke to me. Where are they and how are they now? As if lost in a vast ocean. I can be sure of only myself in a black coat. (Which our tailor Appu Maistry took months to deliver. He came every month when the crescent moon was three days old, took a long look at the moon from our terrace, and then immediately gazed on my uncle’s face for good luck. “‘If one’s eyes fall on a virtuous face first thing after glancing at the new crescent, one will have good luck a whole month,’ say the shastras,” said Appu. Always in difficulty, he gazed on my uncle’s face every month, for he was the only good man within his reach. He could have given me my coat—an old black one he had undertaken to alter—earlier if he had stuck to his machine instead of pursuing good men’s faces. But he took months, compelling me to visit him every day. Still, he delivered it with every button stitched, in time for the group photo, where it remains enshrined forever.) I cannot recollect a single other name in the photo, although for eight long years ours was a proud batch, reading, playing, and suffering our teachers together. When we came to the final year at school we held ourselves proudly aloof as became seniors, who occupied the rooms upstairs. We thumped up and down the wooden staircase heavily, authoritatively, as became the gentlemen of the school; stood looking down the parapet wall at the juniors swarming the school ground below, like Olympian gods eyeing fumbling and shuffling pygmies below. But I have to ask, Where are my fellow Olympians at this moment? Perhaps watching grandchildren, or waiting for their arrival from play or for a holiday. If and when through a freak of destiny there is a reunion of our group, I am sure we shall be comparing our lumbago, which keeps one pinned down to the pyol of the house, or the hyperacidity that corrodes one from within, converting food into poison, or the blood-pressure that jangles one’s ear drums and decrees as in the case of Macbeth, “Sleep no more.” All this speculation on the premise that they are all alive and recognizable. However, if I saw them now sitting in a row on a park-bench, I would pass them without recognition, as they might wonder in turn, “Who is this hairless fellow striding along jauntily, unbecoming his years?” Very much in the strain of my American hotel manager, who told me once, “Son of a gun, you must be as old as I am, though you don’t look it; don’t push yourself too hard, take care.” He had just recovered from a heart attack, and knew what he was talking about.
A change of school for the fourth form, to an institution called C.R.C. High School, an endowed school whose benefactor’s name was too lengthy and was abbreviated for p
ractical reasons. A school with no particular quality of good or evil about it, the chief interest in this change for me being that to reach the school I had to pass through the shopping area beyond the tram-terminus, which gave me a sense of enlarged horizons. School lessons became secondary at this stage—all kinds of other interests kept me absorbed. I became a scout, and proudly revelled in an exclusive world of parades in khaki shorts, double-pocket shirt, green turban, shoulder stripes, gaudy scarf, and a bamboo staff in hand; we saluted each other with the left hand, since it had to come from the heart, which is on the left side. Our great unseen God was Lord Baden-Powell, who had devised this institution in order to make the younger subjects of the British Empire healthy-minded, sturdy, and loyal to God, Crown, and Country. Our three fingers held up in salute were supposed to symbolize this triple loyalty to God, Crown, and Country. But alas, what a miscalculation! We were absorbed into the B.S.A. (Besant Scouts of India, Annie Besant being our President, championing the cause of Home Rule for India), and our three uplifted fingers indicated an oath to serve not God, Crown, and Country but God, Freedom, and India. The anthem we sang at the end of every drill to the tune of “God Save the King” actually said, “God save our Motherland, God save our noble land, God save our Ind.”