She takes the book out of my hand and sits down on the floor in front of me. She places her hands on my knees and continues, ‘You are becoming irritable these days. You get
gussa
with me whenever I say anything to you. You never used to lose your temper with me. What is happening to you?’
A sigh of resignation escapes my lips. I don’t reply
because I know what she is saying is right. She begins to press my legs with both her hands. It is very pleasant and sensuous. I know I have lost the battle. Where will I find another woman like Bhagmati who will abase herself to soothe my temper? She puts my legs in her lap and rubs the soles of my feet. She is a skilled masseuse. She knows I am beginning to enjoy a good massage more than sex. Sometimes I can’t get roused till she has rubbed oil in my scalp and vigorously massaged the dandruff itch out of it with her stubby, sturdy fingers. Next to my scalp it is my feet which respond to her ministrations. If
I don’t fall off to sleep I end up by sleeping with the masseuse. My frayed nerves are soothed. My temper dissolves. I no longer want to buy myself an air ticket to go abroad to get away from Bhagmati and Delhi. I told you—once you are in their
clutches there is no escape.
We had two colour prints on the walls of our
deorhi
which was both the entrance to our home and waiting-room for male visitors. One above the wooden platform on which my father sat reclining on a bolster was of Queen Victoria. On the wall facing the Queen was Guru Nanak. Every morning after my mother had said her morning prayers, while churning the earthen pitcher of buttermilk, she would light two joss-sticks and stick one each in the frames of the pictures and make obeisances to them: first to the Guru, then to the Empress. And every evening, after he had recited his evening prayer and the invocation, my father would stand in front of the Queen with the palms of his hands joined together and say loudly: ‘Lord, bless our Malika! Long may she rule over us! And bless us, her subjects! May we forever remain loyal and contented!’
When Queen Victoria died in 1901, we had a non-stop reading of the Holy
Granth
lasting two days and nights and prayed that her soul find a resting place beside the lotus feet of our Guru. When her son, Edward, was crowned king we sent plates of sweets to families with whom we maintained
bhai chaara
(fraternal relationship). Nine years later when Emperor Edward died, we again had a non-stop reading of the
Granth
. And a few days later when George V was proclaimed Emperor of Hindustan we celebrated the occasion by sending out sweets. Our family was as devoted to the Gurus as it was faithful to our English rulers whose salt it ate.
When the ship bearing King George and Queen Mary docked in Bombay on 2 December 1911 my father and I reached Delhi by train. He wanted to have the
darshan
of our rulers and explore possibilities of getting building contracts. He had been in the building business for some years. He had bored tunnels and laid railtrack between Kalka and the summer capital, Simla, but was lately of the opinion that there was more money in building houses than in drilling holes in mountains. He forced me to give up studies before I could take the final school-leaving examination. ‘Education is for making money,’ he said. ‘For making money all you need to know is how to add, subtract, multiply, calculate simple and compound interest. You have learnt all that. The rest is
aaltoo
faltoo
(dispensable rubbish).’ When I protested that I wanted to learn how to speak English like Englishmen, he lost his temper and called me a
bharooah
(pimp) which was his favourite term of abuse. When he realized he had hurt my feelings, he added very gently that English gentlemen did not like Indians who spoke English like them and much preferred Indians who spoke
tutti-phutti
(broken English).
It did not take much to make my father lose his temper and lay about with his walking-stick. When he decided that at fourteen I had learnt all there was to learn, I had to leave school and join his contracting business. When I was seventeen, he decided I was old enough to get married and chose a thirteen-year-old girl from a neighbouring village to be my wife. Before she was eighteen (and I twenty-two) she had borne me two sons. Then my father decided that I should leave my wife and sons in the village and accompany him to Delhi to seek our fortunes.
I had never seen a city as grand as Delhi. At the time it looked bigger and grander because more than five hundred rajas and maharajas were encamped there with their retinues. Also hundreds of thousands of common people from distant provinces had come to see Their Majesties. It took us three days to find accommodation. We rented two rooms on the first floor of an old building behind a bioscope close to Dufferin Bridge under which passed trains running between Delhi and Punjab, Delhi and Rajputana, Delhi and Central India.
We bought
charpoys
, tables and chairs before we went to see the preparations for the
darbar
. A city of 40,000 tents called Kingsway Camp had gone up on the northern side of the city stretching over twenty-five square miles from the river Jamna in the east to beyond the Shalimar Gardens in the west. All day long there were rehearsals with regimental bands marching up and down; caparisoned elephants being made to kneel and raise their trunks in salute; maharajas and their sons being lined up and told how to bow before the King and Queen. Every minute of the programme was gone over many times with the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, his Vicereine and their Chief Adviser, Malcolm Hailey, riding around on horseback checking everything in detail. They said that over 90,000 rats had been killed in the previous month to make sure that nothing disturbed the proceedings of the
darbar
.
On the morning of 2 December 1911 the alarm clock which regulated my father’s life went off at 4 a.m. It was bitterly cold. My teeth chattered while I washed my face in icy cold water. After a quick repast of stale
chappaties
left over from the previous evening gulped down with tumblers of steaming-hot, over-sweetened tea we set out in the pitch dark. We had to cross over Dufferin Bridge well before Their Majesties train was to pass under it on its way to Delhi railway station as the railtrack passing through Delhi including the bridge was later to be cordoned off by the police as a precaution against the designs of evildoers.
We had to walk almost three miles with crowds milling around us before we reached our destination. The roads near Kingsway Camp were brightly lit. By the time the streetlights were switched off we were in our places. A very bright sun came up on the huge open square. At one end of the square was a platform covered with a red carpet with two ‘thrones’ placed under a canopy. On all the other sides of the square were rows of chairs at different levels. There must have been over 3,00,000 people in these enclosures. I asked myself where in India you could see such an orderly, well-behaved crowd except in Delhi! White soldiers were directing people to their allotted seats; no one dared to question them. No shouting. No squabbling. And military bands playing all the time; as one brass band ended, bagpipes began to whine; when they ended another roll of drums and the clash of cymbals.
Suddenly the bands fell silent. From the distance we heard the thunder of cannons firing a twenty-one gun salute. Their Majesties had arrived at Delhi railway station.
An hour or so later we heard the roar of crowds from the city side come nearer and nearer towards us and sensed that the royal procession was on its way. A long line of elephants came lumbering down with bells clanging. Then came regimental bands followed by infantry, cavalry, more bands and more elephants. I trained my eye on every passing
howdah
to see if I could recognize Their Majesties from pictures I had seen. After all the elephants had gone by, I asked my father, ‘Where are the King and the Queen?’ He had also failed to spot them. ‘That’s the
Laat Sahib,
’ he said pointing to a tall man on horseback. ‘And that small gentleman riding on the white horse alongside Lord Hardinge is the King,’ said a man sitting next to my father. I was disappointed. He should have been seated on an elephant. Besides the tall Viceroy, the king looked like a pink dwarf with a beard. I am sure few people realized that the king had ridden past them till they saw him and his queen walk up to their thrones. Then everyone stood up as massed bands struck up the National Anthem ‘God Save The King’.
From where we sat we could not hear any of the speeches. Though the white soldiers could frighten Indians into staying in their places, no power on earth can stop Indians from talking all the time.
Yeh
dekh! Voh dekh
! (See this! See that!)— everyone kept telling everyone else. All at once there was an uproar. A
shamiana
was on fire and people began to run. Tommies hollered at the top of their voices: ‘Sit down, sit down.’ No one cared: everyone valued his life above everything else. My father and I ran with the crowd and were out of the camp in a few minutes. We did not pause for breath till we were back in our apartment.
I had read about the disloyal activities of mischiefmakers in Bengal and Maharashtra. Perhaps they were behind this conflagration. In the bazaars people were making wild guesses about who started it, how many had been killed, how narrowly Their Majesties had escaped. And the heads that would roll because of the fiasco. Surely the wrath of the
sarkar
would fall on the city and it would order parts of it to be burnt down! It was only in the evening that we learnt from special bulletins issued by the local papers that the fire had been caused by a short circuit and had been put down immediately without any loss of life. The bulletins also mentioned two momentous decisions taken by the government: the partition of Bengal made six years ago was to be revoked and the capital of India would be shifted from Calcutta to Delhi.
The partition of Bengal by Lord Curzon in 1905 had angered Hindus who felt that it was designed to further divide Hindus and Muslims and create a Muslim state in East Bengal. Young Bengali Hindus and Maharashtrians and some misguided Sikhs vowed to undo the partition and destroy British rule. In Bengal bombs were thrown at English officers and some were murdered. In Gujarat an attempt was made on the life of Lord Minto who had succeeded Curzon as Viceroy. A Punjabi boy studying in London shot and killed Wylie. The English being wise realized that the partition of Bengal had caused too much heart-burning and decided to revoke it in the hope that it would put an end to terrorism. For a while it did. But it also created an impression that the English could be frightened with bombs and pistols. Indian nationalists said it was wrong to think that the white race was superior to the brown. If a yellow race of dwarfs like the Japanese could defeat the mighty empire of the white Tsars of Russia surely a nation of hundred-and-fifty million Indians could make mincemeat of the handful of Englishmen in India! They said if all Indians were to stand alongside and urinate in a tank there would be enough urine to drown the English population of India.
The transfer of the capital to Delhi was widely welcomed— the only exceptions were Europeans with businesses in Calcutta. They suspected that Lord Hardinge was behind the move and started a campaign to have him dismissed. They said that the letters H.M.G. no longer stood for ‘His Majesty’s Government’ but for ‘Hardinge Must Go’. Their efforts came to nothing. Delhi had always been the capital of Hindustan. It was closer to the heart of the country. Before Hardinge there were Viceroys who had given clear hints that they regarded Delhi as India’s most important city. In 1877 it was in Delhi that Lord Lytton had read the proclamation recognizing Queen Victoria as Empress of Hindustan. Likewise in 1903 it was in Delhi that Lord Curzon had held the
darbar
in honour of the coronation of King Edward VII.
Having made the proclamation there was no question of the king going back on it. Three days after inaugurating the
darbar
Their Majesties laid the foundation stone of the new capital at Kingsway Camp. The next day they left for Nepal to shoot tigers before returning to England.
My father was a man of foresight and had a knack of making money. He was also very tight-fisted and haggled over the prices of peanuts, onions and potatoes. ‘Money saved is money earned,’ he often said. ‘Put a rupee in the bank today and let it accumulate compound interest —
sood dar sood
. Sitting in the bank without doing anything in a hundred years that one rupee will become one lakh rupees.’ Although he could not speak English he could get round English officials and get them to do what he wanted. Whenever he went to call on them he wore his big white turban, a black coat and a gold-brocaded sash running from his left shoulder to his waist. He bought the best fruit available in the market and presented them to the sahibs saying they were from his orchard. We had no orchard. The only fruit that grew in our native village, Hadali, were date-palms. He told me, ‘Never try to give sahibs cash or jewellery; they will abuse you and will kick you out. But fruit is
daali
— an acceptable gift.’ He was open-handed with his tips to the sahibs’
chaprassies
and clerks. ‘This is not
baksheesh,
’ he explained to me later, ‘but sound investment.’ It was true. The sahibs’ orders in his favour were never lost in officials’ files but immediately attended to.
As soon as the
darbar
tents were struck, plans for building the new capital were taken in hand. Malcolm Hailey was made Commissioner and put in charge of the capital project. My father had met Hailey when he had visited our district town, Shahpur. He took me along when he went to pay his respects to the Commissioner. We bought oranges, apples and Kandahari pomegranates then available in Fatehpuri Bazaar and had several baskets nicely wrapped in pink tissue-paper and silver thread. One basket was presented to the sahib’s personal assistant and the contents of another distributed amongst the orderlies. It was the personal assistant who reminded Hailey that my father had met him earlier and brought the pick of fruit from his orchard. Hailey who must have known that there were no fruit grown around Shahpur nevertheless graciously accepted them. He asked my father in Punjabi if there was anything he could do for him. My father introduced me to him ‘as your own son,’ and mentioned the experience we had in building. Hailey put down our names and address on a piece of paper and said, ‘You will hear from me if anything comes up.’