Seven Summers by Mulk Raj Anand

Author:Mulk Raj Anand [Anand, Mulk Raj]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9788184754520
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

5

About this time I began to notice a conspicuous change in my father’s relations with us all. He was harder, much more reticent in his manner and short with anyone who dared to contradict him. Perhaps he had got scent of another conspiracy against himself by his enemies, or perhaps it was just a passing mood, but he began to absent himself from home in the evenings when previously after dinner he used to sit down and coach us in our studies and preside over the family hearth, as it were. He would go away for weekends to Peshawar or to Amritsar on a few days’ leave and my mother often cried herself to sleep. And when he was in the house, a nameless oppression reigned there like a dark thundercloud.

I did not then know the reasons for this change. I found later that it certainly had something to do with the strained atmosphere between the Sahibs and the people, ever since the discovery of the bomb in the Viceroy’s house. The fact that my father had suddenly cut any connections he had had with the social life of the Arya Samaj seemed to weigh on him. And although the fear of possible intrigues against him still haunted him, he was unhappy at the restrictions which he had to impose on himself. The company of narrow-minded, illiterate Indian officers, and wine and women at Peshawar, were inadequate compensations. And he hated, though he accommodated himself to them, the petty rivalries, the meannesses and the intrigues of the small-minded men in the army.

I recall now that I felt acutely the impact of this change in my father’s temperament, because it so happened that about this time I was growing up from the petted child to the active school-going age, and experiencing all the miseries of that crucial development besides the other miseries.

I had been relinquishing my status as the ‘baby’ of the house to Shiva for some time, quite willingly, because I liked him, and, being unacceptable to older children like Ganesh and his friends as a companion, I played with my baby brother and built up a joint front with him against my elder brother. I had also, of course, accepted the ‘don’t do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ from my father and mother with the characteristic nonchalance of the child who listens to an injunction with one ear and lets it go out through the other. I had accepted the beliefs, prejudices and preferences which my father had cultivated through his own experience and which, even though he was himself far removed from the years of his own childhood, he ordered us to adopt because he wanted to help us to grow up to be men like himself.

I had even accepted the family code that we should all make a positive contribution towards increasing the prestige of our father by doing deeds worthy of the family, which was held up as a model of izzat and respectability, for I could recite paragraphs from the Gita, as a parrot imitating my mother, and was good at school.

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