Tooni and Abdul heard the terrible news of Cawnpore six months
later. They had gone back to their own country, and it was far
from Cawnpore--hundreds and hundreds of miles across a white sandy
desert, grown with prickles and studded with rocks--high up in the
north of Rajputana. In the State of Chita and the town of
Rubbulgurh there was no fighting, because there were no Sahibs.
The English had not yet come to teach the Maharajah how to govern
his estate and spend his revenues. That is to say, there was no
justice to speak of, and a great deal of cholera, and by no means
three meals a day for everybody, or even two. But nobody was
discontented with troubles that came from the gods and the
Maharajah, and talk of greased cartridges would not have been
understood. Thinking of this, Abdul often said to Tooni, his wife;
'The service of the sahib is good and profitable, but in old age
peace is better, even though we are compelled to pay many rupees to
the tax-gatherers of the Maharajah.' Tooni always agreed, and when
the khaber came that all the memsahibs and the children had been
killed by the sepoys, she agreed weeping. They were always so kind
and gentle, the memsahibs, and the little ones, the babalok--the
babalok! Surely the sepoys had become like the tiger-folk. Then
she picked up Sonny Sahib and held him tighter than he liked. She
had crooned with patient smiles over many of the babalok in her
day, but from beginning to end, never a baba like this. So strong
he was, he could make old Abdul cry out, pulling at his beard, so
sweet-tempered and healthy that he would sleep just where he was
put down, like other babies of Rubbulgurh. Tooni grieved deeply
that she could not give him a bottle, and a coral, and a
perambulator, and often wondered that he consented to thrive
without these things, but the fact remains that he did. He even
allowed himself to be oiled all over occasionally for the good of
his health, which was forbearing in a British baby. And always
when Abdul shook his finger at him and said--
'Gorah pah howdah, hathi pah JEEN!
Jeldi bag-gia, Warren HasTEEN!'[3]
he laughed and crowed as if he quite understood the joke.
[3] 'Howdahs on horses, on elephants JEEN!
He ran away quickly did Warren HasTEEN!'
'Jeen' means 'saddles,' but nobody could make that rhyme! Popular
incident of an English retreat in Hastings' time.
Tooni had no children of her own, and wondered how long it would be
before she and Abdul must go again to Cawnpore to find the baby's
father. There need be no hurry, Tooni thought, as Sonny Sahib
played with the big silver hoops in her ears, and tried to kick
himself over her shoulder. Abdul calculated the number of rupees
that would be a suitable reward for taking care of a baby for six
months, found it considerable, and said they ought to start at
once. Then other news came--gathering terror from mouth to mouth
as it crossed Rajputana--and Abdul told his wife one evening, after
she had put Sonny Sahib to sleep with a hymn to Israfil, that a
million of English soldiers had come upon Cawnpore, and in their
hundredfold revenge had left neither Mussulman nor Hindoo alive in
the city--also that the Great Lord Sahib had ordered the head of
every kala admi, every black man, to be taken to build a bridge
across the Ganges with, so that hereafter his people might leave
Cawnpore by another way. Then Abdul also became of the opinion
that there need be no haste in going.
Sonny Sahib grew out of the arms and necks of his long embroidered
night dresses and day dresses almost immediately, and then there
was a difficulty, which Tooni surmounted by cutting the waists off
entirely and gathering the skirts round the baby's neck with a
drawing string, making holes in the sides for his arms to come
through. Tooni bought him herself a little blue and gold Mussulman
cap in the bazar. The captain-sahib would be angry, but then the
captain-sahib was very far away, killed perhaps, and Tooni thought
the blue and gold cap wonderfully becoming to Sonny Sahib. All day
long he played and crept in this under the sacred peepul-tree in
the middle of the village among brown-skinned babies who wore no
clothes at all--only a string of beads round their fat little
waists--and who sometimes sat down in silence and made a solemn
effort to comprehend him.
In quite a short time--in Rubbulgurh, where there is no winter, two
years is a very little while--Sonny Sahib grew too big for even
this adaptation of his garments; and then Tooni took him to Sheik
Uddin, the village tailor, and gave Sheik Uddin long and careful
directions about making clothes for him. The old man listened to
her for an hour, and waggled his beard, and said that he quite
understood; it should be as she wished. But Sheik Uddin had never
seen any English people, and did not understand at all. He
accepted Tooni's theories, but he measured and cut according to his
own. Sheik Uddin could not afford to suffer in his reputation for
the foolish notions of a woman. So he made Sonny Sahib a pair of
narrow striped calico trousers, and a long tight-fitting little
coat with large bunches of pink roses on it, in what was the
perfectly correct fashion for Mahomedan little boys of Rubbulgurh
and Rajputana generally. Tooni paid Sheik Uddin tenpence, and
admired her purchase very much. She dressed Sonny Sahib in it
doubtfully, however, with misgivings as to what his father would
say. Certainly it was good cloth, of a pretty colour, and well
made, but even to Tooni, Sonny Sahib looked queer. Abdul had no
opinion, except about the price. He grumbled at that, but then he
had grumbled steadily for two years, yet whenever Tooni proposed
that they should go and find the captain-sahib, had said no, it was
far, and he was an old man. Tooni should go when he was dead.
Besides, Abdul liked to hear the little fellow call him 'Bap,'
which meant 'Father,' and to feel his old brown finger clasped by
small pink and white ones, as he and Sonny Sahib toddled into the
bazar together. He liked to hear Sonny Sahib's laugh, too; it was
quite a different laugh from any other boy's in Rubbulgurh, and it
came oftener. He was a merry little fellow, blue-eyed, with very
yellow wavy hair, exactly, Tooni often thought, like his mother's.