He stood in the verandah, salaaming with both hands, in each of which
he held a bouquet--round-topped, compressed, prim little posies, with
fat bundles of stalk bound spirally with date-fibre; altogether more
like ninepins than bouquets, for the time of flowers was not yet, and
only a few ill-conditioned rosebuds, suggestive of worms, and a
dejected _champak_ or two, showed amongst the green.
The holder was hardly more decorative than the posies. Bandy, hairy
brown legs, with toes set wide open by big brass rings--a sight
bringing discomfort within one's own slippers from sheer sympathy; a
squat body, tightly buttoned into a sleeveless white coat; a face of
mild ugliness overshadowed by an immaculately white turban. From the
coral and gold necklace round his thick throat, and the crescent-shaped
ear-rings in his spreading ears, I guessed him to be of the Arain
caste. He was, in fact, Heera Nund, gardener to my new landlord;
therefore, for the present, my servant. Had I inquired into the matter,
I should probably have found that his forbears had cultivated the
surrounding land for centuries; certainly long years before masterful
men from the West had jotted down their trivial boundary pillars to
divide light from darkness, the black man from the white, cantonments
from the rest of God's earth. One of these little white pillars stood
in a corner of my garden, and beyond it lay an illimitable stretch of
bare brown plain, waiting till the young wheat came to clothe its
nakedness.
I did not inquire, however; few people do in India. Perhaps they are
intimidated by the extreme antiquity of all things, and dread letting
loose the floodgates of garrulous memory. Be that as it may, I was
content to accept the fact that Heera Nund, whether representing
ancestral proprietors or not, had come to congratulate me, a stranger,
on having taken, not only the house, but the garden also. The _sahibs_,
he said, went home so often nowadays that they had ceased to care for
gardens. This one having been in a contractor's hands for years had
become, as it were, a miserable low-degree native place. In fact, he
had found it necessary to steep his own knowledge in oblivion in order
that content should grow side by side with country vegetables. Yet he
had not forgotten the golden age, when, under the aegis of some judge
with a mysterious name, he, too, Heera Nund the Arain, had raised
celery and beetroot, French beans and artichokes, asparagus and
parsley. He reeled off the English names with a glibness and inaccuracy
in which, somehow, there lurked a pathetic dignity. Then suddenly, from
behind a favouring pillar, he sprung upon me the usual native offering,
consisting of a flat basket decorated with a few coarse vegetables. A
bunch of rank-smelling turnips, half-a-dozen blue radishes running two
to the pound, various heaps of native greens, a bit off an overblown
cauliflower proclaiming its bazaar origin by the turmeric powder
adhering to it in patches, a leaf-cup of mint ornamented by two glowing
chillies. He laid the whole at my feet with a profound obeisance. "This
dust-like offering," he said gravely, "is all that the good God
(_Khuda_) can give to the _sahib_. Let the Presence (_Huzoor_) wait a
few months and see what Heera Nund can do for him."
I shall not soon forget the ludicrous solemnity of voice and gesture,
or the simple self-importance overlaying the ugly face with the smile
of a cat licking cream.
I did not see him again for some days, for accession to a new office
curtails leisure. When, however, I found time for a stroll round my new
domain I discovered Heera Nund hard at work. His coatee hung on a bush;
his bare, brown back glistened in the sunshine as he stooped down to
deepen a watercourse with his adze-like shovel. A brake of sugarcane,
red-brown and gold, showed where the garden proper merged into the
peasants' land beyond; for the well, whence the water came that flowed
round Heera Nund's hidden feet as he stood in the runnel, irrigated
quite a large stretch of the fields around my holding. The well-wheel
creaked in recurring discords, every now and again giving out a note or
two as if it were going to begin a tune. The red evening sun shone
through the mango-trees, where the green parrots hung like unripe
fruit. The bullocks circled round and round; the water dripped and
gurgled.
"How about the seeds I sent you?" I asked, when Heera Nund drew his wet
feet from the stream, and composing himself for the effort, produced an
elaborate salaam.
He left humility behind him as he stalked over to a narrow strip of
ground on the other side of the well, a long strip portioned out into
squares and circles like a doll's garden, with tiny one-span walks
between.
"Behold!" he said, "his Honour will observe that the cabbage caste have
life already."
Truly enough the half-covered seeds showed gussets of white in their
brown jackets. "But where are the tickets? I sent word specially that
you were to be sure and stick the labels on each bed. How am I to know
which is which?"
"The Presence can see that the sticks are there," he answered with a
superior smile; "but there are others beside the _sahibs_ who love
tickets."
He pointed to the tree above us, where on a branch sat a peculiarly
bushy-tailed squirrel, as happy as a king over the brussels-sprouts'
wrapper, which he was crumpling into a ball with deft hands and sharp
teeth. How I came to know it was this particular wrapper happened thus:
I threw my cap at the offender, and in his flight he dropped the paper
on my bald head; it was hard, and had points.
"They are mis-begotten devils," remarked Heera cheerfully; "but they
are building nests, _sahib_, and like to paper the inside.
Notwithstanding, the Presence need fear no confusion; his slave has
many names in his head. This is _arly walkrin_ (Early Walcheren), that
is _droomade_ (Drumhead), yonder is _dookoyark_ (Duke of York), and
that, that, and that--He would have gone on interminably, had I not
changed the subject by asking what was growing beneath a dilapidated
hand-light, which stood next to a sturdy crop of broadcast radishes.
Only a few panes of glass remained intact, but the vacancies had been
neatly supplied by coarse muslin. The gardener's face, always simple in
expression, became quite homogeneous with pure content.
"_Huzoor!_ It is the _malin_ (female gardener)!"
"The _malin!_ What on earth do you mean?"
Have you ever watched the face of a general servant when she takes the
covers off the Christmas dinner? Have you ever seen a very young
conjurer lift his father's hat to show you that the handkerchief (which
he has palpably secreted elsewhere) is no longer in its legitimate
hiding-place? Something of that mingled triumph and fear lest some
accident may have befallen skill in the interim showed itself in Heera
Nund's countenance as he removed the light with a flourish, thus
disclosing to view a fat and remarkably black baby asleep on a bed of
leaves. It was attired in a pair of silver bangles, and a Maw's
feeding-bottle grew, like some new kind of root-crop, from the ground
beside it.
"My daughter, _Huzoor_--little Dhropudi the _malin_."
His voice thrilled even my bachelor ears as he squatted down and began
mechanically to fan the swift-gathering flies from the sleeping child.
"You seem to be very fond of her," I remarked after a pause. "It is
only a girl after all. Have you no son?"
He shook his head.
"She is the only one, and I waited for her ten years--ten long years;
so I was glad even to get a malin. Dhropudi grows as fast as a boy,
almost as fast as the _Huzoor's_ cabbages. Only the other day she was
no bigger than my hand."
"Your wife is dead, I suppose?" The question was, perhaps, a little
brutal, but it was so unusual to see a man doing dry nurse to a baby
girl, that I took it for granted that the mother had died months
before, at the child's birth. I never saw a face change more rapidly
than his; the simplicity left it, and in place thereof came a curious
anxiety such as a child might show with the dawning conviction that it
has lost itself.
"She is not at all dead, _Huzoor_; on the contrary, she is very young.
Children cry sometimes, and my house does not like crying. You see,
when people are young they require more sleep; when she is old as I am
she will be able to keep awake."
His tone was argumentative, as if he were reasoning the matter out for
his own edification. "Not that Dhropudi keeps me awake often," he
added, in hasty apology to that infant's reputation; "considering how
young a person she is, her ways are very straight-walking and meek."
"If she cries you can always stop her with the watering-pot, I
suppose."
He looked shocked at the suggestion.
"_Huzoor!_ it is not difficult to stop them; such a very little thing
pleases a baby. Sometimes it is the sunshine--sometimes it is the wind
in the trees--sometimes it is the birds, or the squirrels, or the
flowers. When it is tired of these there is always the milk in its
stomach. Dhropudi's goat is yonder; it lives on your Honour's weeds.
You are her father and her mother."
However much I might repudiate the relationship, I soon became quite
accustomed to finding Dhropudi in the most unexpected places in my
garden. For, soon after my first introduction to her, the claims of an
early crop of lettuces to protection from the squirrels led Heera Nund
to transfer the hand-light from one of his charges to another.
Dhropudi, he said, could grow nicely without it now; the black ants
could not carry her off, and the squirrels had quite begun to recognise
that she was of the race of Adam. At first, however, he took
precautions against mistakes, and many a time I have seen the sleeping
child stuck round with pea-sticks, or decorated with fluttering
feathers on a string, to scare away the birds. Sometimes she was
blanching with the celery, and once I nearly trod on her as she lay
among the toppings in a thick plantation of blossoming beans. But she
never came to harm; the only misadventure being when her father would
lay her to sleep in some dry water channel, and, forgetting which one
it was, turn the shallow stream that way. Then there would be a
momentary outcry at the cold bath; but the next, she would be pacified
with a flower, and sit in the sun to dry, for to say sooth, no more
good-tempered child ever existed than Dhropudi. In this, at any rate,
she was like her father, though I could trace no resemblance in other
ways. "She is like my house," he would say, when I noticed the fact.
"She is young, and I am old--quite old."
Indeed, as time passed I saw that Heera Nund was older than I thought
at first. Before the barber came in the morning there was quite a
silver stubble on his bronze cheek, and his bright, restless eyes
were haggard and anxious. Despite his almost comic jauntiness and
self-importance, he struck me as having a hunted look at times,
especially when he came out from the mud-walled enclosure at the
further end of the garden, where his "house" lived. He went there but
seldom, spending his days in tending Dhropudi and his plants with an
almost extravagant devotion. His state of mind when that young lady
used her new accomplishment of crawling, to the detriment of a bed of
_sootullians_ (Sweet Williams) in which he took special pride, was
quite pathetic. I found him simply howling between regret for the
plants and fear lest I should order punishment to the offender. His
gratitude when I laughed was unbounded.
After this Dhropudi used to be set in a twelve-inch pot, half sunk in
the ground, where she would stay contentedly for hours, drumming the
sides with a carrot, while Heera weeded and dibbled.
"She grows," he would say, snatching her up fiercely in his arms; "she
grows as all my plants grow. See my _sootullians!_ They will blossom
soon, and then all the _sahibs_ will come and say, 'See the
_sootullians_ which Heera Nund and Dhropudi have grown for the
_Huzoor_.'"
Yet with all this blazoning of content the man was curiously
restless--almost like a child in his desire for action and vivid
interest in trivialities. "See the misbegotten creature I have found
eating the honourable _Huzoor's_ roots!" he would say, casting a
wire-worm on the verandah steps, and dancing on it vindictively. "It
was in the _Huzoor's_ carnations, but by the blessing of God and Heera
Nund's vigilance it is dead. Nothing escapes me. Have I not fought
wire-worms since the beginning of all things, I and my fathers? We kill
all creeping, crawling things, except the holy snake that brings fruit
and blossom to the garden."
One night I was disturbed by unseemly noises, coming apparently from
the servants' quarters; but my remonstrances next morning were met by
my bearer, with swift denial. "It is Heera. He, poor man, has to beat
his wife almost every night now. I wonder the Presence has not heard
her before; she screams very loud."