The Story of Sonny Sahib
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Mrs. Everard Cotes >> The Story of Sonny Sahib
This etext was created by Don Lainson (dlainson@sympatico.ca) & Charles Aldarondo (Aldarondo@yahoo.com)
THE STORY OF SONNY SAHIB
By MRS. EVERARD COTES
(SARA JEANNETTE DUNCAN)
1894
CHAPTER I
'Ayah,' the doctor-sahib said in the vernacular, standing beside
the bed, 'the fever of the mistress is like fire. Without doubt
it cannot go on thus, but all that is in your hand to do you have
done. It is necessary now only to be very watchful. And it will
be to dress the mistress, and to make everything ready for a
journey. Two hours later all the sahib-folk go from this place in
boats, by the river, to Allahabad. I will send an ox-cart to take
the mistress and the baby and you to the bathing ghat.'
'Jeldi karo!' he added, which meant 'Quickly do!'--a thing people
say a great many times a day in India.
The ayah looked at him stupidly. She was terribly frightened; she
had never been so frightened before. Her eyes wandered from the
doctor's face to the ruined south wall of the hut, where the sun of
July, when it happens to shine on the plains of India, was beating
fiercely upon the mud floor. That ruin had happened only an hour
ago, with a terrible noise just outside, such a near and terrible
noise that she, Tooni, had scrambled under the bed the mistress was
lying on, and had hidden there until the doctor-sahib came and
pulled her forth by the foot, and called her a poor sort of person.
Then Tooni had lain down at the doctor-sahib's feet, and tried to
place one of them upon her head, and said that indeed she was not a
worthless one, but that she was very old and she feared the guns;
so many of the sahibs had died from the guns! She, Tooni, did not
wish to die from a gun, and would the Presence, in the great mercy
of his heart, tell her whether there would be any more shooting?
There would be no more shooting, the Presence had said; and then he
had given her a bottle and directions, and the news about going
down the river in a boat. Tooni's mind did not even record the
directions, but it managed to retain the words about going away in
a boat, and as she stood twisting the bottle round and round in the
folds of her ragged red petticoat it made a desperate effort to
extract their meaning.
'There will be no more shooting,' said the doctor again, 'and there
is a man outside with a goat. He will give you two pounds of milk
for the baby for five rupees.'
'Rupia! I have not even one!' said the ayah, looking toward the
bed; 'the captain-sahib has not come these thirty days as he
promised. The colonel-sahib has sent the food. The memsahib is
for three days without a pice.'
'I'll pay,' said the doctor shortly, and turned hurriedly to go.
Other huts were crying out for him; he could hear the voice of some
of them through their mud partitions. As he passed out he caught a
glimpse of himself in a little square looking-glass that hung on a
nail on the wall, and it made him start nervously and then smile
grimly. He saw the face of a man who had not slept three hours in
as many days and nights--a haggard, unshaven face, drawn as much
with the pain of others as with its own weariness. His hair stood
up in long tufts, his eyes had black circles under them. He wore
neither coat nor waistcoat, and his regimental trousers were tied
round the waist by a bit of rope. On the sleeve of his collarless
shirt were three dark dry splashes; he noticed them as he raised
his arm to put on his pith helmet. The words did not reach his
lips, but his heart cried out within him for a boy of the 32nd.
The ayah caught up her brass cooking-pot and followed him. Since
the doctor-sahib was to pay, the doctor-sahib would arrange that
good measure should be given in the matter of the milk. And upon
second thought the doctor-sahib decided that precautions were
necessary. He told the man with the goat, therefore, that when the
ayah received two pounds of milk she would pay him the five rupees.
As he put the money into Tooni's hand she stayed him gently.
'We are to go without, beyond the walls, to the ghat?' she asked in
her own tongue.
'Yes,' said the doctor, 'in two hours. I have spoken.'
'Hazur![1] the Nana Sahib--'
[1] 'Honoured one.'
'The Nana Sahib has written it. Bus!'[1] the doctor replied
impatiently. Put the memsahib into her clothes. Pack everything
there is, and hasten. Do you understand, foolish one?'
[1] 'Enough.'
'Very good said the ayah submissively, and watched the doctor out
of sight. Then she insisted--holding the rupees, she could insist--
that the goat-keeper should bring his goat into the hut to milk
it; there was more safety, Tooni thought, in the hut. While he
milked it Tooni sat upon the ground, hugging her knees, and
thought.
The memsahib had said nothing all this time, had known nothing.
For two days the memsahib had been, as Tooni would have said,
without sense--had lain on the bed in the corner quietly staring at
the wall, where the looking-glass hung, making no sign except when
she heard the Nana Sahib's guns. Then she sat up straight, and
laughed very prettily and sweetly. It was the salute, she thought
in her fever; the Viceroy was coming; there would be all sorts of
gay doings in the station. When the shell exploded that tore up
the wall of the hut, she asked Tooni for her new blue silk with the
flounces, the one that had been just sent out from England, and her
kid slippers with the rosettes. Tooni, wiping away her helpless
tears with the edge of her head covering, had said, 'Na, memsahib,
na!' and stroked the hot hand that pointed, and then the mistress
had forgotten again. As to the little pink baby, three days old,
it blinked and throve and slept as if it had been born in its
father's house to luxury and rejoicing.
Tooni questioned the goat-keeper; but he had seen three sahibs
killed that morning, and was stupid with fear. He did not even
know of the Nana Sahib's order that the English were to be allowed
to go away in boats; and this was remarkable, because he lived in
the bazar outside, and in the bazar people generally know what is
going to happen long before the sahibs who live in the tall white
houses do. Tooni had only her own reflections.
There would be no more shooting, and the Nana Sahib would let them
all go away in boats; that was good khaber--good news. Tooni
wondered, as she put the baby's clothes together in one bundle, and
her own few possessions together in another, whether it was to be
believed. The Nana Sahib so hated the English; had not the guns
spoken of his hate these twenty-one days? Inside the walls many
had died, but outside the walls might not all die? The doctor had
said that the Nana Sahib had written it; but why should the Nana
Sahib write the truth? The Great Lord Sahib, the Viceroy, had sent
no soldiers to compel him. Nevertheless, Tooni packed what there
was to pack, and soothed the baby with a little goat's milk and
water, and dressed her mistress as well as she was able, according
to the doctor's directions. Then she went out to where old Abdul,
the table-waiter, her husband, crouched under a wall, and told him
all that she knew and feared. But Abdul, having heard no guns for
nearly an hour and a half, was inclined to be very brave, and said
that without doubt they should all get safely to Allahabad; and
there, when the memsahib was better, they would find the captain-
sahib again, and he would give them many rupees backsheesh for
being faithful to her.
'The memsahib will never be better,' said Tooni, sorrowfully; 'her
rice is finished in the earth. The memsahib will die.'
She agreed to go to the ghat, though, and went back into the hut to
wait for the ox-cart while Abdul cooked a meal on the powder-
blackened ground with the last of the millet, and gave thanks to
Allah.
There was no room for Tooni to ride when they started. She walked
alongside carrying the baby and its little bundle of clothes.
There was nothing else to carry, and that was fortunate, for the
cart in which the memsahib lay was too full of sick and wounded to
hold anything more. In Tooni's pocket a little black book swung to
and fro; it was the memsahib's book; and in the beginning of the
firing, before the fever came, Tooni had seen the memsahib reading
it long and often. They had not been killed in consequence, Tooni
thought; there must be a protecting charm in the little black book;
so she slipped it into her pocket. They left the looking-glass
behind.
The ox-cart passed out creaking, in its turn, beyond the earthworks
of the English encampment into the city, where the mutinous natives
stood in sullen curious groups to watch the train go by. A hundred
yards through the narrow streets, choked with the smell of
gunpowder and populous with vultures, and Abdul heard a quick voice
in his ear. When he turned, none were speaking, but he recognised
in the crowd the lowering indifferent face of a sepoy he knew--one
of the Nana Sahib's servants. Saying nothing, he fell back for
Tooni and laid his hand upon her arm. And when the cart creaked
out of the town into the crowded, dusty road that led down to the
ghat, neither Abdul nor Tooni were in the riotous crowd that
pressed along with it. They had taken refuge in the outer bazar,
and Sonny Sahib, sound asleep and well hidden, had taken refuge
with them.
As to Sonny Sahib's mother, she was neither shot in the boats with
the soldiers that believed the written word of the Nana Sahib, nor
stabbed with the women and children who went back to the palace
afterwards. She died quietly in the oxcart before it reached the
ghat, and the pity of it was that Sonny Sahib's father, the
captain, himself in hospital four hundred miles from Cawnpore,
never knew.
There is a marble angel in Cawnpore now, standing in a very quiet
garden, and shut off even from the trees and the flowers by an
enclosing wall. The angel looks always down, down, and such an
awful, pitiful sorrow stands there with her that nobody cares to
try to touch it with words. People only come and look and go
silently away, wondering what time can have for the healing of such
a wound as this. There is an inscription--
SACRED TO THE PERPETUAL MEMORY OF A LARGE COMPANY OF CHRISTIAN
PEOPLE, CHIEFLY WOMEN AND CHILDREN, WHO NEAR THIS SPOT WERE CRUELLY
MURDERED BY THE FOLLOWERS OF THE REBEL NANA DHUNDU PANT OF BITHUR,
AND CAST, THE DYING WITH THE DEAD, INTO THE WELL BELOW, ON THE XVTH
DAY OF JULY MDCCCLVII.'
And afterward Sonny Sahib's father believed that all he could learn
while he lived about the fate of his wife and his little son was
written there. But he never knew.
CHAPTER II
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!'[1]
he laughed and crowed as if he quite understood the joke.
[1] '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.
CHAPTER III
It was a grief to Tooni, who could not understand it; but Sonny
Sahib perversely refused to talk in his own tongue. She did all
she could to help him. When he was a year old she cut an almond in
two, and gave half to Sonny Sahib and half to the green parrot that
swung all day in a cage in the door of the hut and had a fine gift
of conversation; if anything would make the baby talk properly that
would. Later on she taught him all the English words she
remembered herself, which were three, 'bruss' and 'wass' and
'isstockin',' her limited but very useful vocabulary as lady's-
maid. He learned them very well, but he continued to know only
three, and he did not use them very often, which Tooni found
strange. Tooni thought the baba should have inherited his mother's
language with his blue eyes and his white skin. Meanwhile, Sonny
Sahib, playing every morning and evening under the peepul-tree,
learned to talk in the tongue of the little brown boys who played
there too.
When Sonny Sahib was four he could drive the big black hairy
buffaloes home from the village outskirts to be milked. Abdul
walked beside him, but Sonny Sahib did all the shouting and the
beating with a bit of stick, which the buffaloes must have
privately smiled at when they felt it on their muddy flanks, that
is if a buffalo ever smiles, which one cannot help thinking
doubtful. Sonny Sahib liked buffalo milk, and had it every day for
his dinner with chupatties, and sometimes, for a treat, a bit of
roast kid. Chupatties are like pancakes with everything that is
nice left out of them, and were very popular in Rubbulgurh. Sonny
Sahib thought nothing in the world could be better, except the
roast kid. On days of festival Abdul always gave him a pice to buy
sweetmeats with, and he drove a hard bargain with either Wahid Khan
or Sheik Luteef, who were rival dealers. Sonny Sahib always got
more of the sticky brown balls of sugar and butter and cocoa-nut
for his pice than any of the other boys. Wahid Khan and Sheik
Luteef both thought it brought them luck to sell to him. But
afterwards Sonny Sahib invariably divided his purchase with whoever
happened to be his bosom friend at the time--the daughter of Ram
Dass, the blacksmith, or the son of Chundaputty, the beater of
brass--in which he differed altogether from the other boys, and
which made it fair perhaps.
At six Sonny Sahib began to find the other boys unsatisfactory in a
number of ways. He was tired of making patterns in the dust with
marigolds for one thing. He wanted to pretend. It was his
birthright to pretend, in a large active way, and he couldn't carry
it out. The other boys didn't care about making believe soldiers,
and running and hiding and shouting and beating Sonny Sahib's tom-
tom, which made a splendid drum. They liked beating the tom-tom,
but they always wanted to sit round in a ring and listen to it,
which Sonny Sahib thought very poor kind of fun indeed. They
wouldn't even pretend to be elephants, or horses, or buffaloes.
Sonny Sahib had to represent them all himself; and it is no wonder
that with a whole menagerie, as it were, upon his shoulders, he
grew a little tired sometimes. Also he was the only boy in
Rubbulgurh who cared to climb a tree that had no fruit on it, or
would venture beyond the lower branches even for mangoes or
tamarinds. And one day when he found a weaver-bird's nest in a
bush with three white eggs in it, a splendid nest, stock-full of
the fireflies that light the little hen at night, he showed it
privately first to Hurry Ghose, and then to Sumpsi Din, and lastly
to Budhoo, the sweeper's son; and not one of them could he coax to
carry off a single egg in company with him. Sonny Sahib recognised
the force of public opinion, and left the weaver-bird to her house-
keeping in peace, but he felt privately injured by it.
Certainly the other boys could tell wonderful stories--stories of
princesses and fairies and demons--Sumpsi Din's were the best--that
made Sonny Sahib's blue eyes widen in the dark, when they all sat
together on a charpoy by the door of the hut, and the stars
glimmered through the tamarind-trees. A charpoy is a bed, and
everybody in Rubbulgurh puts one outside, for sociability, in the
evening. Not much of a bed, only four short rickety legs held
together with knotted string, but it answers very well.
Sonny Sahib didn't seem to know any stories--he could only tell the
old one about the fighting Abdul saw over and over again--but it
was the single thing they could do better than he did. On the
whole he began to prefer the society of Abdul's black and white
goats, which bore a strong resemblance to Abdul himself, by the
way, and had more of the spirit of adventure. It was the goat, for
example, that taught Sonny Sahib to walk on the extreme edge of the
housetop and not tumble over. In time they became great friends,
Sonny Sahib and the goat, and always, when it was not too hot, they
slept together.
Then two things happened. First, Abdul died, and Sonny Sahib
became acquainted with grief, both according to his own nature and
according to the law of Mahomed. Then, after he and Tooni had
mourned sincerely with very little to eat for nine days, there
clattered one day a horseman through the village at such a pace
that everybody ran out to see. And he was worth seeing, that
horseman, in a blue turban as big as a little tub, a yellow coat,
red trousers with gold lace on them, and long boots that stuck out
far on either side; and an embroidered saddle and a tasselled
bridle, and a pink-nosed white charger that stepped and pranced in
the bazar so that Ram Dass himself had to get out of the way. It
ought to be said that the horseman's clothes did not fit him very
well, that his saddle girth was helped out by a bit of rope, and
that his charger was rather tender on his near fore-foot; but these
are not things that would be noticed in Rubbulgurh, being lost in
the general splendour of his appearance.
Sonny Sahib ran after the horseman with all the other boys, until,
to everybody's astonishment, he stopped with tremendous prancings
at Tooni's mud doorstep, where she sat to watch him go by. Then
Sonny Sahib slipped away. He was afraid--he did not know of what.
He ran half a mile beyond the village, and helped Sumpsi Din keep
the parrots out of his father's millet crop all day long. Nor did
he say a word to Sumpsi Din about it, for fear he should be
persuaded to go back again. Instead, he let Sumpsi Din sleep for
long hours at a time face-downwards on his arm in the sun, which
was what Sumpsi Din liked best in the world, while he, Sonny Sahib,
clapped his hands a hundred times at the little green thieves,
abusing them roundly, and wondering always at the back of his head
why so splendid a horseman should have stopped at his particular
doorstep. So it was not until the evening, when he came back very
hungry, hoping the horseman would be gone, that he heard Tooni's
wonderful news. Before she gave him water or oil, or even a
chupatty, Tooni told him, holding his hand in hers.
'The Maharajah has sent for you, O noonday kite; where have you
been in the sun? The Maharajah has sent for you, lotus-eyed one,
and I, though I am grown too old for journeys, must go also to the
palace of the Maharajah! Oh, it is very far, and I know not what
he desires, the Maharajah! My heart is split in two, little Sahib!
This khaber is the cat's moon to me. I will never sleep again!'
Then for some reason the fear went out of Sonny Sahib. 'Am I not
going with you, Tooni-ji?' said he, which was his way of saying
'dear Tooni.' 'There is no cause for fear. And will it not be
very beautiful, the palace of the Maharajah? Sumpsi Din says that
it is built of gold and silver. And now I should like six
chupatties, and some milk and some fried brinjal, like yesterday's,
only more, Tooni-ji.'
CHAPTER IV
The palace of the Maharajah at Lalpore was not exactly built of
gold and silver; but if it had been, Sonny Sahib could hardly have
thought it a finer place. It had a wall all round it, even on the
side where the river ran, and inside the wall were courts and
gardens with fountains and roses in them, divided by other walls,
and pillared verandahs, where little green lizards ran about in the
sun, and a great many stables, where the Maharajah's horses pawed
and champed to be let out and ridden. The palace itself was a
whole story higher than the stables, and consisted of a wilderness
of little halls with grated windows. It smelt rather too strong of
attar of roses in there--the Maharajah was fond of attar of roses--
but the decorations on the whitewashed walls, in red and yellow,
were very wonderful indeed. The courtyards and the verandahs were
full of people, soldiers, syces, merchants with their packs,
sweetmeat sellers, barbers; only the gardens were empty. Sonny
Sahib thought that if he lived in the palace he would stay always
in the gardens, watching the red-spotted fish in the fountains, and
gathering the roses; but the people who did live there seemed to
prefer smoking long bubbling pipes in company, or disputing over
their bargains, or sleeping by the hour in the shade of the
courtyard walls. There were no women anywhere; but if Sonny Sahib
had possessed the ears or the eyes of the country, he might have
heard many swishings and patterings and whisperings behind
curtained doors, and have seen many fingers on the curtains' edge
and eyes at the barred windows as he went by.