The Story of Sonny Sahib by Sara Jeannette Duncan (short story to read .txt) 📕

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!'[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.


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