My mother's own words

Today, I am posting a small excerpt from The Drumming, something I will do from time to time on this site.  (I will also be posting longer excerpts for download on the site, hopefully in the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!)

About this excerpt:  A bond has formed between young Barbara and one of the house servants, a punkah-puller named Gopal. (Gopal operated the fans in the family's Patna residence).  He had a growing sense that the memsahib, Barbara's mother, was cruel and dangerous, that she wanted to do her own daughter harm. Barbara was relieved that she had an adult she could confide in, even if he was almost powerless to help her. Barbara's mother was away for a number of days undergoing a procedure at a nearby hospital while this friendship was allowed to grow.

...

As I was sharing so much with Gopal, one of the things I shared with him was Dolly.  Dolly had been given to me by my daddy when I was two years old.  My mother had damaged the doll so often that I had finally used the other contents of my toybox, such as they were, to make a construction that prevented my mother from getting at her. 

Actually, I could no longer even get at Dolly myself, but because of mother's absence I was able to bring the entire toybox outside.  There was a concealed access so I could show Dolly's face.  I let Gopal in on the secret of the trick entrance.  He had a sick look on his face after hearing about the ways Dolly had been damaged, most of which he couldn't see because her body was locked into a sort of Chinese puzzle construction.  He could not see the cut-off arms, the razor-marked kid body, or the broken toes, but he saw the smashed nose, the missing eye, the discoloured cheeks and the slashed hair.  Gopal saw the rest of the toybox's pitiful contents too, but it was Dolly I really wanted to show. I told Gopal she was my private life.

Sharing Dolly with Gopal resulted in one of the most moving moments of my childhood.  Gopal had said very little to me except to express anger about my mother's abuse of Dolly, but he must have said a whole lot more to the senior handyman Hamid, at whose home he took lodging.[...]

Several days after Gopal's viewing of the toybox Hamid and Aziz [who worked with Hamid] presented me with a toy.  Hamid, who was the spokesman for the two, told me it was a toy used by Indian children.  He said he would have made me one long ago if he had known I had nothing to play with.

I thought it was the most beautifully made toy I had ever seen.  It looked a bit like a square bolo bat with a square hole in the centre.  The corners were slightly rounded.  Two different kinds of wood were used in the construction, one darker, one paler, with the dark wood -- probably mahogany -- used partly as a decoration, and partly because the edge had to be a harder wood as it took more punishment.  The woods were joined together so you couldn't see a seam.  Attached to the handle there was a string, and hanging on the string was a stone that was an almost perfect sphere, flattened in shape.  It was a lovely stone that could only have been smoothed in a riverbed, imperceptibly grainy in texture and very satisfactory to hold in the hand, with not a single flaw in the shape.  It had a hole drilled right through its centre so it could be anchored securely on the string. If you tossed the stone just exactly right, you could make it go through the square hole in the bat.

The greatest wonder was the handle. It was whittled into a flattened pear shape, then beautifully sandpapered until it was smooth as silk.  Even though entirely hand-fashioned, no mould could have produced a handle formed more perfectly.  The whole bat was a pleasure to touch, but the handle was especially marvellous, satiny soft to the fingers, curved to nestle into the palm as if it belonged there.  It was like holding butter.

Hamid said Aziz had done the stone-drilling, while he had done the carpentry.  Hamid told me Aziz's part might not look as hard but it was even harder, because it took a long time and a lot of patience to drill the hole through the stone.[...]

Living in white seclusion, I had never had opportunity to watch Indian children at play, but I had an idea that this was probably far more exquisite than the simple con�structions most Indian parents made.  In my entire childhood, next to Dolly it was the most beautiful present I ever received.

Hamid said he understood from Gopal that I would not be allowed to keep the toy if my mother knew, so we would keep it hidden behind a bush right outside the exit of the Indians' compound.[...] If my mother happened to spot the thing lying behind the bush, she would think it was an Indian child's toy.  If that made her cross, she would be told the child had thrown it by mistake and hadn't been able to retrieve it because it was lying on forbidden ground.  But my mother would probably never spot it, Hamid said, because she always stayed well away from the compound.

That night I cried for a very long time in my bed.  Real tears again, but this time for myself alone.[...] I knew I had been given a gift from the heart.  But I think most of the tears were because Hamid and Aziz had reminded me that I was not an adult at all, but a six-year-old child who had never had a childhood.

...

I find this passage very poignant.  My mother had so much coping and surviving to do, you sometimes forget she is only 6 during the events of this book. This is one of those moments where the reader is reminded. 

Let me know what you think.