When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt—which,
with a magic square engraved on silver and hung round
his neck, made up the greater part of his clothing—he
staggered on a perilous journey down the garden to
Pir Khan and proffered him all his jewels in exchange
for one little ride on Holden’s horse, having
seen his mother’s mother chaffering with pedlars
in the verandah. Pir Khan wept and set the untried
feet on his own gray head in sign of fealty, and brought
the bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing
that Tota would be a leader of men ere his beard was
grown.
One hot evening, while he sat on the roof between
his father and mother watching the never-ending warfare
of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded
a kite of his own with Pir Khan to fly it, because
he had a fear of dealing with anything larger than
himself, and when Holden called him a ‘spark,’
he rose to his feet and answered slowly in defence
of his new-found individuality, ’Hum’park
nahin hai. Hum admi hai [I am no spark, but a
man].’
The protest made Holden choke and devote himself very
seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future.
He need hardly have taken the trouble. The delight
of that life was too perfect to endure. Therefore
it was taken away as many things are taken away in
India—suddenly and without warning.
The little lord of the house, as Pir Khan called him,
grew sorrowful and complained of pains who had never
known the meaning of pain. Ameera, wild with
terror, watched him through the night, and in the
dawning of the second day the life was shaken out of
him by fever— the seasonal autumn fever.
It seemed altogether impossible that he could die,
and neither Ameera nor Holden at first believed the
evidence of the little body on the bedstead.
Then Ameera beat her head against the wall and would
have flung herself down the well in the garden had
Holden not restrained her by main force.
One mercy only was granted to Holden. He rode
to his office in broad daylight and found waiting
him an unusually heavy mail that demanded concentrated
attention and hard work. He was not, however,
alive to this kindness of the gods.
III
The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk
pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its
protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later.
Holden realised his pain slowly, exactly as he had
realised his happiness, and with the same imperious
necessity for hiding all trace of it. In the
beginning he only felt that there had been a loss,
and that Ameera needed comforting, where she sat with
her head on her knees shivering as Mian Mittu from
the house-top called, Tota! Tota! Tota!
Later all his world and the daily life of it rose up
to hurt him. It was an outrage that any one of
the children at the band-stand in the evening should
be alive and clamorous, when his own child lay dead.
It was more than mere pain when one of them touched
Copyrights
Life's Handicap from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
