Within forty miles of where the Himalayas rise from the plains, and the sunrise unveils the blushing snows—and precisely half a koss from the Kanāt river—lies the hamlet of Haru, surrounded by a tangle of castor-oil plants, mango trees, and tamarinds, and standing in the midst of a fertile tract of cane, corn, and poppy. The scarlet-and-white poppies, the stiff, green cane, the waving yellow wheat, also the village (which boasted nine hundred souls at the last census), were the joint property of two wealthy zemindars. The northern part of Haru—including the crops sown for the opium department—was the inheritance of Durga Pershad, a tall, dark, gaunt man, with an unpleasant and sinister expression. The wheat, cane, and southern end of the town belonged to Golab Rai Sing, who bore but a scant resemblance to his name—“the King of Roses;” he was, in fact, a stout, smiling, pock-marked person, with a glib tongue, and a close fist. These two zemindars hated one another as thoroughly as men in their position were not only bound, but born to do. They had not merely been bequeathed adjoining lands, and a whole village between them, but a venerable blood feud, which had been conscientiously handed down from generation to generation.
In good old days—days within living memory—there had been desperate outbreaks, dacoities, and murders, attended with the usual sequel: hanging or imprisonment beyond the seas. Now, in more civilized times (although the vital question of the well by the temple was yet in abeyance, passed on from collector to collector), the rival factions were content with pounding each other’s cattle, burning each other’s fodder, and blackening each other’s characters. Both had a large following of tenants, relations, parasites; and he who brought tidings that evil had befallen the enemy was a truly welcome guest! When the great men met, they simply scowled and passed on their way, and their women-folk laid every sin to the charge of their neighbours that it is possible for the depraved imagination of a practised native slanderer to conceive.
Golab Rai Sing was the richer of the two zemindars, though Durga Pershad owned a larger extent of ground; but it was whispered that he had lost much money in a law-suit, and that Muttra Dass (the soucar) held a mortgage on his best crops; nevertheless, he carried his head high, and his wife had real silver tyres to the wheels of her ekka!
It was the first moon in the new year, and the collector’s camp was pitched under the mango tope, between the village and the river; he had but recently returned from two years’ furlough, and from the whirl of politics and the turmoil of life at high pressure; also, he was new to the district.
As he stood meditating on the river bank at dawn, and saw the snows rise on the horizon with the sun, watched the strings of cattle soberly threading their way to pasture, heard the doves cooing in the woods, and the rippling of the river through the water plants, he said to himself, “Here at least is rest and peace.” Casting his eyes toward the red-roofed houses, half concealed among bananas and cachar trees,—with their exquisite purple flowers—
“I am not sure that these people have not six to four the best of it,” he remarked aloud (no one but his dog received this startling confidence), as he gazed enviously at a group of lean brown Brahmins who were dipping piously in the Kanāt, and pouring water from their brass lotahs; he thought of his own tailor’s and other bills, his wife’s insane extravagance, her flirtations, his hard work, his years of enforced exile.
“Yes,” he continued, “we know nothing about it. We wear ourselves out running after phantoms. Here is contentment, assurance of future happiness, and present peace.”
But then, you see, he was a new man—a visionary—and was totally ignorant of the internal condition of this picturesque and primitive hamlet.
The same day, as in duty bound, the two zemindars, each mounted on a pony, and followed by a crowd of retainers, waited upon the collector sahib, apparently on the most amicable terms. Just once a year they were compelled to masquerade as friends, though when they had the collector’s ear in private audience, their mutual complaints were both numerous and bitter. They bore, as offerings, fruit and wreaths of evil-smelling marigolds (that noxious flower so amazingly dear to the native of India); also Golab Rai Sing carried with him one thing which his rival lacked, and that was his son and only child, Soonder—i.e. “the beautiful”—a lively boy of five years, who was gaily attired in a rose-coloured satin coat, and wore a purple velvet cap and gold bangles. He was a sharp and unquestionably spoiled urchin. He sat with his father and friends, or with his mother and her associates, and listening open-eared, like the proverbial little pitcher, heard many things that were not good for his morals—heard perpetual ridicule and abuse of the enemy of his house; therefore, when he encountered Durga Pershad in fields or byways, he made hideous grimaces at him, squinted significantly, and called him “dog,” “pig,” “robber”—behaviour that naturally endeared him to Pershad, who yearned with irrepressible craving to find him alone! Subsequently the heir of Golab Rai Sing would return to his fond parents, boast of his performance, and receive as reward and encouragement lumps of sticky cocoanut and deliciously long, wormy native sweets.
On the supreme occasion of the yearly reception, the child Soonder was as prettily behaved and hypocritical as his elders. The collector’s lady noticed him—and that publicly. She knew better than to say he was a handsome boy (for, if she had no fear of the evil eye, it was otherwise with her audience), but she gave him a picture paper, and a battledore and shuttlecock, and his father swelled, beamed, and literally shone with pride—for was not the presentation made in the face of childless Durga Pershad, and all the elders of the people? And greater glory was yet in store for this fortunate zemindar. The collector, having looked over various papers, and heard witnesses (many false), actually deigned to visit the well in person, and concluded what he considered a shamefully procrastinated case, and finally made over the Kooah well, and all its rights, to Golab Rai Sing and his heirs for ever!