Old Uncle

I

ABDUL HAQ rubbed his hands in water from the brass pot at his side in the ritual washing of the morning. ‘God the Merciful, the only God . . .’ He murmured the prayer through clogged lips.

The place of mats in Po Twan’s shop was filled with the heavy brown smell of burned opium. The Chinaman dozed on his stool by the door. Sweat ran in glistening streams over the folds of his paunch. His yellow skin shone through the dimness.

Abdul Haq blew through the stem of his pipe. With the opium needle he cleared the vent at the bottom of the tiny bowl. He tucked the pipe into the twist of his red and black sarong.

He sat up. His consciousness swung through the emptiness of vast spaces. From the middle of a great silent sea a lonely microscopic body, only the shell of Abdul Haq, looked upwards. His spirit was sad for Abdul Haq.

He felt his way past the Chinaman into the blinding white sunshine of Sule Pagoda Road. He crooked his cotton umbrella over his arm. He walked. His heart was heavy. In the last thirtysix hours in Po Twan’s opium shop he had smoked away every anna of available cash.

The life of the Rangoon streets passed him by. Sweating Oriya coolies hove, ‘Hu-yah, Hi-yah,’ at the rice carts lumbering over cobbles. Wheels of electric trams screamed on the curve. The cold-drink seller’s tinkling bell was bright and incessant as rain. A Sikh policeman ejected a six-foot stream of rich scarlet betel juice.

Eyes heavy and drugged, Abdul Haq walked, meditating.

‘I am Abdul Haq . . . elephant rider for the Big Company. I am Abdul Haq. . . .’

Bit by bit he strove to gather the threads of his lost identity.

‘I am Abdul Haq . . .’

II

Abdul Haq cared nothing for Englishmen who thought they knew about elephants, not even for Petigo Sahib, head of the Big Company’s two thousand elephants, with his thirty years’ experience.

When elephants were sick, Petigo gave each one a pound of Epsom salts. If they grew worse he called for drops of their blood on flimsy strips of glass. . . .

Abdul Haq belonged to an older school. As a naked baby he had been hoisted in the crook of an elephant’s trunk, to sit on its forehead between his father’s knees. He had been cradled between the forefeet of an elephant while his father fed it sugar cane and juice ran in froth from the corners of its jaws.

As he had, so had his father and his father’s father before that, as far back as anyone could remember. Elephant riding was a family affair. Its wisdom was handed down from father to son.

A tiger’s whisker in a copper amulet gives strength and courage. A tip of barking deer’s horn lifts the poison from snake bite. In cases of cataract, powdered glass must be blown through a bamboo tube into the eye. . . .

Abdul Haq knew these things were good. His father had told him so himself, and his father’s father, and his uncle on his mother’s side.

Abdul Haq rode Old Uncle, a tusker of enormous size, last of the Rangoon timber elephants. In the old days every teak mill had had its gang of elephants, but they had given way before the march of machinery and been sent back to work in the jungle. Now only Old Uncle was left. He would have gone too, but they said he was too old to learn new tricks. And he had the reputation of being bad.

Old Uncle stayed on to spend his last days hauling gray teak logs from the gray water of the Rangoon River up the gray grease of the tide-flooded banks. It used to be the thing for tourists to come down to the storage ground at Prawn Trap Creek to watch Old Uncle piling teak. At the end of the show Abdul Haq made him give the Grand Salaam. Then Old Uncle held out his trunk for money, which, Abdul Haq always carefully explained, was for sugar cane for Old Uncle and not for any personal profit. The tourists dropped annas into the nozzle of Old Uncle’s trunk, and he lifted it up to blow the money into Abdul Haq’s lap where he perched on the massive neck.

Every so often Abdul Haq announced that Old Uncle was sick and must go off work for a day or two. The mill manager, concerned only with his log supplies and the sweet running of his dynamos, knew nothing of elephants. He was in Abdul Haq’s hands.

But this time Petigo happened to be down in Rangoon from the forests.

‘You might go down to Prawn Trap Creek and look over Old Uncle,’ said the manager. ‘Abdul Haq says he’s sick again. It’s probably only that Abdul Haq wants a day off to smoke opium, but Old Uncle is something of an institution and we’d hate to lose him.’

Petigo found Old Uncle in the elephant shed, fidgeting from one leg to the other. He clanked his leg chains and blew scraps of grass from his feed pile. He cocked a wicked eye at the door.

Abdul Haq made a low salaam.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Petigo curtly. He was not going to be taken in.

‘Sahib,’ said Abdul Haq, ‘he does not eat and he does not drink. Old Uncle is very sick.’

‘H’m!’ said Petigo. ‘Let’s have a look at him.’

‘Come, my lord,’ said Abdul Haq coaxingly. Old Uncle grunted and squinted evilly at Petigo.

‘Come, pig!’ hissed Abdul Haq. He gave Old Uncle a surreptitious swipe on the side of the head with the hook end of the chain.

‘What’s that? Wind?’ said Petigo.

‘The Sahib knows all,’ said Abdul Haq. ‘I will make him sit.’

‘Get down, you—’ Abdul Haq jabbed hard behind the ear with his iron-shod riding spike.

Old Uncle did not want to get down. He teetered from one foot to the other. He blew a little blast from his trunk. Petigo stepped back. Everyone knew Old Uncle was bad.

Old Uncle liked to see them jump, but he knew it was a trick which could be worked too often. He lowered himself ponderously in the mud, first his hind legs into a kneeling position, then his front legs, very deliberately. He pluffed at the grass stems and picked at them daintily with the finger of his trunk.

‘See, Sahib, he is sick,’ whined Abdul Haq. ‘He will not eat.’ Abdul Haq tendered a brown ball of raw sugar.

Old Uncle sniffed it cautiously. It was unlike Abdul Haq to give him free sugar. In a corner of his massive brain he had a recollection of something very like this. His suspicion was justified. The sugar had been treated with hing — asafætida, if you like. Old Uncle did not like hing. He turned from it wearily.

‘He does n’t act well,’ said Petigo. ‘Give him a pound of Epsom salts in a bucket of unhusked rice, and see that he is properly scrubbed.’

‘The Sahib knows all,’ said Abdul Haq.

Petigo did not deny it. He ventured a hand on the ill-fitting gray hide sparsely covered with stiff black bristles. Old Uncle jumped like an outraged girl. Petigo jumped too.

‘The Sahib knows all,’ repeated Abdul Haq. ‘And there will be money for the rice?’

‘No,’ said Petigo shortly. ‘And we must have a blood smear. Do you know how to prepare the slide?’

‘Aye, I know, Sahib. But I have no glasses.’

‘I’ll send them. Take the elephant off work for a couple of days. And let me have fresh slides twice daily. Thus we may watch the changes in his blood as his sickness proceeds.’

Old Uncle was led back into his shed by the ear. He accepted a brown molasses cake from Abdul Haq’s hand, and paddy in a bucket — without the salts. Those Abdul Haq set thriftily aside. He would sell them in the bazaar to the Chinese doctor who made red-paper doses brushed with black characters to be taken for wind in the stomach.

III

To Petigo Old Uncle’s sickness was a splendid opportunity. His firm’s two thousand elephants were spread all over Burma, from the Chin Hills to the Salween gorges, and from Moulmein among the mango trees to Mogaung, where pack bullocks trotted with loads of uncut jade and pickled tea. Often it took two weeks for smears to get in. By that time the elephant was either cured or dead. Sometimes the slides arrived in reasonably good condition. More often they were opaque messes of mould, and Petigo swore and bemoaned the loss to science.

And here was Old Uncle — a sick elephant almost under the microscope. Petigo rubbed his hands. Secretly he hoped it might be something worthwhile. Septicæmia, perhaps, or even — he hardly dared hope — rinderpest, with a chance to use the methyleneblue injection.

Down at Prawn Trap Creek, Abdul Haq was preparing to take a couple of days off. There was no point in resting the beast if the man had to work. He sent for Ali, his sister’s son, who worked as a checker in the yard.

‘The elephant is sick,’ said Abdul Haq. ‘And I too — I do not feel well. I will return in two days. The Sahib thinks he can cure the beast by taking of his blood on little glasses. That is nonsense, but harmless.’

Ali bowed his head before his fierce little uncle, who had reached the age when he felt it necessary to conceal the gray hairs in his beard by dyeing it bright scarlet.

‘Now do you,’ said Abdul Haq, ‘take these little glasses and prick the ear of Old Uncle.’

‘But I am afraid!’ quavered Ali.

‘Afraid!’ snorted Abdul Haq. ‘I will order that pig. You shall see.’

Old Uncle was busy with his breakfast of a cartload of green fodder.

‘My lord,’ said Abdul Haq, ‘your servant is sick. I go for rest and medicine. Now do you let this worthless boy prick the august ear — thus.’

Old Uncle swished a trunkful of green stuff on the floor to remove the dirt. He munched on.

‘I go, my lord,’ said Abdul Haq. ‘Be good, princeling.’ He swung a short length of chain threateningly. Old Uncle rolled his red pig’s eyes at Abdul Haq and paused in his munching.

‘You see?’ said Abdul Haq. ‘It is easy. And if I come back to find that you have not taken of the blood of Old Uncle I will beat you.’

Ali bowed miserably. He was afraid of Old Uncle, but he was more afraid of Abdul Haq. He watched his uncle’s swaggering figure out to the clack and bustle of Strand Road.

Over rice and curried mango fish, Ali made his complaint to his fellow checkers. ‘My uncle has gone to drink the black smoke at the Chinaman’s shop. He has left that elephant to me, and I dare not go near that swine of swine. He will kill me. But if I do not take his blood my uncle, Abdul Haq, — God rest his soul, — will beat me with the chain.’

The others clicked their tongues in sympathy. Ali sighed a deep sigh. He spooned his fingers into the bowl. He heaped buttered rice on a flap of greasy bread. He dipped it in the curried mango fish. He stuffed his mouth with forefinger and thumb.

‘Ai me,’ he moaned.

Mahommed Ganni, the head checker, belched appreciation of the meal. He turned his back to wash his mouth with water from his brass pot.

‘But why, O brother?’ he said. ‘ Why not send the little glasses without the blood of the elephant?’

‘And have the Sahib down here raging?’ Ali snorted derision.

‘Yes,’ said Mahommed Ganni softly. ‘But that goat — has it not blood? The blood of an elephant — the blood of a goat. Who knows?’

Not for nothing had Mahommed Ganni risen to be head checker. Ali gaped in admiration.

IV

It took almost exactly twenty-four hours to bring Petigo. The watchman came running over the logs.

‘The Sahib! ’ he cried excitedly. ‘The Sahib comes!’

Mahommed Ganni went forward to meet the storm. Experience had taught him it was the best way.

‘Abdul Haq is sick, your honor.’ He spoke as man to man. His manner was frank. ‘He has gone to the bazaar for medicine.’

‘Then who sent these blood slides?’ Petigo had them in his hand. He was really angry.

‘The blood slides, your honor?’ Mahommed Ganni looked at them curiously as if he had never helped to hold the goat. ‘Ah, that I know not, Sahib. But perhaps Ali, the son of Abdul Haq’s sister, perhaps he can tell. From Old Uncle came —’

‘Nonsense!’ said Petigo.

‘The Sahib knows,’ said Mahommed Ganni gently, in a tone Petigo found particularly infuriating.

Ali came cringing. ‘From Old Uncle came the blood.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Petigo. ‘I don’t know what blood it was, but it was n’t Old Uncle’s. But now we will get it. Fetch out the elephant.’

‘Sahib, we dare not. Abdul Haq — ’

‘Fetch him out! Take him down by the logs. On the mud. Then I can take a slide where he cannot rise.’

Mahommed Ganni shrugged his shoulders. He gave Ali a little push.

‘I am afraid,’ wailed Ali.

‘Fetch him,’ ordered Petigo firmly.

In the elephant shed Old Uncle made no move as Ali entered. He was lying down. He was comfortable. But Ali was desperate. He seized the heavy iron ankus which his uncle always used. He advanced menacingly. He swung himself to Old Uncle’s neck.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now rise, my lord.’

Old Uncle did not move. Ali struck him a ringing blow on the top of his skull. Old Uncle knew by long experience that more like that would make his head ache. He rose ponderously. He moved with dignity from the shed.

‘You see, brothers,’ said Ali triumphantly. ‘You see, I order and he obeys. He is but a too fat pig.’

To Petigo, balanced on a slippery log on the foreshore, it was a peaceful, everyday scene. Everywhere on the ooze were the rounded gray backs of logs. Beyond ran the dizzily swirling river. The rice mills on the Dallah side were clothed in a smoky haze of heat. From the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company’s dockyard came the chatter of the pneumatic riveters and the hiss and stamp of a pile driver. The languid southwest wind carried the putrid whiff of fish pickle and the slightly rotten smell of the river at low tide.

As he looked about him from his log in the gray waste of ooze, Petigo was a little surprised to find himself awaiting Old Uncle’s arrival alone. None of the men had come with him. Above him, on firm ground, was a great pile of teak logs, representing Old Uncle’s labors. In its deep shadow a panting family of goats sought coolness. Petigo eased the band of his white sun helmet from his forehead. It was very hot.

A buff-funneled Bibby liner was coming up the river, stern first to keep her steerage way on the racing ebb tide. Her wash set the logs into uneasy motion behind the booms. A feather of white steam fluttered from her funnel. She hooted impatiently for a string of paddy boats. Old Uncle tooted back.

Petigo turned to see the elephant, his great head lowered, picking his way among the logs. His lower lip hung pendulous. His tusks stuck out aggressively in an ungraceful sweep. They had been cut off at the tips and bound with iron. His great warty feet squelched in the slime. The gray mudhoppers fled before his shadow to bury themselves in the cool safety of the ooze.

‘Seems fit enough to-day,’ murmured Petigo. ‘I’ll sack that swipe Abdul Haq when he gets back.’

Old Uncle lifted his wicked little pig’s eyes and saw Petigo perched on his log. He stopped dead in his tracks. Ali, sitting on the elephant’s neck, hammered with his ankus, shouting for Old Uncle to turn.

Old Uncle lunged toward Petigo. Petigo thought of standing his ground. There were the questions of dignity and example. Old Uncle gave a vicious little squeal. Petigo knew the sound. Petigo ran, leaping from log to log. He slipped to be engulfed in slime. He thumbed gray mud from his eyes. He clambered up the bank. In a backward glance he saw Ali sliding to the mud over Old Uncle’s tail.

Petigo knew that Old Uncle was at a disadvantage among the logs on the foreshore. Once on hard ground Old Uncle would move with the speed of a fairly fast horse, and the race was up. Petigo, topping the bank with pounding heart and bursting lungs, looked for refuge. The great log pile loomed before him. It seemed impregnable. Petigo sprinted for the pile and began to climb. Sweat impeded his vision. He felt the ground tremble under the pounding feet. Old Uncle gave a toot of triumph as Petigo fought his way blindly upward.

V

The dilated eyes of Abdul Haq saw nothing. Fingering his red beard, he allowed himself to be jostled without protest in the seething crowds of Strand Road. Instinctively he turned towards Prawn Trap Creek. The Sikh policeman on the corner caught the stale smell of burned opium as he passed. He sniffed suspiciously and shrugged his shoulders. It was no business of his.

Outwardly Abdul Haq was a dignified old Mahommedan. Inwardly he was a man sad for the loss of his self. Folk pushed by him, naked sweating coolies and Burmans strutting peacocklike in the hot sunshine.

Suddenly above the clatter of the noonday streets he seemed to hear the squeal of an angry elephant. He stopped dead. His mind struggled through the smothering blanket of drowsiness.

Strange, he told himself. Strange. Old Uncle is tied with chains in the great elephant shed. Abdul Haq, his rider, has left him with his sister’s son, Ali.

From a great height he saw himself, a remote figure, lying on his mat in Po Twan’s opium shop.

He turned into the yard. That vicious little scream came again. And there was Old Uncle, riderless, tiptoeing round the log pile.

Abdul Haq watched, fascinated. At any moment he felt that he might slide comfortably awake to see the old Chinaman dozing by the door.

Old Uncle swung his trunk angrily from side to side. He set his forefeet on a log. He tested another with trunk and forefoot to see if it would bear his weight. When it shifted a little he drew back cautiously.

He tried another. Forefeet up, he cocked his head sideways to see over into the crevices of the top, like a cat peering into a bowl of goldfish.

He darted with his trunk. He searched with it in the recesses of the pile.

He produced something. He twirled it on the tip of his trunk. He held it up to look at it. He glared at it, head cocked on one side.

It was a hat. An Englishman’s white sun helmet.

Old Uncle put it carefully on the ground. Deliberately he stepped on it, first one wide warty foot, then the other. He trampled it in the mud.

Abdul Haq’s fingers played through the sparse hairs of his beard. He leaned back on the crook of his black cotton umbrella.

Except for the riderless elephant stamping on the white sun helmet everything seemed real enough. The sun beat down on the brown reedy grasses of the mud flats. On the steely glare of the river a red-painted sampan with staring white-painted eyes made slow progress under the lunging strokes of the solitary rower. A string of lighters lagged in the churning wake of a tug.

Old Uncle turned his attention again to the top of the pile. He stood very still, listening. His tattered ears twitched.

Old Uncle’s trunk flashed out. It returned triumphantly, fluttering a khaki shirt. He put one foot on it. The sound of rending cloth floated across the heavy stillness of the noonday air.

Abdul Haq was not unused to the strangeness of dreams of the pipe, but this was the strangest of all.

The stillness was broken by another sound, a shouting and a hammering of brass. Old Uncle whirled ponderously on all four feet. From behind the great elephant house, with its worn rubbing post of a single teak log, there emerged a procession, a shouting procession waving cloths and beating brass trays which flashed in the sun. Abdul Haq thought he could make out the portly dignity of Mahommed Ganni, whose wisdom kept him in the rear.

Old Uncle gave one squeal, a high, angry sound. He twirled his trunk. He charged three steps. . . . The noonday was still again, the procession gone. The sun beat its silent white heat on the silver-gray logs.

For a moment Old Uncle stood still to listen; then with feverish energy he set to work to pull the pile apart. He hooked his trunk around a log. He gave a heave. He stepped neatly back. The outside layer came tumbling.

For Abdul Haq, even in a dream, this was too much. Old Uncle was taking apart the pile which they had made with infinite labor. In the blinding sunshine Abdul Haq set off across the brown burned grass. In his hand he gripped the crook of his cheap cotton umbrella.

Another log came down with a hollow crash. Abdul Haq shouted. Old Uncle did not hear.

From the top of the pile a white arm waved a pair of khaki shorts. Old Uncle snatched at them. One leg from the other he tore them. So.

‘Hut bahadur, kya hai!’ cried Abdul Haq.

Old Uncle waltzed round on his great feet, nimble as a polo pony. His trunk curled up into a ball, his red pig’s eyes glared at Abdul Haq. He trumpeted, a muffled, brassy sound.

Old Uncle lunged.

‘Now, brother!’ squeaked Abdul Haq. He struck out with his black cotton umbrella. Old Uncle cowered.

‘Now let me up, my lord,’ ordered Abdul Haq. ‘Let me up and jippoo andha — get a move on.’

Old Uncle crooked his great forefoot at the wrist. Abdul Haq seized the flapping ear. He swung himself to the neck.

From the heart of the log pile came a voice.

‘Abdul Haq?’

Old Uncle’s ears went forward. He stiffened. The cotton umbrella came down.

‘Now, my lord,’ said Abdul Haq, ‘we’ll see who’s master. Kneel, you pig.’

Old Uncle knelt. And from the depths of the log pile arose the naked figure of Petigo; his skin rapidly turning a bright prawn red in the blinding sunshine.

Abdul gaped, open-mouthed.

‘What the devil are you staring at?‘ asked Petigo. Above all, he told himself, be dignified.

Abdul Haq averted his eyes like a girl. It is not right for one man to look on another’s nakedness.

‘And where the hell have you been to?’

Then indeed Abdul Haq knew that he was no longer stretched on his mat in the Chinaman’s opium shop.

‘You’re dismissed,’ said Petigo harshly. ‘Go down and get your wages. I’ll give you a slip for the cashier.’

His hand felt for the pocket of his shorts. His eye fell on Old Uncle, pluffing with the finger of his trunk at some scraps of khaki cloth.

‘Oh, well . . .’said Petigo.