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Our ayah was a wizened little woman who, in so far as I connected age with her at all, was assumed by my sister and me to be very old, much older than our father and mother. We were very fond of her, perhaps more fond than of our parents. On second thoughts, perhaps not. My mother was a little frightening. For one thing she might die because she was so old. She was not so old as our ayah; my sister and I agreed that she was not less than, say, two or maybe three hundred years old, and though this was a ripe age she did not seem likely to die. Our mother, on the other hand, was peculiar; it felt queer if she picked me up and put me on her lap, warm and safe and comfortable. Then suddenly cold and frightening, as it was many years later at the end of school service when the doors were opened and a cold draught of night air seemed to sigh gently through the sermonically heated chapel. Sermons, the Headmaster, God, The Father Almighty, Arf Arfer Oo Arf in Mphm, please make me a good boy. I would slip off her lap quickly and hunt for my sister.
In the evening we would stand together by the travelling harmonium while my mother, in the light of an oil lamp, carefully picked out tunes which my sister and I joined her in singing, about the green hill – so green compared with parched burning India of the daylight that had just finished – and its tiny jewelled city wall. Poor little green hill; why hadn't it got a city wall? It took me a long time to realize that the wretched poet meant it had no city wall, and longer still to realize he meant – incredible though it seemed – that it was outside the city wall.
I went into this question thoroughly – and others like “Is golden syrup really gold?” – with my mother, and later with my father, but without being satisfied by either. I concluded that my mother didn't
really know; though she tried very hard she seemed as puzzled as I was. It was more complicated with my father; he would start but seemed to tire when I did not understand