The Flower of Forgiveness

Flora Annie Steel

• Publisher: Read & Co. Classics
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781528714679
• eBook ISBN: 9781528788854
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History

"The Flower of Forgiveness" is a 1894 collection of short stories by Flora Annie Steel. Flora Annie Steel (1847 – 1929) was an English writer who notably lived in British India for 22 years and is best remembered for her books set or related to the sub-continent. Like most of her work, these tales are set in colonial India and offer a unique insight into what life was like at that time. "The Flower of Forgiveness" is highly recommended for those with an interest in India's history and will not disappoint those who have read and enjoyed other works by this author. Contents include: "The Flower of Forgiveness", "Harvest", "For the Faith", "The Bhut-Baby", "Râmchunderji", "Heera Nund", "Feroza", "In the House of a Coppersmith", "Faizullah", "The Footstep of Death", "Habitual Criminals", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. Other works by this author include: "Tales of the Punjab" (1894) and "The Potter's Thumb" (1894). It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

FOR THE FAITH.

I.

An old man dreaming of a past day and night as he sat waiting, and these were his dreams.

* * * * *

Darkness, save for the light of the stars in the sky and the flare of blazing roof-trees on earth. Two shadowy figures out in the open, and through the parched silence of the May night a man's voice feeble, yet strenuous in appeal.

"Dhurm Singh?"

"Huzoor!"

The kneeling figure bent closer over the other, waiting.

"The mem sahiba, Dhurm Singh."

"Huzoor—dhurm nâl."[9]

Then silence, broken only by the long howl of jackals gathering before their time round that scene of mutiny and murder.

* * * * *

Darkness once more. The darkness of daylight shut out by prisoning walls. The sweltering heat of July oozing through the shot-cracked walls; the horrors of starvation, and siege, and sickness round two dim figures. And once again a strenuous voice—this time a woman's.

"Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor."

The answer came as before—broad, soft, guttural, in the accent of the north—

"Sonny baba, Dhurm Singh!"

"Huzoor—dhurm nâl."

Then silence, broken only by the whist-ch-t of a wandering bullet against the wall of the crumbling fort, where one more victim had found peace.

* * * * *

Both the May night and the July day were in old Dhurm Singh's thoughts as he sat on his heels looking out from the Apollo Bunder at Bombay across the Black Water, waiting, after long years, for Sonny baba'sship to loom over the level horizon. A stranger figure among the slight, smooth coolies busy around him with bales and belaying pins than he would have been among the dockers at Limehouse. Tall, gaunt, his long white beard parted over the chin and bound backwards over his ears, his broad mustache spreading straight under his massive nose, his level eyebrows like a white streak between the open brown forehead and the open brown eyes. A faded red tunic, empty of the left arm, a solitary medal on the breast, and above the unseen coils of white hair—long as a woman's—the high wound turban bearing the sacred steel quoit of the Sikh devotee.

Such was Dhurm Singh, Akâli; in other words, Lion of the Faith and member of the Church Militant. Pensioner to boot for an anna or so a day to a Government which he had also served dhurm nâl as he had served his dead captain, his dead mistress, and, last of all, Sonny baba!

Twenty years ago. Yes! twenty years since he had answered those strenuous appeals by his favourite word-play on his own name. He had used it for many another promise during those long years; as a rule, truthfully. For Dhurm Singh, as a rule, did things dhurm nâl—partly because a slow, invincible tenacity of purpose made all chopping and changing distasteful, partly because fidelity to the master is sucked in with the mother's milk of the Sikh race: very little, it is to be feared, from conscious virtue. Twenty years ago he had carried Sonny baba through the jungles by night on his unhurt arm, and hidden as best he could in the tiger-grass by day, because of his promise. And now, as he sat waiting for Sonny baba to come sailing over the edge of his world again, the broad simple face expanded into smiles at the memory. He passed by all the stress and strains of that unforgotten flight in favour of a little yellow head nestling back in alarm against the bloodstains on the old tunic, when the white mems in the big cantonment of refuge had held out their arms to the child.

Sonny baba had known his friends in those days; ay! and he had remembered them all these years: he and the mem's sister, who had taken charge of the boy in the foreign land across the Black Waters whence the masters came—a gracious Miss who wrote regularly once a year to ex-duffadar Dhurm Singh, giving him the last news of Sonny baba and as regularly urging her correspondent to safeguard himself against certain damnation by becoming an infidel. For this, briefly, crudely, was the recipient's view of the matter as he sat staring at the little picture texts and tracts in the Punjâbi character which invariably accompanied the letters. They puzzled him, those picture cards in the sacred characters which were printed so beautifully in the far off land by people who knew nothing of him or his people, and who yet wrote better than any mohunt.[10]Puzzled him in more ways than one, since duty and desire divided as to the method of their disposal. Respect for the captân-sahib, whom he had left lying dead at the back of the native lines on that May night, forbade his destroying them; respect for his own religious profession forbade his disseminating the pictures, irrespective of the letterpress, as playthings among the village children. So he tied them up in a bundle with his pension papers, and kept them in the breast pocket of the old tunic under the bloodstains and the solitary medal which was beginning to fray through its parti-coloured ribbon—an odd item in that costume of a Sikh devotee which he had assumed when the final loss of his arm forced him into peace and a pension. As a rule, however, the tunic was hidden under the orthodox blue and white garments matching the turban, just as the huge steel bracelets on his arms matched the steel quoit on his head; but on this day loyalty to the dead had spoken in favour of the old uniform. It may seem a strange choice, this of devoteeship, but to the old swash-buckler it was infinitely more amusing, even in these degenerate days when Akâli-dom had lost half its power, to go swaggering about from fair to festival, from festival to fair, representing the Church Militant, than to lounge about the village watching the agricultural members of the family cultivate the ancestral lands. They did it admirably without his help, as they had done it always; so Dhurm Singh, at a loose end now legitimate strife was over, took to cultivating his hair with baths of buttermilk instead, adopted the quoit and the bracelets, and used the most pious of Sikh oaths as he watched the wrestlers wrestle, or played singlestick for the honour of God and the old regiment. And there were other advantages in the profession. A man might take a more than reasonable amount of opium occasionally without laying himself open to a heavier accusation than that of religious enthusiasm; since opium is part of the Akâli's stock in trade.

As he sat among the tarred ropes with his back against a consignment of beer and rum for the British soldier, he broke off quite a large corner of the big black lump he kept in the same pocket with the tracts, and swallowed it whole. Sonny baba's ship was not due, they told him, for some hours to come, so there would be time for quiet dreams both of past and future. The latter somewhat confused, since the Miss-sahib'sletters had not always been adequately translated by the village schoolmaster. Only this was sure: Sonny baba was three and twenty, and he was comi...

Table of contents

• THE FLOWER OF FORGIVENESS.
• HARVEST.
• FOR THE FAITH.
• THE BHUT-BABY.
• RÂMCHUNDERJI.
• HEERA NUND.
• FEROZA.
• IN THE HOUSE OF A COPPERSMITH.
• FAIZULLAH.
• THE FOOTSTEP OF DEATH.
• HABITUAL CRIMINALS.
• MUSSUMÂT KIRPO'S DOLL.
• "LONDON."
• LÂL.
• A DEBT OF HONOUR.
• THE VILLAGE LEGACY.