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HUSSEIN
An Entertainment
PATRICK O’BRIAN
Contents
I cannot remember the genesis of Hussein with great clarity, but I rather think that it derived from a tale I wrote for one of the Oxford annuals, to which I contributed fairly often: Mr Kaberry, an amiable man who ran the annual, said that it would be a pity to publish no more than the abbreviated form I showed him, and suggested that I should expand it to a book.
This I did: I was living in Dublin at the time, in a boarding-house in Leeson Street kept by two very kind sisters from Tipperary and inhabited mostly by young men studying at the national university with a few from Trinity. What fun we had in the evenings: the Miss Spains from Tipperary danced countless Irish dances with wonderful grace, big-boned Séan from Derry sawing away at his fiddle and the others joining in as well as they could. On Sundays we would go to a church where, without impropriety, the priest could say his Mass in eighteen minutes; then we would ride to Blackrock to swim; and all this time the book was flowing well, rarely less than a thousand words a day and sometimes much more. I finished it on a bench in Stephen’s Green with a mixture of triumph and regret.
Although I had known some Indians, Muslim and Hindu, at that time I had never been to India, so the book is largely derivative, based on reading and on the recollections, anecdotes and letters of friends of relations who were well acquainted with that vast country; and it has no pretension to being anything more than what it is called, an Entertainment. But it did have a distinction that pleased my vanity: it was the first work of contemporary fiction that the Oxford University Press had published in all the centuries of its existence.
It was fairly well received, and in the writing of the book I learnt the rudiments of my calling: but infinitely more than that, it opened a well of joy that has not yet run dry.
PATRICK O’BRIAN
Trinity College, Dublin 1999
In the Public Works Department of the Government of India there are a great number of elephants. It is the custom for one mahout to stay with the same elephant throughout the years of his service. One of these elephants was called Muhammed Akbar; his first mahout was Wali Dad. When Wali Dad grew old, and was pensioned off, his son Ahmed became Muhammed Akbar’s mahout, for he had grown up with the elephant.
Time went on, and as Muhammed Akbar was reaching the prime of his life, Ahmed took a wife, who presently died, giving birth to a son.
The child was brought up by his grandfather and Ahmed. Ahmed had loved his wife very wholeheartedly, and he felt that he could not take another woman, although his food was much the worse for the want of a wife. She had been a small, delicately-formed girl of fifteen when Ahmed had married her — a grown woman by the standards of her people. But before the first year of their marriage was gone, she was dead, so Ahmed, who had not had time for disillusionment, carried a sweet memory with him always.
From his babyhood the boy, called Hussein after the father of his grandfather, who had been a great mahout in his day, was brought up among the elephants. His grandfather was very fond of Hussein, and he taught him to walk by looping an elephant’s picket-rope about him, and trailing him very gently to and fro.
The very first thing that Hussein could remember was his grandfather trailing him round in the shade of a pipal tree, while an elephant — probably Muhammed Akbar — rubbed himself with a grating noise against the bark of the thick trunk. What fixed the incident in his memory was a brilliantly blue butterfly that hovered quite near, but which he could not catch; while he was trying to, he suddenly discovered that he could run by himself.
At first an aunt looked after Hussein, but while he was still quite a baby the elephants were moved to Agra and she was left behind, so Hussein grew up without any women. As soon as Hussein was old enough to learn, Wali Dad taught him the Mohammedan confession of faith — La illah il Allah, Mohammed raisul Allah — there is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is the Prophet of Allah — that, with a few vague remarks about Paradise, which was only to be reached by those who did not make a noise when their elders