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Updated: June 27, 2025
When that died away for a minute or two I caught the sound of the sharp and quavery squall of something, of something which had never squalled before, a squall of protest and injured pride, of maltreated youth resenting the ignominious way it must enter the world. Then the tom-tom beating started up again, and I opened my eyes to make sure it wasn't the Grenadiers' Band going by.
So the tale ran on with its accompaniment of song, its suggestion of regret. Once in the middle of a ballad a funeral passes in the street below. The mourner's chant sounds above the bourdon of the tom-tom, the wail of the saringis. "Hush, hush" cries Nur Jan, "let the dead pass in peace. It is not meet that the song of the dancing-girl should be heard upon the final journey."
Here was no silence, but blatant noise roar and chatter and shriek, the beat of the tom-tom, the thin piping of a flute the crash of a band. But it was the thin piping which Christopher followed, guiding Anne with his hand on her arm. Following the plaintive note, they came at last to the snake-charmer an old man in a white turban. The snakes were in a covered basket.
Waiting, listening, agonising, the tom-tom growing louder and louder or was it only the throbbing in her own head? With a choking cry she leaped to her feet suddenly and fled from him, back till the side of the tent stopped her and she stood, with wide-flung arms, gripping the black and silver hangings until he reached her.
With soft, Insistent regularity came the beat of the tom-tom over the hills, calling the Indians to the Medicine Lodge dance. There was something weirdly fascinating in the reiterated turn, turn, that carried almost a hypnotic power as hour after hour it called through the stillness.
He laughed to himself, and spent the rest of the way in seeing her at it. They would drink pink lemonade, and there would be pop-corn balls the entrancing smell of sawdust the beat of the band. He hoped there would be a tom-tom, and some of the dark people from the Far East. He reached his destination at seven o'clock. Dunbar met him at the station.
Then they took horse again with the retinue riding to the right and left and fared forward till they came to the river banks; when the troops alighted and pitched their tents and pavilions and standards to the blare of trump and the piping of fife and the dub-a-dub of drum and tom-tom.
Suppose the king, if there was one, and the priest, if there was one and I presume there was a priest, because it was a very ignorant age suppose the king and priest had said: "The tomtom is the most beautiful instrument of music of which any man can conceive; that is the kind of music they have in Heaven; an angel sitting upon the edge of a glorified cloud, golden in the setting sun, playing upon that tom-tom, became so enraptured, so entranced with her own music, that in a kind of ecstasy she dropped it that is how we obtained it; and any man who says it can be improved by putting a back and front to it, and four strings, and a bridge, and getting a bow of hair with rosin, is a blaspheming wretch, and shall die the death," I ask you, what effect would that have had upon music?
There was no car, no procession, no music: and, when night came, no tom-tom was beaten, no rocket sent up, nor any other sign that it was the day of Runga. One morning, when preaching in the village, I observed that the old man who used to conduct the services of the temple, was not in the congregation; and feeling, for the moment, a suspicion lest he should have returned to his former occupation, I asked, `Where is the poojari? A young man instantly replied, smiling, and patting his person, `O, he has gone to the fields with the cattle: now that the temple is given up, he must do something for his stomach."
He was tired of making patterns in the dust with marigolds for one thing. He wanted to pretend. It was his birthright to pretend, in a large active way, and he couldn't carry it out. The other boys didn't care about making believe soldiers, and running and hiding and shouting and beating Sonny Sahib's tom-tom, which made a splendid drum.
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