This article was too much for Sucharita to bear. She longed to shred its every argument to bits. ‘Gourmohanbabu could reduce this essay to dust, if he wished,’ she thought to herself. The image of Gora’s glowing face arose before her mind’s eye, and his powerful voice echoed even within the recesses of her heart. So trivial did this essay and its author’s meanness appear, in comparison with the extraordinariness of that face and those words, that Sucharita flung the paper to the ground.
After a long time, Sucharita approached Binoy of her own accord. ‘Tell me,’ she remarked conversationally, ‘you had promised to bring me the papers in which you people have published articles. Then why haven’t you given them to me?’
Binoy did not tell her that he had not dared to keep his promise, observing Sucharita’s change of heart. ‘I’ve put them together,’ he said instead. ‘I’ll get them tomorrow.’
The next day, Binoy brought a bundle of books and papers and left them with Sucharita. Having obtained them, Sucharita put them away in a box without reading them. Because she was dying to read them, she did not do so. Vowing that she would not allow her mind to be diverted under any circumstances, she once again sought consolation in surrendering her rebellious heart to Haranbabu’s authority.
~25~
On Sunday morning, Anandamoyi was stuffing rolled up paan with spices. Beside her, Shashimukhi was shredding supari into a tiny heap. At this moment, Binoy came in. Shashimukhi immediately ran from the room, scattering the betelnut gathered in her lap in the corner of her sari aanchal. Anandamoyi suppressed a smile.
Binoy could get along with everybody. So far, he had enjoyed a very friendly relationship with Shashimukhi. They would tease each other a lot. Shashimukhi had invented the strategy of stealing Binoy’s shoes in order to extract stories from him. Binoy had invented a couple of tales, highly coloured versions of some trifling events in Shashimukhi’s life. If he began recounting one of those stories, Shashimukhi would be outwitted. First she would loudly accuse the narrator of lying; then, admitting defeat, she would flee the room. To counter this, she too had tried to create stories that were distortions of Binoy’s biography; but as she could not match Binoy’s creativity, she had not achieved much success in this matter. Anyway, whenever Binoy visited this house, Shashimukhi would drop all her work and rush to attack him. Sometimes she troubled him so much that Anandamoyi would scold her, but Shashimukhi was indeed not solely to blame. Binoy would provoke her beyond endurance. When the same Shashimukhi quickly escaped from the room upon catching sight of Binoy, Anandamoyi smiled, but it was not a happy smile.
Binoy, too, was so offended at this trifling matter that he remained speechless for a while. It was apparent from such trivial instances how inappropriate it would be for him to marry Shashimukhi. When consenting to the match, Binoy had thought only of his friendship with Gora; he had not imagined what the experience of marriage might actually be like. Besides, he had taken pride in publishing many newspaper articles about the fact that marriages in our country are primarily family affairs rather than a matter of personal choice. As for himself, he had never entertained any personal likes or dislikes in this matter. Today, when Shashimukhi bit her tongue and ran away upon seeing Binoy because she saw him as her would-be husband, he witnessed an aspect of his future relationship with her. At once, his whole heart rebelled. He felt furious with Gora for forcing him to act in a way so contrary to his own nature. He cursed himself, and recalling that Anandamoyi had been against this marriage from the start, his heart was filled with respect mixed with wonder at the subtlety of her perception.
Anandamoyi sensed Binoy’s mood. To divert his mind, she said:
‘Binoy, I received a letter from Gora yesterday.’
‘What does he say?’ asked Binoy, rather absently.
‘He doesn’t say much about himself. He writes in sorrow about the plight of the lower classes in this country. He recounts the injustices committed by the magistrate at some village called Ghoshpara.’
‘Gora only notices what others are doing,’ Binoy blurted out impatiently, provoked into opposing Gora. ‘And when we ourselves oppress society, straddling its body and stifling its breath, that must always be pardoned, as the holiest task ever undertaken.’
Seeing Binoy suddenly attack Gora in this way, contradicting him in order to establish his own credibility, Anandamoyi smiled to herself.
‘You smile, Ma,’ said Binoy. ‘You wonder why Binoy should suddenly grow so angry. Let me tell you why. The other day, Sudhir had taken me to a friend’s garden estate at their Naihati station. As soon as we pulled out of Sealdah, it started raining. When the train stopped at Shodpur station, I saw a Bengali in Western attire, sporting an umbrella, helping his wife off the train. The wife had a baby boy in her arms. Covering the child somehow with her heavy wrap, the poor thing stood at one end of the open platform, huddled in cold and embarrassment, getting drenched. Her husband, carrying the umbrella, attended to the luggage, creating a commotion. I was instantly reminded that, in the whole of Bengal, rain or shine, among the elite or uncultured, no woman carries an umbrella. I saw the husband shamelessly protecting his head with the umbrella while his wife silently got drenched in her wrap, without condemning his own behaviour even in his private thoughts, and nobody at the station found anything wrong with this. I have vowed ever since not to utter poetic falsehoods claiming that we revere our women greatly, regarding them as Lakshmi, as devi, and so on. We call the nation our motherland, but if we don’t see the greatness of that female image manifest in our womenfolk, if we don’t see our women as mature, spirited, and direct in their intelligence, physical strength, sense of duty and largeness of heart, if we find only weakness, narrowness and immaturity in our homes, then we shall never experience the glory of our nation.’
Suddenly embarrassed at his own fervour, Binoy continued in his normal tone: ‘Ma, you are thinking, sometimes Binoy tends to launch into lectures, making tall claims, and today as well he is obsessed with the urge to hold forth. By force of habit, my words begin to sound like lectures, but today, this is no public speech. I had not understood properly, never considered, how far ahead of the nation our nation’s women might be. Ma, I won’t say more. Because I talk too much, nobody believes my words to be my own. From now on, I’ll say less.’
Binoy left without further delay, his heart aflame with enthusiasm.
‘Baba,’ Anandamoyi sent for Mahim and said, ‘Binoy can’t marry our Shashimukhi.’
‘Why? Do you have any objection?’
‘It’s because this match won’t work in the long run that I am against it. Otherwise, why should I object?’
‘Gora is in favour of it, so is Binoy. Why shouldn’t it last? Of course if you withhold your consent, Binoy won’t proceed. Of that I’m well aware.’
‘I know Binoy better than you do.’
‘Better even than Gora?’
‘Yes, I know him even better than Gora does. That’s why, all things considered, I can’t give my consent.’
‘Very well, let Gora return.’
‘Mahim, listen to me. If you are too persistent in this matter, it will ultimately create trouble. I don’t want Gora to say anything about this to Binoy.’
‘Well, we shall see,’ declared Mahim, stuffing a paan in his mouth. He rushed from the room in fury.
~26~
When Gora set out on his journey, he was accompanied by four people: Abinash, Matilal, Basanta and Ramapoti. But they could not keep pace with Gora’s relentless enthusiasm. Within four or five days, Abinash and Basanta returned to Kolkata on the pretext of poor health. Purely out of devotion to Gora, Matilal and Ramapoti could not bring themselves to abandon him. But there was no end to their sufferings, for Gora never tired of walking, nor did a sedentary existence exasperate him. However inconvenient the diet and lifestyle, he would spend day after day in the home of any village householder who offered him hospitality out of respect for his Brahmanhood. All the villagers would gathe
r about him to listen to his discourses, reluctant to let him go.
For the first time, Gora saw what our country is like, outside the social worlds of the respectable bhadralok, the educated, and the Kolkata-dwellers. How fragmented, narrow-minded and feeble was this vast, concealed realm of rural Bharatvarsha—how utterly unaware of its own power, how completely ignorant and indifferent about its own interests! How extreme were the social differences between places only five or seven krosh, ten to fifteen miles apart—how many self-created and imaginary obstacles constrained the land from advancing in the world’s giant workspace—how much importance it attached to trivialities, how moribund it had grown, clinging to every prejudice and superstition—how somnolent was its mind, how faint its heart, how feeble its efforts! Had he not dwelt among the villagers in this way, Gora could never have imagined all this. During his stay at a village, a fire broke out in one of the localities. Even in the face of such a grave disaster, Gora was amazed to see how poor was their capacity to band together and fight the danger wholeheartedly. They ran about in confusion, all of them, weeping and wailing, but unable to do anything in an organized fashion. There was no water-body near that neighbourhood. The women would fetch water from far away to perform their household chores, yet even the more well-to-do villagers had not thought of reducing that daily inconvenience by digging an inexpensive well in their backyard. There had been fires in this locality on earlier occasions as well, but the people passively took them for acts of God, making no effort to arrange some supply of water near at hand. Gora thought it a mockery to discuss the state of the entire nation with people who were mentally so inert, even about their urgent local needs. What amazed him most was that Matilal and Ramapoti felt no consternation at witnessing such scenes; on the contrary, they found Gora’s rage inappropriate. This was how poor folks always behaved, such was their mindset. They did not regard these hardships as hardships at all. To imagine that things should be any different for the poor folk was taking things too far, they thought. Gora’s heart was tormented day and night because he now realized clearly the terrifying enormity of the burden of such ignorance, stasis and suffering, a burden oppressing the educated and the illiterate, rich and poor, allowing nobody to progress.
Matilal left, claiming he had news of illness in the family; now Gora had only Ramapoti with him. Travelling on, the two of them arrived at a Muslim settlement beside the river. Searching for hospitality, they heard of only one family of Hindu barbers in the entire village. Seeking refuge there, the two Brahmans noticed that the old barber and his wife had adopted a Muslim boy. Ramapoti, very devout, became highly agitated. When Gora reprimanded the barber for his sinful act, he said:
‘Thakur, we say Hari and they call Him Allah, but there’s no difference.’
The sun beat down upon their heads, the sand-bank was vast, the river far away. Desperate with thirst, Ramapoti asked:
‘Where can we find some water for a Hindu to drink?’
There was an unpaved well in the barber’s house, but unable to drink from a well polluted by such irreligious conduct, Ramapoti felt dejected.
‘Is this boy an orphan?’ Gora inquired.
‘He has parents, but for him, they’re as good as dead,’ the barber replied.
‘How’s that?’
The gist of the background narrated by the barber was as follows:
The zamindari they belonged to was leased by sahebs, traders in indigo. There were endless disputes between the tenants and the owners of the factory, the nilkuthi, over the indigo fields on the chors or sandbanks. All the other tenant-farmers had yielded, but the sahebs had not been able to subdue the tenants of this sandbank named Chor-Ghoshpur. All the subjects here were Muslims and their leader, Pharu Sardar, feared no-one. He had served a couple of jail sentences for thrashing the police after being harassed by the nilkuthi owners. He was virtually starving now, but giving up was alien to his nature. This season, farming on the zigzag sandbanks of the river, the villagers had managed to grow some boro paddy. But a month ago, the nilkuthi manager had arrived in person to rob his tenant-farmers, accompanied by strongmen armed with staves. During that attack, Pharu Sardar had dealt such a blow to the saheb’s right hand that it had to be amputated at the clinic. Never had this area witnessed such a daring feat. Ever since, police torture had spread like wildfire through every neighbourhood. They left nothing intact in the tenant-farmers’ homes, and the honour of women in their homes was jeopardized. Pharu Sardar and many others were behind bars; most of the villagers were absconding. Pharu’s wife was starving; in fact, her only garment was so tattered that she was ashamed to emerge from her house. Her only son Tamiz used to address the barber’s wife as his aunt, as fellow villagers do. Seeing that he was starving, the barber’s wife had taken him in. One of the courthouses of the nilkuthi was about a krosh and a half away; the police superintendent was still stationed there with his team. There was no saying when he might show up in the village and what he might do there, in connection with the investigations. The previous day, the police had arrived at the doorstep of old Nazim, the barber’s neighbour. A young brother-in-law of Nazim’s had come there from another village, to visit his sister. Without any provocation, the superintendent declared: ‘I must say this is a strapping young fellow, look at his puffed up chest!’ And he attacked him so violently with his stave that the youth began to bleed from the mouth, his teeth smashed. Witnessing such torture, his sister rushed up to him, but the policeman pushed the old woman aside. Formerly, the police would not dare create such trouble in the locality, but now every able-bodied youth in the area was either behind bars or absconding. It was to capture the fugitives that the police still roamed the village. There was no saying when the dominance of this malign planet would end.
Gora showed no inclination to leave, but Ramapoti meanwhile was growing desperate. The barber had barely ended his narrative, when he demanded:
‘How far away is the Hindu neighbourhood?’
‘You know the nilkuthi courthouse a krosh and a half away? The tehsildar there is a Brahman named Madhab Chatujje,’ the barber informed him.
‘What’s he like?’ Gora inquired.
‘Like the devil’s own messenger,’ answered the barber. ‘It’s hard to find someone so heartless, yet so devious. He’ll make us pay for the superintendent’s stay with him as his guest, with some profit added too.’
‘Let’s go,’ pleaded Ramapoti. ‘That’s enough.’ Especially when the barber’s wife began to bathe the Muslim boy near the well, drawing water from it in her small ghoti, he flew into a rage and lost all desire to linger in this house.
‘How is it that you have remained in this locality, amidst all this oppression?’ Gora asked the barber while taking his leave. ‘Don’t you have relatives elsewhere?’
‘I’ve lived here a long time,’ the barber told him. ‘I have grown attached to these people. I am a Hindu barber. Because I have no landed property to speak of, the nilkuthi folks leave me alone. Among the men in this locality, there is no elderly person left. If I leave, the women will die of apprehension.’
‘Very well,’ said Gora, ‘I’ll return after my meal.’
Faced with this prolonged description of the oppressive conduct of the nilkuthi owners, at a time when he was acutely hungry and thirsty, Ramapoti became incensed at the villagers. It seemed to him an extreme instance of the daring and folly of staunch Muslims that these fellows should rise against those in power. He did not doubt that it would be all for the best if their arrogance were to be demolished through appropriate disciplinary action. He considered it customary for the police to oppress such lawless wretches for such things were inevitable, and these people were primarily responsible for them. After all, they could always compromise with the owners. Why create trouble? Where was all their fire and mettle, now? As a matter of fact, Ramapoti privately sympathized with the saheb who owned the nilkuthi.
All the way, traversing the scorching sand under the midday sun,
Gora uttered not a word. Ultimately, they spotted the thatched courthouse roof through the foliage, from a distance. Gora suddenly declared:
‘Ramapoti, please go ahead and have your meal. I am going to that barber’s house.’
‘How can you say that!’ expostulated Ramapoti. ‘Won’t you have something to eat? You must proceed on your way after stopping for a meal at Chatujje’s.’
‘I’ll take care of my duties,’ responded Gora. ‘Now after your meal, please proceed to Kolkata. I might have to stay on at the Ghoshpur Chor for a while. It would be too much for you.’
Ramapoti’s hair stood on end. He could not imagine how a devout Hindu like Gora could even propose staying with that infidel. He began to wonder whether Gora had resolved to renounce food and drink, to fast unto death. But this was not the time to ponder; every moment seemed an age to him. He did not need much persuasion to escape to Kolkata, abandoing Gora. Glancing at him briefly, Ramapoti saw the small shadow of Gora’s tall frame trudging back alone amidst the desolate, scorching sands, in the heat of the midday sun.
Hunger and thirst had overwhelmed Gora, but the more he thought about having to accept the hospitality of the vile, unjust Madhab Chatujje just to preserve his caste purity, the more intolerable the prospect appeared. His face reddened, his temper flared, and a tremendous sense of rebellion arose in his heart. He thought, ‘What a great heresy we are committing in Bharatvarsha, making purity a matter of appearances alone! It would save my caste purity to dine at the home of a man who torments Muslims by creating all sorts of trouble, but I would lose my caste status in the home of a person who accepts such torment to protect a Muslim boy, and is even ready to suffer social condemnation for it. Anyway, I’ll reflect later upon the pros and cons of such discriminatory practices, but at present, I have no choice.’
Gora Page 20