‘Why were you not more careful, my son?’ Lakha strained himself to be more kind than angry.
‘But, father, what is the use?’ Bakha shouted. ‘They would ill-treat us, even if we shouted. They think we are mere dirt, because we clean their dirt. That pundit in the temple tried to molest Sohini and then came shouting: “Polluted, polluted.” The woman of the big house in the silversmith’s gully threw the bread at me from the fourth storey. I won’t go down to the town again. I have done with this job.’
Lakha was touched. A queer self-conscious smile hovered on the edges of his moustache, a smile of impotent rage.
‘You didn’t abuse or hit back, did you?’ he asked. His sense of fear for his son for the consequences of such a crime, should he have been provoked to commit it, was mixed with that servile humility of his which could never entertain the prospect of retaliation against the high-caste men.
‘No, but I was sorry afterwards that I didn’t,’ replied Bakha. ‘I could have given them a bit of my mind.’
‘No, no, my son, no,’ said Lakha, ‘we can’t do that. They are our superiors. One word of theirs is sufficient against all that we might say before the police. They are our masters. We must respect them and do as they tell us. Some of them are kind.’
He looked at his son’s face. It had relaxed a bit from the deliberate, tense expression it had assumed, to a sort of resigned cynicism, as if he didn’t care. But the old man sensed that the boy was grieved and hurt, and he sensed also that he hated the high-caste people. He sought to assuage his son’s grief, to placate his wrath.
‘You know,’ he began in the impersonal manner with which he always lifted himself from the lazy old man he was to the superior dignity of an aged father; ‘You know, when you were a little child, I too had a nasty experience. You were ill with fever, and I went to the house of Hakim Bhagawan Das, in this very town. I shouted and shouted, but no one heard me. A babu was passing through the dawai khana of the Dakdar and I said to him:
“Babu ji, Babu ji, God will make you prosperous. Please make my message reach the ears of the Hakim ji. I have been shouting, shouting and have even asked some people to tell the Hakim Sahib that I have a prayer to make to him. My child is suffering from fever. He has been unconscious since last night and I want the Hakim ji to give him some medicine.”
‘“Keep away, keep away,” said the babu, “don’t come riding on at me. Do you want me to have another bath this morning? The Hakim Sahib has to attend to us people who go to offices first, and there are so many of us waiting. You have nothing to do all day. Come another time or wait.”
‘And with this he walked into the dispensary.
‘I remained standing. Whenever anyone passed by I would place my head at his feet and ask him to tell the Hakim. But who would listen to a sweeper? Everyone was concerned about himself.
‘For an hour I stood like that in a corner, near the heap of litter which I had collected, and I was feeling as if a scorpion was stinging me. That I couldn’t buy medicine for my son, when I was willing to pay my hard-earned money for it, troubled me. I had seen many bottles full of medicine in the house of the Hakim ji and I knew that one of those bottles contained the medicine for you, and yet I couldn’t get it. My heart was with you and my body was outside the house of the Hakim. I had torn my heart away from the room where you lay with your mother, and prayed to God to make my difficulty easy. But nothing happened. I began to think I was seeing you die. It seemed as if someone was giving me a blow in my side and saying “come and see the face of your son for the last time”. I ran back home.
‘“Have you brought the medicine?” asked your mother, rushing out to me.
‘You, of course, only half opened your eyes and you were too delirious to recognize me. They told me they would soon bring you down on the floor.2 So I ran back to the Hakim’s house. Your mother shouted and said: “What is the good of medicine now?” But I ran and ran. When I got to the Hakim’s house I just lifted the curtain and went straight in. I caught the Hakim’s feet and said: “Still there is a little breath left in my child’s body, Hakim ji, I shall be your slave all my life. The meaning of my life is my child. Hakim ji, take pity. God will be kind to you.”
‘“Bhangi! Bhangi!” There was an uproar in the medicine house. People began to disperse as the Hakim’s feet had become defiled. He was red and pale in turn, and shouted at the highest pitch of his voice: “Chandal! by whose orders have you come here? And then you join hands and hold my feet and say you will become my slave for ever. You have polluted hundreds of rupees worth of medicine. Will you pay for it?”
‘I began to shed tears,’ Lakha continued, ‘and said:
‘“Maharaj, I forgot. Your shoe on my head. I am not in my senses. Maharaj, you are my father—mother. I can’t compensate for the medicines. I can only serve you. Will you come and give some medicine to my child? He is on his death-bed!”
‘Hakim ji just shook his head and exclaimed: “Serve me! Serve me! How can you serve me? Have you ever received medicine here, that you come rushing in?”
‘I said: “Sarkar, I went away after standing outside for some time. I tried to fall at the feet of every passer-by and prayed them to tell to the Sarkar that my child was suffering. But Sarkar, this is the time of kindness. Be compassionate this time. Another time you can take even my life. Only save my child. All night I have been rocking him in my arms, thinking that if he survives the night I shall come and fetch medicine from you with the rising of the sun. Who could have heard my call in the middle of the night if I had come here then?”
‘With this the Hakim ji’s heart melted to some extent and he began to write a prescription. Just at that time your uncle came running and shouted from without: “Ohe, Lakha! Ohe, Lakha! The boy is passing away!”
‘I ran out. Hakim ji had dropped his pen. When I came home I found that you were very bad and they had put you on the floor for the fourth time, and your mother was crying.
‘In a little while there was a knock at the door. And what do you think? Your uncle goes out and finds the Hakim ji himself, come to grace our house. He was a good man. He felt your pulse and saved your life.’
‘He might have killed me,’ Bakha commented.
‘No, no,’ said Lakha, ‘they are really kind. We must realize that it is religion which prevents them from touching us.’
He had never throughout his narrative renounced his deep-rooted sense of inferiority and the docile acceptance of the laws of fate.
Bakha had felt stirred in the deepest cells of his body as his father narrated the story. Every time his father mentioned his name, every time he referred to his dangerous illness, Bakha felt a strain of self-pity run through him which made him hot and cold at the same time, raised his hair on end and brought tears gushing to his eyes. It was by sheer exertion of his will power that he kept back his tears. In a few moments, however, he was his own strong self again.
‘This rascal of a Rakha must have strayed away to play somewhere,’ grumbled the old man. ‘Whether you want to eat or not, I must. Sohini, give me some bread.’
‘There is no dal,’ said Sohini. ‘Would you like to take it with some of the tea left over from the morning.’
‘“What is taste to the palate of holy men, let it come with cream”,’ the old man sang the familiar Indian proverb in reply. Sohini proceeded to put the smoke-bottomed handi full of tea-leaves, water and milk to boil.
Bakha crouched down to a tin jug and gingerly sprinkled a few drops of water on his hands and his face. He had heard his father ask for the food and he slightly resented it.
‘I feel hungry too,’ he thought. ‘Perhaps much hungrier than he does. He has been sitting here all day.’ The boy did not grudge his old father the food that he was going to eat, but a feeling of disgust ran through him as hunger gnawed at his belly. To the young and healthy animal in him, with the strength of his close-knit sinews, his old father was as good as dead, a putrefying corpse like that of a stray dog
or cat on the rubbish heap.
Rakha was at length in sight, a basket of food on his bare clean-shaven head, a pan slung by a string handle in his hand, and his feet dragging a pair of Bakha’s old ammunition boots, laceless and noisy and too big for him. His tattered flannel shirt, grimy with the blowings of his ever-running nose, obstructed his walk slightly. The discomfort resulting from this, the fatigue, assumed or genuine, due to the work he had put in that morning, gave a rather drawn, long-jawed look to his dirty face on which flies congregated to taste the saliva on the corners of his lips. The quizzical, not-there look defined by his small eyes and his narrow, very narrow forehead, was positively ugly. And yet his ears, long and transparent in the sunlight, had something intelligent about them, something impish. He seemed a true child of the outcaste colony, where there are no drains, no light, no water; of the marshland where people live among the latrines of the townsmen, and in the stink of their own dung scattered about here, there and everywhere; of the world where the day is dark as the night and the night pitch-dark. He had wallowed in its mire, bathed in its marshes, played among its rubbish-heaps, and his listless, lazy, manner was a result of his surroundings. He was the vehicle of a life-force, which would never reach its culminating point, because malaria lingered in his bones and that disease does not kill but merely dissipates the energy. He was a friend of the flies and the mosquitoes, their companion since his childhood.
‘So you have got back after all,’ Bakha exclaimed when Rakha was within hearing distance.
His younger brother did not reply but came sulkily up to where Sohini sat in the kitchen and, depositing his load of food before her, sat down in the dust, exploring the heap of crumbs in his basket. He ate big morsels. His mouth filled on one side, and looked grotesque.
‘At least wash your hands, ohe wild animal!’ said Bakha, irritated by the sight of his brother’s running nose.
‘You mind your own business,’ retorted the young boy, aware that his father loved him more than he loved Bakha.
‘Look at yourself in the mirror! What a picture you look!’ exclaimed Bakha.
‘Don’t keep on finding fault with him,’ put in Lakha. ‘Stop quarrelling, occasionally, at least.’
‘Come and eat a piece of bread,’ said Sohini to her elder brother, sympathetically.
Bakha got up from his chair unwillingly and, crouching by the kitchen, casually dipped his hand in the basket. There was a heap of food there, broken pieces of chapatis, some whole ones and lentil curry in a bowl.
They all ate from the same basket and the same bowl, not apportioning the food in different plates as the Hindus do, for the original Hindu instinct for cleanliness had disappeared long ago. Only Bakha felt a thrill of loathing for his brother go through him after he had eaten his first few morsels of the day. He changed his position slightly, so that he had his back turned towards his brother. But his hand touched a piece of sticky, wet bread. He shrank back from the basket. The picture of a sepoy washing his hands in his round brass tray, over the leavings of bread and salad, and then throwing them in Rakha’s basket appeared before him. He had himself gone so often to beg for food and the thing he hated about it was the sight of those bits of bread softened by the water poured upon them. He had a queer, warm feeling of water running under his tongue from across the sides of his mouth. He felt sick. He tried to drop the soft crumb he had got hold of, but some of it stuck to his fingers still. It was nauseating. He rose from the floor.
‘You were saying you were hungry!’ said Lakha, when he saw his son get up so suddenly from the meal.
Bakha bent over the tin vessel from the mouth of which he was sprinkling drops of water on his hand. He didn’t know what to say in reply. ‘He won’t understand if I tell him that I feel sick,’ he said to himself. ‘I will make an excuse. But what—’ Suddenly a pretence occurred to him.
‘I have to go to Ram Charan’s house to see his sister’s marriage—and to receive my share of the sweets,’ he said. The last he added tactfully, to fortify himself against any objection his father might have to his going, by appealing to the old man’s greed.
The true reason for the sudden impulse that had come so useful in the invention of his lie was inexplicable to anyone, even to himself. For even he did not realize why he was going to see the wedding of Ram Charan’s sister. He hadn’t been invited to go by Gulabo or by Ram Charan. And he couldn’t have been asked by Ram Charan’s sister, because she had never talked to him since she was ten. Why then was he going? What had made him decide so suddenly on such an extraordinary adventure?
He only knew that he wanted to get away from home, his father, his brother, his sister, everyone. But he wouldn’t confess even to himself that he was going to see Ram Charan’s sister for the last time. A picture of her appeared from the past before his eyes. She was a tiny girl with shaven head, wearing a miniature skirt of gaudy, red cotton with a white pattern, that the washerwomen wear. She looked like a juggler’s little monkey. He himself was then a boy of eight, in a gold-embroidered cap which his father had begged from a moneylender who had three small sons whose discarded clothes fitted Lakha’s three children exactly. Bakha remembered how, while he had been playing with her brother and Chota in the barracks, they had come home and started to play at marriage. Ram Charan’s little sister was made to act the wife because she wore a skirt. Bakha was chosen to play the husband because he was wearing the gold-embroidered cap. The rest of the boys took the part of members of the marriage party. Bakha recalled how he had been ragged by Chota for acting as the husband of a shaven-headed, ridiculous, little girl, and how he (Bakha) had been angry with him, although he himself thought she looked funny. There was something wistful about her, a soft light in her eyes, for which she had become endeared to him and for which, he remembered, he had actually quarrelled with his friend. Since then, of course, she had grown up to be a tall girl with a face as brown as ripe wheat and hair as black as the rain clouds. And Bakha always felt proud of having once acted as her husband. Being very reticent and shy, however, he seldom dared even to look at her. But in the depths of his being he had felt waves of confusion at the thought of her. Now at the age of fourteen she was being married off to a young washerman attached as a follower to the 31st Punjabis regiment. He had heard of this arrangement a year ago. It was common knowledge in the sweepers’ street that Gulabo had taken two hundred rupees for the hand of her daughter. Chota had told him that. He remembered the evening on which he had heard it, for it had been somewhat of a shock to him, and he had felt a sadness in his soul, like a doleful lyric melody. During the dreary hours of his routine work at the latrines, subsequently he had often heard the delicate strain of that elfin music. But he had never quite comprehended the source from which it came. In the darkness of his home at night, when he lay half asleep, something in him secretly led him towards the vague sylph-like form which he could have squeezed in his embrace, but he could not connect the feelings he had at such moments with the ripples that surged up in him whenever he caught sight of Ram Charan’s sister.
As he walked towards her home today, he recalled occasions on which his vague flowings towards her had become more defined. His large eyes had rested with adoration on her face as she met him once going to the shops to buy some kerosene oil in an old wine bottle when from the dark undeclared places of his soul arose another picture of her in his memory—as she came through the darkness before the dawn from the banks of the brook where he knew she and the other women of the outcastes’ colony went every day, taking advantage of the privacy which the half-light afforded, to perform their toilets unseen by men. He remembered that he had been about the latrines and had at first felt a thrill of delight, then a sensation more vital. He had pictured her quite naked as he had seen his mother quite often when he was a child, and his sister, and other little children. An impulse had arisen like a sudden tremor to his brain, and darkened his thoughts. He had felt as if he could forcibly gather the girl in his embrace and ravish he
r. Then he had put his hand across his eyes and shuddered in horror at the thought. He had cursed himself for such a vision. His reputation as a docile, good, respectable boy seemed at stake. He had wondered at himself: ‘How could I, who am known to everyone as Bakha the good, have such an unholy design?’ Nevertheless, the picture had persisted. The more he tried to blot it out, the more it had defined itself, until, when he had ceased to bother about his sensual feelings, his phantasy had vanished.
As he recalled these things, he seemed to feel ashamed. He had felt that shame also on the occasion when those things first happened. In a frantic effort to escape from himself, to escape from the secret, buried desire he had for the girl, he casually took a turning off the track which led to the washermen’s houses, and wandered aimlessly into a lane which ended in the washermen’s ghats.
Shioh! Shioh! Shi! A few washermen were shouting as they tore the garments of their customers and broke their buttons on slabs of stone by the edges of the brook. Their dark legs were immersed in the water up to the knees and their bodies from the rumps upwards were swathed in the thick folds of loincloths up to the waists, where their shirts were tucked in. They doubled over the stones with supple movements and struck the garments with a loud swinging sweep which was graceful in itself even if it did not do any good to the cloth. Bakha had often stood watching this operation. In his childhood, of course, he had been fascinated by it, so that he wished to become a washerman. It was Ram Charan, true son of his mother, Gulabo, if he wasn’t his father’s son, but of the rich man, his mother’s lover, who had knocked the bottom out of that ambition by telling Bakha that, though he (Ram Charan) touched him and played with him, he was a Hindu, while Bakha was a mere sweeper. Bakha was too young then to understand the distinction implied in the washer-boy’s arrogant claim, or else he would have slapped Ram Charan’s face. But now he knew that there were degrees of castes among the low-caste, and that he was the lowest.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 11