‘O Calvary! O Calvary!
It was for me that Jesus died
On the Cross of Calvary!’
He sacrificed Himself for us, Bakha reflected. His idea of sacrifice was something very certain and definite. He remembered that when some calamity brooded over the family, such as an epidemic of sickness, or starvation, his mother used to make offerings to the goddess Kali, by sacrificing a goat or some other animal. That sacrifice was supposed to appease the goddess’s wrath and the evil passed over. Now, what did this sacrifice of Yessuh Messih mean? Why did He sacrifice Himself?
‘Why did Yessuh Messih sacrifice Himself, Huzoor?’ he asked.
‘He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood,’
answered the Colonel forgetting, as he often did while he was with Bakha, that the sweeper-boy didn’t understand a word of what he was singing. Then in a sane moment he recognized the look of anxious solicitude on the face of the boy and realized he had been babbling too much, and mostly to himself.
‘He sacrificed Himself out of love for us,’ he said. ‘He sacrificed Himself to help us all; for the rich and the poor; for Brahmin and the Bhangi.’
The last sentence went home. ‘He sacrificed Himself for us, for the rich and the poor, for the Brahmin and the Bhangi.’ That meant there was no difference in His eyes between the rich and the poor, between the Brahmins and the Bhangis, between the pundit of the morning, for instance, and himself.
‘Han, han, Sahib, I understand,’ said Bakha eagerly. ‘Yessuh Messih makes no difference between the Brahmin and myself.’
‘Han, han, my boy, we are all alike in the eyes of Jesus,’ the Colonel answered him. But he began garrulously: ‘He is our King. He is the Son of God. We are all sinners. He will intercede with God, His Father, on our behalf.’
‘He is superior to us. We are all sinners. Why, why, is any one above another? Why are we all sinners?’ Bakha began to reflect.
‘Why are we all sinners, Sahib?’ he queried. ‘We were all born sinners,’ replied the Colonel evasively, the puritan in him shying at an exposition of the doctrine of original sin which seemed called for.
‘We must confess our sins. Then alone will He forgive us, otherwise we will have to suffer the eternal torment of hell. You confess your sins to me before I convert you to Christianity.’
‘But, Huzoor, I don’t know who Yessuh Messih is. I know Ram. But I don’t know Yessuh Messih.’
‘Ram is the god of the idolaters,’ the Colonel said after a pause, and a bit absent-mindedly. ‘Come and confess your sins to me and Yessuh Messih will receive you in Heaven when you die.’
Now Bakha was utterly bored. Never mind if it was a sahib who was giving him his company. He was afraid of the thought of conversion. He hadn’t understood very much of what the Salvationist said. He didn’t like the idea of being called a sinner. He had committed no sin that he could remember. How could he confess his sins? Odd. What did it mean, confessing sins? ‘Does the Sahib want some secret knowledge?’ he wondered. ‘Does he want to perform some magic or get some illegal information?’ He didn’t want to go to heaven. As a Hindu he didn’t believe in the judgment day. He had never thought of that. He had seen people die. And he just accepted the fact. He had been told that people who died were reborn in some form or other, after the god of Death, Yama, had tried them in hell for their faults. He dreaded that he should be reborn as a donkey or a dog. But ‘Yessuh Messih must be a good man,’ he thought, ‘if he regards a Brahmin and a Bhangi the same.’ But who was he? Where did he come from? What did he do? He had heard the story of Ram. He had heard the story of Krishna. He hadn’t heard the story of Yessuh Messih. ‘This Sahib will not tell me the story,’ he said to himself. But he still hoped he might give him a pair of his cast-off trousers. And he followed him half unwillingly.
‘Look, that is our home,’ said the Colonel reaching the gate of a compound leading to a pile of mud-houses among the neem trees with thatched and sloping roofs.
‘I know, Sahib,’ said Bakha who had often passed by it.
‘It was a drug-house once, an opium distillery,’ said the Colonel with great pride. ‘But five years ago we took it.’ He paused for a moment to recall the trouble it had cost him to acquire the piece of land to erect a building, and he burst out piously into an exclamation of his gratitude to Christ. ‘Oh Lord, how great are Thy works, and Thy thoughts how deep! God has indeed brought light into the world!’ Then turning from his thoughts to the young man, he said: ‘He has cast out the heathen from the place.’
‘George, George, tea is ready!’ came a shrieking, hoarse and hysterical voice.
‘Coming, coming!’ responded the Colonel automatically, standing where he was, but with his arms and legs all in a flurry. He had heard his wife’s voice. He was afraid of her. He was confused. He didn’t know whether to go into the mud-house on the right which was his bungalow, or to take Bakha in there, or to take him to the church. He stood hesitating.
‘Where are you? Where have you been all the afternoon?’ came the shrill voice again. And behind it appeared the form of a round-faced, bigbellied, dark-haired, undersized, middle-aged woman, a cigarette in a long cigarette-holder in her mouth, a gaily-coloured band on her Eton-cropped hair, pince-nez glasses on her rather small eyes, a low-necked printed cotton frock, that matched her painted and powdered face and reached barely down to her knees.
‘Oh, is that what you’ve been doing, going to these blackies again!’ she shouted, frowning, her heavily-powdered face showing its layers of real, vivid scarlet skin underneath the coating. ‘I give you up. Really you’re incorrigible. I should have thought you would have learned your lesson from the way those Congress-wallahs beat you last week!’
‘What is the matter? I am just coming. I am coming,’ responded the Colonel, impatient, disturbed and embarrassed.
Bakha was going to slip away in order to save the Colonel the displeasure of his wife, for which, he felt, he was mainly responsible.
‘Ither! Ither!’ said the Colonel, holding the sweeper-boy’s hand. ‘I’ll take you to the church.’
‘So that the tea should get cold!’ exclaimed Mary Hutchinson. ‘I can’t keep waiting for you all day, while you go messing about with all those dirty bhangis and chamars.’ And saying this, she withdrew into the house.
Bakha had not known the exact reason for her frowns, but when he heard the words bhangi and chamar, he at once associated her anger with the sight of himself.
‘Salaam, Sahib,’ he said, extricating his hand from the old man’s grasp, before the missionary realized he had done so. And he showed his heels; such was his fear of the woman.
‘Wait, wait, my son, wait,’ cried the padre after him.
But in the white haze of the afternoon sun he hurried away as if the Colonel’s wife were a witch, following him with raised arms and crooked feet.
The old man was piously reciting another hymn as he stood staring at Bakha’s receding figure:
‘Blessed be Thy love, blessed be Thy name.’
‘Everyone thinks us at fault,’ Bakha was saying to himself as he walked along. ‘He wants me to come and confess my sins. And his memsahib! I don’t know what she said about bhangis and chamars. She was angry with the Sahib. I am sure I am the cause of the memsahib’s anger. I didn’t ask the padre to come and talk to me. He came of his own accord. I was so happy talking to him. I would certainly have asked him for a pair of white trousers, had the memsahib not been angry.’
He walked along, vacantly oppressed by the weight of his heavy cloud of memories. He felt a kind of nausea in his stomach. The spiritual nausea that seemed to rise in him when he was in difficulties, the ghaoon maoon. He was unnerved again as in the morning after his unfortunate experiences. Only, he was now too tired to care. He let himself be carried by his legs towards the edge of the day. There was a faint smell
of wetness oozing from the dusty earth which paved his way, a sort of moist warmth that rose to his nostrils. High above the far-distant horizon of the Bulandshahr dales the sun stood fixed, motionless and undissolved, as if it could not bring itself to go, to move or to melt. In the hills and fields, however, there was a strange quickening. Long rows of birds flew over against the cold, blue sky towards their homes. The grasshoppers chirped in an anxious chorus, as they fell back into the places where they always lay waiting for food. A lone beetle sent electric waves of sound quivering into the cool, clear air. Every blade of grass along the pathway, where Bakha walked, was gilded by light.
As he went on, striding lightly from his heavy rump, his head bent, his eyes half closed, his lower lip pursed, he felt the blood coursing through his veins. He seemed full of a tired restlessness. The awkwardness of the moment when the missionary’s wife emerged from her room on to the veranda of her thatched bungalow and glared at her husband, stirred in his soul the echoes of those memories which had shaken and stirred him during the morning. There was a common quality in the look of hate in the round, white face of the Colonel’s wife and in the sunken visage of the touched man. The man’s protruding lower jaw, with its transparent muscles, shaken in his spluttering speech, came before Bakha’s eyes. Also his eyes emerging out of their sockets. The Colonel’s wife had also opened her little eyes like that, behind her spectacles. That had frightened Bakha, frightened him much more than the thrust of the touched man’s eyeballs, for she was a memsahib, and the frown of a memsahib had the strange quality of unknown, uncharted seas of anger behind it. To Bakha, therefore, the few words which she had uttered carried a dread a hundred times more terrible than the fear inspired by the whole tirade of abuse by the touched man. It was probably that the episode of the morning was a matter of history, removed in time and space from the more recent scene, also, perhaps, because the anger of a white person mattered more. The memsahib was more important to his slavish mind than the man who was touched, he being one of his many brown countrymen. To displease the memsahib was to him a crime for which no punishment was bad enough. And he thought he had got off comparatively lightly. He dared not think unkind thoughts about her. So he unconsciously transferred his protest against her anger to the sum of his reactions against the insulting personages of the morning.
His attention was diverted to a leper who sat swathed in tattered garments, exposing his raw wounds to the sun and the flies by the wayside, his crumpled hand lifted in beggary, and on his lips the prayer: ‘Baba pesa de.’ Bakha had a sudden revulsion of feeling. He looked away from the man. It was the Grand Trunk Road near the railway station of Bulandshahr. The pavements were crowded with beggars. A woman wailed for food outside one of the many cook-shops which lined one side of the road. She had a little child in her arms, another child in a bag on her back, a third holding on to her skirt. Some boys were running behind the stream of carriages begging for coppers. Bakha felt a queer sadistic delight staring at the beggars moaning for alms, but not receiving any. They seemed to him despicable. And the noise they made through their wailings and moanings and blessings, oppressed him.
He heard the rumbling thunder of a railway train which passed under the footbridge he was ascending. Almost simultaneously he heard a shout from the golbagh rend the still, leafy air. The shadow of the smoke-cloud that the engine had sent up to the bridge choked Bakha’s throat and blinded his eyes. Then the fumes of smoke melted like invisible, intangible flakes of snow, leaving a dark trail of soot behind. This too paled in the sunshine. The train had rushed into the cool darkness of the tin roof on Bulandshahr station.
Two choruses of voices tore through the air this time, one charged the sky from the platform where the train had stopped; another rose above the treetops of the golbagh, undulating from horizon to horizon.
Bakha stood for a moment on the platform of the footbridge and stared towards the tin roof. Myriads of faces were jutting out of white clothes. He looked in the direction of the golbagh. A veritable sea of white tunics faced him in the oval, where, ordinarily, he had seen the city gymkhana play cricket. Now there was a profound silence. He waited in the hush and listened. The chorus began again. As a spark of lightning suddenly illumines the sky, the myriad of voices leapt up the curve of the heavens before Bakha, and writ in flaming colours the cry: ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai.’ And, in a while, there was a rush of eager feet ascending the footbridge behind him shouting: ‘The Mahatma has come! The Mahatma has come!’
Before Bakha had turned round to look at them, they were descending the steps south of the bridge. A passing man answered the questioning look of all the pedestrians by informing them that there was going to be a meeting in the golbagh, where the Mahatma was going to speak.
At once the crowd, and Bakha among them, rushed towards the golbagh. He had not asked himself where he was going. He hadn’t paused to think. The word ‘Mahatma’ was like a magical magnet, to which he, like all the other people about him, rushed blindly. The wooden boards of the footbridge creaked under the eager downward rush of his ammunition boots. He was so much in a hurry that he didn’t even remember that he was an Untouchable, and actually touched a few people. But not having his broom and basket with him, and the people being all in a flurry, no one noticed that a sweeper-boy had brushed past him.
At the foot of the bridge, by the tonga and motor-lorry stand, the road leading to the fort past the entrance of the golbagh looked like a regular racecourse. Men, women and children of all the different races, colours, castes and creeds, were running towards the oval. There were Hindu lallas from the piece-goods market of Bulandshahr, smartly dressed in silks; there were Kashmiri Muhammadans from the local carpet factories, immaculately clad in white cotton; there were the rough Sikh rustics from the near-by villages swathed in handspun cloth, staves in their hands and loads of shopping on their backs; there were fierce-looking red-cheeked Pathans in red shirts, followers of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi; there were the black-faced Indian Christian girls from the Salvation Army colony, in short, coloured skirts, blouses and aprons; there were people from the outcastes’ colony, whom Bakha recognized in the distance, but whom he was not too anxious to greet; there was here and there a stray European—there was everybody going to meet the Mahatma, to pay homage to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. And like Bakha they hadn’t stopped to ask themselves why they were going. They were just going; the act of going, of walking, running, hurrying, occupied them. Their present motive was to get there, to get there somehow, as quickly as possible. Bakha wished, as he sped along, that there were a sloping bridge on which he could have rolled down to the oval.
He saw that the fort road was too long and too congested. Suddenly he swerved round to a little marsh made by the overflow of a municipal pipe in a corner of the golbagh, jumped the fence into the garden, much to the consternation of the gardener, but wholly to the satisfaction of the crowd behind him, which, once it had got the lead, followed like sheep. The beautiful garden bowers planted by the ancient Hindu kings and since then neglected were thoroughly damaged as the mob followed behind Bakha. It was as if the crowd had determined to crush everything, however ancient or beautiful, that lay in the way of their achievement of all that Gandhi stood for. It was as if they knew, by an instinct surer than that of conscious knowledge, that the things of the old decadence must be destroyed in order to make room for those of the new. It seemed as if, in trampling on the blades of green grass, they were deliberately, brutally trampling on a part of themselves, which they had begun to abhor, and from which they wanted to escape to Gandhi.
Beyond the bowers, on the oval, was a tumult, and the thronging of the thousands who had come to worship. The eager babble of the crowd, the excited gestures, the flow of emotion, portended one thought and one thought only in the surging crowd—Gandhi. There was a terror in this devotion, half-expressed, half-suppressed, of the panting swarms that pressed round. Bakha stopped short as he reached the pavilion end of the cricke
t ground. He leant by a tree. He wanted to be detached. It wasn’t that he had lost grip of the emotion that had brought him swirling on the tide of the rushing stream of people. But he became aware of the fact of being a sweeper by the contrast which his dirty, khaki uniform presented to the white garments of most of the crowd. There was an insuperable barrier between himself and the crowd, the barrier of caste. He was part of a consciousness which he could share and yet not understand. He had been lifted from the gutter, through the barriers of space, to partake of a life which was his, and yet not his. He was in the midst of a humanity which included him in its folds, and yet debarred him from entering into a sentient, living, quivering contact with it. Gandhi alone united him with them, in the mind, because Gandhi was in everybody’s mind, including Bakha’s. Gandhi might unite them really. Bakha waited for Gandhi.
Absorbed, he eagerly recalled all that he had heard of this man. People said he was a saint, that he was an avatar of the Gods Vishnu and Krishna. Only recently he had heard that a spider had woven a web in the house of the Lat Sahib at Dilli, making a portrait of the sage, and writing his name under it in English. That was said to be a warning to the sahibs to depart from Hindustan, since God Almighty himself had sent a message through a little insect that Gandhi was to be the Maharaja of the whole of Hindustan. That the spider’s web appeared in the Lat Sahib’s kothi was surely significant. And, they said, no sword could cut his body, no bullet could pierce his skin, no fire could scorch him!
‘The Sarkar is afraid of him,’ said a lalla standing by Bakha. ‘The magistrate has withdrawn his order against Gandhiji’s entry into Bulandshahr.’
‘That is nothing, they have released him unconditionally from gaol,’ chimed in a babu, spitting out a phrase of the Tribune, pompously, in order to show off his erudition.
‘Will he really overthrow the government?’ asked a rustic.
‘He has the shakti to change the whole world,’ replied the babu, and he began to vomit out the whole article about Gandhi that he had crammed from the Tribune that morning. ‘This British Government is nothing. Every country in Europe and America is passing through terrible convulsions, politically, economically and industrially. The people of Vilayat, the Angrez log are less convulsed on account of their innate conservatism, but very soon every country on earth including Vilayat will be faced with problems that cannot be solved without a fundamental change, in the mental and moral outlook of the West. Without a radical change from a hankering after sense-gratification, which is the goal of Western civilization, through a striving after sense-control, whether in individual or in group life, which is the essence of India’s dharmic culture! India has been the privileged home of the world’s eternal religion, that teaches how every man and woman, according to their birth and environment must practise swadarma, how through sense-control they must evolve their higher nature, and so realize the bliss of divinity, deep-seated in the hearts of all beings. For this bliss all humanity blindly pants, not knowing that neither cigarettes nor cinemas nor sense-enjoyment can lead to the path of dharmic discipline, which alone is the highest bliss to be realized. Gandhi will reveal this path to the modern world, he will teach us the true religion of God-love which is the best self-government.’
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 16