As the brief Indian twilight came and went, a sudden impulse shot through the transformations of space and time, and gathered all the elements that were dispersed in the stream of his soul into a tentative decision: ‘I shall go and tell father all that Gandhi said about us,’ he whispered to himself, ‘and all that the poet said. Perhaps I can find the poet on the way and ask him about his machine.’ And he proceeded homewards.
Coolie
1
‘MUNOO, OHE MUNOOA, OH MUNDU!’ SHOUTED GUJRI FROM THE VERANDA OF a squat, sequested, little mud hut, thatched with straw, which stood upon the edge of a hill about a hundred yards away from the village in the valley. And her eagle-eyes explored the track of gold dust which worked its zigzag course through rough scrub, beyond the flat roofs of the village houses, under the haze of the Kangra sun. She could not see him.
‘Munoo ohe Munooa oh Mundu! where have you died? Where have you drifted, you of the evil star? Come back! Your uncle is leaving soon. You must go to the town.’ She shouted again with a shrill, hoarse voice. And her gaze travelled beyond the mango-grove to the silver line of the river Beas, and roved angrily among the greenery of the ferns and weeds and bushes that spread on either side of the stream against the purple gleam of the low hills.
‘Munoo ohe Munooa!’ she called again, exasperated, and raising her voice, this time to the highest pitch to which, in her anger and hate, she could carry it: ‘Where have you died? Where have you gone, ominous orphan? Come back and begone!’ The piercing soprano resounded through the valley and fell on Munoo’s ears with the frightening effect of all its bitter content.
He heard but he did not answer. He merely turned from the shade of a tree, where he sat hidden, to see her scarlet dress disappearing into the hut. He had been grazing cattle on the banks of the Beas, and had begun to play while the buffaloes and cows in his charge had entered the low waters of the marsh, where they now sat chewing the cud of little comfort that the cool of the water afforded against the torrid heat of the morning sun.
‘Your aunt is calling you,’ said Jay Singh, son of the village landlord, clean of face and apparel, nudging Munoo’s bare body with his elbow. ‘Can’t you hear? Have you no manners, you savage, that you let your aunt shout herself hoarse and don’t answer her?’ He was Munoo’s rival for leadership of Bishan and Bishambar and the other village boys. He knew that Munoo was to depart for town that day and he wanted to hurry him out of the way as soon as possible.
‘Don’t go yet,’ Bishan, the fat one, pleaded, ‘your aunt only wants you to run an errand for her.’ Then he turned banteringly to Jay Singh and said, ‘You call him a savage for not going home when his aunt calls. What about you, who abuse your mother for asking you to stay indoors and not go out in the heat of the noon? You won’t even go to school, though your father gives you two annas a day for pocket money! We go to school. And during the holidays we graze the cattle. What are you doing here, coward, if not idling? You haven’t even the courage to steal a few mangoes. Munoo collected all these, so let him suck a few before he goes home.’
‘I don’t steal mangoes,’ said Jay Singh, ‘I buy them!’ And he continued righteously: ‘I only said he ought to go because his aunt is so rude that she will abuse us for keeping him here. He has to go away to town with his uncle.’
‘Is it true you are going away to town?’ asked fiery little Bishambar.
‘Han, I am going away this morning,’ replied Munoo, and felt a quiver go through his belly.
‘But you are only fourteen years old yet! And you are only in the fifth class at school!’ cried Bishambar.
‘My aunt wants me to begin earning money,’ said Munoo. And she says she wants a son of her own. My uncle says I am grown up and must fend for myself. He has got me a job in the house of the Babu of the bank where he works in Sham Nagar.’
‘It must be nice to live in Sham Nagar,’ remarked Jay Singh, now jealous of the importance Munoo assumed in his eyes because he was going to live in town, where there were beautiful things to eat, beautiful clothes to wear and beautiful toys to play with.
Munoo smiled at this, but his smile seemed to say, ‘If it wasn’t my last day here, I would give you such a sock on the jaw that you would never dare to aspire to the leadership of the boys.’ For though Munoo was young he had more than a vague idea of how Jay Singh’s father was responsible for his impending misfortunes.
He had heard of how the landlord had seized his father’s five acres of land because the interest on the mortgage covering the unpaid rent had not been forthcoming when the rains had been scanty and the harvests bad. And he knew how his father had died a slow death of bitterness and disappointment and left his mother a penniless beggar, to support a young brother-in-law and a child in arms. The sight of his mother grinding grain between the scarred surfaces of mill-stones which she gyrated round and round, round and round, by the wooden handle, now with her right hand, now with her left, day and night, had become indelibly imprinted on his mind. Also, the sight of her as she had lain dead on the ground with a horrible yet sad, set expression on her face had sunk deep into him.
‘Will you never come back?’ inquired Jay Singh, more insistently.
‘No, never; I never want to come back,’ replied Munoo, urged by a genuine bitterness to lie, although in his heart he knew it were better to irritate Jay Singh by telling the truth. For, in spite of the fact that his aunt was always abusing him, in spite of the fact that she ordered him about, asking him to do this and to do that, in spite of the fact that she beat him more than he beat his cattle, he really did not want to go to the town.
At least, not yet.
He had dreamed, of course, of all the wonderful things which the village folk spoke about when they came back from the towns: the lallas, the babus, and the sahibs from beyond the black waters, the silk clothes they wore and the delicacies they ate. He was especially interested in machines such as he had read about in the science primer of the fourth class. But he had meant to go to town when he had passed all his examinations here and was ready to learn to make machines himself.
Meanwhile, it was pleasant to sit here with his friends, all little boys of his own age, and eat the fruit they had stolen during their wanderings behind the cattle in the morning. And it tasted good in the humid, sweet-scented shade of the banyan tree.
Some fruit or other was always in season. Ripe yellow mangoes dropped by dozens in the spring and could easily be hidden in the grass and the hay. Purple and red jamans and long green mulberries which fell in sickly profusion during the summer could be stored on broad banana leaves. In the winter stealing the sugar-cane aroused no suspicion in the farmer, who drowsed lazily in his siesta.
Then one could play ‘You can catch me only in the air, when I am seated neither on earth nor on wood.’ This involved a constant jumping on and off trees. And Munoo was a genius at climbing trees. He would hop on to the trunk like a monkey, climb the bigger branches on all fours, swing himself to the thinner offshoots as if he were dancing on a trapeze, and then, diving dangerously into space, he would jump from one tree to another.
And then there was the cool breeze which soothed the fatigue of the body and relieved the natural heat, the snow breeze from the river Beas that was rising even as he sat there now, stirring the acacia trees, while the cicadas rasped in the thickets, the frogs croaked in the shallows and the swamps, the birds sang, the butterflies flitted over the wild flowers and the insects buzzed over the pollen for honey.
The blood of little Munoo ran to the tune of all this lavish beauty. And he would rather have had all the machines come here than tear himself away from the sandy margins of the still back-waters where he played. But—
‘Munoo ohe Munooa oh Mundu,’ came his aunt’s voice again.
The face of his aunt, with its hard jaw, its bright red-cornered eyes, its sharp nose and thin lips, all in a malevolent framework of dark hair, flashed across his mind.
He got up.
All the boys
, even Jay Singh, rose to their feet.
He called his cattle.
The boys shouted for their cows and buffaloes, too.
The bony-hipped, thin-flanked, big-horned creatures emerged from the water and, splashing mud in the bog, dripping globules of froth, trailed wearily ahead of their little guides, mute against the abuse and beatings that were used to urge them on towards home, a little more quickly today than ever before.
2
‘WALK QUICKLY! WALK QUICKLY! OHE!’ SHOUTED DAYA RAM, THE CHAPRASI of the Imperial Bank of India, as he strode with big military strides, in his gold-brocaded, red coat and neatly tied white turban, along the circuitous hill road constructed by the Angrezi Sarkar, of which he felt himself to be the symbol as he flourished his hand ostentatiously and angrily at his nephew Munoo.
The boy had sat down to nurse his bare feet, which were sore and weary after a ten-mile march. The sun had been shining with a searing intensity, and he was perspiring under the thick cotton tunic which had originally belonged to his uncle and looked like a cloak about him. The ochre-coloured dust, which trailed behind the reckless bullock carts round the hairpin bends, had got into his nose and irritated him. His olive face was flushed. His dark brown eyes were strained. He felt as if all the blood in his supple young body had evaporated as sweat and left him dry.
‘Come quickly, or I will be late at the office!’ shouted Daya Ram again. He said this not so much from the fear of being late as to impress his nephew and the rustic passers-by with the importance of the position he occupied in the service of the Angrezi Sarkar.
There were tears in Munoo’s eyes as he gazed at his blistered feet and felt a quiver of self-pity go through him.
‘My feet hurt me,’ he sobbed in reply to his uncle’s admonition.
‘Come, come,’ said Daya Ram irritably. And he stiffened his tall, lanky body, though he wanted to soften and be kind. ‘Come,’ he continued, ‘I will get you a pair of shoes out of your next month’s pay.’
‘I can’t walk,’ said Munoo, hearing the screeching brakes of a cart brought to a halt ahead of him, where the road bent sharply round a point seven hundred feet sheer above the gorging Beas. ‘That driver will give me a lift if you ask him.’
‘No, no, he will want money if he lets you ride,’ said Daya Ram loudly, so that the driver of the cart might hear and offer the ride free of charge.
He felt much too dignified in his uniform to ask the man directly for a favour.
‘Don’t be too proud of your chaprasihood, and put the boy on the back here,’ said the cart-driver bluntly, noticing Daya Ram’s manner. ‘And you can get on the cart, too. You must be warm in that red woollen coat.’
‘Don’t you bark! I didn’t talk to you,’ said Daya Ram. ‘Go your way, or I will have you put into prison. Don’t you know that I am a Government official!’
‘Acha, enjoy yourself, make the poor child walk barefoot, torturer,’ retorted the driver, and moved on.
‘Get up, ohe! You have been the bringer of disgrace to me! Get up or I will kill you!’ exclaimed Daya Ram, turning toward Munoo, his white teeth flashing.
Munoo sprang up, knowing that his uncle’s threats of beating always led to actual blows. He wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand and followed his guardian in the torrid heat, abusing him in his mind.
The curvy road inclined downwards, reaching out from the wild barren mountains to the limitless spaces of the lowlands.
After he had gone a few hundred yards, with a heart contracted by fear and a head expanded by thoughts, his feet bore the burning earth more easily. He avoided the stones by hopping about and gave occasional relief to his soles by walking a while on his toes. He was more than grateful for half a mile in a tunnel, and he grew cheerful when he saw, at the foot of the hill, a large number of tall, flat-roofed houses, crowded in irregular groups round the red stone minarets of mosques and the golden domes of temples. He forgot the inconveniences of the journey at the prospect of the journey’s end.
As he descended from the hill, the sun above the plateau poured its lava on the city, flooding it with a brilliant hue, making its heterogeneous elements stand out vivid and large. The limitless mountains were being blotted out of Munoo’s mind. He felt agreeably excited about his new surroundings and in everything that crowded around him.
He stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the marvels of different carriages, two-wheeled, box-like bamboo carts and tongas, four-wheeled phaetons and landaus, and huge, rubber-wheeled, black-bodied phat-phaties which seemed to him curious as they ran without horses on the main road. And, wonder of all wonders, he saw a black iron vehicle with two round humps like the humps of a desert camel, with hosts of little brown houses studded with glass windows behind it, rushing along furiously puffing out a foul black smoke and shrieking hysterically. It blew a shrill whistle and made his heart leap to his throat.
‘What is that animal?’ he asked, rushing up to his uncle to still the thumping of his heart and to seek the confidence that knowledge brings.
‘That is the injan of the rail gari,’ his uncle replied, a little more kindly now that he was getting into the world where he could not pass himself off as the Master he had pretended to be in the hills, but had again to be the slave of the Imperial Bank officials.
The boy looked hard at the black monster, which, with a final shriek and much hoarse shouting, had now come to a standstill alongside a platform adjoining a solid hut. It released a multitudinous throng of men and women clad in thin muslins, milk-white cottons and silks of hues more varied than those which Munoo had ever seen in his life in the Kangra hills. ‘Wonderful,’ he said to himself; ‘wonderful!’
‘Where is the cattle which these people graze and where are the fields they plough, uncle?’ he asked, turning to Daya Ram.
‘They have no cattle and no fields here,’ said the chaprasi, pushing his neck back to stiff uprightness. ‘It is only the rustics in the villages who graze cattle and plough the land!’
‘But how do they get their food, uncle?’ Munoo inquired. ‘They have money,’ said Daya Ram pompously. ‘They have scores of rupees in my Bank. They earn money by buying wheat which the peasants grow and by selling it as flour to the Sarkar, or by buying cotton and making cloth and selling it at a profit. Some of them are babus who work in offices, like the babu in whose house you are going to be a servant.’
‘How strange!’ the child said. And he lagged behind, absorbed by the sight of huge cauldrons in the cook-shops which steamed with the most spicy smells he had ever smelt. Tiers of sweets, dripping with syrup, rose from platform to ceiling in the sweetshops. Rubber balloons and little pink dolls and fluffy rabbit-like toys decorated the general stores. A stall-keeper was shouting ‘Ices, cool ices,’ and emptying little conic tins on to leaf cups for some customers who sat on a wooden bench before him.
Munoo felt he would have liked to taste one of those ices, but he dared not ask his uncle to buy him one. Instead he became interested in the weird tin wail of a song which issued from a box on which a black disc revolved. He smiled as the voice in the box trailed along. He retreated when it became hoarse, as if he were frightened, and then, recovering, he drew nearer.
‘Come, come, or you will get lost,’ his uncle called from a distance.
‘What is that singing? How does a man get into a box to sing?’ he asked.
The owner of the shop laughed and gave Munoo a contemptuous look.
‘Hurry up, hurry up, fool!’ shouted Daya Ram. ‘That is a phonogram. There is no man in the box, but the machine speaks.’
The boy dared not ask how the machine spoke. He tore himself away unwillingly from the wonderful spectacle and followed.
Before he had gone a few yards, however, his gaze was arrested by the curious phenomenon of little dog dolls which a man was setting into motion on the road after an ostentatious juggling with their sides.
‘Tin tin, tin tin,’ a bell suddenly rang behind Munoo, and before he ha
d time to see, a two-wheeled steel horse came towards him at a terrific speed.
‘Look out, you son of a donkey!’ shouted the young man who sat astride it.
Munoo stepped aside and barely escaped being knocked down into the gutter.
‘Ohe, illegally begotten! You will get killed! Idiot!’ A tirade of abuse descended on him from his uncle, who had rushed back.
The toy-seller came and dragged Munoo safely out of harm’s way, saying consolingly:
‘Oh, he was only trying to make his bicycle run as fast as my dogs. But he didn’t warn me that the race had begun. Don’t you mind. Everything is all right. No harm done. The proper way to treat abuse is to let it come in one ear and go out the other.’
This aroused a smile on the boy’s face.
‘Walk quickly, rascal! You will get killed before long if you don’t look out!’ His uncle shouted, and struck him on the face.
Munoo began to cry. He followed, resentful and disheartened, thinking how he hated his uncle. But he saw that the fellow on the steel horse, who had been the cause of his being punished, had come to grief fifty yards ahead, having collided with a calf which strayed about among the crowds of men and women near the fruit-shops at the cross-roads. So he walked along reassured, forgetful still but sufficiently cautious, with one eye on his uncle ahead of him, another on the row of shops, and an occasional glance behind to see that there was not another steel horse—or bicycle, as the juggler had called it—following.
The narrow streets, congested with rows of shops, the regular pattern of whose awnings was broken, here by the sudden rift of a shadowy lane or a dark grimy gully, there by bright patches of sunlight, seemed beautiful to him, especially when a man passed clad in a silk tunic and dhoti and gold-embroidered shoes, or when a group of women shuffled along, swinging their elbows and flourishing their green, pink or purple silk veils. He felt as if he were walking in a dream, in a land of romance where everything was gilded and grand, so different was this world from the world of the mountains.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 19