The chota Babu seemed to do it all so easily, biting the bread which he had smeared with butter and then taking a gulp or two of tea from the cup he held in his right hand. The burra Babu found it difficult, apparently, as he shifted about in his seat, dropped the crumbs on himself and the carpet, poured the contents of his tea-cup into the saucer, blew at the steaming liquid cautiously, and sucked noisily as, from time to time, he wiped the bristles of his drooping moustache with his dirty, yellow tongue.
‘Come, vay, you dead one! Where are you now?’ shouted Bibiji, presumably aroused at overhearing Sheila asking her uncle if she could give Munoo some tea. ‘Isn’t there any more work to do here? Do you think that, just because you have lifted a tray of tea-things and taken it over to the next room, you have earned your wages?’
Munoo withdrew to the kitchen, rather sorry for himself, as Sheila’s kind offer had touched him to the quick.
‘Come and scrub these utensils with the ashes, idler! Not a speck of dirt or grease must remain on that,’ she roared. Then, as he applied himself to the task, she cried: ‘Oh, God, leave it, leave it. You are no good! I will have to do it. I must do everything myself. Nobody does anything satisfactorily. Can’t you see, you idiot, that that black must come off? Just compare the sheen of those utensils which lie polished on the rack with those you have cleaned today. You must get the same brilliance.’
Luckily for Munoo there was a call for her from the sitting-room:
‘Oh, I say, the mother of my daughter,’ said the burra Babu, in the archaic convention of Indian family life, ‘bring another cup. Babu Ram Lall has come. And get some hot water ready for shaving. Sheila should be bathed and got ready for school. Babu Ram Lall’s daughters are almost ready to go.’
Bibiji took an extra cup and saucer from the shelf to the sitting-room, with a coyness that contradicted the high-pitched tone of her immodest voice and hardened exterior.
Munoo enjoyed a little less attention from her for a while, as, when she came back with Sheila and Lila from the sitting-room, she sent him off with the hot water which the Babus wanted, and engaged herself in bathing her daughters and dressing them.
‘What an awful woman,’ he thought. He had been awaiting an excuse to go out from the kitchen to the sitting-room, for that was a much nicer world, the world where tea was being drunk by the jocular chota Babu, where the queer-looking burra Babu was, and where, he had now heard, another babu had arrived.
He was rewarded not only with the sight of an amiable little man who was reciting Punjabi verses such as he had heard the professional clowns recite in his village, but by the far more amazing spectacle of the chota Babu soaping his cheeks and rubbing the teeth of a bright steel machine.
What was the Babu doing? he wondered. Then his mind went back to the barber’s shop in his village and he understood. ‘Shaving,’ he said, half-audibly. And he stood and stared at the process.
Of all the many marvellous, the most mysterious things he had seen since he came to town yesterday, the little machine with the teeth seemed the most marvellous, the most wonderful. In his village the barber shaved the beards of men with a long, sharp razor. This machine he had never seen. ‘It cannot be very dangerous,’ he thought, ‘if the Babu is rubbing it on his face, so quickly, up and down, down and up.’
‘What are you looking at, you owl?’ said the chota Babu affectionately, noticing that the boy stood absorbed. This spectacle had aroused his curiosity, too, the first time he had seen it.
Munoo smiled, slightly embarrassed.
‘Babuji,’ he ventured after a while, ‘does this machine cost a lot of money?’
‘Why,’ said the burra Babu, with an attempt at light-hearted irony, ‘why, do you want to shave the hair on your head off? Have you become an orphan?’
‘I am an orphan, Babuji,’ said Munoo self-pityingly.
‘Oh!’ said the visitor humorously, ‘you haven’t yet risen to the height of my little finger and you want to possess a razor to shave with!’
‘All right,’ said the chota Babu in his naturally bantering manner; ‘if you will be good enough to go and get me a towel from the other room, I shall give you, not a machine, but a blade to cut your throat with if you like.’
Munoo ran back for the towel, his heart beating in admiration and love for the chota Babu. He could feel a kinship with this light-hearted man.
When he came back he was confronted with the sight of yet another miracle, which, this time, the burra Babu was performing, revolving a small handle on the side of a shining, egg-shaped machine.
He stared hard, trying to comprehend what was happening, and before he could muster enough courage to ask the dry, pale man what he was doing, his mind went back to the piece of lathe on which the barber in his village used to sharpen his long razors.
‘This,’ he said impetuously to the Babus, to share with them the joy of his discovery, ‘this is surely a sharpening machine.’
‘Vay, eater of your masters,’ came Bibiji’s bark, and he knew that she had heard him talking to the Babus. ‘Where have you flown to? Is there no work to do that you go wasting your time? Haven’t I told you that your place is in the kitchen? Won’t it sink in your brain, or do you want your bones broken before you understand? I have all the work to do. This witch has to go to school and Babuji is soon going to the office. I don’t suppose you have even learnt to make dough in the hills where you come from. Besides, your hands are dirty. I will never let you touch any of the food in the house. I must do it all. No use depending on you. You—’
‘What shall I do now, Bibiji?’
‘Vay, don’t eat my head,’ she yelped again. ‘Isn’t there anything to do before you? Are you blind or what! Look at those utensils, tea-things, which want cleaning, vegetables to be peeled.’
Munoo got down to the job of cleaning the tea-set.
He found that as soon as he poured water on the ‘white chalk’ the utensils became clean. ‘That is easy,’ he thought. And he hurriedly washed some cups and set them apart to dry.
‘Vay, what are you doing?’ she barked more sharply. ‘Rub that china with the ashes exactly as we do the brass utensils, and clean them thoroughly, so that not a speck of dirt or the taint of anyone’s mouth remains. We are not so debased as the sahibs, that we should eat and drink out of our dirty utensils after merely rinsing them. We may have to respect them because they are our officers, but they are dirty. They bathe in tubs in the dirty water that comes off their bodies, lying there all the time, even after they have rubbed themselves with soap and washed off the dirt. The ayah of the Mem of the Bank sahib told me that they eat the flesh of cows like the Muhammadans, and of pigs like the Sikhs.’
‘I also eat the flesh of cows and pigs, you know,’ said Prem teasingly, as he wandered into the kitchen to see if the slab of stone in the comer was unoccupied and he could have his bath.
‘Oh, don’t say that, you make me feel sick,’ appealed Bibiji. ‘Really—’Munoo sat there rubbing the utensils with ashes and washing them, quickly and with not too fastidious a care for the corners and depths of the pots. He was essentially impetuous by nature, and as yet too young to have disciplined his hands to the adequate performance of menial jobs.
At home his aunt, in spite of her dark, brooding hatred of him, had done the housework herself, untiringly, uncomplainingly and quietly. He remembered that he had often volunteered in a rush of sympathy to sweep the floor, to treat it with antiseptic cow-dung and to run errands for her. The only quarrel between himself and his aunt, he realized, was that she could not have children, and people shamed her for her barrenness. Otherwise, he remembered how often she had taken him in her arms and kissed him, and how often he had gone to sleep embracing her. But this woman seemed to hate him for nothing.
As he wiped the utensils with a dirty cloth, he hoped that she would stop nagging one day, that he would settle down, and not feel so much of an outsider in the house. The chota Babu was nice and the children were amused by hi
s monkey dance. The burra Babu was all right, because one could avert one’s eyes from him. But Bibiji—
He checked his mind from running into a violent criticism of her, because he felt if he abused her she might somehow come to know of his thoughts and take him to task for it. He switched his mind off to the contemplation of the fine, well-cut silk clothes he had seen hanging in a corner of the sitting-room, clothes like those which the Sahib wore, whom he had seen yesterday. He felt he would like to see the chota Babu putting them on. But as he got up to go he met the chota Babu coming towards him.
‘Has Your Highness finished working on the slab, and is it free for me to take a bath on?’ he asked with an air of humorous subservience.
‘Han, Babuji,’ Munoo answered. ‘I—’
But at this Bibiji descended on him like lightning.
‘Finished washing the utensils?’ she snapped. ‘Well, where are you going then? What do you want in the other room?’
‘I—’ Munoo strained to invent an excuse.
‘You are going to tell me a lie,’ she said, threatening to strike him with her fist. ‘Go and put those utensils away. The babus want to take their baths. Peel the vegetables and clean up here. Haven’t I told you that you are not to go into the other room unless you are wanted? When they have all gone you can clean the carpet and make the beds. I don’t know whether you know how to do these things. I suppose I will have to show you. But meanwhile there is work to do here in the kitchen. All that you seem to want to do is to run around, inquisitive little fool. You have never seen anything in your life in the hills and now your eyes are bursting at the sight of all the beautiful things in our home.’
‘The flood has started,’ said Prem, throwing jugfuls of water on his head. ‘Look out, ohe fool, you will be submerged not only in the ocean of words but in the sea of water.’
Munoo suppressed a smile at the good humour of the chota Babu, but muttered a curse as he recollected Bibiji’s stream of words.
She went to give Sheila some pocket-money as the child stood ready to go to school, else she might have caught him doing something wrong. He now believed she could always find something to abuse him for, some fault, the slightest detail, the way he placed a pot, the manner in which he handled the broom, or the way he held the potatoes as he peeled them.
During the brief respite his mind wandered from the chota Babu’s beautiful white body, glistening with water, to the clothes that would adorn it soon, the wonderfully cut silk clothes. And suddenly, as if out of the blue, a picture of the boots, the burra Babu’s black boots, came before him, with their gloss and their intricately tied laces. He wondered if the chota Babu had also boots like that.
‘Sheila! ni, Sheila!’ a young voice disturbed his cogitation from outside.
‘Yes, coming,’ called Sheila from the bedroom.
A young girl with a fine wheat-coloured face, framed modestly but prettily in a pink muslin head-cloth, looked in through the kitchen door.
‘Sheila’s mother!’ she called, and then uttered a sudden ‘Oo’ at the sight of Munoo.
‘Why, ni, witch with long hair and crooked feet, why are you running away?’ teased the chota Babu, as he went to the sitting-room.
‘Kausalya, ni, Kausalya,’ called Bibiji after her, ‘don’t be afraid of this rustic, my little child. The eater of his masters is really harmless. You don’t know what he did this morning. He went and relieved himself by the wall outside there! . . . Now Sheila is ready. Do take her and look after her, won’t you, my child?’
‘Isn’t he funny, this servant of yours,’ remarked Kausalya, looking in again. ‘My Babuji told me he dances like a monkey. But come, Sheila, quick, my sisters are waiting and we will be late for school.’
Munoo felt humiliated. He did not know how to face people if they were all going to be told what he had done this morning.
The sudden emergence of the chota Babu, immaculately dressed in a tussore jacket and smartly creased trousers, a flannel hat on his head and a pair of beautiful brown shoes on his feet, excited him.
He loved this man, admired him as his hero. He wanted to be like him.
‘Where is Bibiji, ohe devil without horns?’ queried the chota Babu.
Munoo smiled, embarrassed, but happy.
‘Here I am,’ she said, coming in from the outer door. ‘Now what do you want?’
‘Five of those wonderful silver rupees of which my brother earns one hundred and fifty every month from the Imperial Bank of India,’ Prem mocked. ‘I am going to see a patient at the other end of town. And it is good tactics to have plenty of money jingling in your pockets, because the world believes you are well off and they bring you all their diseased relatives to cure. Money, you see, attracts money.’
She relaxed her hard face to return the twinkle in his eye.
As she left the room, however, she gave a stern glance to Munoo as if to forbid him from following her course to the cash-box where she hid the family wealth.
This, she felt, did not have the effect she intended. She saw him peeping towards the corner where she had retreated. She shuffled and shifted to camouflage the movement of her key in the lock of the cash-box.
‘Thief,’ she shouted. ‘Do your work and don’t follow me about with your gaze.’
Munoo went on peeling the vegetables. Then he heard the chota Babu slam the door of the sitting-room and walk out with his elder brother.
‘Go and sweep the rooms now and do the beds,’ Bibiji said a little more calmly as she came back. ‘I will put the vegetables on to cook and knead the flour into dough for the chapatis.’
He lost himself in the fairyland of the sitting-room as, squatting on his heels, he swept the carpet with the broom. His eyes caressed the mahogany varnish of the throne-like chairs, they dwelt with admiration on the various photographs. Twice or thrice he could not resist the temptation to get up and look closely at the pictures. He scrutinized everything with wonder and love, tracing the colours, the shapes and sizes of all the things, inquiring into their meanings. ‘What is written in that book, I wonder?’ he asked himself. ‘How does the big clock work? The voice in the box: I wonder how it arises?’
‘Don’t you wake Lila up,’ Bibiji called as she heard him push a chair. ‘I will come and help you to do the beds.’
She came. She had quietened a bit, though she abused him for being too quick in getting through things.
After the rooms were done she asked him to go and fill the pitchers at the pump. Later he sat down to learn to cook under her orders.
His uncle came to fetch the midday meal for Babuji and for Sheila and asked him: ‘Do you like it here?’
He could have cried at that, but Bibiji was there. So he answered: ‘I like it.’
But when Daya Ram asked Bibiji’s permission to take him along to show him the way to Sheila’s school, so that he could go and meet her every day, he burst out weeping on the way and complained about the hard, bitter life which he had had since he arrived, especially about Bibiji’s continual nagging.
‘You are their servant,’ said Daya Ram. ‘You must not mind what they say. You must grow up and work. You have had too easy a life at home. Your mother spoiled you. Your aunt was too kind to you.’
Munoo suffered this. But, out in the open, his strong wild self came back to him with the contagion of the elements, and he could have hit his uncle.
On his return Bibiji gave him two chapatis and a spoonful of lentils and vegetables. He had to eat with his hands, being considered too low in status to be allowed to eat off the utensils. The insult stung him. He could hardly swallow his food.
But it was no use caring, he felt now.
Bibiji went out visiting some neighbours after the midday meal, taking Lila with her.
Munoo began to scrub the utensils again. Before he had finished the afternoon was over. He perspired with the heat and work. He felt tired and lay down.
But Sheila came back with the tall girl Kausalya, who had come in the mo
rning, and two other little girls. They all began dancing in the sitting-room.
Munoo wanted to join them. So he pushed in and began to perform the morning’s monkey dance. This amused them and they let him play with them, though they had begun by pushing him away, saying, ‘You are a servant, you must not play with us.’
The chota Babu came back with some other babus and demanded tea.
Bibiji was called.
Munoo’s spirits revived in the atmosphere created by the chota Babu’s jollity. His mouth watered at the sight of the rasgulas, the gulabjamans and the strange English sweets, which the chota Babu had brought. He gave him a portion on a plate to eat. Munoo’s heart went out to him. He answered every little gesture of command with the alacrity with which the little boys in the village used to do things for him. He felt sorry when the chota Babu went away for a walk.
Bibiji began to nag again towards dusk, as if she had been accumulating her breath all the afternoon.
Life in the Babu’s house soon resolved itself, for Munoo, into the routine of domestic slavery. He did not settle down to it easily. The wild bird of his heart fluttered every now and then with the desire for happiness.
‘What am I—Munoo?’ he asked himself as he lay wrapped in his blanket, early one morning. ‘I am Munoo, Babu Nathoo Ram’s servant,’ the answer came to his mind.
‘Why am I here in this house?’ a further question occurred to him. ‘Because my uncle brought me here to earn my living,’ his mind reflected vaguely, the waves in his brain struggling to flow. ‘He could probably get me the job of a chaprasi, like himself, I suppose,’ a sudden tide arose and said, ‘or a job in someone else’s house.’
It did not occur to him to ask himself what he was apart from being a servant. His identity he took for granted, and the relationship of Babu Nathoo Ram, who wore black boots, with himself, Munoo, who went about barefoot, was to him like sunshine and sunset, inevitable.
Then, with curious abruptness, he thought of the sweets which the chota Babu invariably brought in the afternoon and of which he gave Munoo a small portion, if Bibiji was not looking. His mouth watered with the memory of the relish of the syrup. The Angrezi sweets were more beautiful than the rasgullas and gulabjamans and pairas. But you had to be a babu or a sahib to eat them. You had to wear silk clothes like the chota Babu, and basket cap of flannel. He would prefer to have the burra Babu’s black boots rather than the chota Babu’s brown shoes with the buckles. The latter looked so much like the plain shoes that the southern leather-workers sold to the peasants in the street. The chota Babu had marvellous clothes in his boxes, silk handkerchiefs and warm woollen suits. Wonderful they were! He would love to touch them. Perhaps when he was big enough to be able to wear those clothes he could ask the chota Babu to give him a shirt and coat for a gift. Had he not already given him a razor-blade? He was a generous man, and kind.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 22