He was clever, too. The way he could read the messages of people’s hearts and tell what diseases they were suffering from, by means of that machine with rubber tubes, the ends of which he applied to his ears and whose mouth he rested on the chest of a person. He had other machines in velvet boxes. How he would like to handle them, Munoo thought. How he would like to be the chota Babu, a medicine man! He would not even mind being like the burra Babu, an official in the Bank, whom all the townspeople saluted. But—
The expedient, however, which made him want to live, was forcing the multi-coloured cells in his body to reach out instinctively to the space about him, even for a breath of the foul air in his master’s dingy little kitchen. He was vaguely aware of the need of love in his orphan’s body. But he was as yet essentially an ineffectual ‘pawn on the chessboard of destiny’ such as the village priest had declared all men to be, with perverted ambitions in a world of perverted ideas, and he was to remain a slave until he should come to recognize his instincts.
These people were superior, superior to all the hill people, he thought, though were they superior to the retired Subedar of the village, and Jay Singh’s father, the landlord? he wondered. What constituted their superiority, he did not know. They all wore nice clothes, had nice things. That was enough to convince him that they were marvellous, wonderful people. He did not search for causes and effects.
And so, thoroughly convinced of his inferiority, he accepted his position as a slave, and tried to instil into his mind the notion of his brutishness, that his mistress had so often nagged him about. And he promised himself again that he would be a good servant, a perfect model of a servant.
Unfortunately, however, the road to perfection is punctuated by pitfalls, and it was not long before he tripped up and brought the odium of his mistress’s wrath upon himself.
It so happened that Mr W.P. England came to tea with Babu Nathoo Ram and family one afternoon.
Mr England was the chief cashier of the Sham Nagar branch of the Imperial Bank of India in whose office Babu Nathoo Ram was a sub-accountant. He was a tall Englishman with an awkward, shuffling gait, accentuated by the wooden, angular shape of his feet marching always hesitantly at an angle of forty-five degrees, and with a small, lined, expressionless face, only defined by the thick glasses on his narrow, myopic eyes. He had a rather good-natured smile on his thin lips, and it was that which led to the tea-party.
Babu Nathoo Ram had seen this smile play upon Mr England’s lips every morning when the Sahib said ‘Good morning’ to him in response to his salute. There seemed little doubt that it was a kind smile which betokened the kindness of Mr England’s heart, exactly as the frown on the face of Robert Home, Esq., Manager of the Imperial Bank of India, Sham Nagar, betokened a vicious temperament. But then Mr England spoke so few words. The smile might just be a patronizing, put-on affair. And it was very important to Babu Nathoo Ram’s purpose to know whether it was a genuine smile or an assumed one. For he wanted a recommendation from Mr England to support his application for an increase in salary and promotion to the position of the Accountant. He had aspired to this position for a long time now, but he had not been able to attain it because Babu Afzul-ul-Haq occupied it as he had occupied it for the last twenty years.
Mr England was a new officer. The Babu wanted to get him to write a recommendation before he was influenced by all the other English Officers in the Club and began to hate all Indians, before the kind smile on his lips became a smile of contempt and derision, or before it became sardonic on account of the weather. So he did not wait till he got to know Mr England better, or till Mr England got to know his work a little more, but he asked him to tea.
It had taken a great deal of courage, of course, and a lot more effort for him to ask Mr England to tea.
At first he tried several mornings to muster enough courage to say something beyond the usual ‘Good morning, Sir.’ There seemed to be nothing to make the basis for an exchange of words, not even a file or letter, because they met on arrival at the office before the mail was opened. And, later in the day, there was much too much to say about files for an informal exchange of ideas. Babu Nathoo Ram began to contemplate Mr England’s ever-ready smile with a certain exasperation. And he believed more than ever that these Englishmen were very slippery and confounding, because they were so reticent, just gaping at you without talking and without letting you talk.
Then someone (it was a barrister friend of Nathoo Ram’s) told him that, from his experience in England, he had found that the only way of starting a conversation with an Englishman was by talking to him about the weather.
‘Good morning, Sir,’ said Babu Nathoo Ram respectfully every morning, without daring to use the new knowledge.
‘Good morning,’ mumbled Mr England, always smiling his nice smile, but rather self-conscious, because he saw that the Babu was older than he by at least twenty years, and his reverence seemed rather out of place. Besides, the Babu was a rich man. He had forty thousand rupees’ worth of shares in the Allahabad Bank and was surely a trusted ally of the Government, which owned most of the Banks. He certainly was well thought of by the Manager and the Directors of the Bank. But why did he not live up to his status? Horne was right, he reflected, when he said that these Indians were embarrassingly obsequious.
Nathoo Ram walked sheepishly behind Mr England in the hall one day, and the Sahib was rather ill at ease as he stepped angularly along in the cool shade cast by the drawn blinds on the windows.
‘Fine morning, Sir! Beautiful day!’ announced Nathoo Ram suddenly.
Mr England shuffled his feet, hesitated and turned round as if a thunderbolt had struck him. His face was suddenly pale with peevishness. Then he controlled himself and, smiling a sardonic smile, said:
‘Yes, of course, very fine! Very beautiful!’
The Babu did not understand the sarcasm implicit in the Sahib’s response. He was mightily pleased with himself that he had broken the ice, although he could not muster the courage to say anything more and ask him to tea.
That he did after sitting in the office for whole days, waiting in suspense for the right moment to come. It came when Mr England, seeking to relieve the tension and to put Nathoo Ram at ease, approached the Babu’s table one day before going off to lunch.
‘How are you, Nathoo Ram?’ he said.
‘Fine morning, Sir,’ said Nathoo Ram, suddenly looking up from the ledger and springing to attention as he balanced his pen, babu-like, across his ear.
‘Yes, a bit too fine for my taste,’ replied Mr England.
‘Yes, Sir,’ said Nathoo Ram, wondering what to say.
There was an awkward pause in which Mr England looked at the Babu and the Babu looked at Mr England.
‘Well, I am going off to lunch,’ said the Sahib, ‘though I can’t eat much in this heat.’
‘Sir,’ said the Babu, jumping at his chance, ‘you must eat Indian food. It’s very tasty.’ He couldn’t utter the words fast enough.
‘The khansamah at the Club cooks curry sometimes,’ returned Mr England. ‘I don’t like it very much, it is too hot.’
‘Sir, my wife cooks very good curries. You must come and taste one of our dishes,’ ventured Nathoo Ram, tumbling over his words.
‘No, I don’t like curries,’ said Mr England. ‘Thank you very much all the same.’ And smiling his charming smile, he made to go. He had realized that he was becoming too familiar with the native, a thing his friends at the Club had warned him about.
‘Will you come to see my house one day, Sir?’ called Nathoo Ram eagerly and with beating heart. ‘My wife would be honoured if you would condescend to favour us with the presence of your company at tea, Sir. My brother, Sir—’
Mr England had almost moved his head in negation, but he ducked it to drown his confusion.
‘Yes, Sir, yes, Sir, today.’
‘No,’ said Mr England. ‘No, perhaps some day.’
After that Nathoo Ram had positively pestered Mr E
ngland with his invitations to tea. Every time he met him, morning, noon, afternoon, he requested the favour of Mr England’s gracious and benign condescension at tea.
At last Mr England agreed to come, one day, a week hence.
For a week preparations for this party went on in the Babu’s household, and Munoo had more than his share of the excitement. The carpets were lifted and dusted, and, though all the paraphernalia of the Babu’s household, pictures, bottles, books, utensils and children’s toys and clothes, lay in their original confusion, a rag was passed over everything to make it neat and respectable.
The news of a sahib’s projected visit to Babu Nathoo Ram’s house had spread all round town, and in the neighbouring houses, dirty, sackcloth curtains were hung up to guard female decorum from the intrusion of foreign eyes.
As Mr England walked up, dressed for the occasion in a warm navy-blue suit, with Nathoo Ram on the one side and Prem Chand, the Babu’s doctor brother, on the other, and with Daya Ram, the chaprasi, in full regalia following behind he felt hot and bothered.
Between mopping his brow with a large silk handkerchief and blushing at the Babu’s reiterated gratitude and flattery, Mr England wondered what Nathoo Ram’s house was going to be like. Would it be like his father’s home in Brixton, a semidetached house on the Hay Mill estate, which they had furnished on the hire-purchase system with the help of Mr Drage and where he had occupied the maid’s room when he was a clerk in the Midland Bank, before he came here and suddenly became the chief cashier? Or would it be like the house of ‘Abdul Kerim, the Hindoo’, in that Hollywood film called The Swami’s Curse, with fountains in the hall, around which danced the various wives of the Babu in clinging draperies and glittering ornaments?
The sight of the flat-roofed structures jutting into each other on the uprise to which the Babu pointed was rather disconcerting.
‘Sahib! Sahib!’ a cry went up, and there was a noise of several people rushing behind sackcloth curtains.
‘The Muhammadans keep strict purdah, Sir,’ informed Babu Nathoo Ram. ‘And it is the women of the household of Babu Afzul-ul-Haq running to hide themselves.’ ‘Fate is favourable,’ the Babu thought, for he had been able to have a dig at his Mussalman adversary.
Mr England smiled in a troubled manner as he looked aside.
‘Look out!’ Dr Prem Chand called. ‘Your head!’
Mr England just missed hitting his forehead against the low doorway which led beyond the small veranda into the Babu’s sitting-room. The pink of his face heightened to purple.
There was hardly any room to stand or to walk in the low-ceilinged, eight foot by ten room, especially as both Nathoo Ram and Daya Ram had rushed to get a chair ready for the Sahib to sit upon.
Mr England stood looking round at the junk. He felt as tall as Nelson’s column in this crowded atmosphere.
He could not see much, but as he sank into a throne-like chair he faced the clay image of the elephant god, Ganesha, garlanded with a chain of faded flowers. He thought it a sinister image, something horrible, one of the heathen idols which he had been taught to hate in the Wesleyan chapel he had attended with his mother.
‘The god of wisdom, worldliness and wealth, Sir,’ said Babu Nathoo Ram, defining his words rather pompously, as he knew his illiterate wife was overhearing him talk English to a sahib, on an equal footing, for once in his life.
‘Interesting,’ mumbled Mr England.
‘I hope to go to England for higher studies, Mr England,’ said Dr Prem Chand, more at ease because he was an independent practitioner of medicine and not the Sahib’s subordinate like his elder brother.
‘Yes, really!’ remarked Mr England, brightening at the suggestion of ‘home’, as all Englishmen in India learn to do.
‘I suppose you have a big residence there,’ asked Prem Chand, ‘and perhaps you could give me some advice about my courses of study.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr England in reply, blushing to realize that though he had to pose as a big top to these natives, he had no home to speak of, the semi-detached house in Brixton being not yet paid for, and he remembered that he had never been to a university and knew nothing about ‘courses of study’, except those of Pitman’s Typewriting and Shorthand School in Southampton Row, which he had attended for a season before going to the Midland Bank. He felt he should make a clean breast of it all, as he was really extremely honest. But his compatriots at the Club had always exhorted him to show himself off as the son of King George himself if need be. A guilty conscience added its weight of misery to his embarrassment.
‘This is a family photograph taken on the occasion of my marriage, Sir,’ said Nathoo Ram, lifting a huge, heavily-framed picture off its peg and clumsily dropping two others, so that Munoo, who stood in the doorway, staring at the rare sight of the pink man, rushed in to save them.
Mr England looked up with a face not devoid of curiosity.
The Babu brought the picture along and, half apprehensive at the liberties he was taking, planted it on the Sahib’s knees. Mr England held it at the sides and strained his eyes almost on to the glass to scrutinize it.
Munoo was drawn by the instinctive desire for contact, which knows no barriers between high and low, to come and stand almost at the Sahib’s elbow and join in the contemplation of the picture.
‘Go away, fool,’ whispered the Babu, and nudged the boy with his sharp, bony elbow.
Mr England, who was almost settling down, was disturbed. He did not know who Munoo was, but he might be the Babu’s son. If so, it was cruel for Nathoo Ram to drive him away like that, though he was glad that the dirtily clad urchin had not come sniffling up to him, for he might be carrying some disease of the skin. All these natives, Horne said, were disease-ridden. And from the number of lepers in the street, he seemed to be right.
‘The servant boy,’ said Nathoo Ram confidently to the Sahib in a contemptuous tone, to justify his rudeness to Munoo.
The Sahib assented by twisting his lips and screwing his eyes into an expression of disgust.
‘This is my wife, Sir,’ said Nathoo Ram, pointing to a form loaded with clothes and jewellery, which sat in the middle of the group, dangling its legs in a chair and with its face entirely covered by a double veil.
Mr England looked eagerly to scan the face in the picture and, not being able to see it, blamed his myopic eyes, as he pretended to appreciate the charm of the Babu’s wife by saying, ‘Nice—very nice.’
But lifting his hand he saw that it was covered with dust, which lay thickly on the back of the frame, and that his trousers were ruined. He frowned.
‘My wife does not observe purdah, but she is very shy,’ said the Babu apologetically. ‘So she will not come in as is the custom with the women of your country.’ In the same breath he switched on again to the picture: ‘This is my humble self as the bridegroom, when I was young.’
Mr England saw the form of a heavily turbaned, feebler incarnation of Nathoo Ram, with rings in his ears, garlands round his neck and white English-Indian clothes, as he stood stiffly caressing the arm of his bride’s chair with the left hand and showing a European watch to the world with the right.
Mr England’s eyes scanned the wizened forms of dark men in the background of the picture. They then rested on two boys, who lay, reclining their heads against each other and on their elbows, in the manner of the odd members of cricket teams in Victorian photographs.
‘Ain—ain—wain—ain—ain—ai—an,’ a throaty wail wound its way out of the trumpet of the gramophone which Dr Prem Chand had set in motion.
Munoo rushed up to the door, really to hear the voice from the box sing, but making an excuse of the message that tea was ready. Sheila, who had just returned from school, came in too.
‘This is our Indian music, Sir,’ said Nathoo Ram proudly; ‘a ghazal, sung by Miss Janki Bai of Allahabad.’ ‘My elder daughter,’ he added, pointing to Sheila. Then turning to her he said, ‘Come and meet the Sahib.’
The child wa
s shy and stood obstinately in the doorway, smiling awkwardly.
Mr England’s confusion knew no bounds. He was perspiring profusely. The noise and commotion created by the ‘ain—ain—wain—ain’ were unbearable. His ears were used at the best to the exotic zigzig of Charleston or Rumba or his native tunes ‘Love Is Like a Cigarette’, ‘Rosemarie, I Love You’ and ‘I want to be Happy, but I can’t be Happy till I make You Happy too’. And he felt the children staring at him.
He wished it would all be over soon. He regretted that he had let himself in for it all.
‘Go and get the tea,’ said Nathoo Ram to Munoo.
‘Han, Babuji,’ said Munoo as he ran back, excited and happy. He nearly knocked into his uncle Daya Ram, who was coming towards the sitting-room bearing heaps of syrupy Indian sweets and hot maize-flour dumplings which Bibiji had been frying in a deep pan of olive oil the whole afternoon.
Bibiji saw Munoo rushing and would have abused him, but she was on her best behaviour today. She gave him only a furious look as she pushed some dishes of English pastries from outside the four lines of her kitchen, commanding him to take them to the sitting-room.
Munoo was in high spirits, far too exalted by the pleasure of the Sahib’s company in his master’s house to be damped by Bibiji’s frowns. He took the dishes over, his mouth watering at the sight of the sweets.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 23