The red and green signal lamps drew him on.
Once he stumbled over some wires and fell on his palms on the railings. He felt he would be instantaneously killed, though the nearest shunting engine was two hundred yards away and there were no trucks near.
Then the distant whistle of the shunting engine made his body jump. He rushed headlong towards a long row of carriages which stood almost indistinguishable from the darkness, except where black pits of emptiness yawned squarely from their sides. He scrambled up the thick wooden planks that served as footrests. But the reflection of a moving green and red lamp in the hands of some invisible man started a panic in his soul. He fell and muttered a curse. Luckily the light moved away.
He got up and jumped into the yawning window of the door like a tiger leaping into the darkness of a cave for fear of some silent hunter.
He had fallen on his side on a hard bunk. A shooting pain went up from his ribs to his head. He felt dizzy with the ache, with the heat of the running and the stuffiness of the compartment.
He sank to the floor, nursing his side and wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve.
He had never felt so alone, so intensely alone, as during the suspended moments of his descent into this inferno. But as he lay in the tense emptiness, opening his thick tunic and his dhoti to expose his bare body to the atmosphere in a vain attempt to dry the clammy sweat, he heard a beetle whining in the distance.
Then, suddenly, he heard the eager feet of hordes of men rushing, stamping into the compartment, and the heavy thud of loads of baggage falling all around him. He dragged his body to safety, deeper into the space under the bunk, and rested his face on the floor to soothe the white fumes of heat.
The noise around him became more significant. There were shouts of ‘Where are you, Ala Dad Khan?’ ‘Oh what has happened to you, Devi Singh?’ ‘Lalla Churanji Lall, have you got a seat?’
Munoo’s heart beat to an easier rhythm. He raised his ears to listen and felt his cheek coated with the dust. The sweat soaked his body. His veins seemed to have swelled. He felt like a mass of lead.
The train started. He could now breathe the foul air of other people’s breath, if not the fresh breeze which was coming in from the fields.
Later, he breathed the pure air.
He did not know where the train was going, but he was thankful to be in the moving thing.
3
‘HOON . . . HOON,’ MOANED SETH PRABHA DYAL, AS HE STRAINED TO DRAG his bundle from under the bunk of a third-class carriage in the slow train which jerkily ran from Sham Nagar to Daulatpur.
The Seth, a broad-shouldered, tall, gaunt man from Kangra, who seemed more a soldier than a business man, was half asleep. He had sat through the night in an awkward, cramped position on the wooden boards in the packed compartment, and was getting ready to disembark long before the train was anywhere near its destination.
He blew a mouthful of heavy breath as he struggled to gather his luggage from under the bunk where he had placed it, and mopped his brow to wipe off the sweat.
‘Hoon-an-haan . . .’ he heaved again. The bundle seemed heavy as lead, though it was soft to the touch and slippery.
‘Hoooo . . . haa,’ he now dragged, willing more power into his limbs, and drew, half in fear, half in wonder, the sleeping body of Munoo from where it had lain all night buried amid the congestion of trunks, wooden boxes, rolled-up bedding, and bundles of all kinds, from dislocated bedsteads wound in their hemp mattresses to shapeless mounds of foodstuffs, clothing and knick-knacks bound in sheets of cotton, roughly knotted on the top.
‘Ram re Ram!’ the Seth exclaimed, reverently but with a broad grin on his pale, brave face, adorned with a well-groomed black moustache.
‘What occasion is there for such hilarity early in the morning?’ muttered Ganpat, the Seth’s young partner in business, with a dark-brown goat-like face, hollow-cheeked and pinched, as he lay sprawled on some sacks of merchandise in a vain effort to sleep.
‘La hol billah!’ shouted a Muhammadan peasant as he gazed at Munoo, who now lay curled up at Prabha Dyal’s feet. ‘Who could this be? The son of Eblis!’
‘Wah Guru! Wah Guru!’ whispered a Sikh peasant in consternation. ‘Strange are the ways of Wah Guru!’
‘Is he alive or dead?’ a woman strained to know as she crouched on the floor, holding the teats of her breasts to give suck to the child in her arms.
Other passengers in the compartment half opened their eyes through the dawn and, dazed with wonder at so uncanny a spectacle, began to ask: ‘Who is it? Where does he come from?’
Munoo could not speak. He was terror-stricken.
When Prabha Dyal fished him out he was in a nightmare, in which elephantine giants were trampling on his body and weird two-horned devils were lashing him with fury.
‘Strange are the ways of God, indeed!’ said Prabha Dyal, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘He is a very auspicious find. He seems to be from the hills.’
‘You should be happy now,’ said Ganpat mockingly. ‘Here is a son for you, ready-made and complete. And you can forget all about the herbs that you were going to fetch for your wife—or yourself. I suspect,’ he added grimly, ‘that you want medicine for yourself. It is you who are impotent, and not your wife who is barren!’
‘What is your name? Where do you come from? Whose child are you?’ asked Prabha Dyal in the hillman’s accent that he had not forgotten, though he had left home early and lived in the city of Daulatpur, working his way up from a coolie in the streets to the proprietorship of a pickle-making and essence-brewing factory.
‘I was called Munoo at Gopipur, Mundu at Sham Nagar,’ Munoo began, as if the accent of the hills had suddenly released his speech. ‘My father died and then my mother died too. My uncle, Daya Ram, who is a chaprasi in the office of the Bank at Sham Nagar, got me a job as a servant in the house of a babu. Yesterday the Babu beat me and I have run away. . . .’
At this he was possessed by a mixture of fear and self-pity, and his face twisted against his will, and he began to cry.
Then he was ashamed of his tears and he hid his eyes behind the rubbings of his right fist.
‘He is bithot tikkus!’ said a young Hindu student, who affected an English accent both to impress the illiterate peasants and to live up to his strange conglomeration of English and Indian clothes—a faded, spotted necktie, a velvet waistcoat, a pair of khaki shorts and a most flamboyant turban.
‘We had better take him with us,’ said Prabha to his partner.
‘We don’t know who he is,’ replied Ganpat. ‘He may be a rogue, a thief. But, of course, we need another boy at the works to help Tulsi, Maharaj and Bonga, to run errands and do odd jobs. And, it seems, he will be glad enough to have the food, and we need not pay him.’
‘Will you come with us, ohe, Munoo?’ asked Prabha, ignoring his partner’s advice and gently stroking the boy’s dark hair, which grew long on all sides and shadowed his wheat-coloured face. ‘Will you come and live with us? I am from Hamirpur, so we will look after you.’
Munoo moved his head up and down to signify assent, but did not speak, as he hovered on the edge of doubt. For he had not thought about what he was going to do since he had escaped, having been too occupied by the fear of being caught and taken back.
Seth Prabha Dyal patted the boy on his back and said: ‘Come, come, now, be a brave lad. Wipe your eyes. We will take care of you. Look, we are almost nearing Daulatpur!’
He made room for the boy on the bunk by withdrawing his left leg and squeezing him in the space thus vacated.
He felt tender towards the boy. He had suddenly recognized a kinship with him, the affinity his soul felt for his unborn son. Only he tried to make himself believe that it might be possible to regard this completely strange boy as a son. He tried to imagine what his parents were. ‘They must have been poor,’ he thought, ‘but, then, all hill folk are poor.’ He recalled the images of his own father and mother, who had died at Hamirpur
during his absence in the city of Daulatpur: his earnings as a coolie had not been enough to procure them all rice twice a day. He wished they were alive now and could enjoy the comfortable income the factory brought in. He heaved a sigh to forget the impossible. ‘This boy’s parents,’ he reflected, ‘died before he became a wage-earner. He is not as guilty as I.’ But the boy was like him really. He would probably feel the same about his parents. It was always like that except for a rich man’s son like Ganpat, whose father was a successful broker and had given him money, even when Ganpat had disgraced the family by gambling, drinking and whoring. ‘Strange,’ Prabha wondered, ‘that a youth like Ganpat, who had everything, should have wasted his time, while I myself have pined for knowledge and have never had the chance of acquiring it. And this boy, I wonder whether he can read and write . . .?’
‘Did you go to school, ohe, Munoo?’ he asked gently, turning round.
‘Han, I was in the fifth class when my uncle brought me to earn my living in town.’
‘He will be able to do accounts for you,’ mocked Ganpat, waking from a doze.
‘Han,’ Prabha said, taking up the suggestion. ‘We will make him our clerk.’
‘Don’t puff the boy up from the very start,’ remarked Ganpat with bitter malice. ‘The seducer of his daughter! He won’t rest his feet on earth, what with your desire to adopt him as a son and to give him the status of a munshi. You hardly know yet who he is. He is probably a thief, the runaway scamp!’
Prabha smiled sheepishly, as if he were afraid of his partner. But he could not help being naturally paternal to the boy.
The train was speeding through the outskirts of Daulatpur. Munoo was staring out of the window. The golden domes of a temple flashed past his eyes on a background of broad-leaved banana trees. He inclined towards the window and traced the naked forms of men, some dragging water from a well and pouring it over their heads, some rubbing each other’s bodies with oil, others wrestling on a pitch. But the scene passed before he had taken it in completely. He prepared himself to take in the next sight: a mosque with four minarets from which a green-turbaned, white-robed figure, whom he presumed to be a mullah, was bawling out the call to prayers. His eyes sped past the scores of flat-roofed houses and rows of stands and stalls at a crossing where, beyond a blue-uniformed signalman who waved a green flag to the train, crowds of quick-moving city folk were already busy buying and selling. Then Munoo’s rudimentary stare travelled with the motor-cars and lorries that moved, leaving clouds of dust behind them, along a road parallel to the railway. The smoke of a factory chimney, on the back wall of which was written in huge Hindustani letters ‘Soda Water Works’, lured him beyond the neighbouring tanks of the ‘Burma Oil Company’ to the heavens, where, unlike anything he had seen before, unlike anything he had ever imagined, flew a droning bird, a queer steel bird with straight wings, leaving a streamline of smoke in its trail across the even blue sky. Retracing their course to the earth, his eyes now surveyed miles and miles of the houses of Daulatpur City, and, as if overpowered by the vast magnitude of this amorphous world, they turned to see the inmost thoughts in his breast. There was only a curious flutter of excitement in his heart, like the thrill of fear and happiness which had filled him when he first laid eyes on Sham Nagar—the fear of the unknown in his bowels and the stirring of hope for a wonderful life in the new world he was entering.
A ragged canvas cloth covered the skeleton of the high bamboo cart in which Munoo sat sandwiched between Ganpat and Prabha and four other men on the way home from the station. So he missed the bazaars of Daulatpur. All that he saw was the few shops at the entrance to Cat Killer’s Lane, outside which the yekka stopped, and the Lane itself, a narrow, sordid little gully chockful of rubbish which festered in the shade by the congested gutters, bordered by tall, three-storeyed houses.
He felt strange and awkward as he walked behind Prabha and Ganpat past the half-naked women who sat on open-fronted platforms making dishes and pots of dried leaves, which the pure Hindus use instead of utensils on ceremonial feasts and in catering food for large parties. By the look of them these women were all from the hills: wives of coolies, they supplemented meagre incomes by a little domestic industry. He was reassured when they greeted his benefactors in the language of the hills saying, ‘Jay deva Sethji. Have you come back happy and well? Is everyone well at home?’ And Prabha replied by joining his hands and saying, ‘I fall at your feet.’
He entered through the huge doorway of a big house into a courtyard flanked by small, dark rooms, outside which were more hill-women engaged in making leaf pots. Prabha and Ganpat were immediately surrounded by old women and young girls, who greeted them cordially and asked them what gifts they had brought from the hills.
Munoo was embarrassed when Prabha smilingly pointed him out as the only gift he had brought.
As they went up ten flights of wide steps to a huge room which looked down on the compound, Munoo faced a slight, modest woman, whose eyes lit up with a tender gambolling light, and who, he presumed, was Prabha’s wife. She was rather pale and reticent, but the wonderful eagerness with which she came up to Munoo, and, without asking who he was, took him in her arms and patted him on his forehead, at once put him at ease.
‘I fall at your feet, sister-in-law,’ said Ganpat with a sneer of mockery.
‘May you live,’ answered Parbati gracefully, and continued in a bantering manner, ‘Didn’t you get a pretty hill woman for a wife, then?’
‘No,’ he replied sardonically, ‘but I have brought you a ready-made son.’
‘Han,’ she said, hugging Munoo, and dropped the conversation. And then she addressed her husband: ‘I am just getting the meal ready. Will you take your bath so that you can rest afterwards and sleep off the fatigue of the journey?’
‘Acha,’ said Prabha, affectionate but undemonstrative.
And, drawing a hemp bedstead from where it stood leaning by a wall, he flung his bundles on it and asked Munoo to sit down.
Munoo contemplated the contrast of the cool shade of the tall room and the blazing sunshine in the courtyard outside. He wiped the sweat off his face and wondered where the factory was.
His thoughts were disturbed by the tumbler of sherbet which his mistress handed him.
And then Prabha led him to a slab of stone in the corner to bathe.
The meal followed. There were rice, both plain and sweet, and dal and vegetables, tamarind pickle, all hill dishes which he had missed in the Babu’s home, and a few city ones: flour dumplings mixed with curds and kara parshad. It was the most sumptuous meal he had eaten since the feast on the death anniversary of his father and mother, which his aunt had given three months before he left the hills.
His stomach was full, his body cool and he had hardly laid down on the charpai when he fell asleep.
When he awoke it was afternoon.
‘Go down there,’ said Prabha, who sat smoking a hubble-bubble with a coconut-shell bottom, ‘and look at the factory. There is the entrance to it. Somebody will lift you down over the well.’
Munoo walked up to a small window in a corner of the room and looked down. He stood hesitant. It seemed so awkward and dangerous to descend into the strange, dark, airless outhouse of the factory, which sank like a pit into the bowels of the earth, among the tall surrounding houses in the heart of the town. The window was precariously perched on the side of a well. And Munoo was afraid of falling into the well.
But he stood looking on with naïve enthusiasm, excusing the unwholesome outlook of the place by recalling the good fortune he had had since he was picked up by Prabha in the train, and the hospitality he had received from him.
Under the thick shade of corrugated-iron sheets he could see the mouths of two black caverns opening out into a narrow yard. On one side, stood three ovens topped by huge steaming cauldrons. On another side, in a niche under stacks of wood fuel, stood a long wooden platform with a greasy iron safe, some ochre-coloured account books, a papier mâché in
kstand and a bottle of black ink. Close by the ovens and the well stood huge barrels, some containing copper flasks, others full of soaking roses and ginger. A narrow passage-way, a yard wide, led to a small door which opened into an alley, of which the factory was the dead end.
The man who lifted him from the window over the well into the factory was massive and shapeless, with a thick animal face, of which each feature was hard muscle. He had big sodden hands and feet, on which corns had formed and the veins stood out swollen and fat. His skin must be stricken with leprosy, Munoo thought, because it had curious white patches over the brown surface. And there was an absent air about his whole form, rudely clothed in a homespun tunic and loincloth, which proclaimed the simpleton, the idiot.
Munoo shrank away from him as the man lifted him down to the platform of the well and, smiling, stared at him.
Then he heard Ganpat say: ‘Get on with your work, ohe, Maharaj.’
That, Munoo felt, was a hint for him to move away.
He turned towards the caverns, self-consciously.
But the suspicion in the red eyes of a short, thick boy, with a pale, clayey face, bare except for a loincloth, who stood near the mouth of the cavern facing the ovens, confused him still more. And when this boy began to push him away and, opening his mouth, made strange noises, Munoo felt very uncomfortable.
‘Bonga is asking you to sit down,’ said Ganpat from where he smoked the hubble-bubble on the platform in the niche. ‘He is deaf and dumb.’
When Munoo was reassured and put at ease, he strayed in the direction of the caverns, past the ovens. Here stood a light-coloured, good-looking boy with a muslin shirt and loincloth, his hair parted like the babus and the sahibs, emptying a huge cauldron full of hot water into a ditch.
‘Look out, fool,’ he snapped with a sharp, sudden anger as Munoo rushed past him to the accompaniment of cries of, ‘Hai! Hai! He is scalded! Undone! Burnt to death?’ from the ghostly forms of wrinkled old women who were busy peeling apples in the caverns.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 26