‘Sit down, swine! Where are you straying?’ shouted the goat-face. ‘Tulsi is getting the flask of essence ready. He will soon be taking the essence of keora to our clients, and he will take you along to show you the shops where you are to deliver the flasks from tomorrow. Meanwhile, don’t interfere with anyone’s work. Don’t fidget. Learn to sit still. You would have been in the hands of the police, or you would have had to walk hungry and forlorn in the city, if we had not brought you here. You are not to walk around getting in other people’s way.’
And he directed Munoo to a four-legged stool, thickly encrusted with dried mud, which was used for shoes and was thus considered a fit place for the workers to sit on.
Munoo looked around at the thick walls from which small bricks, worn by years of damp air, jutted out, except where patches of cow dung or dirt or mould plastered the wall, or where the spiders had woven long, delicate webs, or where the soot hung in slimy black clots, and the bats clung like crystals in a cave.
His straying gaze met Ganpat’s eyes. So he turned to look at the low and heavy logs of wood which stood covered with cobwebs, and the corrugated-iron sheets coated with smoke, which pressed down upon the yard like a dead weight. It seemed the wind of the heavens never visited this world, and the sun never entered it, except through the nail-holes and chinks and slits in the sheets, where it crept like snails.
As he was thus engaged, a blast of steam oozed from the boiling water which Tulsi had emptied into the ditch, and dimmed his eyes.
His gaze retreating to himself, he suddenly felt small and insignificant in this underworld of cauldrons and barrels, long, black caverns and crumbling yet solid walls.
As he rubbed his eyes to ease them he felt that the three other workers in the yard were looking at him askance as if to inquire: ‘Who are you? Where have you come from?’
He felt an intruder in the place. And a tense irritation possessed him.
The heat of the cauldron alternated with a stale, smelly draught that came from the caverns, rusting the iron and mixing with the sweat on the flesh to produce a sticky dirt on which the flies buzzed insidiously.
He would have flown away out of there if he had had wings.
But just then Seth Prabha Dyal came in and the atmosphere became charged with a comfortable presence.
‘Where are you, O Munoo?’ asked Prabha, searching for the boy, as he strained to accustom his sun-soaked eyes to the gloom of the factory.
‘There he is,’ said Ganpat, pointing from the cavern with his finger. ‘The brute almost got burnt, messing about near the ovens, when Tulsi was emptying boiling water out of the cauldron.’
Munoo got up and came near Prabha.
‘Come,’ said the Master, smiling. ‘I will take you round to the shops and show you to the clients to whom you will be delivering goods. Also, you might like to see a few sights and come to the temple with me.’
‘Han, go and spoil him as you have spoilt every one of these servants,’ remarked Ganpat icily.
Prabha smiled, took an ochre-coloured account book, and walked out.
Munoo followed eagerly behind him.
If the town of Sham Nagar, at the foot of the hills, had far exceeded in complexity anything conceived by the imagination of Munoo, the hill-boy from Gopipur, the feudal city of Daulatpur was an even more staggering confusion of things. In the face of it he had only one feeling: that of holding himself together and in close connection with Prabha, so that he might not get lost.
As he emerged from Cat Killer’s Lane into the Misri Bazaar behind Prabha, and faced an adjacent turning into the Bazaar Jhatkian, another into the Bazaar Sabunian, and another into the Bazaar Chabuksawaran, he did not know which turning he had taken, the right or the left. It was all a maze. He certainly knew he could neither go forward nor find his way back alone.
So with one eye on his master, another more eager on the shops, he capered ahead, through the narrow, irregular streets, past swarthy faces with gleaming eyes and white teeth, past palefaces and pale brown faces, all mixed together and distinguished only by the varied colours and shapes of their clothes.
‘Come, Seth Prabha Dyal, have you come back?’ called someone, and Prabha stopped.
Munoo stopped too, sweeping his eyes across the shops that lined the way, grottoes, lighter than those inside the factory and more visibly packed, with sweets of a hundred different kinds, or iron locks of every conceivable variety, cloth of different patterns, leather goods, saddles, collars, straps and horn fittings, all shaded by awnings and supported by carved posts, resting on the lowest storey, raised from the street by low platforms which served both as counters and working benches for the merchants who squatted upon them and combined the functions of manufacturer and salesman.
‘This is a new boy who will come to deliver essences,’ said Prabha, dragging Munoo up to face a pot-bellied lalla who squatted complacently, but alertly on one platform with a greasy cow-tailed cushion behind him.
‘Acha,’ assented the Lalla.
Prabha joined his hands meekly, bowed and moved on.
Munoo followed like a dog behind his master.
He fell to reading the signboards of the various shops. Each shop had invariably two, three and sometimes four boards. And, whether it was on that account or because the street abounded in doctors, he read the names of at least fifteen, written out in huge letters in both Hindustani and English, with all their degrees and titles. Dr Hira Lal Soni, M.B.B.S. (Punjab), L.R.C.P., M.R.C.S. (Eng.), D.T.M. (Liverpool), D.O.M.S. (Bristol). So read a signboard outside one of the shops, a shop different from the rest in that there were tables and chairs arranged in it. He read the names and titles aloud to himself eagerly, wondering what they meant.
A shop where small, many-coloured bulbs burned along a magic wire, without being fed by oil or wax, disconcerted Munoo. But he had learnt in Sham Nagar to label everything he could not understand as English. So he did not pause to inquire, but moved on to contemplate, with wide eyes, a row of antique buildings of which the second storey was supported over the shops by intricately carved columns and painted in floral designs such as he had seen in the picture of the Diwan-i-khas, the Emperor Shah Jehan’s Council Chamber, in his Urdu history book. Beyond this Munoo’s eyes were caught by a shop in which a group of tailors sat stitching away at garments, while one of them worked a sewing machine; again, by a shop where jewellers sat studding little bright stones into brown wax; again, by a cookshop; and next by a fruit shop, where oranges and melons and bananas and mangoes spread their riot of colour and perfume to feast the senses. An ascetic with an ash-smeared body and shaggy hair, naked except for a rag suspended across a brass chain round the waist to cover his fore and aft, glided by Munoo, striking a long pair of tongs and swaying his garlands of thick beads. The crowd became thicker and more varied, as baggy-trousered Muhammadans alternated with loinclothed Hindus and trousered babus. Prabha caught hold of Munoo’s finger, and, pressing by the big wheels of a bullock cart which had got stuck against a phaeton, brought him into a narrow street where the effigies of the various gods were displayed behind small sanctuaries in red and black paint overflowing with the grease of oily offerings. They skirted the domed shrine or mausoleum of a Sikh saint, and entered the courtyard of the vast medieval Lotus Temple of Vishnu, before which was a holy tank. Prabha bought a string of marigold and jasmine flowers. Just then a drum began to beat in the courtyard below the steps. People hurried round to take a place at the tank. Munoo had never before formed part of so vast a congregation of humanity as now murmured prayers to the solar disc which seemed to set fire to the water as it reflected its last flames across the edge of the sky before going under for the night.
They moved away at last, bending their steps towards the temple lights that adorned the blue-black of the parting hour. Prabha offered the garland in the shrine to an image which stood swathed in all the magnificence that gold-embroidered clothes and silks and jewels could lend. Munoo looked dumbly at the ritual
of tinkling bells and chantings of hymns and loud hysterical shouts of ‘Long live the gods’. He followed his master sheepishly into a shady square punctuated by beds of flowers and garden bowers, where naked ascetics sat growing lean by pyres of burning wood, surrounded by devotees with offerings of food, fruit and flowers; and yellow-robed, clean-shaven mystics, with clouded eyes intent on something which people called God, but which for the life of him Munoo did not know and could not understand.
On the way home Munoo thought of the varied succession of the day’s events. He felt he was in a strange world. ‘The house of the master is nice,’ he felt. ‘I shall be comfortable there and free to wander where I like, and the factory is dirty enough not to be spoilt by sitting around. I don’t know what work I shall have to do, but I shall be looked after.’ The prospect of visits to the bazaars was exciting. There were so many things to look at, strange things, stranger than those he had seen at Sham Nagar. All kinds of things. It was truly a wonder city. He remembered what he had thought of for a moment during the concluding part of the journey in the morning: that the city of Daulatpur occurred in his geography book as one of the two oldest and most important in Northern India. He recalled that it was said to have been founded by Maharaja Daulat Singh, the Rajput king who ruled here in the days when Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, ruled in Oudh. And that it had been the scene of various battles in history, having been conquered by Mahmud Ghaznawi, the idol-breaker and looter of the buried treasures of the temple of Somnath. He wondered whether Mahmud had plundered any gold or jewels from the temple he had just visited. But he remembered that Akbar, the great Moghul, had given money to the priests of this city and encouraged their religion. The Sikhs had defeated the Moghuls outside the town and Ranjit Singh had given away its old houses to his beloved councillors. But the Angrezi Sarkar had conquered it before the Mutiny.
The resplendent figures of all the kings of India, as they appeared in the pictures of his history book, passed before his eyes, garlanded with rows upon rows of necklaces, with plumes in their turbans and jewels on their dresses. ‘This city was,’ he thought, ‘when my village did not exist.’ He felt confused and bewildered by its mosques and temples, its old shops and new shops. He would rather have lived outside the city, where the railway station was and the English quarter, plain and simple. He wondered why the Angrezi Sarkar had not razed the old city and built shops and houses like their bungalows here, and decorated them with tables and chairs. But he was lucky to be here at all, he reflected. ‘I do not know where I should have been if Prabha hadn’t picked me up. I might still be in the train, hungry and lost.’
He rushed, as he had been lagging behind his master, and caught hold of his finger.
‘Wake up, ohe Munoo! Wake up!’ Munoo heard the distant rumble of Tulsi’s voice early in the morning.
Then he felt the big toe of his right foot being twisted. And again he was conscious of a clear whisper:
‘Wake up, ohe Munoo! Wake up!’
His eyes opened slightly under the thick crusts of grit and he moaned in a sleepy tone.
‘Wake up! Look sharp, or the young Seth will be angry!’ Tulsi said.
Munoo yawned and stretched his arms. Then he rubbed his eyes with his fists and looked around. The shades of the night enveloped the white-sheeted humanity which lay spread on charpais on the flat roofs of nearby houses. But the dawn was approaching. The horizons of the high rocks about his village came back before his eyes; also the herd of cows, walking under a sky which was dotted by swarms of birds veering out in an anguished flight towards the slopes of the mountains. He had seldom remembered home at Sham Nagar, because there he had got up comparatively late, when the sun was already up. But he did not want to remember home, he said to himself. Nor did he want to think of the Babu’s house. ‘They must be missing me now,’ he reflected. ‘I wonder what they will do. My uncle must be angry. I shall write to him and tell him I am safe and sound, but that I don’t want to come back.’
‘Come,’ said Tulsi, rolling up a ragged carpet and a dirty shirt round a greasy pillow which made his bedding, and securing the bundle under his arm.
Munoo followed Tulsi past sleeping bodies, tiptoeing awkwardly.
The atmosphere of the dark, dusty stairs was humid and stale, because the air had lain locked up in the house overnight. His brow felt moist as he groped his way downstairs.
‘Let me lift you,’ said Tulsi, as he descended from the window over the well into the factory.
But Munoo climbed down with the alacrity of the old days when he used to jump trees.
Tulsi went towards the niche where the wooden platform was, and, shaking two huge mounds of flesh roughly, called:
‘Get up, ohe Maharaj! Get up, ohe Bongay!’
Munoo could see the elephantine figure and the deaf and dumb coolie huddled against each other in sleep. He stared at them as he leaned over the barrels from the platform of the well. He felt happy to be the favoured one who had been privileged to sleep on the top of the house where his master and mistress, Ganpat and Tulsi slept. On a separate bed, too, though it was a small bed. He knew who to thank for it. He had heard Prabha and Parbati talk of adopting him as a son when he fell asleep during the meal. He liked the mistress. She had patted him on the head and given him cream to eat with his bread as an extra dish. But she was so quiet. Her pale, olive face was serene except when she smiled, and she spoke so few words. He was afraid of her, afraid and shy.
‘Come and sift the ashes from the cinders, ohe Munoo,’ Tulsi whispered gently but firmly, as he himself picked up a bent, twisted rod and began to prod the ovens.
Munoo jumped down to the floor lightly and began to sift the ashes.
‘Oooi,’ he shrieked, and fell back almost immediately, for he had touched a live coal as he put his hand into the heap of ashes through the aperture under the ovens.
‘Oh fool!’ cried Tulsi, to cover up his own neglect in not warning the boy. ‘But come, you will soon get used to it,’ he added sympathetically.
Munoo drew back, nursing his hand and pulling faces with the pain that shot through his fingers. And he sat, for a moment, with the terrified hopelessness of the confident nature receiving a set-back at the very start of a new job.
‘Come, come,’ said Tulsi, smiling, ‘you will get used to it. Only try to be careful. Get a piece of tin or something to separate the coal from the ashes. Look, there is a bit of iron there.’
The boy took up a triangular piece of rusted tin from the debris that blocked the doorway of the long cave facing the ovens and attacked the job again.
He moved the tin gingerly among the ashes, keeping as far away as possible from the heap, which Tulsi had raked out. For not only was he now a burnt child who dreaded the fire, but also he felt a curious irritation at the contact of the tin with the hard, scarred pieces of dead coal; the kind of feeling which he used to get walking on sand in his uncle’s nailed slippers in the village. But when the cinders lay heaped on one side and he put his hand into the soft, grey ashes he felt a luxurious feeling: a feeling of silk which melted in the hand. He applied himself to the job. The two feelings quarrelled within him.
‘So you haven’t even lit the fire yet!’ came Ganpat’s voice, followed by the appearance of his person at the window over the well. He was naked up to the waist, and irritation marked his goat-face.
‘Hurry up, ohe Munoo,’ whispered Tulsi, according to his familiar habit of passing on the orders of his masters to the other labourers, a method which had insured for him the position of a sort of foreman in the factory.
Munoo applied his hands more vigorously to the job, without looking up to the goat-face whom he had by now come to fear as he had feared the Babu’s wife and his uncle. ‘It is sad,’ he said to himself, ‘that my good luck in finding work so easily should be spoiled by the presence of this man. But it is a good thing that the master is kind, and the mistress gave me cream as an extra dish to eat with my bread last night.’
�
�Put the cinders you have collected on the grate,’ Tulsi said, disturbing his thoughts. He himself had begun to arrange pieces of chopped wood that he had fished out from the black depths of a cavern.
‘Where are Maharaj and Bonga?’ Ganpat asked, yawning, as he still stood at the window. ‘Haven’t they got up yet?’
‘Get up, ohe Maharaj, ohe Bonga!’ called Tulsi.
There was a stirring of the chain knocker on the door opening into the gully. Tulsi was going to move towards it.
‘I will see to them,’ said Ganpat, suddenly springing out of the window on to the platform of the well. And he walked through the passage muttering: ‘They are late coming this morning and these louts haven’t awakened yet. I don’t know what has been happening in the factory in our absence. Everything seems to have slackened. Of course, who can expect you swine to have any sense of responsibility? You have been enjoying a holiday while I and Prabha were away.’
‘Get up,’ he shouted, abruptly stirring the labourers on the platform.
Bonga got up, rubbing his eyes. But Maharaj lay insensible.
‘Get up, son of an elephant!’ roared Ganpat, rocking Maharaj’s frame.
‘Master,’ came the voice of the workman, rumbling from the depths of sleep in the gross mass of his flesh. But he did not move.
The latch on the door rattled again.
‘Oh, all right, Lachi, wait,’ Ganpat shouted.
And he picked up a log of fuel wood and belaboured the body of the servant, hard, till his eyes, bloodshot with the fury into which he had worked himself up, met the slave’s eyes, bloodshot with fatigue.
‘Come along, you swine!’ said Ganpat, panting with the exercise of his limbs. ‘The sunshine has spread far and wide and you are still asleep.’
Maharaj sat up and yawned tiredly. He did not seem to have been much hurt by the beating, unless his repeated moaning yawns were an indication of his pain. He contemplated the surroundings with his idiot’s eyes, now watery with tears where they had been bloody with unquenched sleep.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 27