Mr Hem Chand went and called Dr Marjoribanks.
Dr Marjoribanks came, a short, fat man, about forty, bald-headed and prim, with a genial smile under his thin, fair moustache and dressed in breeches, gaiters and a Norfolk jacket, with his polo topee in his hand.
‘Good morning, Sir Todar Mal,’ he greeted. ‘I am sorry I didn’t have time to answer your letter. But I was away playing cricket for the gymkhana at Lahore.’
‘Good morning, Sahib,’ said Todar Mal, bowing with an humility strangely in contrast with his own dignity.
‘Come into my car,’ said Marjoribanks, in a smart tone which derived its snappiness from the fact that, like all Englishmen in India, he played tennis, cricket, polo, drank whisky and tried to retain the affections of his wife, and to be happy. ‘Brand-new Ford my wife has just brought from “home”. I am sure you will like it.’
There was a method in his mad rush towards the car. He did not want to go riding in Sir Todar Mal’s gig, as he hated to be stared at and salaamed by all the natives.
Sir Todar Mal saw his dream of being seen driving with the Englishman in an open carriage through the bazaars of the city fading.
‘Very good, Sahib,’ he said, gathering as much grace as he could in his answer and stepping rather awkwardly into the car. Dr Marjoribanks came and sat beside him.
‘Rai Sahib’s house, Huzoor?’ queried Sucha Singh, the Sikh chauffeur.
‘Yes,’ answered Marjoribanks.
As the car sped along, Sir Todar Mal, though sorry to be hidden from the world under the hood, consoled himself with the feeling of luxury afforded by the spring seat sinking up and down beneath him.
Dr Marjoribanks had not counted on the fact that the streets were too narrow beyond the Clock Tower Square for the car to go right up to Cat Killer’s Lane.
Sir Todar Mal bowed graciously to all the shopkeepers when he walked down the Anandmai Bazaar by the side of the Health Officer, whether they were looking at him in the company of this official or whether they were too busy to notice them at all.
Dr Marjoribanks had never got used to the idea of being followed by swarms of dirty urchins, who begged for the gift of a pice, stubbornly, brazenly. By the time he had reached Cat Killer’s Lane he was scarlet with self-conscious fury.
The ogling eyes of men and women who got up in their shops to stare at him made him bend his head down in wild rage.
The cow dung, straw, torn rags, broken earthen utensils, stale food and other rubbish which lay in heaps in different corners of the lane disgusted him. Sir Todar Mal was not making it easy, either:
‘Sahib, the Municipal sweepers don’t perform their duties well,’ he complained.
A housewife threw a packet of mess into the gully, just then, almost on to the Health Officer’s head.
Dr Marjoribanks closed his mouth tight.
A drain on the second storey of a house which had no pipe attached to it splashed the bath-water of a pious Hindu down into the narrow width of the alley.
Dr Marjoribanks could have wrung his hands in despair at this India.
‘That is my house and there is the factory, Sahib,’ said Sir Todar Mal.
‘I see,’ said Marjoribanks. He did not know whether to brave it any further into the slimy, damp gully. Duty beckoned. He heard curious, low whispers behind him. He could not go back. He advanced hesitantly.
‘Come out, vay Prabha! Come out now!’ Lady Todar Mal called, coming to the door of her house with her apron drawn over her face.
Dr Marjoribanks entered the yard of the pickle factory.
‘Gut noon,’ greeted Munoo as he sat on the platform in the niche, naked except for the loincloth. He had learnt the English greetings for morning, noon, afternoon and night from the chota Babu at Sham Nagar, and thought to put his knowledge to use.
‘Good morning,’ said Marjoribanks, slightly taken aback. He surveyed the yard with its muddy passage-way, its beer barrels full of fruit, its cauldrons over the furnaces. He was sweating. The heat was terrible. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the beads of perspiration from the top of his bald head, taking care not to cover his eyes, as he heard footsteps behind him and he had the eerie feeling, encouraged by the penny-bloods he had read at ‘home’ as a child, that a native with a dagger might suddenly spring from somewhere at his side and stab him to death.
But it was Prabha who saluted him with a bow as he turned round to guard himself against the shuffling behind him.
‘You master here?’ he said, in his Englishman’s bad Hindustani.
‘Han, Janab,’ said Prabha, trembling, pale and frightened.
‘All right, Rai Bahadur,’ said Dr Marjoribanks, turning to Sir Todar Mal. ‘I will see what I can do about it. I wish there were not all these people blocking my way up there. Can’t you disperse them?’
‘Jao!’ shouted Sir Todar Mal, awakening to the Sahib’s discomfort. ‘I will see you off, Sahib,’ he continued, brandishing his huge stick towards the crowd of men, women and children gathered at the head of the lane.
‘Gut morning, Sahib,’ shouted Munoo mischievously from the door of the pickle factory.
Marjoribanks turned back at the sudden unfamiliar voice with a frown which could not help turning into a smile at the sight of the ragged brown boy speaking English.
Prabha was in a panic. He thought that the Sahib would certainly send him to jail. He hurried into the factory and filled two jars of pickles and jams respectively. Giving them to Munoo to hold, he led the boy up to Lady Todar Mal, who was shouting as she stood in the hall of her house: ‘Now, you wait and see. What a dance I will make you dance, you who have raised your heads to the sky!’
Joining his hands, Prabha bent and laid his head on Lady Todar Mal’s feet, saying: ‘Forgive me, mother, forgive us all our faults. Here is an offering. Deign to accept it and forgive.’
‘What is he doing here now, this rogue! What does he want? I will see him ejected!’ said Sir Todar Mal, coming back, feeling a new strength in his ageing limbs, the strength of that pride which showing himself off to the world as the friend of an Englishman gave him.
‘Forgive them, let us forgive them,’ said Lady Todar Mal. ‘Don’t let us be the cause of sending them to jail. Already we have a great many sins to expiate!’
‘Offer the jars to Rai Bahadur, ohe Munoo,’ said Prabha.
The rich man’s greed made him relent.
For Prabha it was a very serious matter, because he was sure that Sir Todar Mal would land him in jail.
For Munoo it was all a joke as he sat boasting to Tulsi and Bonga and Maharaj that he had met an Englishman before and knew their language.
For the most part men realize themselves through the force of external necessity, in the varied succession of irrelevant and unconnected circumstances.
Munoo soon got used to life in this primitive factory.
It was a dark, evil life. He rose early at dawn before he had had his full sleep out, having gone to bed long after midnight. He descended to work in the factory, tired, heavy-lidded, hot and limp, as if all the strength had gone out of his body and left him a spineless ghost of his former self.
But he had learnt to be efficient. His first job was to sift the cinders from the ashes. Then he helped Tulsi to light the fires, waiting in suspense for the rich neighbours to burst out, for, though Prabha had placated them with bribes of pickles and jams and essences, there was no telling when they might forget about the gifts.
The goat-face came bullying the boys, and hurrying them. But since the quarrel with the neighbour’s son he had cooled down a great deal and, even taken to visiting the temple with Prabha in the mornings. As the ablutions in the sacred tank and the circumambulation of the shrine lasted till late into the morning, and as he went out canvassing for orders to the bazaars after the midday meal, and for a ride on his new Japanese bicycle in the evening, his grim shadow was absent most of the time.
Still, he might come back at any moment. And then it was difficu
lt if he caught any of the boys lazing about. Munoo did not know what was the matter with him. Why did he always remain ‘burnt up’, with a frown on his face, abuse on his tongue and his bullying fist upraised? He did not know that Ganpat was a rich man’s son, born and bred in the lap of luxury, with a grievance against fate because his father had gambled away his fortune on the Stock Exchange and left him penniless to work for his own living; and that, though he had been taken up by Prabha and lived in comfort through his partner’s kindness, he was always afraid that he had neither the skill nor the will to work, and felt himself a mere parasite. To ward off the possibility of his downfall he had cultivated a tough skin and a bullying manner which, with his ambition to amass wealth and to rise in the world, had developed into instruments of personal hate and a perverse selfishness, defeating the very ends they were employed to serve. The hate that gleamed from his bloodshot eyes made him loathsome to look at, demonish and malevolent like a would-be murderer, and people turned their faces away as he stared at them, stubborn, tight-lipped and relentless.
Munoo did not laugh and talk even as much as he used to at the babu’s house. He went in continual fear of the goat-face. He was possessed by moods of extreme melancholy in the mornings, dark feelings of self-distrust and a brooding, sinking feeling which oppressed his heart and expressed itself in his nervous, agitated manner. He felt he could neither face nor talk to anyone in the mornings, least of all his master and mistress, that he would break down if they said a kind word to him or looked at him tenderly.
The only thing that relieved these fits of depression was the silent comradeship which existed between him and the other coolies.
When Ganpat was away they would all fall to singing a hill tune as they raked the fire, watched the essences brew in the cauldrons, drew pails of water from the well, or peeled the fruit in the caverns. The doleful melody traced its long-drawn notes from a painful cry through the full, clear accents of a verse quickly mounting to an agonized crescendo. Then, retracing itself to a minor key, it reiterated the sympathetic flow of words along the ringing tenderness of the song to a final despair. As an alternative to the sad songs which soothed the suffering of these exiles, they sang one of the ribald and boisterous popular folk songs of the season. Munoo then regained the wild freedom of his childhood and moved to a quicker tempo, cutting jokes with all and sundry, teasing the old women in the caverns by hiding their fruit, and especially making of Maharaj and Bonga butts for good-humoured raillery.
Also, he would settle down for a while on the platform in the niche, with a cheap looking-glass and a celluloid comb which he had bought, and would start to dress his hair as he had seen the chota Babu dress it in Sham Nagar, parting it on the side. But his long, thick, black hair did not easily submit to the discipline of civilization. He would then set about washing his hair with the Pears’ Soap which Tulsi had bought to whiten his skin, and he would steal his colleague’s perfumed hair-oil and literally pour it on to his head. His hair emerged a soft, wavy glossy black and was then easily parted. But, of course, the parting must be brushed away as soon as the goat-face arrived in the factory, for one day he had beaten Tulsi for pretending to be like him when he saw the boy parting his hair. Munoo would have liked to shave his beard with a sharp, long razor of his master’s which was used to sharpen pencils and lay near the inkstand. But there was as yet no hair on his cheeks or his chin. He wished he could grow up soon and have a beard. He wanted to be a man, to flourish in the true dignity of manhood, like the chota Babu at Sham Nagar. He was a little sad to realize that there had not been any appreciable change in his height and girth since he left the village.
He was content to think, however, that he was taking enough exercise. To carry heavy copper flasks of essence from the factory to the various retail shops on his head was a pleasant exercise, since it meant an escape from the gloom of the factory into the world of fine-clothed men and women, and of wonder shops. Unfortunately Ganpat, if he were about, kept a vigilant eye on the time spent on these errands, and woe betide the coolies if they were caught walking leisurely back, enjoying the sights of the bazaar. For then they were punished by being ordered to stay indoors for a week and draw fifty pails of water a day, and Maharaj, who did not care if he went out or not, was asked to go and deliver the flasks instead.
Thus they worked from day to day in the dark underworld, full of the intense heat of blazing furnaces and the dense malodorous smells of brewing essences, spices and treacle, of dust and ashes and mud, which became kneaded into a sticky layer on the earth of the passage with the overflow of water from the barrels of soaking fruit, and plastered the bare toes of the labourers. They ran about bare-foot and naked except for loincloths, emptying the boiling water which hummed ceaselessly in the cauldrons, refilling them, joining the receptacles to tin tubes with smears of sticky clay and rags; cooling the flasks; transporting them; then coming back to wash the fruit; doling it out to the women and helping them to peel it, till the next flasks of essences were ready; drawing water out of the well or helping the bosses in the intricate business of making jams and pickles. They worked long hours, from dawn to past midnight, so mechanically that they never noticed the movements of their own or each other’s hands. Only the sweat trickled down their bodies and irritated them into an awareness that they were engaged in a strenuous physical occupation. Or when they went up to the house by turns to eat the rice and dal which the mistress cooked in the middle of the day, they felt tired and sleepy and did not want to come back.
When summer turned to winter Munoo felt more at home in the factory.
For the dark recesses of the subterranean cellars into which his eyes had travelled during the first months after his arrival did not seem so sinister now as they had once appeared. He began to recognize the tins and jars of pickles and jams, which lay in rows along the walls of the caverns. He no longer had the hallucination of seeing two jawless monsters with glistening white teeth, who seemed to belch a cold, foul breath, sometimes with a bellowing groan, sometimes with a hungry, steel whistle. And in the winter there was also no danger of the snakes, while during the summer he himself had seen a monstrous python with a glowing beard sitting over the fuel in a deeper chamber of the grotto facing the ovens. And another day Maharaj had brought out the coiled bodies of two snakes which had apparently died quarrelling. And Prabha had discovered a reptile with a mouth at each end, dead, in a tin of jam.
Also, with the coming of winter it was not so stuffy and hot in the factory yard. And one could sit quite near the ovens watching the red flames of the fire cast a glow of warmth on one’s body. Munoo sat very eagerly every morning, staring at the flames leaping up from the surface of the coal. He was in love with the fire, seeing it heighten the health of his pale body and the ochre-coloured bricks on the walls, noticing it enact an eerie devil dance, and filling his soul with the warmth he needed so much under the grey shade that seemed to hang under the corrugated-iron sheets, as the gloom of a cold grey night hangs upon the earth like a leaden roof.
Towards the late spring, Munoo became very happy indeed. For then, early at dawn, came mangoes, green mangoes, big and unripe, like those which he had stolen from the gardens in the village. Sackfuls of them were delivered in the mornings by coolies, bigger than himself, and emptied into the caverns, where Lachi and the old spinsters and widows congregated to peel them for pickling and jam-making.
Munoo’s heart beat wildly at the sight of this fruit, and he waited in suspense for the goat-face to leave the factory, as, indeed, all the workers did during those days, for they were all eager to eat the fruit.
But Munoo’s ravenous hunger for the mangoes was to cause him trouble. For you cannot eat a great deal of the mango, even when it is at its ripest. A large ripe one is enough for a full grown man, and of the small ripe ones five or six may be sucked. A tumbler of some cooling drink is required to offset the heat of its luscious, yellow juices. Of the unripe mangoes you cannot eat even a small one without harm.
Munoo would go and pick out the ripest of the unripe mangoes, and sucking it from his left hand, he would go about leisurely working with his right hand.
But there were no ripe mangoes there, only the unripe ones being fit for pickling.
Munoo’s teeth ached with the sharp taste of this unripe fruit, but in his childish greed he ate more and more of it, till his eyes were sore.
The goat-face could not have had more certain proof of the fact that the boy had been stealing mangoes than his sore eyes.
As he saw him rubbing them furiously one morning, he walked up to him, forcibly wrested his hand from the reddened pupils and slapped him furiously four times.
Munoo’s howls brought Prabha down from the house.
‘You should have buried the unripe mangoes in straw for a few days, fool, and eaten them when they were ripe,’ said Prabha, taking him in his arms and shielding him from more blows which Ganpat threatened to deal the boy.
Munoo sobbed.
‘You spoil him. You have made a thief of him!’ shouted Ganpat.
‘Come, I will take you to the Doctor’s to get some medicine put in your eyes,’ Prabha said, dragging Munoo away.
‘You spoil him, Prabha. You have no idea of running a business,’ fumed Ganpat. ‘These swine don’t do any work, but laze around eating raw fruit all day. They won’t work unless you goad them with the rod. Now we will be short of a workman for several days. And this is the busiest season of the year, when we cannot afford to lose a moment, especially as I am going on tour, collecting money—’
Prabha and Munoo had moved out into the gully.
During Ganpat’s absence from Daulatpur there was ‘Peace on earth and goodwill among men’.
Munoo was laid up with a fever and sore eyes for a few days. But this illness, unlike that which had followed his quarrel with Varma at Sham Nagar, was relieved by the tender care of his mistress.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 29