Munoo took it all for granted, as if he had been used to it throughout his life. Only the mixture of types excited him. He had seen many Hindu hill coolies together, but he had never seen so many Kashmiri Muhammadan labourers or Sikh coolies mixed up. He wondered if the Hindus did not resent the violation of their religion by mixing with the Muhammadans. He hoped they did not, for he secretly recalled how he had bought a pot full of mutton curry with swollen bread at a Muhammadan cook-shop one day when he went out to run an errand, because his mouth had watered at the smell of the spicy stuff steaming away on the oven. True, he had got into the shop in order to conceal himself from the sight of any passing Hindu who might recognize him, but he had not felt there was anything strange in violating the prevailing custom, except the guilt of having tasted a dish which the Muhammadans cooked better than the Hindus. It seemed that religion did not matter, for there, there before his eyes, he could see a coolie accepting a Muhammadan hubble-bubble. If the acceptance of hookah and water were a test, surely the coolies had no religion. But he felt vaguely that they would not eat food from each other’s hands. For himself, however, it did not matter. And anyway, whether it mattered or not, all that he was concerned about now was to find a job.
‘Tulsi, Tulsi,’ he said, turning round in a panic. ‘Let us hurry and join that crowd pressing round the shop which is opening. Come quick.’
And he jumped down and scurried towards the thronging tide surging onwards to a wide godown which stood under a grotesquely painted four-storied house.
Tulsi followed him leisurely.
But he found it difficult to get through to the front, so wild was the rush for jobs by the taller and heftier coolies. He tried to push, to scrape through the edges, to crawl under the legs of the crowd. He sweated with the strife. But he did not get anywhere near the vantage point. He stood helpless at the back, only hearing the shouts, the curses, the oaths and the prayers that arose from the throng.
‘Get back, get back!’ shouted the merchant, as he stood on top of his iron safe with a bamboo pole in his hand. ‘Get back! None of you will get a job if you don’t get back.’
‘Oh, Lallaji! Oh, Lallaji! I am Muhammad Butt. You employed me yesterday!’ a coolie said.
‘Get back. Get back!’
‘Oh, Lallaji! I can carry two maunds on my back easily! Please employ me,’ another coolie said.
‘Get back, get back! None of you will get a job this way!’
‘Lalla, Lalla, only an anna a sack. I will take only an anna to bear the sack from here to anywhere!’ a third appealed.
‘Get back, swine, or I will break your bones!’
‘Oh, Lallaji! Lallaji!’
This was all that could be heard for some seconds, and then the creaking of the bamboo stick falling on hard bones, and the queer angry noises at the front of the crowd, the stamping of feet as they were pressed back and the heaving of wave after wave of men as they strained to escape from the rod.
‘Lalla Thakur Das’s shop is opening,’ someone shouted, and there was a frantic rush towards a big shop guarded by a door of iron rails.
Munoo cunningly perceived the advisability of staying where he was so that if the whole crowd fled away he would get an easy job. When Tulsi came up and said, ‘Come, ohe Munoo,’ Munoo whispered: ‘Stay here. All these fools are running away. We will get jobs.’
It happened as Munoo had foreseen. But he had not foreseen all.
Only Munoo, Tulsi and five other coolies remained while the others ran towards Lalla Thakur Das’s shop.
‘Come, you have made me sweat,’ said the merchant, laying aside the bamboo stick. ‘Come and lift the sacks in the godown and load Rahmat’s bullock-cart, which is going to the railway station.’
‘FROM GOKAL CHAND, MOHAN LALL
TO
RALLI BROTHERS, EXPORTERS, BOMBAY’.
Munoo read the blue Hindustani inscription on the sacks of grain. He rolled the word ‘Ralli’ in his mouth with a taste for its melody and strangeness, as he had often rolled the words of his science primer in the old village days.
All the coolies, including Tulsi, had sat down to adjust their shoulders to the sacks, which lay on a platform. And they rose, some shaking, some straining, some with ease, and began to walk away, bowed under the weight.
Munoo had waited to see how to apply himself to the job. Having seen the others, he imitated their movements, from the spitting on the hands to get a grip to the heaving. But, unfortunately, he could not lift the sack. He felt he had surely missed some miraculous movement which the other coolies had performed. So he heaved and strained and shifted and sought the hidden secret of lifting the weight. But it was all in vain.
The other coolies came back for their second load. Munoo still sat straining his muscles to lift the weight.
‘Ohe, leave it, seducer of your sister,’ said a middle-aged coolie paternally. ‘You will kill yourself. You should go and lift small weights in the vegetable market.’
But Munoo was intent on earning a living for himself, for his master and his mistress.
‘Come and give me a hand so that I can stand,’ he said to Tulsi.
Tulsi came and lifted the sack on to his back.
Munoo rose, his legs trembling, his whole frame stretched tautly outwards to support the burden on his back. He took a step forward, two steps, three steps. Now he was under way, impelled by the mere weight of the sack to go forward in a sustained momentum. At a little ditch on the edge of the courtyard his legs crossed, but he found his balance by an effort of will. His bare, supple body was sweating with the heat of violent exercise. Then he had to cross the square beam of the doorstep. He lifted his left foot and, before deciding whether he should jump or take a long step, lifted his right foot. His feet hit each other and he fell tottering on to the ground, completely clear of the sack of grain, but on an uprise of hard earth which stunned his head.
‘Ohe, lover of your mother,’ shouted the merchant, jumping up from the platform of the shop, where he had settled to do accounts in an ochre-coloured portfolio. ‘Ohe, illegally begotten, who asked you to lift that sack, you who have hardly emerged from your mother’s womb? Run away, little rascal! I didn’t see you go in to lift the weights or I should have stopped you. Do you want to have me sent to jail for murder? Get away, little wretch!’
Munoo rose with a sudden jerk and, unmindful of the hurt he had received, bolted to get under cover of the sacks on which he had slept last night, so that he could go to another shop for a job later.
But the merchant was still abusing him and had drawn the attention of the other businessmen who were opening their shops and performing purification ceremonies by sprinkling holy water over their cash-boxes.
They took up the cue for abuse from their brother merchant:
‘Run away, little wretch! Run away!’ they shouted loudly, mechanically, without any grievance, and they worked up a scare all round the market as if Munoo were a thief or a brigand to be chased off.
Munoo made for the passage opening out of the square. After he had run for a 100 yards or so he slowed down. There was a throbbing in his head and streams of perspiration were running down his face. He brushed his cheeks, leaving a trail of flushed, hot blood. A cool draught was blowing through the aperture of the gully at the confluence of the two bazaars. He stopped under the shadow cast by a tall house to feel the breeze and to recollect himself.
He thought of Tulsi carrying weights of grain. ‘Lucky Tulsi, he will earn four annas today, and I shall have nothing to take home to Prabha. And it was all my idea. If I hadn’t told Tulsi to wait when the coolies had been pushed back by the Lalla, he would not have got this job! I wish I had been strong enough to bear the sack of grain.’ He was angry with himself and impatient. ‘Oh,’ he rebuked himself, ‘when will I grow up and be a strong man?’ Then he became conscious of the hurried glances of the passers-by. One man, who had come to the passage-way leading into the market and sat down to make water by the gutter, star
ed at him.
‘I must go,’ he said to himself. ‘Go home. But I can’t go home without having earned any money,’ the stabbing thought came.
And he stood torn for a moment, his heart beating, his head still throbbing faintly, and the heat in his body swelling in the veins of his legs. Then a sack-laden cart came by, pulled by a sleepy-eyed buffalo, and two men who flogged the animal ruthlessly as they strained to steer the shafts of the vehicle by a thick wooden handle. Munoo had to move on, because there was hardly room for a big cart to pass. For a while he walked emptily, hardly aware of anything. Then he suddenly stopped and asked himself where he was going.
‘To the vegetable market, where the old coolie said I could lift small weights,’ the answer came to him swiftly. He moved on.
‘Why do I suddenly die like that?’ he kept asking himself the rest of the way. ‘What happens to me that I can’t think or see or feel sometimes, while my body goes on moving? And then, at once, I can recognize and hear everything. Do I die, or what? Get burnt up into a speck of ash and then evaporate into complete emptiness? How is it that I go on breathing? What is the separate thing under my skin which exists apart from the things in my head? And where do the globules of light come from, tinted on the side, which swarm before my eyes and wave, like the sunlight in Master Prabha’s factory which stole through the chinks in the iron sheets in summer?’
But the problems seemed insoluble. Only the hammer of his brain struck more rapidly, and the heat of his body grew, and the minute images in the corners of his soul broke up into even more microscopic elements, till they sank into the complete emptiness from which they had emerged. Then the more concrete shapes of men jostling in the street, the articles in shops and the forms of tall houses, small houses and light cavernous gullies filled his eyes.
‘Where is the vegetable market, brother?’ he pulled up a coolie and asked.
The man stared at him, taken aback. Then he said: ‘Second turning on the right by the Chok Farid.’
Munoo ran away without even looking at the man or expressing his gratitude. The desire to earn money possessed him like a panic.
The vegetable market was a bazaar, rather than a square, and richer in colour and life, as business here began earlier in the day, so that the fruit and flowers might be sold before the heat of the sun tarnished their beauty. All the multi-hued and heterogeneous greens which grow in the tropical gardens of Hindustan were there: green chillies, green cucumbers, green spinach, pale lady’s-fingers, purple brinjals, red tomatoes, white turnips, grey artichokes, yellow carrots, golden melons, rose-cheeked mangoes, copper-coloured bananas, all arranged in little baskets, which sloped up from the foot of each shop to its ceiling, on both sides of the street.
And in the street were the endless streams of ill-clad servant boys, ragged men, black-skinned old widows who bargained for a commission, and rich women in silk skirts and tinted aprons, chaperoning their daughters or daughters-in-law, loaded with gold-embroidered silks and garlands of jewels, haggling with the wild-eyed shop-keepers over the price of potatoes.
Amid the clamour of tongues, the challenge of sights and the symphony of smells, Munoo did not know which way to turn. He stared at the piles of fruit which glowed from the beds of green leaves. He nosed towards the baskets in which the more delicate fruits were arrayed. A contingent of ripe, luscious, small mangoes attracted him, and his mouth watered.
‘Ohe, seducer of your daughter!’ called a shop-keeper from a side. ‘Will you lift a weight for two pice?’
‘Han, Lallaji,’ shouted a chorus of five voices.
But Munoo had got hold of the basket in the shop-keeper’s hand. It was as easy as that.
Munoo returned to the vegetable market, dawn after dawn, while Tulsi repaired to the grain market. Their total earnings were never more than eight annas a day, of which the ratio was Tulsi’s six to Munoo’s two. Poor enough wage! But it needed all their pluck and a bit of luck to get it.
For there were swarms of coolies about. And, urged by the fear of having to go without food, driven by fear, they rushed frantically at the shops, pushing, pulling, struggling to shove each other out of the way, till the merchants’ staves had knocked a hillman’s teeth out or bled the sores on a Kashmiri’s head. Then they would fall back, defeated, afraid for their lives and resigned to the workings of Fate, which might single them out for the coveted prize of an anna job. It was not that the strongest of them were chosen and the weaker had to go to the wall. The caprice of any merchant boy decided their lot, or the shrewdness of the lalla who could make them accept less wages for more work. Sometimes, perhaps, a subtle trick could secure a coolie a job. Certainly it was cunning which secured Munoo most of the work he got.
Knowing that there was a great deal of competition in the vegetable market, he would roam into the side streets, and, putting on an innocent expression, greet any ladies who seemed to be heading for the vegetable market: ‘Mother, will you let me carry your shopping home?’
‘Acha acha,’ the woman would say. ‘You can carry the burden if you will do it for a pice.’
‘Oh, two pice, mother—two pice,’ he insisted, pronouncing the word ‘mother’ with a deliberate tenderness that he had specially cultivated for the purpose.
‘Acha acha, may you die!’ the woman replied.
And he would wrest the basket out of her hand, carrying it as an insignia of his established right, so that none of the other coolies should dare to approach the lady.
When the other coolies began to practise the same trick, he had perforce to think of another.
He tried to curry favour with the shop-keepers. But they were concerned with their business, and too selfish, to appreciate his courtesies, especially as all coolies were to them a nuisance—rude, uncouth, dirty people to be rebuked, abused, or beaten like the donkeys which brought the weights of vegetables to the market every morning.
He sought to trick the other coolies by spreading the rumour that the market was to be closed next day. This worked two or three times, but most of the coolies hung around the markets all day and all night, eating, drinking, sleeping and working there, and those who were gullible soon found out that Munoo was a mischievous imp, never to be trusted.
He had to fall back upon the original scheme of booking jobs with women, though he slightly varied the method of getting them now. He did not go out of the market, but while the other coolies sat admiring the beautiful young women who passed through the bazaar, he kept a look-out for the oldest, the ugliest and the most eccentric hags. The only disadvantage of this was that the old ladies bargained vociferously for hours to save a pice, spent ages superstitiously counting each half-pice, and generally wanted to requite Munoo, for patiently following them from shop to shop with a loaded basket half the day and for walking two miles behind them to their houses in the gullies, with a loaf of stale bread and yesterday’s lentils, or haggled with him about the two pice they had promised to pay.
So all his efforts and all Tulsi’s did not earn them more than eight annas a day, and this money could not feed the whole family on anything but lentils and rice.
Meanwhile, though Prabha had recovered from the fever and the bruises, he had had a relapse and lay ill with a nervous breakdown, brought about by the pain of seeing the stock in his factory auctioned away, and by the anxiety of the resolve that he had formed to pay every farthing that he owed to his creditors. He worried, too, on account of the boys, knowing from his own past experience as a coolie in the markets how hard it was to earn even a pice a day.
His condition became worse and worse, until the doctor advised him to go away to the hills if he wanted to save his life.
At last he was persuaded to go home with his wife. Tulsi was to see them off to Pathankot, to put them in a cart there and come back. Munoo was to stay in Daulatpur, as they had not enough money to buy railway tickets for all of them. But he was to join the master and mistress later on in the hills.
It was an awful parting.
Both Prabha and his wife wept bitterly.
Munoo had never seen a man of Prabha’s age and size cry. That wretched face, which had always smiled so gently and so good-naturedly at him and which was now hollow and dark with sickness and misery, looked ridiculous in this plight. The boy shirked coming near his master, as if he had lost all the sympathy of his nature. He looked on mechanically from a distance, asking himself in brief whispers: ‘What is the matter with me? Why can’t I go near him? He has been so kind to me!’
With his mistress, however, he was more affectionate. He fell into her lap as she sat in the window after everything had been packed and, bathed in her tears, felt the shy bird of his heart fluttering in a sad, silken darkness. The memory of the day when he had arrived here came back to him vividly, illuminating the gentle face of this woman, defining the evasive, tender smile with which she had made him feel at home. And then he recalled the pressure of her limbs against him when he was ill. The echo was full of a warmth similar to that which he felt now, only somehow he did not want to give himself to that warmth as he had done during his helplessness.
He withdrew from her grasp with a sudden self-consciousness, and stood torn and miserable while she wept.
Tulsi came with the message that he had engaged a bamboo cart, which stood waiting at the head of the lane to carry them to the station. Two coolies followed him, Tulsi’s friends from the grain market, who had with a natural brotherliness offered to help with the luggage.
There was not much luggage. Only a trunk and bedding.
As Prabha rose, leaning on Tulsi’s and Munoo’s shoulders, he surveyed the desolate room which he had inhabited in the heyday of his prosperity. Then he looked at the single trunk and the bedding being lifted by the coolies and recalled that those were the only things with which he had entered the house when he first came. And now he was going out of Daulatpur with just those two things. All the surplus goods that he had acquired during the interim were gone.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 33