This modern world was fearsome. Approached through spacious grounds which surrounded the bungalows of sahibs, impressively empty in contrast to the congested world in which he lived, he felt like the outcaste he was. But he liked the prim beauty of the place, its handsome villas, half hidden by hedges, half revealed through sumptuous verandas overhung with cane chics and tatties and pearl bead-curtains, inviting the air while warding off the heat, the concrete and stone buildings, clean-cut and secure, with their long show windows of glass.
His rudimentary stare explored the exquisite array of glass bowls, full of coloured water and neatly bottled medicines and powder-puffs and soaps and razors, in the window of a chemist’s shop. But it was beaten back by the hard, shining barrier which made the approach of his imaginary hand past its exterior impossible.
He stared fascinated at a series of enlarged photographs of beautiful women and children and uniformed men, hung by shining brass plates outside a door. At once a wild desire surged up in his heart to see his own face in a brown picture like that of the young sahib who stood dressed in a miniature suit with a white collar round his neck and a straw hat on his head. But the contrast of the neat way in which the sahib was dressed and his own dirty body clothed in rags was disheartening.
He walked past two Indians dressed in English clothes and wondered whether one needed money or education to become a sahib. The glimpse of a fat lalla, the long tuft on whose head contradicted his English suit of white tussore, as he waited for customers behind the glass window of his shop, with its array of silver tea-sets and plates and tumblers and huge cups, answered his inquiry.
But now he walked on in sheer delight at the elegance of clearcut buildings, the polished surfaces of black, blue and fawn-coloured motorcars, gigs and phaetons which passed, without raising any dust on the metal road, at a speed which created the illusion of a quicker rhythm in his own body.
‘Look where you are going, ohe!’ a squeaky little voice fell on his ears suddenly, as he was gazing at the jars of English sweets in the windows of Messrs Jenkins’ General Stores. A memsahib with a pink-white face covered with brown spots, naked according to his Indian standards, for her silk dress immodestly exposed her thin arms, reedy legs and flat bosom, stood before him.
‘Look where you go!’ she exclaimed, stiffening and turning up her nose with apparent distaste.
Munoo did not understand the peculiar tone of her bad Hindustani, but guessed from the manner in which she was avoiding contact with the air about him that she considered him unworthy for some reason. As, however, he had developed a strong sense of inferiority before white people, on account of his uncle and the Sham Nagar Babu’s hush-hush manner of respectful attention to the sahibs, he did not become conscious of the insult at all. Instead he felt happy to have been spoken to by the memsahib, and, possessed by the desire and the hope of becoming one day worthy of walking in the same street with people like her, he rushed away to the railway bridge which divides the sahibs’ world from the outskirts of the native town.
He did not want to recognize any connection between himself and the lepers who whined ‘Oh, give me a pice!’ as they sat exposing their sores, or with the blind beggars who chanted verses as they swayed their heads up and down. He felt he belonged to a superior world because he had enjoyed the privilege of walking through a superior world. ‘I have read up to the fifth class,’ he said to himself, to confirm his claim of superiority, ‘and I have served in a babu’s house where a sahib once paid a visit.’
The darker shades of his experience were going to crowd out the bright lights of those two peak points of glory, but he stifled them, ignoring all the memories of his life save the two acts of going to school and being in the same room with a sahib at Sham Nagar.
The riot of noises at the carriage-stand opposite the old caravanserai, however, fell on his ears and the bewildering multiplicity of sights swamped him.
The sunburnt, scraggy, bearded peasants waiting for a lorry to start, with their bundles of shopping on their backs; the red-cheeked, ferocious-looking Pathans roaming about in their nattily-tied turbans, gold-braided red velvet waistcoats, baggy trousers and thick slippers, selling knives and herbs; the frail Hindu confectioners crouching behind their brass trays of sweetmeats, in greasy garments; the cows and buffaloes chewing the cud; the horses snorting and neighing, were all familiar sights and sounds to him, and negligible. He did not have to make an effort to prove his eligibility among them.
The only question that shaped itself in his mind was how to find work and where. He did not very much want to go back to the vegetable market, and he did not want to go home, not until Tulsi came back. At any rate, they would have to leave off sleeping there when the month was over. Then what? Tulsi was all right. ‘He can earn his living at the grain market,’ Munoo thought. ‘I can’t. What shall I do? . . .’ ‘Go away,’ came the answer. ‘Where—not back to Sham Nagar?’ He recalled that he had never written to his uncle. So far as he was concerned Daya Ram was dead to him and he was dead to Daya Ram.
As he walked along, head bent and absorbed, he heard the sudden beat of a drum: dhum, dhum, dhum. He looked up and saw a city crier, who had come to a standstill by the crossroads, with a troupe of sandwich-men bearing huge coloured posters. One showed a woman in a sahib’s costume, decorated with endless medals, flourishing a whip at a pack of ferocious lions, tigers and elephants; another displayed her as she lay supporting a colossal stone; a third pictured her pushing a carriage full of men with her head.
‘Miss Tara Bai! Miss Tara Bai!’ shouted the crier. ‘Miss Tara Bai!—the Female Giant!—owner of the most spectacular circus in the world—is beginning her last performance in the city of Daulatpur now! Marvellous feats of strength hitherto unseen in the seven worlds! Feats of strength and endurance and power for which she has won trophies from all the kings and queens of Europe! Tamer of wild beasts! Queen of artists! Take this last opportunity to see her, because she goes to Bombay tonight en route for England, and will not come back this side for years. Miss Tara Bai! Miss Tara Bai! Wonder Woman of the Age!’ And the crier struck the drums again, dhum, dhum, dhum, dri, dri, dhum, and walked on.
‘I must go to the circus,’ Munoo decided with a delight in his eyes. ‘And I will go to Bombay.’
He snatched a leaflet which the sandwich-men were distributing as they followed the barker. It read:
‘OUTSIDE MADAN LAL’S THEATRE
BY THE HATHI GATE
MISS TARA BAI! THE FEMALE HERCULES!
MOST MAGNIFICENT! MOST SPECTACULAR
SHOW ON EARTH!’
There, fifty yards away, was the Hathi Gate, its red bricks shining cruelly against the glare of the sun. And there, a hundred yards away, shadowed by the imposing architecture of Madan Lal’s Theatre, was the vast circus tent.
‘Bombay, Bom-Bom-Bombay!’ The word seemed to strike like the pendulum of the Town Hall in his brain. And, as if the reverberations of the note had conjured up all the elements of his life in a deep echo, the pendulum gathered up in its swing the distant memories of all that he had heard about Bombay.
A coolie in the vegetable market, whose brother had gone to work in Bombay, had said that one could earn anything from fifteen to thirty rupees a month in a factory there. And that it was truly a wonder city one should visit before one died. The coolie said his brother had exhorted him to save money from that very moment for the fare, and work day and night to get there. Because once you were there, there was plenty of work. The ships sailed across the black waters, too, from Bombay, the coolie had said, and there were palm trees and coconut trees in plenty on the ambrosial isle, among which lived Southerners and Parsees.
‘It is an island, of course, it is an island.’ Munoo recollected having read in his geography book that Bombay was an island on the coast of Malabar. ‘Bombay, Bom-Bom-Bombay. I shall go to Bombay,’ he decided.
He crossed a dirty ditch by a small garden beyond which the top of Miss Tara Bai’s circus stood.
He had looked at the handbill and read that the price of the cheapest seat was eight annas. And he had decided that he was going to see the circus without paying the price of a ticket. ‘I wouldn’t waste the rupee Prabha gave me on useless enjoyment like this,’ he said to himself, feeling the edge of his loincloth, in which the silver coin lay knotted.
His habitual recklessness had suddenly turned to unscrupulousness, because his good conscience sought to avenge the failure of his master. So he avoided the regular entrance.
A bay horse, a white mare and snub-nosed pony stood snorting as they grazed on a bundle of grass by a few piebald nags. Munoo detected the form of a smart man with a turned-up moustache, looking somewhat like Sorabji, the Parsee chemist, except that he wore breeches, whereas the compounder of medicines always had on cotton trousers and an alpaca jacket.
He crept under cover of a small, filthy tent and waited tensely for a while. Then he looked towards the right and sighted an elephant coming soundlessly out of the entrance of the tent, followed by a crowd of city urchins, while a black driver sat on its head with his legs hidden under the ears of the beast.
‘Do you know it dances, climbs on a ladder, and plays a mouth-organ,’ one of the urchins was saying to his friends.
Munoo ran and joined the throng of boys.
One of the leaders of the throng mistook Munoo’s caper for an invasion.
He lifted Munoo’s strip of a turban and threw it at the elephant’s trunk. Jumbo swallowed it up after a graceful salute.
Munoo returned the compliment by snatching the cap off the boy’s head and throwing it to the elephant.
Before he knew where he was Munoo had been caught by the neck.
He swerved and, planting his leg against his opponent, flung him lightly into the ditch.
As the young man struggled out, covered all over with slime, the urchins behind roared and screamed with laughter.
The elephant shied for a moment and the driver punched the beast with an iron handle, cursing Munoo the while.
‘He started it first,’ Munoo apologized.
The driver jumped down and, catching Munoo by the ear, led him towards the trunk of the elephant to frighten him.
All the boys shied off screaming.
Munoo thought his last moment had come. But Jumbo only blew a heavy breath at his head and went on.
‘I am not afraid,’ Munoo said brazenly.
The driver smiled.
‘All right,’ the driver said. ‘Go and call that grass-cutter who is going on the road with the bundle of grass on his head.’
Munoo was only too willing to oblige, for he knew that if he came back with the grass-cutter he would get free access to the circus ground, where people were not admitted without a pass.
He ran for the grass-cutter. He caught him at the entrance of the Theatre stables and brought him back.
‘I want to see the tamasha,’ he said to the elephant-driver, currying favour with a humble smile.
‘Go away! Go away!’ the driver said casually.
‘Look,’ Munoo insisted, ‘I did that work for you.’
The man was walking towards the back of the tent.
Munoo followed lightly behind.
‘Look, I did that work for you!’ he repeated as they got well behind the tent.
‘Don’t pester me,’ snapped the elephant-driver. ‘Sit down there, anywhere, and see through the hole in the canopy.’
And he walked away.
Munoo looked for a hole in the canopy. There did not seem to be one at first glance. He tried to lift it from one side.
‘Don’t do that,’ the elephant-driver’s voice came sharp into his ear. ‘You will bring the whole tent down. Here!’
Munoo jumped towards a rent in the canvas in which the elephant-driver had dug the forefinger of his left hand.
The performance was well under way. The arena was packed in a crescent of layer upon layer of chairs.
On the near side a band played European music, while under the top of the tent a troupe of trapeze dancers had just brought off a miraculous swing, flying from one end of space to another, till their supple bodies came to a standstill and they walked out of the arena.
Munoo’s heart beat wildly at the cheering which followed. Then its violent activity died down in the applause with which the audience greeted Miss Tara Bai, who came swaying, almost like the elephant, Munoo thought, which had swallowed his turban.
He could not see the details of her face through the rent in the tent, as she lay down to accept a huge stone on her stomach and rested calmly as two men beat the stone with siege-hammers, in the way in which Munoo had seen the coolies break huge boulders to make small stones for new roads. There was applause as she flung the weight off her body and stood bowing to the audience.
Munoo was spellbound.
But a noise of shuffling feet at a side entrance to the tent about twenty yards away on Munoo’s left made him withdraw his eyes. It was only a white horse galloping into the arena.
He looked again and saw the horse enter the ring, followed by a young man who wore what seemed to Munoo curiously tight Angrezi trousers and a long cloak of silver sequins. The man might have been a rubber doll the way he leapt from the ground on to the back of the fast-moving horse, stood balanced on its back for a moment, somersaulted, then balanced himself on his head with his legs stretched in the air, and slipped off lightly over the tail of his mount, as easily as if he were walking down marble stairs.
Munoo watched enraptured, his eyes wide open, his brain in a whirl at what seemed to be a miracle.
‘I should like to do that,’ he said to himself, wildly excited. But then the sight of the accomplished artist jumping from a very precarious position clean on the back of his mount and galloping away seemed an impossible feat for him to imitate. ‘He will be going to Vilayat beyond the seas to where the sahib-logs come from,’ Munoo thought. ‘I cannot go there, anyway. I am only a coolie. But I will go to Bombay. Probably I might earn enough there to go beyond the black waters.’
From the midst of resounding cheers a couple of clowns seemed to have been born, dressed in conic hats and loose, spotted clothes, their faces painted white, red and black. They first played with a coloured ball, balancing it on the tips of their extended noses, then aped the trapeze dancers with hesitant movements, which somehow became perfect towards the end and created in Munoo just the effect they were intended to create.
The lion-cages were coming in.
But Munoo was disturbed by the elephant-driver, who was passing.
‘Come, oh boy, do some work; help me to carry these buckets of water; you have seen enough of the circus now.’
It was hard for Munoo to tear himself away, but he felt that he owed the whole treat to the elephant-driver and could not refuse to help. He rose limply from where he had crouched and followed the man.
‘Surely an elephant drinks more than a bucketful of water,’ Munoo said, shirking from the prospect of having to carry too many buckets.
‘Yes, but I am only washing his buttocks clean,’ replied the driver.
Munoo lifted a bucket in each hand from the pump at a corner of the compound and carried it to where Jumbo still stood eating the grass that the driver had bought for it.
‘Everyone can see that I am a coolie,’ Munoo felt as he sped along. And he was slightly crestfallen at the prospect of never being able to go beyond the seas as the horse-rider would. ‘Perhaps I shall go to Bombay,’ he said to console himself.
But the sheer strain of carrying buckets of water brought about a feeling of exhilaration in his bones. He felt light and buoyant after having done three turns at the pipe.
‘I shall ask this man if he will take me to Bombay,’ he said to himself, as he stood by the elephant-driver, wiping the sweat off his brow.
‘Can’t you employ me as your assistant and take me to Bombay with you?’ he asked, his voice reverberating through his body, tense and hard for a moment.
�
��I can’t give you a job, because elephant-training is learnt through long experience and we go beyond the black waters soon,’ said the driver. ‘But there is no reason why you shouldn’t stow yourself away somewhere in the train in which we go to Bombay. I stole rides in goods trains across the whole Southern peninsula when I was your age.’
‘Are you talking true talk?’ asked Munoo, to keep up the vague promise.
‘Han,’ said the driver. ‘You stay here and help us to pack. I shall get you wages for the coolie work you do. And at night I shall smuggle you somewhere into the train.’
‘Oh, you are a kind man,’ said Munoo, his blood quickening. ‘How shall I thank you?’
‘Don’t,’ said the driver, stiffening. ‘Somebody will be listening. Come, get some more grass for Jumbo.’
4
THE ENGINE OF THE SPECIAL CIRCUS TRAIN WHISTLED SHRILLY AND THEN began to move.
Munoo’s heart throbbed with fear and with the pang of separation from Daulatpur as he lay flat by the edge of an open truck on the thick folds of a rolled-up tent, looking up to the stars through the darkness. He recalled the grim moments of the night when he had escaped from Sham Nagar. Only he was not sweating now as much as he had sweated on that occasion. And he did not feel so guilty. He had really earned the ride by working through the whole afternoon, carrying huge, heavy steel ring tops, which came off the centre poles of the vast tent, on to the carts which brought it to the train. Nor did he feel so alone, as the elephant-driver was somewhere about in a servants’ compartment. But there was the same haunting, ghostly air about the whistle of the engine in the dark which had frightened him almost a year ago.
The train was running slowly past the oil tanks of the Burma Oil Company. Munoo wished it would hurry, for, though secure, he was still a little afraid that someone might come and throw him out. And then he would have to go back to the vegetable market. ‘No,’ he said to himself, ‘I would kill myself rather than go back. I would prefer to die than to work there.’ He felt, as most determined people feel when they have once conceived an idea, that the frustration of his plan would be death.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 35