‘Acha!’ said Nadir Khan contemptuously, and turned to a young Parsee errand-boy, who sat, dressed English fashion, on a stool by the wooden watch-box. ‘Lalkaka, go and tell Chimta Sahib there is an old coolie wanting employment.’
The boy had awakened on Munoo’s shoulder and the girl on Lakshmi’s arms had come to life too. They grovelled in the dust of the road in complete oblivion of everything.
‘The Sahib is very nice,’ Hari said to reassure Munoo after they had waited for about twenty minutes in silence.
Munoo’s suspense was heightened by the anticipation of the exalted contact with an Englishman that he would soon enjoy. He recalled the small face of Mr England at the house of the Babu in Sham Nagar, and the glistening bald head of the Sahib who came to Cat Killer’s Lane in Daulatpur. He was elated.
Lakshmi looked towards her husband as if she were going to say something, because her heart too had begun to throb with the joy of being able to see one of those red-faced men whom she had always seen through her veil from afar. But she suppressed her happiness and kept quiet. She had set the children playing about with pebbles and pieces of stone on the road to divert their attention from the breakfast they might want.
‘Don’t throw stones about,’ shouted Nadir Khan, striking the end of his rifle on the ground, when he heard the wild, free tone of the children’s laughter.
They came running to hide behind their mother’s skirt. Hari turned on them with a rebuke.
Lakshmi pressed them into her lap.
Munoo smiled sympathetically.
At this juncture appeared Jimmie Thomas, sometime mechanic in a Lancashire mill, now for fifteen years head foreman in one of the biggest cotton mills in India, a massive man with a scarlet bulldog face and a small waxed moustache, his huge body dressed in a greasy white shirt, greasy white trousers and a greasy white polo topee, of which the leather strap hung down at the back of his thick neck.
‘Salaam Huzoor Chimta Sahib,’ said Hari, bending low and taking the palm of his hand to his forehead.
‘Tum Harry,’ said Jimmie Thomas. ‘You come back?’
‘Han, Huzoor, mai-bap,’ said Hari, joining his hands, ‘and I have brought my wife and child also to work, and a young man from the North.’
‘Why did you not bring the whole of your village, ooloo, rogue!’ said Jimmie Thomas, who had not only acquired the Indian accent, but the Indian manner and the Indian swear-words.
‘I will write a letter to some more people, Huzoor, if you need more workers,’ said the simple Hari, innocent of the foreman’s sarcasm.
‘Stupid bullock!’ said Jimmie irritably. ‘There are no jobs here. Perhaps for that boy,’ he continued, looking Munoo up and down, ‘but I have very little room.’
‘But, Huzoor,’ said Hari, pushing forward his hands in abject humility, ‘you are the giver of food to the poor, Sahib. You are mother and father. You can make room for us.’
‘Acha, acha, fifty rupees a month altogether,’ said Jimmie Thomas, raising his hands high in the air and showing the tigers, the snakes and the women tattooed on his bare arms, ‘twenty for you, twenty for that boy, five for your wife, two and a half each for those children.’
‘But, Huzoor!’ said Hari, touching the foreman’s black boots with his hand and taking the touch of the beef hide to his forehead. ‘Be kind. Just think that we have to live in a room here and food is expensive.’
‘What have you done for me that I should think of that?’ said the foreman, blushing purple and seeking to control his confusion by twirling his waxed moustache. ‘What have you brought as a gift from your village for the Memsahib that I should be kind to you? You have never given me or the Memsahib a basket of fruit on the big day. If the pay suits you all, take it, otherwise go away.’ And he made to go.
‘Oh, Huzoor,’ Hari wailed, and almost ran towards the Sahib. ‘We will please you. But be kind to us. I was getting thirty rupees a month when I was here before.’
‘You think, bloody fool,’ said the foreman bluntly, ‘that you can go away when you like and come back when you like and get the same pay all the time? The burra Sahib has ordered me not to take any coolies back who have once left. He doesn’t want old and used men. I am doing you a favour, bahinchod!’
‘Oh, Huzoor,’ entreated Hari, joining his hands again, ‘please be kind to us for the sake of these children.’
‘Yes,’ said the foreman, ‘you have the pleasure of going to bed together, damn fools, and breeding like rabbits, and I should be kind to you when your children come. . . .’
‘Huzoor Sahib,’ interposed Munoo, ‘I heard in Daulatpur that the least pay for work in a factory was thirty rupees.’
‘You bark a lie!’ said Jimmie Thomas. And he would have burst, but Lalkaka brought a book for him to sign.
‘Let us try somewhere else,’ whispered Munoo, nudging Hari by the elbow.
Hari was not so hopeful about the other factories, and he knew. ‘Acha, speak, you want the job or no?’ said Jimmie finally. ‘You will find no work elsewhere. There are hundreds of coolies in Bombay who can’t find work at all. I take you because you have experience and the boy there looks smart.’
‘Oh, Huzoor,’ said Hari, ‘we want to work with you, but be kind and consider our lot. Rice is so dear here.’
‘Acha, acha, you two can have twenty-five rupees a month,’ said the foreman, flourishing his hands frighteningly. ‘I take pity on you this time. But you know you did not do anything for me the last time you were here. . . . I am kind to you folk.’ He set about to do business with a sudden smile. ‘And now I suppose you have no money. Well, I will advance you ten rupees at four annas in the rupee, which sum I will add to the regular monthly commission you give to me. Agreed? I will go and fetch the money.’
He went.
‘I lend money on a lower interest,’ said Nadir Khan. ‘Two annas on a rupee.’
‘Now we have agreed with the Sahib,’ said Hari, his heart thumping at the thought that Nadir Khan might be angry with him.
Munoo took advantage of the Sahib’s absence and Nadir Khan’s momentary withdrawal into the watch-cabin to nudge Hari again and to whisper to him the absurdity of having to pay a commission to the foreman besides an exorbitant interest on the money he was borrowing.
‘It is no use,’ replied Hari, wearily shrugging his shoulders. ‘It is the same everywhere. Paying a commission to the foreman is a question of self-preservation. He is the most important man in the factory.’
Indeed, thought Munoo, the Sahib must be an important man, but his clothes were greasy. He did not know that the Sahib in greasy clothes was the virtual master of the factory, from the number of functions entrusted to him. He did not know that he was the employer’s agent to engage workmen, the god on whose bounty the workmen depended for the security of their jobs once they had got them, that he was the man in charge, responsible for the supervision of the labourers while at work; that he was the chief mechanic, who, with other mechanics, helped to keep the machines running; that he was the technical teacher of the workers; that he was the intermediary between the employer and the worker (for it was through him that the employer signified any change he wished to communicate to the workers); that because of all this he charged every worker in the factory a price for the gift of a job, a price which went up if there were more men about than there were vacancies to fill; and that, incidentally, he ran a moneylender’s business; that lastly he was a landlord who owned hundreds of straw huts in the neighbourhood and rented them out to the coolies.
It was in the capacity of landlord that he appeared when he brought the money. ‘I have a hut,’ he said, ‘at the head of Sahib’s Lane, for which the rent is five rupees a month. It is open. Go and occupy it before I let it to anyone else. I will let it to you for three rupees.’
‘Huzoor, you are kind, you are father and mother,’ said Hari, touching his forehead with the palm of his hand again.
‘All right, all right, go, and be here sharp to
the tune of the first whistle tomorrow morning, all of you,’ said Jimmie Thomas, curling his lips into a benevolence that hardened his soft, fat, padded face.
The cavalcade walked back the way it had come.
‘That is Sahib’s Lane,’ said Hari, as they crossed the road and entered a pit bordered by heaps of rotting garbage and pools of noisome sewers. ‘And that there is, perhaps, the hut which the Sahib has rented us. Did he not say it is at the head of the lane?’ He pointed to the nearest of the many straw huts, which stood in parallel lines at the foot of the long grey tenements that stretched horizontally, a hundred yards away. The old man seemed to know every patch of ground, having lived here for a year before he went away to his village to recuperate from an illness and to fetch his family.
He went up to the shed at the end of the lane and, lifting the sacking which hung at the low doorway, stooped and led the party into the gloom.
The roof of clumsy straw mats, which drooped dangerously at the sides from the cracked beams supporting it in the middle, was not high enough for Munoo or Hari’s wife to stand in, though Hari, whose back was bent, escaped hitting his head against it. The mud floor was at a level lower than the pathway outside, overgrown with grass which was nourished by the inflow of rain-water. The cottage boasted not a window nor a chimney to let in the air and light and to eject the smoke. But then, had it not the advantage of a sound sackcloth curtain at its door, when most of the huts in the neighbourhood had torn and tattered jute bags, or broken cane chics, old rags, bent tins and washing and what not, to guard them against the world?
‘Let us settle down and rest,’ said Hari, taking everything for granted. ‘Lakshmi, give us all some of the food left over from the journey.’
Munoo’s dreams were shattered as he surveyed the gloom of the grave in which he stood, bending double, and as he smelt the damp, fetid smell that oozed from its sides. He had cast his eyes on the imposing tenements with the hope that he would live in one of their top-storied rooms and survey the world from that supreme eminence.
He suddenly felt a sweat cover his face, and his head seemed to whirl in a frenzy of movement. Then the darkness seemed to come stealing over his eyes. He felt dizzy and faint and struggled to breathe in the suffocating atmosphere that enveloped him. He smiled and sank on to the ground to save himself from swooning.
Lakshmi, who had been distributing stale sweet-bread from the trunk, rushed to his side.
The boy had sufficiently recovered from his fainting fit to accompany Hari for a walk up to the bazaar of the Mill Land on a shopping tour.
It was about half a mile away on the main road, which left Sir George White’s Mill on one side and skirted past the Jamsetji Cowasji factories, a bazaar only in name. For there were a few tumbledown booths and stalls which displayed coloured rags, imitation beads and pearls, tin toys, cotton slippers, razors, knives, scent sprays, and such dazzling manufactures with which Europe has won the heart of Asia. There were, however, a few regular shops: a wine shop, owned by a fat Parsee; a betel-leaf and biri shop, occupied mainly by a large mirror; a grimy cook-shop ministered by a greasy Muhammadan; a cloth-seller’s shop, where a tailor sat wielding a Singer sewing-machine; and, last, a grocer’s general store, owned by a lean, white Sikh with a scarce beard, who sat dressed in a clean turban, a closed-collar coat, white tight pyjama trousers and pump shoes, flourishing a hand scale in which he weighed lentils, rice, flour, and sugar from the tiers of baskets that rose on small wooden planks.
‘Salaam, Sardarji,’ Hari said, the light of humility glistening tremulously in his eyes.
Munoo felt rather strange and therefore sat down about a yard away on a brick, watching the group of coolies in waist-coat-like blouses, loincloths and turbans, who formed a semi-circle two yards away from the counter of the shop.
‘Eka, eka! dua, dua!’ the Sikh chanted as he weighed the rice, completely deaf to the honour that was shown him.
‘When did you come back, Hari?’ asked a coolie who came and stood by the wooden pillar of the shop with a fowl under each arm.
‘Yesterday,’ said Hari, joining his hands to greet an old comrade.
‘And are the wife and children well?’ the man asked.
‘Han, they have come with me,’ said Hari.
‘Eka, dua, eka . . . don’t talk and make a row!’ shouted the Sikh. ‘Is this my shop or a place for you to gossip? And get away, get away, give me a little air and light. You sit there with your big hulking bodies casting your evil shadows on all the foodstuff.’
The coolies became silent, and, smiling humble, sheepish smiles, looked at each other, then hung their heads down, and sat still in the fast gathering twilight.
‘Eka, dua, tria, eka, dua, tria!’ the Sikh sang to remember the measure of the pulses that he was weighing out.
‘What else does the Chimta Sahib want?’ he asked, as he emptied the seventh measure of seven different foodstuffs into the corners of the sheets which the long-coated bearer of the foreman had tied into several knots by means of jute strings.
‘Doe double roti!’ the bearer said. ‘A dozen eggs and two chickens.’
‘Here are the double rotis,’ said the Sikh, fishing out two loaves of white bread such as Munoo knew the sahib-logs ate. ‘And here, one, two, three . . . here are the dozen eggs. As for the fowls. . . .’ He switched his attention to the coolie who stood with the fowls in his hands. ‘Oh, son of an owl, Shambhu, what do you want for those two?’
Shambhu came forward, knocking one leg against another in his hurry.
‘Feel this, Sardarji, feel this,’ he said, handing first one, then the other, cackling, fluttering cock from under his arm.
‘Hum,’ said the Sardar, feeling the fowl, twisting his lips into an ironical smile and winking his right eye at the bearer, at the same time. ‘This is an old cock, and the other is as light as a feather. No flesh on them, all bones. How much do you want for them?’
‘Sardar Sahib, you are the master, you are my father and mother,’ said the coolie. ‘Please give me a fair price for them. They are lusty young cocks and they have been fed on crumbs while we starved.’
‘Here we are, Badar Din,’ said the Sikh, handing over the fowls to the foreman’s bearer, winking surreptitiously the while to ensure that nothing was said about the price at which he was selling them before the man from whom he was buying them. ‘I will put it all on the Sahib’s account. And here,’ he continued, fishing for a handful of coloured English sweets that stood in the jar behind him, ‘here is a little gift for the Memsahib. You come one afternoon and we will settle the accounts.’
The bearer put the cocks under his left arm, pocketed the sweets, and walked off with a swagger characteristic of the white man’s servant.
‘Ohe Shambhu! Do you want money or do you want rice in exchange for the fowls?’ the Sardar asked.
‘Part money and part food, Sardarji,’ said Shambhu, meekly.
‘Acha, here are eight annas in cash and I will weigh you some rice,’ the Sardar said, taking up the scales.
‘But Sardarji,’ said Shambhu, joining his hands and kneeling down in supplication, ‘each of those cocks is worth a rupee. My wife fed them well so that we could get enough food for a week. I was all against selling them, but we haven’t any ready money. Sardarji, be fair and deal straight.’
‘And do you think I have dealt you crooked?’ shouted the Sardar, his white face raging red. ‘The Sahib won’t pay me at all for those cocks. That is a bribe to him so that I may be allowed to trade here. I am not making any profit on them.’
‘The Sahib and you are both my masters,’ said Shambhu. ‘You are both rich and can afford to give gifts. I would like to make you the gift of a fowl later on. But these cocks, Sardarji, they are the only things I had in the world. I am in debt. All my pay has been confiscated for damaged cloth and for debts I owe. There is nothing for my wife and child to eat. Five seers of rice won’t last two days. And what can I buy in Bombay for eight annas? Please b
e kind, I pray you, and give me a fair price.’
‘Again you say I am going to give you an unfair price,’ shouted the Sikh, working himself up into a show of rage and indignation. ‘Unfair. You accuse me of unfairness. I, who worship the Guru Granth! You give me a bad reputation! Here are eight annas over, and the rice. And now go away and don’t make any more noise. I have other customers to deal with.’
‘Oh, but sire!’ said Shambhu, summoning all the meekness, the humility, the weakness in the hollows of his cheeks and the dim pits of his eyes. ‘Please be kind, take pity on me and mine. Give me the just price for the cocks.’
‘Get out of my sight!’ the Khalsa raved, suddenly rising on his haunches and striking Shambhu with a big wooden spoon. ‘Get away, whimperer!’
Shambhu fell back, but not before he had been hit on the mouth. He wept like a child, with ridiculous, hysterical sobs.
Munoo sat fixed to his seat, staring vacantly at it all, as if he were not concerned with the quarrel. His body shivered with sympathy when Shambhu was struck. But it became hard and feelingless as the man fell back.
Hari and the other coolies proceeded to help Shambhu to get up.
‘Come along. Come along. Come and be a man!’ the coolies were saying to disguise their sympathy for their comrade, for they were all dependent on the Sardar’s bounty and dared not antagonize him.
‘Here’s another four annas and the swine’s rice,’ said the Sikh. ‘Take him out of my sight for Guru’s sake!’
The coolies helped Shambhu to get up. He wiped the blood which trickled over his chin from the mouth, collected the money, took the conic packet of rice, joined hands to the Sardar, and wailed: ‘Forgive me, Sardarji, forgive.’
And he disappeared into the darkness.
‘What do you want?’ the Sardar asked the other coolies.
‘Nothing, Sardarji,’ one of them said for the others. ‘We are waiting to see if you will give us a weight which you want transported somewhere.’
‘No, I have no weight to be lifted today,’ he said peevishly. And he turned to Munoo. ‘You, you, ohe, what do you want?’
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 39