‘He is with me,’ said Hari. ‘He is a new employee at my mill. He wants to open an account. And perhaps you recognize me, your humble Hari. I was a coolie here last year.’
‘I have raised the rate of interest on the money I lend out now, Hari,’ said the Sardar.
‘I have not come to borrow, Sardarji,’ said Hari, ‘but if you will give me two rupees’ worth of rice and a rupee worth of dal on credit, I shall be grateful. The rest of the stuff I will buy with cash.’
‘The rate of interest on goods bought on credit is an anna on the rupee,’ announced the Sardar.
‘If that is what you will, master,’ said Hari, ‘I don’t complain.’
‘Spread your cloth, then. And tell me what are the other things you want,’ said the shopkeeper, as if he were conferring a favour.
‘What is the rate of flour, Sardarji?’
‘Flour is a rupee a seer, rice eight annas a seer, clarified butter is five rupees a seer, best mustard oil, for cooking, a rupee a seer, dal of channa five annas a seer, gur four annas a seer, angrezi sugar eight annas a seer,’ the Sikh quoted all the prices quickly, peevishly, querulously. ‘Now hurry up. I have other things to do.’
Hari paid for ten seers of flour, fifteen seers of rice, five seers of dal, a seer of cooking oil, a seer of native sugar.
He did not reckon the money he would have to pay at the end of the month, because he could not reckon at all.
The shrill whistle of the factory pierced the thin, cool air of the twilight.
Lakshmi was already up in the hut, groping around, almost in undress, for some cold rice and dal to serve for breakfast to her family. As she crouched over the new earthen pan, scraping the last little bit of rice gruel from where it had stuck to the bottom, little beads of perspiration covered her forehead. But she did not let the discomfort of warmth irritate her in any way. Her face, the face of a young girl in spite of the fact that she had had two children, still had the bloom of youth which the open life of the village had encouraged. And whether she was still too innocent of suffering, or whether her inherited springs of energy kindled her body, there was a gambolling light in the coy black eyes that matched the rich brown of her cheeks, enhanced by the little gold point of the ring in her small nose, that glistened in the semi-darkness, and there was a naïve, fearless smile on her half-parted lips, and a furtive dimple on her chin.
As she heard the sharp, steel sound of the factory whistle she felt a cold shiver of some distant fear run through her belly. She got up to rid herself of the commotion by transferring it to her husband, like a child who goes to its parent in trouble. She caught the big toe of his right foot and shook it with as much reverence as she could put into the rude act.
‘Hun, hun, ho!’ bellowed Hari as he sprang up, suddenly opening his eyes.
‘Time to go to work,’ Lakshmi said gently; ‘the whistle has just gone.’ And she set about waking the children by washing their eyes, full of thick crusts of grit, with a wet corner of her cotton sari.
‘Awake, brother,’ Hari called, stirring Munoo by the shoulder.
The boy opened his eyes slowly, moved his head sideways, yawned, stretched his arms, wriggled about on the taut muscles of his body, and sat up staring at the full vision of Lakshmi’s face without a veil. He had seen young girls of her age, her form, her rich, pale hue, on the banks of the Beas in the mornings. His whole being warmed with the comfort of that knowledge which a beautiful person gives one.
‘May I have some water to wash my face?’ he asked modestly, not addressing Lakshmi, but meaning her to hear.
She looked at him, then withdrew her eyes with a wide-open smile, filled a small brass jug from the pitcher and put it near the far corner of the hut, where a slab of stone lay slanting into a hole, the drain for water.
‘No time to eat if we want to get washed at the pond before we go to work,’ said Hari, seeing his wife dish out the food. ‘We must get up before the first whistle from tomorrow.’
Lakshmi coaxed the children to eat, in spite of her husband’s orders. But the boy and girl, awakened before they had had their full sleep, were irritable and refused to eat.
‘Come along! come along!’ said Hari, who was ready to go as soon as he stood up from the sheet on which he had slept. And he led the way out of the hut.
Munoo wiped his face on his tunic and followed him, feeling fresh on the cheeks, but stale in the mouth, which he had not cleaned for days.
Lakshmi took time to prepare the children, and the various knickknacks, and only emerged when Hari’s temper dictated sternly:
‘Come out! We will be late. Everyone is on his way already!’
She emerged, dragging the children.
As they reached the edges of the pond they dispersed to relieve themselves among the other men and women who sat answering the call of nature, little distances apart.
A second sharp, clear whistle hastened them before they had settled for very long.
They rose and finished their toilet, sprinkling first their bottoms and then their faces with palmfuls of water from under the thick crusts of scum on the surface of the pond.
The third and final whistle greeted them a few yards from the factory, as they walked, with the swarm of other coolies, with uncertain footsteps through the slime and mud of the unpaved pathways, in the dew-covered fields. They were all silent, with furrows of fear fixed on their brows, with the heavy weight of thought in their bent heads. Occasionally one of the many coolies muttered a hoarse curse as he splashed the dirty water of a puddle over his bare legs, or slipped on the earth; or ‘Ram, Ram,’ said a pious old coolie greeting another; or a young coolie peevishly nudged a comrade who was not agile. The progress of this swarm was slow.
Munoo observed that the hands of the factory clock marked the hour of six.
He followed Hari past Nadir Khan, through an untidy compound littered with rubbish and congested with bales of compressed cotton behind huge motor lorries.
The factory before him consisted of blocks of buildings grouped together into a space hardly big enough to hold half of them.
The other workers did not seem to notice the cramped spaces of the factory, except perhaps Hari’s wife and her children, who had put their fingers in their mouths. All the other coolies filed past as if they lived and ate and slept and had their being here, perhaps because they had got used to the look of the mill, or because they measured it against the background of hovels in which they lived, and really liked to come away to the comparative luxury of the huge building. Munoo preferred the outlook of a bungalow, which he later learnt to know as the house of Chimta Sahib, standing by itself in the grounds beyond the Manager’s office on the left, in the arena of a garden, profusely overgrown with marigolds and hollyhocks and nasturtiums.
At the door of the shed which led into the factory stood Jimmie Thomas. As each group of coolies looked up and saw him twirling the fine ends of his moustache, they would suddenly lift their hands, salaam him and simultaneously lift their feet and rush into the factory like chickens frightened of a shadow. But since the entrance to the factory was not big enough to allow for such alacrity, it gave the Chimta Sahib the first of a series of opportunities to show the natives the methods of organized behaviour in the factory.
‘Why do you run now? Why didn’t you come earlier, that you now make up for lost time by running? Walk one after another in Indian file,’ the Sahib shouted in the Englishman’s Hindustani.
‘Salaam, Sahib!’ said Hari, wisely taking his family up to him only after all the other workers had passed into the sheds.
‘You new coolies,’ said Jimmie Thomas, mopping the sweat off his face with a greasy handkerchief. ‘Come, I will take you to your jobs.’
‘Han, Huzoor,’ said Hari, and his retinue followed at these words.
The preparing-shed was on the ground floor, ten yards away from the small door which led into the factory.
The Chimta Sahib halted at its narrow entrance, through whic
h you could only pass by lowering your head.
‘Women, children, go here. Here work. Ask Matron to tell you what to do,’ he said, his fluent Hindustani becoming a bit faulty. ‘Matron!’
Lakshmi could not understand the speech. She stood mute for a moment, the apron on her head covering her face completely.
‘Chalo, Chalo, be quick,’ he bullied, stamping the floor with his feet, sweating, his face suffused to a vivid pink, either with anger or with the heat in the gallery where they stood.
Mortally afraid and trembling, Hari rushed towards his wife and pushed her into the shed quicker than she could drag the children.
‘Come, come, woman, no snake is going to bite you,’ said the Matron, receiving her inside the door.
Munoo sensed from the Chimta Sahib’s manner that it was his and Hari’s turn next. So he walked carefully through the gallery up the difficult iron stairs, determined not to err. But, of course, he erred, on the side of caution. He minced his steps.
‘Jaldi chalo!’ shouted the foreman from the top, where, in spite of his heavy frame, he had climbed quickly and easily. ‘Am I your servant that I should wait for you all day?’
The boy hurried up the steps, afraid that one false step and he would stumble to death or break his skull on the iron staircase.
As he came past the dark wall on his left past box-like rooms, built round heaps of machinery, to which there seemed no means of access except through the door of the spinning-shed, where the Chimta Sahib stood, he was afraid and wavered. He saw no sign of Hari. He guessed the old man knew the ins and outs of the place and had presumably gone in.
‘Chalo!’ roared the Sahib over the hum of machinery, and catching the boy from the back of the neck, brought him to an empty wooden stool between Hari and a thick-set man of about thirty, with a handsome, round face and broken ears like those of a wrestler’s. ‘These coolies will teach you your work,’ the Chimta Sahib continued, and, much to Munoo’s relief, wheeled round and left.
Munoo stared at his surroundings, hot and perspiring. The black, expressionless faces of the coolies seemed impenetrable. He lifted his eyes to the horizontal, circular, cylindrical, octagonal, diagonal shapes of the different parts of the machine. The first impact was fascinating. Then the bold gesticulation of a hundred knobs and shafts of the engine deafened him with its uproar. But the wooden columns which stood beyond him, extending from the middle of the monstrous steel plant to the low ceiling of corrugated-iron sheets, seemed to alleviate his confusion a little. Soon, however, they gave him the feeling of being shut in a cage. He looked around in an effort to quell this feeling. The strong walls, sooty with crystals of cotton flakes, seemed to beat his glance back, till he met the light stealing in through two small ventilators high in the side walls. The air grew suffocatingly hot, and a queer smell of cotton and oil came heavily up to his nostrils. The sweat covered his face and his shirt was soaking on his back. He felt alone and isolated. He felt he would go mad with the din.
‘You stand here, boy,’ said Hari from where he sat on his left, ‘and move that handle with your right hand as I am doing. Whenever the thread breaks, join it quickly with a knot.’
That, Munoo thought, was easy. He set to work.
At first his hand seemed to move slowly, as if it were afraid.
‘A little more quickly, brother,’ said Hari.
Now Munoo’s hand revolved the handle a bit too fast. The thread broke and he did not know how to tie the knot.
The man on his side called to him.
‘Look, this is the way to tie it.’ And he deliberately broke the thread and began to tie it.
Munoo imitated the movement he had been shown and got it right. He was thrilled to realize that he had learnt his job. Now he could gyrate the handle of the machine to the tempo which it dictated. It was a simple and easy job, the machine seemed to do all the work. He was only moving a handle, while the machine was gathering up the thread and weaving it into a pattern farther ahead. It was different work from any he had so far done. It was delicate and the eyes had to be kept on the thread all the time. That was a strain. But the novelty of the business interested him. And soon he felt his hand helping the machine just in time and joining broken threads up deftly. The atmosphere, though, the atmosphere, the wild hum of the machine, the jig-jig-jigging of its pistons, the tick-tick-ticking of its knobs, the furious motion of the broad conveyor belts across its wheels, the clanking of chains, the heat they all generated, and the heavy, greasy odour of oil mixed with the taste of the fresh cotton thread, not offensive by itself, but sickening like bile in the mouth—from all this seemed to rise a black shadow, strangling one at the throat with its powerful, invisible fingers. Munoo recalled that he had felt somewhat the same feeling in the dark sheds of the weavers in his village, and the black cavern of the oil-makers, where the bullock, blinded by leather goggles and a rag, went round and round and round, harnessed to the shaft. And this place seemed not very unlike the huge flour-mill at Daulatpur, where he had borne weights of grain for the fastidious old women who liked their flour fresh.
As the morning advanced, however, the resemblance of this inferno to anything he had ever seen before began to fade away. For the June sun began to make itself felt, not only through the small ventilator in the east wall, which let in a rectangular stream of light and made the cotton dust above the machine shimmer like the colours of a kaleidoscope, but through the sheets of corrugated iron that lay darkly aslant on the roof.
By noon time Munoo felt the perspiration running down from the top of his head to his face and down his neck to his body. Being intent on his job, he could not wipe it, and he tried to get used to it, regarding it as a sort of poison which it was good for his body to cast off in liquid shape. Only it was clammy and exuded a warmth which was becoming unbearable. Besides, the streams were trickling into his eyes and falling across the lines of his body on to the drier surfaces. He was irritated, and looked round to see how the others fared in this sticky heat. The coolies about him had taken off their tunics and their bare bodies were bathed in oily smears of sweat.
He felt he would take off his shirt, too. But he did not know how he could do so while his hands were engaged.
A whistle blew and the handles which the coolies wielded refused to work, though the steel wheels on the sides of the main plant continued to roar themselves hoarse.
All the coolies were getting up, draining the sweat off their faces with their hands.
Munoo got up and, walking towards the door for air, began to take off his shirt by crossing his arms and lifting the lapels over his head. The soiled, wrinkled, homespun garment came up to his head and stuck there, as he had forgotten to unbutton it in the front. He struggled to pull it off. The tunic slipped over the left arm and uncovered his eyes, but still stuck on the right arm. A great gust of hot wind that flew by the wheels of the conveyor belt blew the edge of the cloth and tore it into tatters across the wheels that gyrated at their usual speed. Munoo ran for it in despair at his loss. The wrestler coolie with the broken ears, who had sat on his right, barred his way with a strong arm and a loud curse:
‘Keep your senses; you will lose your life if you do that.’
Hari rushed up in a panic and dragged him away. As he walked out of the room Munoo felt as if the many-headed, many-armed machine god was chuckling with laughter at the grim joke it had played on him.
When he reached the compound he did not feel so outraged, because most of the coolies were bare-bodied, anyway, and what was more, their faces were encrusted with the deep lines of wrinkles, the contortion of the furrows and the hollows of the cheeks, the pits and mountains of the jaws; while layers of fluff covered their short-cropped hair, from their necks to the tips of the ritual tuft knots, their eyebrows, their eyelids and their eyelashes.
‘Tiffin time,’ said Hari, sounding quite funny as he whispered the English words by which the midday break was known since Jimmie Thomas came to the factory and adopted the Anglo-
Indian name for what was his lunch hour, and a brief space for resting, cooling, breathing and eating for the coolies.
There was nowhere for the coolies working in the factory to wash, except at a pump in the grounds at the back, among huge drums of oil and bales of cotton, where a hundred men crowded round to get a drink.
There was nowhere to go for a meal, not a canteen, nor a cook-shop, nor even a confectioner’s shop; only a man with two baskets of plain roasted gram and cheap sugar-coated stuff sat outside the factory.
But the wives of the coolies had, with peculiar female foresight, brought food for their kith and kin. And most of the coolies sat under the thin shade of palm trees, rolling great big balls of rice in their hands and swallowing them rudely, unceremoniously, as Munoo had never seen people do in the North.
‘What has happened to my wife?’ asked Hari, looking at the other folk feeding comfortably. And he rushed away towards the sheds to look.
Munoo lay disconsolate and sullen under the scanty shade of a hedge, anxiously expecting Hari. But the whistle blew and, after waiting till everyone had gone in, Munoo returned to work again by way of the pump, which was now hissing sharply and coolly against the torrid heat of the sun.
The stifling heat of the afternoon began to reverberate through his temples when he got inside. His ears sent out waves of heat on to his cheeks. His eyes began to burn with a fiery intensity. His head seemed thick and congested with a thoughtless hardness. His limbs sagged wearily. He felt languid with hunger. He felt a superstitious awe.
The Chimta Sahib had brought another coolie to sit in the place where Hari should have been.
Munoo did not know what had happened. He sat wearily, mechanically revolving the handle in his hand.
At length Hari came rushing, panting and panic-stricken, and said that his little boy had grazed his right arm by ignorantly touching the belt of a machine in the spinning-shed.
Munoo felt hard and could not sympathize. He just looked blankly into Hari’s face and remained dumb.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 40