‘This is a better house than your straw hut,’ said Ratan, addressing Hari.
‘Han,’ said Munoo before Hari had spoken. ‘I wish we had come here from the very start. We would not have lost all our belongings in that hut.’ He was feeling enthusiastic, as the neighbours had turned out to be Northerners, and felt he liked the garrulous old man.
‘Han, brother,’ Hari answered. ‘But the Chimta Sahib will be angry at our having left the hut, and will charge us rent for the whole month.’
‘What was the rent you were paying there?’ asked Ratan.
‘Three rupees,’ said Hari.
‘Well, then, this is only two rupees more,’ said Ratan.
‘We owe ten rupees to the foreman sahib already,’ sighed Hari, ‘and now we will have to borrow more money to buy food and utensils. Perhaps I can search for the old utensils in the hut tomorrow and for what is left of our belongings. God seems against us.’
‘But rest assured, you have a friend in me,’ said Ratan, thumping his chest boastfully and raising a sudden burst of laughter.
‘You have been very kind for Munoo’s sake,’ said Hari. ‘He saved my son’s life the other day. Now again through him you have saved the lives of all of us. I am grateful. I shall pay your price.’
‘Leave that talk now,’ said Shibu, who, once assured of the reduction in his rent because another family was going to share the room, was all generosity. ‘Now, just taste the pancakes that my wife has been cooking. She has put some rice on to boil for you. Eat and lie down. You must be tired. We will go tomorrow when the rain has subsided and try to rescue your things from the hut.’
‘You are very kind,’ said Hari abjectly. ‘You shouldn’t give us food. You have a large family.’
‘Come, come, brother,’ said the man. ‘We may be in Bombay, and poor, but we have not lost all the habits of the North yet. Here is a sackcloth. Let me spread it for you. And, if you all get together, I can spread a blanket on your legs.’
‘This is needless trouble we have given you,’ apologized Hari.
‘No, no trouble at all,’ began the old man. ‘I wouldn’t be my mother’s son if I didn’t offer hospitality to you. I have lived forty years, and I know that if you can’t do a good deed by which people may remember you, you haven’t lived.’
Munoo could not help congratulating himself on the fact that he had been responsible for this goodwill.
But he did not feel in the same self-congratulatory mood when, after a slumber disturbed by cold draughts, he was awakened in the morning by a most foul smell.
‘Where is this odour coming from?’ he asked Ratan, who was already up and smoking a hookah.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ratan casually. ‘From somewhere in the gully beyond the window.’
Munoo rushed up to the window, screwing his nose and contracting his forehead. He stood on tiptoe by the little aperture and, through the dim light radiating from a sun completely hidden from view, saw that a pipe which received dirty water was choked up and overflowing into the stinking gully below.
‘Ohe Ratan!’ he said, ‘the gully is like a river of dung.’
‘Han,’ said the wrestler, perfectly nonchalantly. ‘There are seven latrines downstairs for 200 men, and there is only one sweeper to clean the night soil away. If you want to go and relieve yourself, give the sweeper man an anna and ask him to let you use the special latrine. But come, I am going there. I will show you.’
Munoo followed his friend down the stairs, through the corridors filled with rubbish, washing, rags, trunks, broken wicker baskets, and children’s toys.
As he reached the row of transverse walls, outside which a scantily clad sweeper sat smoking, he had to lift the edge of his loincloth to his nose to ward off the disgusting smell of dung and urine that oozed from the latrines.
‘Mehtar, is our latrine clean?’ asked Ratan, with a swagger.
‘Han, Pahlwanji,’ answered the sweeper, cringing low.
‘Go in then, ohe Munoo, first,’ Ratan suggested, and then he turned to the sweeper and said, ‘This lad is from my part of the world. Clean a latrine for him every day.’
‘Han, Pahlwanji,’ mumbled the sweeper, and then led the way for Munoo.
The boy had been happy for some time at his escape from the awful necessity of having to go to a communal latrine, though the fields to which he had repaired were littered enough with dung, but he was so nauseated by the sight and smell of refuse in the gutters which passed for latrines here that he came out within a minute of his entrance.
‘Were you all right?’ said Ratan as the boy emerged.
‘Han,’ answered Munoo, nodding his head, as he had stuffed his nose and mouth with the lapel of his dhoti.
‘There is the tap to wash yourself,’ Ratan said, pointing to a pump round which a crowd of women stood with their pitchers. ‘I am afraid it is the only tap for the entire block of this house. You will have to wait your turn.’
Munoo dared not cross the mud into which the water of the pump had seeped deeply for yards.
He was proceeding upstairs when he met Hari going out, he presumed, to rescue the utensils from the flooded cottage.
‘I will come with you,’ said Munoo. ‘I can have a bath at the pond.’
Jimmie Thomas stood like a colossus in the courtyard leading to the factory, twirling the needle ends of his waxed moustache, his face like the raw meat in a butcher’s shop, with its vivid whisky-scarlet curdled into a purple, over which the blue lines of a frown traced their zigzag course.
Munoo saw the Chimta Sahib as he and Ratan slipped past the swarms of coolies who sped towards the factory through the bogs of the mill land. He began to prepare himself to say ‘Salaam Huzoor’ to the Sahib, even though he was still a 100 yards away. Saluting the white man required a special effort on Munoo’s part; he did not know why.
Then, as he got to the iron railing of the door, he saw the Chimta Sahib gesticulating, shouting as he kicked some coolies, struck others and ran to and fro in a towering rage.
Munoo’s heart throbbed with the pang of discovering Hari among the batch of victims who, joining their hands, inclining their foreheads, bending their backs, shaking, tottering, falling, prayed for mercy with the most abject humility.
‘Sur ka bacha! Why didn’t you inform me before you moved out of those huts?’ Munoo heard the Chimta Sahib growl.
‘Oh Huzoor, oh Huzoor!’ That was all that he could hear the coolies say as, with piteous moans and cries, they fell back and trembled like frightened children.
‘Huzoor, the roof of the hut was battered and the whole road was flooded,’ Munoo heard Hari say.
His blood ran to the rhythm of that sentence, along the strength latent in its protest.
‘You lie, swine!’ shouted the foreman, inclining menacingly towards him. ‘I went down myself yesterday and there was no water.’
‘Huzoor, there was water yesterday, and it was with difficulty that I cleared it and rescued some of the utensils.’
‘Shabash! Shabash! Hari,’ Munoo muttered under his breath, jumping on his feet. And he was wildly excited by the defence that old Hari was putting up, for he had not thought him capable of it.
‘Then you think I am lying, do you, swine!’ raved the foreman as he advanced furiously and kicked Hari on the shins.
‘Sahib, it is true, there was water in the hut,’ Munoo said, standing where he was, unable to help Hari, but highly excited. ‘I went down with him to get our belongings.’
‘You bark an untruth! You live with him,’ said the Chimta Sahib. And he lunged forward towards the boy threateningly.
Hari’s wife shrieked at this, as she stood with her children at the gate with the wives and children of the other coolies, afraid and cowed.
‘That is the true talk, Sahib,’ Munoo said.
The foreman raised his hands to strike the boy.
‘Leave them, Sahib,’ said Ratan, walking up and measuring his frame against the foreman’s. He was q
uiet yet determined, as if his immense strength were slow to be roused. He kept a dignified balance and restraint. ‘They were deluged by the rain when I found them on Saturday night,’ he continued. ‘The whole mill land was flooded. I myself know that the roof of the hut was broken. I have seen it. Do not dare to call me a liar, or I will teach you the lesson of your life.’ This last he said raising himself to his full height, flashing his eyes, grinding his teeth and thrusting his chin forward.
The foreman saw the towering figure of the wrestler and stepped aside saying:
‘Go away, go away, get to work or I will kick you, fool! I rented the cottage to them, not to you. It is none of your business.’
‘It is my business,’ roared Ratan. ‘Go back to your bungla or I will break your head!’
‘Ratan! Ratan!’ the crowd of coolies called. ‘Sahib. . . .’
‘You are insulting a superior,’ said the foreman. ‘Are you in your senses?’
‘Sahib or no Sahib,’ Ratan returned. ‘You may be a foreman, but you have no right to beat the mill employees.’
‘I shall charge the full rent for the month,’ said the foreman, retreating. ‘That’s all. Attention! March to your jobs, all of you.’
‘That you will get anyhow,’ said Ratan, ‘but just you touch any of them and I will show you a bit of my mind.’
‘Acha! Acha! Pahlwan Sahib!’ said Nadir Khan, the Pathan warder, dragging the wrestler away and dispersing the crowd of coolies.
Ratan walked away to the weaving-shed. The coolies went to their jobs. They were afraid and panic-stricken.
Munoo slunk away to the workroom, making triumphant signs to Ratan as the coolies rolled the balls of their eyes.
‘You look out,’ a young coolie said, coming up to Ratan’s seat in the shed. ‘He will have his revenge on you.’
‘I have seen enough like him,’ said Ratan with a devil-may-care smile. ‘Don’t you be afraid of him. Be confident! Trust in me! I haven’t been a wrestler for nothing!’
‘Ratan, brother, this is a terrible thing to have happened,’ said Munoo as they settled down to their jobs.
‘Don’t you care,’ said Ratan casually. ‘I have seen enough like him. I was at the Tata steel works at Jamshedpur. There were 50,000 workers there. And we all went on strike, because they cut our wages. Who brought the Company to agree to our terms if not I!’ He thumped his chest in a jocular, self-congratulatory way.
‘Why did you leave Jamshedpur, then?’ asked Munoo, tying a knot in the thread that had broken.
‘Oh, we went on strike again as a protest against long hours, general bad treatment, and bad housing. And the Company won over the leaders by threatening them and offering promotion. I caught hold of one of those betrayers and gave him a bit of my mind. After which I left. The strike failed because you must never start another strike immediately after you have won a strike. I didn’t like the work there, anyway. It was difficult work. It was very hot.’
‘I would like to go to an iron factory, though,’ Munoo said eagerly. ‘Do they make girders there, like those solid steel girders that lie by the railway? It must be exciting to be near the furnaces. Better than just pulling thread here and joining it when it snaps.’
‘I was eighteen when I went there,’ began Ratan, suddenly reminiscent. ‘I had worked under artificial heat before at Daulatpur, for I am a coppersmith by birth. The heat of the furnace there was cool breath to the heat at Jamshedpur. It was terrific, steady heat from which there was no escape. A whole acre covered with hot iron. Some smoking, some not. But always the heat waves dancing and jigging before your eyes. The glare was blinding. Night and day it was just the same. Summer and winter. If it rained, there was always a hissing noise where the water struck the hot billets. And then there were clouds of hot steam.’
‘How did you get a job there?’ asked Munoo, romantically pursuing the prospect of going to Jamshedpur.
‘I needed the job,’ replied Ratan. ‘When I applied at the gate I was told to report to the foreman of the billet yard. It seemed too good to be true to me. But some kind of war was on and the Company was doing big business in iron rails for the trains. The Mill was busy and men were hard to find, because most of the coolies preferred to go soldiering with the prospect of certain death before them. They all want to die in glory.’
‘Was the work at the factory easy?’
‘What did you say—easy?’ asked Ratan sarcastically. ‘Six to six. Seven days a week. Those were our working days, before an open furnace, where the molten steel boiled and bubbled like water in a saucepan. Above me, the chain man unhooked the smoking links from a red-hot pile of steel, just lowered by a crane. Shielding his face from the terrific heat with his left hand, as he jerked the chain loose with a crooked length of wire, he always shook his hands and shouted: “Careful, the iron is hot.” It was hot, that iron. Right off the rolls of the twelve-inch mills. Red as sunset viewed through a cloud of smoke. Sometimes it took nearly half an hour to get black. And then it was more dangerous than ever. When the pile was red you knew it was hot, but when it turned black you might accidentally rest your hand against it, or put your foot on the lowest billet. You found out it didn’t have to be red to burn. I put in extra hours. Sometimes, when changing from the day to the night shift, or back again, I did twenty-four hours, and once, when my relief did not turn up, I put in thirty-six hours.’
‘Thirty-six hours! Didn’t you want to sleep?’
‘I didn’t actually work all those thirty-six hours,’ said Ratan. ‘But I must have worked thirty-two hours. The other four I cheated the Company of on the night shift. I slept. In little snatches of fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. With a plank for a bed and a brick for a pillow. Alongside the gas producer was the time-keeper’s hut. But he was an opium-eater. And he knew it is hard to sleep in a steel mill. There is so much noise. And things are always falling. A clumsy crane man may tip over a pile of billets and knock the shanty down. It is really safer to stay awake. But thirty-six hours is a long time to do that.’
Munoo stared at Ratan, open-eyed and admiring.
Ratan divined the youngster’s eagerness and then continued:
‘No, don’t you think of going to Jamshedpur. Stay here and work the bobbins. There, if I bumped into a protruding billet it felt as though my hip was broken. And always, overhead were tons of steel. Being carried back and forth by the crane. A dozen billets to a load, each weighing a quarter of a ton. If they fell. . . . If ever one of them fell. . . . And sometimes they did fall. A chain would break once in a while, and then you ran for your life. But the chain did not have to break to make trouble. There might be a broken link in it. And it came out, spilling the load, scattering it in all directions. And running or even walking about was dangerous. It was so easy to crack an ankle against a hunk of iron. You—’
‘Don’t gossip! Steady at work, all of you!’ the foreman shouted, hovering on the horizon.
‘He will have his revenge upon us,’ whispered Munoo, after he had gone.
The foreman did have his revenge. Not that day, not the next, not that week, nor the next week, not that month but a month and a half later, when the pay that was a month and a half overdue was doled out to the workers.
It was a Saturday afternoon. The malevolent sun, ascendant again after the monsoon, scorched the scantily clad bodies of the coolies in the grassless compound of the factory to a dark, copper hue, while it reddened the face of the Chimta Sahib to a still more vivid scarlet as he sat in his greasy white trousers, greasy open-collared shirt, greasy polo topee, under the shade of the office veranda, protected by Nadir Khan, the warder.
‘Harry!’ called Jimmie Thomas, irritated by the flies and flying bugs, which seemed to find the grease on his moustache and his clothes rather palatable.
Hari, whose ears were not quite used to the Anglicized pronunciation of his name, looked absently round at Munoo and Ratan, who had begun to play with stones while waiting for their turn.
‘H
arry!’ shouted Jimmie Thomas, flushed and angry, taking up a fly-killer attached to a cane and striking it a rap on his desk. There was no answer. The coolies stared at each other, eager to produce the man, lest the wrath of the white man descend upon them.
‘Harry!’ he bawled out again, almost getting up in his seat.
‘Hari!’ Munoo nudged his friend. ‘Go on, you are being called.’
Hari jumped up instantaneously and shambled forward to the pay desk, dragging his skinny, irregular, awkward legs, heaving his flat feet, which seemed weighted down to the earth through fatigue and his cares and trials.
‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ said the foreman as he saw the old man coming. ‘I am not your father’s servant that I should wait here all day for the pleasure of handing over money to you. Your thumb!’
‘Mai-bap,’ said Hari, saluting, pushing forward the thumb of his right hand on the black ink which lay soaking on a pad in a tin, and then lifting it to see if it were well covered.
The foreman caught hold of his trembling hand as if he were touching a leper, and pressed it down on a register. Then he took two currency notes of ten rupees each and twenty silver rupees and handed it over to him, saying curtly:
‘Ten rupees you owe me in cash. A rupee interest on the loan. Three rupees rent for the hut for one month. One rupee for repair of hut. Five rupees cut for damaged cloth. The remainder you receive for you, Munoo, coolie, your wife and children.’
Hari knew these phrases well, from long experience: ‘Loan interest, rent, damaged cloth.’ And though he resented them, he had learnt to respect them. He accepted the twenty rupees, salaamed the foreman, and withdrew.
His heart sank as he came towards Munoo. His eyes were full of tears. His face was knotted and pale, and half told the grim tale.
‘What has happened?’ Munoo asked.
‘Nothing, brother,’ he said with choking breath. ‘Five rupees deducted for damaged cloth. And after the rent on the hut and the interest and loan are paid off, we all get forty rupees only out of the sixty we were to be paid. Here’s your portion of twenty rupees.’
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 42