The Phantom Rickshaw

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘There is the answer,’ said Holden. ‘Mian Mittu has spoken. He shall be the parrot. When he is ready he will talk mightily, and run about. Mian Mittu is the parrot in thy—in the Mussulman tongue, is it not?’

  ‘Why put me so far off?’ said Ameera, fretfully. ‘Let it be like unto some English name—but not wholly. For he is mine.’

  ‘Then call him Tota, for that is likest English.’

  ‘Aye, Tota; and that is still the parrot. Forgive me, my lord, for a minute ago; but, in truth, he is too little to wear all the weight of Mian Mittu for name. He shall be Tota—our Tota to us. Hearest thou, oh, small one? Littlest, thou art Tota.’

  She touched the child’s cheek, and, he waking, wailed, and it was necessary to return him to his mother, who soothed him with the wonderful rhyme of ‘Aré koko, ja ré koko!’ which says:

  ‘Oh, crow! Go crow! Baby’s sleeping sound,

  And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound—

  Only a penny a pound, Baba—only a penny a pound.’

  Reassured many times as to the price of those plums, Tota cuddled himself down to sleep. The two sleek white well-bullocks in the courtyard were steadily chewing the cud of their evening meal; old Pir Khan squatted at the head of Holden’s horse, his police saber across his knees, pulling drowsily at a big water-pipe that croaked like a bull-frog in a pond. Ameera’s mother sat spinning in the lower veranda, and the wooden gate was shut and barred. The music of a marriage procession came to the roof above the gentle hum of the city and a string of flying foxes crossed the face of the low moon.

  ‘I have prayed,’ said Ameera, after a long pause, with her chin in her hand—‘I have prayed for two things. First, that I may die in thy stead, if thy death is demanded; and in the second, that I may die in the place of the child. I have prayed to the Prophet and to Beebee Miriam.* Thinkest thou either will hear?’

  ‘From thy lips who would not hear the lightest word?’

  ‘I asked for straight talk, and thou has given me sweet talk. Will my prayers be heard?’

  ‘How can I say? God is very good.’

  ‘Of that I am not sure. Listen now. When I die or the child dies, what is thy fate? Living, thou wilt return to the bold white Mem-log, for kind calls to kind.’

  ‘Not always.’

  ‘With a woman, no. With a man it is otherwise. Thou wilt in this life, later on, go back to thine own folk. That I could almost endure, for I should be dead. But in thy very death thou wilt be taken away to a strange place and a paradise that I do not know.’

  ‘Will it be paradise?’

  ‘Surely; for what God would harm thee? But we two—I and the child—shall be elsewhere, and we cannot come to thee, nor canst thou come to us. In the old days, before the child was born, I did not think of these things; but now I think of them perpetually. It is very hard talk.’

  ‘It will fall as it will fall. Tomorrow we do not know, but today and love we know well. Surely we are happy now.’

  ‘So happy that it were well to make our happiness assured.

  And thy Beebee Miriam should listen to me; for she is also a woman. But then she would envy me—It is not seemly for men to worship a woman.’

  Holden laughed aloud at Ameera’s little spasm of jealousy.

  ‘Is it not seemly? Why didst thou not turn me from worship of thee, then?’

  ‘Thou a worshiper! And of me! My king, for all thy sweet words, well I know that I am thy servant and thy slave, and the dust under thy feet. And I would not have it otherwise. See!’ Before Holden could prevent her she stooped forward and touched his feet; recovering herself with a little laugh, she hugged Tota closer to her bosom. Then, almost savagely:

  ‘Is it true that the bold white Mem-log live for three times the length of my life? Is it true that they make their marriages not before they are old women?’

  ‘They marry as do others—when they are women.’

  ‘That I know, but they wed when they are twenty-five. Is that true?’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘Ya Illah! At twenty-five. Who would of his own will take a wife even of eighteen? She is a woman—aging every hour. Twenty-five! I shall be an old woman at that age, and—those Mem-log remain young forever. How I hate them!’

  ‘What have they to do with us?’

  ‘I cannot tell. I know only that there may now be alive on this earth a woman ten years older than I who may come to thee and take thy love ten years after I am an old woman, grey-headed, and the nurse of Tota’s son. That is unjust and evil. They should die too.’

  ‘Now, for all thy years thou art a child, and shalt be picked up and carried down the staircase.’

  ‘Tota! Have a care for Tota, my lord! Thou, at least, art as foolish as any babe!’ Ameera tucked Tota out of harm’s way in the hollow in her neck, and was carried downstairs, laughing, in Holden’s arms, while Tota opened his eyes and smiled, after the manner of the lesser angels.

  He was a silent infant, and almost before Holden could realize that he was in the world, developed into a small gold-coloured godling and unquestioned despot of the house overlooking the city. Those were months of absolute happiness to Holden and Ameera—happiness withdrawn from the world, shut in behind the wooden gate that Pir Khan guarded. By day Holden did his work, with an immense pity for such as were not so fortunate as himself, and a sympathy for small children that amazed and amused many mothers at the little station gatherings. At night-fall he returned to Ameera—Ameera full of the wondrous doings of Tota: how he had been seen to clap his hands together and move his fingers with intention and purpose, which was manifestly a miracle; how later he had of his own initiative crawled out of his low bedstead on to the floor, and swayed on both feet for the space of three breaths.

  ‘And they were long breaths, for my heart stood still with delight,’ said Ameera.

  Then took the beasts into his councils—the well-bullocks, the little grey squirrels, the mongoose that lived in a hole near the well and especially Mian Mittu, the parrot, whose tail he grievously pulled, and Mian Mittu screamed till Ameera and Holden arrived.

  ‘Oh, villain, Child of strength! This to thy brother on the house-top! Tobah, tobah! Fy! fy! But I know a charm to make him wise as Suleiman and Aflatoun.* Now look,’ said Ameera. She drew from an embroidered bag a handful of almonds. ‘See! we count seven. In the name of God!’ She placed Mian Mittu, very angry and rumpled, on the top of his cage, and, seating herself between the babe and the bird, cracked and peeled an almond less white than her teeth. ‘This is a true charm, my life; and do not laugh. See! I give the parrot one half and Tota the other.’ Mian Mittu, with careful beak, took his share from between Ameera’s lips, and she kissed the other half into the mouth of the child, who ate it slowly, with wondering eyes.

  ‘This I will do each day of seven, and without doubt he who is ours will be a bold speaker and wise. Eh, Tota, what wilt thou be when thou art a man and I am grey-headed?’ Tota tucked his fat legs into adorable creases. He could crawl, but he was not going to waste the spring of his youth in idle speech. He wanted Mian Mittu’s tail to tweak.

  When he was advanced to the dignity of a silver belt— which, with a magic square engraved on silver and hung round his neck, made up the greater part of his clothing—he staggered on a perilous journey down the garden to Pir Khan, and proffered him all his jewels in exchange for one little ride on Holden’s horse. He had seen his mother’s mother chaffering with pedlers in the veranda. Pir Khan wept, set the untried feet on his own grey head in sign of fealty and brought the bold adventurer to his mother’s arms, vowing that Tota would be a leader of men ere his beard was grown.

  One hot evening, while he sat on the roof between his father and mother, watching the never-ending warfare of the kites that the city boys flew, he demanded a kite of his own, with Pir Khan to fly it, because he had a fear of dealing with anything larger than himself; and when Holden called him a ‘spark’, he rose to his feet and answered slo
wly, in defense of his new-found individuality: ‘Hum ’park nahin hai. Hum admi hai.’ (I am no spark, but a man.)

  The protest made Holden choke, and devote himself very seriously to a consideration of Tota’s future.

  He need hardly have taken the trouble. The delight of that life was too perfect to endure. Therefore it was taken away, as many things are taken away in India, suddenly and without warning. The little lord of the house, as Pir Khan called him, grew sorrowful and complained of pains, who had never known the meaning of pain. Ameera, wild with terror, watched him through the night, and in the dawning of the second day the life was shaken out of him by fever—the seasonal autumn fever. It seemed altogether impossible that he could die, and neither Ameera nor Holden at first believed the evidence of the body on the bedstead. Then Ameera beat her head against the wall, and would have flung herself down the well in the garden had Holden not restrained her by main force.

  One mercy only was granted to Holden. He rode to his office in broad daylight, and found waiting him an unusually heavy mail that demanded concentrated attention and hard work. He was not, however, alive to this kindness of the gods.

  III

  The first shock of a bullet is no more than a brisk pinch. The wrecked body does not send in its protest to the soul till ten or fifteen seconds later. Then comes thirst, throbbing and agony, and a ridiculous amount of screaming. Holden realized his pain slowly, exactly as he had realized his happiness, and with the same imperious necessity for hiding all trace of it. In the beginning he only felt that there had been a loss, and that Ameera needed comforting where she sat with her head on her knees, shivering as Mian Mittu, from the house-top, called ‘Tota! Tota! Tota!’ Later all his world and the daily life of it rose up to hurt him. It was an outrage that any one of the children at the bandstand in the evening should be alive and clamorous when his own child lay dead. It was more than mere pain when one of them touched him, and stories told bv overfond fathers of their children’s latest performances cut him to the quick. He could not declare his pain. He had neither help, comfort, nor sympathy, and Ameera, at the end of each weary day, would lead him through the hell of self-questioning reproach which is reserved for those who have lost a child, and believe that with a little—just a little—more care it might have been saved. There are not many hells worse than this, but he knows one who has sat down temporarily to consider whether he is or is not responsible for the death of his wife.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ameera would say, ‘I did not take sufficient heed. Did I, or did I not? The sun on the roof that day when he played so long alone, and I was—ah! braiding my hair—it may be that the sun then bred the fever. If I had warned him from the sun he might have lived. But, oh, my life, say that I am guiltless! Thou knowest that I loved him as I loved thee! Say that there is no blame on me, or I shall die—I shall die!’

  ‘There is no blame. Before God, none. It was written, and how could we do aught to save? What has been, has been. Let it go, beloved.’

  ‘He was all my heart to me. How can I let the thought go when my arm tells me every night that he is not here. Ahi! ahi! Oh, Tota, come back to me—come back again, and let us be all together as it was before!’

  ‘Peace! peace! For thine own sake, and for mine also, if thou lovest me, rest.’

  ‘By this I know thou dost not care; and how shouldst thou? The white men have hearts of stone and souls of iron. Oh, that I had married a man of mine own people—though he beat me—and had never eaten the bread of an alien!’

  ‘Am I an alien, mother of my son?’

  ‘What else, Sahib? . . . Oh, forgive me—forgive! The death has driven me mad. Thou art the life of my heart, and the light of my eyes, and the breadth of my life, and—and I have put thee from me, though it was but for a moment. If thou goest away, to whom shall I look for help? Do not be angry. Indeed, it was the pain that spoke, and not thy slave.’

  ‘I know—I know. We be two who were three. The greater need, therefore, that we should be one.’

  They were sitting on the roof, as of custom. The night was a warm one in early spring, and sheet-lightning was dancing on the horizon to a broken tune played by far-off thunder. Ameera settled herself in Holden’s arms.

  ‘The dry earth is lowing like a cow for the rain, and I— I am afraid. It was not like this when we counted the stars. But thou lovest me as much as before, though a bond is taken away? Answer.’

  ‘I love more, because a new bond has come out of the sorrow that we have eaten together; and that thou knowest.’

  ‘Yea, I know,’ said Ameera, in a very small whisper. ‘But it is good to hear thee say so, my life,who art so strong to help. I will be a child no more, but a woman, and an aid to thee. Listen. Give me my sitar, and I will sing bravely.’

  She took the light silver-studded sitar, and began a song of the great hero Raja Rasalu. The hand failed on the strings, the tune halted, checked and at a low note turned off to the poor little nursery rhyme about the wicked crow:

  ‘And the wild plums grow in the jungle—

  Only a penny a pound,

  Only a penny a pound, Baba—only—’

  Then came the tears and the piteous rebellion against fate, till she slept, moaning a little in her sleep, with the right arm thrown clear of the body, as though it protected something that was not there.

  It was after this night that life became a little easier for Holden. The ever-present pain of loss drove him into his work, and the work repaid him by filling up his mind for eight or nine hours a day. Ameera sat alone in the house and brooded, but grew happier when she understood that Holden was more at ease, according to the custom of women. They touched happiness again, but this time with caution.

  ‘It was because we loved Tota that he died. The jealousy of God was upon us,’ said Ameera. ‘I have hung up a large black jar before our window to turn the Evil Eye from us, and we must make no protestations of delight, but go softly underneath the stars, lest God find us out. Is that not good talk, worthless one?’

  She had shifted the accent of the word that means ‘beloved,’ in proof of the sincerity of her purpose. But the kiss that followed the new christening was a thing that any deity might have envied. They went about henceforth saying: ‘It is naught—

  ,’ and hoping that all the powers heard.

  The powers were busy on other things. They had allowed thirty million people four years of plenty, wherein men fed well and the crops were certain and the birth-rate rose year by year; the districts reported a purely agricultural population varying from nine hundred to two thousand to the square mile of the overburdened earth. It was time to make room. And the Member of the Lower Tooting, wandering about India in top-hat and frock-coat, talked largely of the benefits of British rule, and suggested as the one thing needful the establishment of duly qualified electoral system and a general bestowal of the franchise. His long-suffering hosts smiled and made him welcome, and when he paused to admire, with pretty picked words, the blossom of the blood-red dhak-tree, that had flowered untimely for a sign of the sickness that was coming, they smiled more than ever.

  It was the Deputy Commissioner of Kot-Kumharsen, staying at the club for a day, who lightly told a tale that made Holden’s blood run cold as he overheard the end.

  ‘He won’t bother any one any more. Never saw a man so astonished in my life. By Jove! I thought he meant to ask a question in the House about it. Fellow-passenger in his ship— dined next him—bowled over by cholera, and died in eighteen hours. You needn’t laugh, you fellows. The Member for Lower Tooting is awfully angry about it; but he’s more scared. I think he’s going to take his enlightened self out of India.’

  ‘I’d give a good deal if he were knocked over. It might keep a few vestrymen of his kidney to their parish. But what’s this about cholera? It’s full early for anything of that kind,’ said a warden of an unprofitable salt-lick.

  ‘Dunno,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, reflectively.

  ‘We’ve got l
ocusts with us. There’s sporadic cholera all along the north—at least, we’re calling it sporadic for decency’s sake. The spring crops are short in five districts, and nobody seems to know where the winter rains are. It’s nearly March now. I don’t want to scare any body, but it seems to me that Nature’s going to audit her accounts with a big red pencil this summer.’

  ‘Just when I wanted to take leave, too,’ said a voice across the room.

  ‘There won’t be much leave this year, but there ought to be a great deal of promotion. I’ve come in to persuade the government to put my pet canal on the list of famine-relief works. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. I shall get that canal finished at last.’

  ‘Is it the old programme, then,’ said Holden, ‘famine, fever and cholera?’

  ‘Oh, no! Only local scarcity and an unusual prevalence of seasonal sickness. You’ll find it all in the reports if you live till next year. You’re a lucky chap. You haven’t got a wife to put you out of harm’s way. The hill-stations ought to be full of women this year.’

  ‘I think you’re inclined to exaggerate the talk in the bazaars,’ said a young civilian in the secretariat. ‘Now, I have observed . . .’

  ‘I dare say you have,’ said the Deputy Commissioner, ‘but you’ve a great deal more to observe, my son. In the meantime, I wish to observe to you . . .’ And he drew him aside to discuss the construction of the canal that was so dear to his heart.

  Holden went to his bungalow, and began to understand that he was not alone in the world, and also that he was afraid for the sake of another, which is the most soul-satisfying fear known to man.

  Two months later, as the Deputy had foretold, Nature began to audit her accounts with a red pencil. On the heels of the spring reapings came a cry for bread, and the government, which had decreed that no man should die of want, sent wheat.