‘You have the temerity to deny me the huckster’s profit on the deal,’ said the money lender, wresting the boots out of Gobindi’s hands after all.
The girl suddenly reeled where she sat and fell headlong on the earth weeping bitterly and screaming: ‘I’ll go mad! I’ll go mad!’
The children fled in terror.
Professor Cheeta
Dedicated to Fredoon Kabraji
Professor Cheeta heaved himself up from his seat on the top of the 77 bus immediately after it had left the Russell Hotel and, in the absence of the conductor upstairs, pressed the red knob of the bell with all his might.
The driver looked round with a scowl on his face, the passengers all stared hard and the conductor, coming to the top of the stairs, mumbled some of the spiciest words in the unacknowledged but most telling and forceful vocabulary of proletarian speech.
The bus hesitated under the clock of Sir Isaac Pitman’s Typewriting School, but did not stop until it had gone well past Peter’s Bar by the Burlington Hotel, almost opposite Bloomsbury Place.
That is exactly where Professor Cheeta had meant it to stop.
‘Come on now, Oldie, your bus fare finished at Russell Square y’ know!’ the conductor shouted.
‘Perhaps he does not understand,’ a passenger said.
‘Oh yes, he does! He comes this way every afternoon!’ the conductor said.
‘Thank you, thank you!’ Professor Cheeta said sheepishly as he struggled down from the bus, breathing heavily. ‘Thank you...’
‘Come on then — I thank you!’ the conductor said ironically, ‘Come on...’
Seemingly undaunted, he stepped down from the deck of the bus hurriedly but carefully, deploring the fact that there was so little respect for old age in the world nowadays and he began to walk down the pavement with mincing steps, followed by the humorous invective of the conductor.
Professor Cheeta was on his way to the British Museum Reading Room to research on the morphology of certain nouns and verbs in the Sanskrit, English and German languages, with a view to establish the cultural affinities of the Indo-Germanic peoples in particular, and the world in general, so as to promote world brotherhood, peace, tolerance and goodwill among men. He had started this particular enquiry about twenty-five years ago on the rebound against the fanatical nationalism of his earlier days and the terrorism with which he had toyed. But, as his research was nowhere near completion and as world tension grew, he was thinking of doing something more immediate, to write a short piece, a poem, to contribute his share to the solution of the difficulties of our troubled times. But almost every day he came into conflict with someone whose look or word implied ‘black man’ and his earlier terroristic impulses re-asserted themselves. He could not concentrate enough to put anything down and felt as though life were crumbling away around him. Now and then he walked the whole distance from his home in King’s Cross Road in order to keep his thoughts together. But he was too old at sixty-four and couldn’t keep it up. The life of poetry and reflection seemed to him more and more irreconcilable with the world of buses and trams.
Still, he rolled along at amazing speed on the short, squat legs which carried his top-heavy, stocky little frame, loaded with clothes. For summer or winter, he wore two shirts, a thick waist-coat made of eiderdown, a rough suit, a large, frayed overcoat, a coloured muffler round his neck, another tied as a turban on his round head, which fell almost over his ears and covered his round coffee-coloured face.
He could not resist looking at the shop windows of Harding’s bookshop in Great Russell Street, mumbling to himself names of the books displayed. Then, suddenly with a jerk, he tore himself away as if he were in a special hurry to get to the Reading Room and did not want to linger. For, ordinarily, he did not regard the Reading Room as a library, but more as a social club where he met all his old friends and cronies among the international fraternity of scholars, cranks, exiles and refugees who had also been researching here for years, monuments of industry and patience who emerged from their lonely attics and converged here towards the late afternoon.
‘You are late today, Professor?’ the tall, top-hatted beadle said by way of a greeting.
‘Hellow, Mr. Jenks!’ the Professor returned the greeting. ‘Ow are you? And the wife?’
Jenks’ perennial inquiries about the wife had always embarrassed him, for from the first Peggy had patronised him by saying that she was marrying him, a coloured man, against the wishes of her family; and he had never got on with her. ‘Rather seedy! Rather seedy you know, Mr. Jenks, my wife is rather seedy,’ he said hypocritically and then sought to change the subject. ‘The weather has not been too good... The Sun! Oh, the Sun of my country!’
‘Too hot for me!’ Jenks said, ‘When I was in your country up in Chitral I had malaria. Yes, too hot for me, your country!’
‘And it is getting hotter — what with Gandhi!’ interjected the dour policeman who stood by the gate.
But the Professor was not really listening. The mention of the Sun had excited a train of thought in his mind and he mumbled academically to himself: ‘The Sun has many names, Brahma, Vishnu, Krishna, Surya, Apollo, Ra, Isis, Phoebus, Thor...’
‘And mumbo-jumbo,’ said the porter with a laugh.
The Professor did not take any notice of Jenks, but began suddenly, spontaneously like a child to weave a rhapsodic chant about the Sun, as children do when they are fascinated by a word.
‘I am the son of the Sun
the true son of the Sun,
descended from the tribe of the worshippers of Surya,
baked in the fire of the Lord...’
‘Breeds a lot of maggots, the Sun!’ said Jenks.
But the Professor did not heed him and walked away with a wave of the hand, singing snatches of little verses and soliloquising in his rhapsodic manner.
‘I am the circle above the zone of the Equator
who stirred the seas
and shook the mountains,
who hurled the earth
into the mounting storm of light...’
‘He’s off his head!’ Jenks said to the policeman. ‘Poet and don’ know it!’ the policeman answered.
Professor Cheeta walked along, talking to himself and chanting the words of certain half-forgotten poems, absentminded and unconcerned with everyone else, he was yet aware that he was different from most men in the juggernaut of commerce which was rushing on outside. An exile from his homeland ever since he had come out of jail for suspected terrorism, he had never taken any roots in this country for all the thirty years that he had spent here. People stared at him, turned back to look at his queer gnome-like, dark, heavy figure, swathed in a thick overcoat, with the blue turban on his head and pince-nez on his nose. The children whispered to each other about whether he was an African or a Red Indian and cheeked him by asking him the time.
But though he seemed a fool to others, he was a dreamer imbued with the precariousness of life. For throughout his life there had come to him certain impulses and visions, vague and fleeting at first, but which had lingered in him with a subtle sense of beauty, nobility and grandeur, like a melody that moved him strongly at odd moments and then evaporated.
And he knew certain kindred souls whose life had been disturbed in the same way but who had later accepted some kind of compensatory faith. There was Miss Richardson, for instance, a lady of seventy, an ardent Christian prohibitionist, who worshipped the memory of Pussyfoot Johnson, read Dr. Mathew’s rendering of the Bible in the Reading Room, and fed pigeons in the compound.
‘Come and see my little ones,’ she said in a squeaky voice as the Professor strolled up today.
Professor Cheeta made a noise with his lips in the cooing language of pigeons and then broke out into human speech:
‘Come, my sons, com
e, you flutter like my heart.’
‘They are not afraid,’ said Miss Richardson with a laugh which knit her shrivelled, lined face with a queer, innocent beauty, the aura of the devoted, of those who believe.
‘Hellow, Miss Richardson,’ said Professor Cheeta almost flirtatiously.
‘The pets — they are so hungry!’ said the old woman blushing a little.
‘They are happy as the air,’ said Professor Cheeta conventionally. But in his heart there was a tense emptiness, as though he felt the need for wings, but realised that he hadn’t even a face, or a tongue to speak with, as though he could not even move or look at anyone. And there came a far-away look in his eyes, a kind of fixed stare at the nothingness about him.
‘Why so sad, Professor?’ Miss Richardson asked as she threw more crumbs onto the palm of her hand.
Professor Cheeta sighed an almost inaudible sigh and swallowing a choking breath, said in a doleful voice: ‘I was born in India, you know, Miss Richardson, in the country of dreams, the fountain of fables, the source of much knowledge and wisdom and tears...’
‘How many Christians are there in India, altogether?’ asked Miss Richardson, ‘I have always wanted to ask you that, Professor?’
‘As a young man,’ went on Professor Cheeta, without heeding her question, and almost as if he were talking to himself, ‘I felt I had a dream. Brighter than all dreams, a glorious vision of myself — I wanted to write a poem in which I could infuse the spirit of fire which would embody light, which would, if you see what I mean, be radiant, glowing and bright, which would put some meaning into things.’
‘I am quite sure if you believe in Jesus...,’ began Miss Richardson.
But Professor Cheeta did not let her finish her sentence, which he knew was the beginning of a quite mechanical speech to convert him that she always delivered in season and out of season! He was too restless and felt as if even his instinct for words was betraying him, as though he were losing his grasp on life altogether. ‘Time went on,’ he said, ‘and the vision still persisted, flashing and sparkling in my brain, flowing like the music of rushing waters, shimmering like the sunshine and bathing me in the aroma of roses, if you see what I mean, a fire consumed me —’
‘And then?’ Miss Richardson said, now interested.
‘Oh lady,’ replied Professor Cheeta, moving his head about dolefully till the pigeons took fright and fluttered. ‘I was let down, betrayed, put into jail. And since then I have been too preoccupied with mundane struggles. Too pulled about, torn by the strain of it all to believe ever in poetry.’
‘Didn’t Krishna say, “Live in action”?’ asked Miss Richardson.
‘He was speaking in another time,’ said Professor Cheeta. ‘Nowadays, what with atom bombs and the rest, I feel —’ And he waved his short arm in a gesture of despair.
‘To work then on your dream!’ exhorted Miss Richardson, so that the pigeons fluttered with the echo of her voice... ‘You have no time to lose.’
Professor Cheeta was affected by the peremptory note in her voice and looked at her for a moment. Then he withdrew his gaze inwards as if he felt the will to have vision anew and was trying to hold fast to a glimpse of it. Greeting Miss Richardson with a bow he fairly ran towards the Reading Room, taking two steps at a time, hurrying through the swing doors and the hall amid the babble of sightseers’ voices. He did not even halt to return the ‘Good afternoon’ of the porter at the doors of the Reading Room, but scrambled towards the North Library, panting for breath. His thoughts seemed to go askew as though the dome had pressed them out and his eyes moved furtively outwards and inwards, as if to keep the vision in control.
‘Is this seat taken, Mr. Southern?’ he asked an old man with the beard of Havelock Ellis and the eyes of Bertrand Russell.
‘Sh, sh!’ shushed Mr. Southern who, though a friend of Professor Cheeta’s, was compiling the history of Egypt in thirty volumes and had no time to answer irrelevant questions.
Professor Cheeta’s face fell a little and he drifted away, groping for a seat and assuring himself in his mind that if only he could get hold of a seat and a pen he could cause the ink to run into gold and hold the glimpse of the beauty and the tragedy he had lived, captive forever... Therefore, he did not acknowledge Mr. Davis who was writing a treatise to blow the cancer research racket skyhigh, or Father Talbot who was writing up the Spanish Inquisition. But he noticed Professor Palmer, the orientalist, and his heart congealed, for Palmer had written a most vicious introduction to a translation of the Gita and was now doing a commentary to damn the Vedas. Professor Cheeta’s eyes quivered with fear and he changed his direction. The Reading Room was full at this time. One of the friendly old assistants, Evans, seeing the Professor in distress, came up to him and said: ‘You are late today, aren’t you? There is only ten minutes to closing time!’
‘Yes,’ Professor Cheeta said apologetically, ‘can you get me a seat, Mr. Evans? I have something important to write.’
‘Wait then,’ Evans said, ‘I shall look around at the other end.’
‘Thank you,’ Professor Cheeta said and moved towards the corners of hope. Looking up at the clock he felt as if the years were rolling by with every tick of the minute-hand. And the urge of the poem in his heart beat louder and louder as he saw the pens of the readers running faster and faster before closing time. Afraid of losing the rhythm of his song, as well as to test its ring on the tympanum of his ears, he paced up and down impatiently, and losing sight of Evans, stood talking to himself as if he were in a delirium. ‘I am no mere bookworm. . . like that Mr. Southern there. Buried beneath dusty volumes. I am no mere chronicler of the dead; I have something in me. My love for my country. I am stirred like the waves of the sea, Mr. Palmer, ghost of dead ideas that you are! I am possessed by the Sun.’
‘Please don’t talk so loudly,’ a reader said.
But Professor Cheeta was absorbed in himself and went on burr-burring,
‘I am the Son of the Sun... I...’
‘Please don’t disturb me,’ the reader said.
‘Young man!’ the Professor said, surprised at the student’s lack of consideration, ‘I want to sit down.’
‘Oh alright, go away from here!’ the young reader stammered impatiently.
Now the other readers were disturbed too and there came suppressed whispers of concern, brief injunctions, suppressed threats, silent angry looks, more potent than any words.
‘What is all this noise?’ a minor official said coming up to SS2.
‘Oh my head aches,’ Professor Cheeta was saying to himself.
‘Throw him out!... Sh... Chuck him out!’ the readers said, bursting from beneath a hitherto suppressed hysteria which seemed to have been waiting to explode in the silence.
‘I shall fetch the Superintendent,’ said the official.
Possessed by tremors of hate and frustration, Professor Cheeta turned towards the exit. His whole frame quivered with the fear that all the Englishmen in the Museum were following him and that they were going to lynch him. Above these delusions the smoke of chagrin covered his thoughts, his head hung down and there was a light in his eyes which was too furtive to stare ahead. As he raced along, the turbulent music of anguish in his body blinded him completely and he fell headlong across the steps by a bookshelf with a giant thud.
‘Oh, the poor old man!’ someone said.
‘Give him a hand!’ another said.
‘Now, now, what have you done, Professor!’ Evans said, rushing up after him.
The Assistant Keeper of Printed Books came down from his perch at this uproar, a tall, towering, bald-headed man. He seowled at the people who had gathered round the old man, whispered something to himself and went away. He knew that Cheeta, like several other people, regarded the library as a social club and disliked him for making himself a nuisance.
‘And I found you a seat too!’ Evans was saying consolingly to the Professor as he lifted him... ‘And you go and fall down like that! Come!’
At that instant the closing bell of the Reading Room rang.
‘There you are, you couldn’t have written much today, anyhow,’ said Evans, seeing him to the door. ‘Now steady as you go...’
‘Thank you, Mr. Evans, thank you for your trouble,’ Professor Cheeta said as he hobbled along.
Then he felt for his turban which had come undone. He did not stop to retie it, however, and went along, clutching his old portfolio securely in his left hand and mumbling: ‘Oh my head! Oh my head!’
‘Hello Professor! Hello!’ someone called to him by the cloak-room.
But he did not want to meet anyone now and hurried out.
‘He seems very restless today!’ the porter said to the policeman, as he saw him rushing away without the familiar, long drawn-out conferences with Professor Carlo, the Professor of Languages, and Mr. Matthews, who came to the Reading Room to pick up newspapers from the waste paper baskets and the various Indian students.
The next day he received an official, brief, curt letter from the Keeper of Books informing him that his Reading Room ticket was cancelled. After he had lain in bed the whole morning, recovering from this shock, he tried to get up and proceed to the Museum as usual. But as he was dressing, he fell with a thud on the floor and was laid out for months and confined to bed with an undiagnosible malaise.
When he recovered slightly, he begged his wife to wheel him to the compound of the Reading Room. But the doctor disallowed any such exercise.
After that he was bedridden and kept losing weight as if something inside him was gnawing at him and corroding his strength.
Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts… and Other Stories Page 8