The sorrow of the sweeper girl made Shrimati Gopi Goel more angry.
‘Go, get out and never enter this house again! Thief! You have not only stolen the bangles, but also my—‘
She dared not finish her harsh words, because the acknowledgement of the loss of her husband to Sajani might turn out to be the confirmation of the fact-and that would be inauspicious, because if you say that’, it often comes…’
Sajani lifted her head as a dove updives off the earth to fly across the valley, threatened by a rough wind…
* From Lajwanti and Other Stories.
22
The Thief*
The ‘hoom’ of the summer months in India is inexplicable, except in terms of an arilessness which seems to dissolve everything about one slowly and surely into a vague nothingness. Perhaps only a graph could illustrate it, because it is as much a sound effect as sense data, and sound can be drawn. Or, may be, one could dispose certain daubs of paint in such a way as to break the exact symbolism of the Wheel of Life in a Tibetan scroll, and show all the concrete objects falling away, crumbling like the edges of the earth on judgment day, the stars breaking, the comets shaking, the seas full of fire and the Sun alone standing there on high, a magnificent orb of brightness; A cruel, blood-sucking demon, scorching all sentient things as in some prehistoric war of the elements…
Ganesh always felt the listessness of half death when he got up in the mornings, the heavy lids on his eyes literally ached as they opened, and no amount of stretching would stir the cells of his body into a sense of more than the doubt that he existed. So he generally crawled out of bed and proceeded towards the small balcony on the first floor of his ancestral mansion, there to inhale deep breaths of any air that was going. But there was seldom even a movement of a: leaf or a dust speck such as could be called a breeze. Only the ‘hoom’ mixed here with certain asafoetid smells which rose from the open drains of damp lanes, the smoke of centuries and the rubbish of days that like a sore out of the huge bin on the corner of Gupta Road (named after his family) and King George’s Road (named after George V, ‘the Sailor King,’ who stood enshrined in marble fifty yards away in his coronation robes).
Although the ‘hoom’ persisted and there was no fresh air to breathe, there was a good reason why Ganesh Prashad reappeared to the balcony with such unfailing regularity. For, since the scarcity in the South, the town’s population had swelled with beggars, and among these was a woman with a child who had taken shelter on the marble steps at the foot of old King George’s statue.
The slippery pads of her buttocks swayed before his gaze in zig-zags, as she walked away from the rubbish bin to the steps of the statue, after collecting a crust or a raw vegetable peel to chew. And as she drifted about like this, Ganesh felt a yearning in his blood, and his breath came and went quickly, until he was nearly in the utter hush of the mornings with the heat produced by the maddening waves of desire. His aching eyelids ached more sharply in the blinding glare and yet he could not keep his eyes from groping across the blaze, among the group of people who clustered round the steps of the statue or the rubbish bin, for the form with the swaying hips.
The fascination had been overwhelming from the start, for the first impression of the triangle formed by her things had made his sensations swirl in a giddy wave. But the memory of this impact had been sucked in by the sagging nerves of his sleep doped body, and had gradually become a vague reaction with which other elements had mingled.
For instance, he had felt a distinct wave of nausea cum pity when he had seen her pick up a rotten banana peel from the rubbish bin and lick it. And he had wanted to run down and tell her that she would get cholera if she ate anything out of that bin. But he was afraid that if he went and singled her out for sympathy the other beggars might notice him and beat him up, for they still seemed to have enough strength left to guard the honour of their women-folk vigilantly. And as he could not do much about it he had just stood and stared at her, with the dull thud of an ache at the back of his head.
On another day, Ganesh had seen the beggar woman feeding her child on a bared breast. And that had aroused a feeling of unbearable tenderness in him, a tenderness, however, which gnawed at his vitals and aroused a lust of which the nether point was fixed somewhere in the memories of his own childhood.
And later, all these feelings had mixed with yet another — with a disgust he had suddenly felt on imagining her unwashed, dishevelled body in his arms, the putrid sore of her mouth touching his, the mouth which had eaten dirt and the filth of the rubbish bin, which had drunk the scum of the drains.
And yet, in spite of all the contradictory feelings, the first fascination of her swaying buttocks lasted, and the irresistible feeling which spread the confusion of a cloud over his senses, so that time and space ceased to exist and no consideration of duty or shame baulked his drunken gaze. And under the impulse of this distended desire, he would stand fixed to the balcony the whole morning though he be late for the office, until his elder brother, with whom he worked in the family firm of solicitors, began to notice the waywardness of his behaviour.
Once, he had tried to work up enough audacity to attract the woman’s attention. But, being a timid, respectable creature, he had to summon all the crazy impulses in his being to exercise the demons of destruction in him and beckon them to help him. The whole thing was a joke, he had sought to tell himself, the whole world was a joke and nothing was really stable. He himself, inheriting half the wealth of his dead father, was yet a slave to all the inhibitions and prohibitions of his elder brother and sister-in-law, living a confined, conventional life contrary to everything he had learnt at college, and in full view of the disintegration, death and disease about him. And if it was all a joke, then this woman was a leer, an abject, worthless nothing, an ignorant, illiterate and dumb creature except that she possessed a pair of hips like boulders, the swaying of which excited him and from which he might get the pleasure of a moment, a mere particle of time in the long aeons of eternity where nothing counted or mattered. But, though the need for hypocrisy and circumlocution to build up an argument resulted in coining of a number of euphemisms, he could not get away from the basic human feelings of pity and tenderness.
For, every day he was reminded of the incident in his youth when he had accused a beggar, who used to come up the lane on the right hand side of this house, of stealing a silk dhoti from his study on the ground floor, and had stood by while the servants beat up the beggar. In his younger days he had willed himself into the belief that he had actually seen the beggar rush out of his room with the dhoti, but since then he had felt less and less sure about it, and was, in fact, convinced that he had been guilty of snobbery with violence against an innocent man. And how, this hangover of an unkind act against one beggar had become an undertone beneath the lust for another, and the mingling of these made for a restlessness which was obvious in the increasingly frequent nervous twitch of his neck.
As he stood there one day, he felt he could not bear it. He could see the woman’s breasts undraped, where her sari had slipped off as she crouched by the statue and washed the grit out of her child’s eyes. And he felt the rustling of a strange song in his ears, the loam-song of dizzy desire mounting to the crescendo of a titanic choir. And the flow of a passionate warmth spread from his loins upwards to his eyes, making them more heavy-lidded and soporific than they had been when he had just awakened.
For long moments he tried to check his instinct to look deeper, to caress the amplitude of her haunches, an instinct which was driving him crazy. But he could feel her presence inflaming his body like a slow forest fire, which comes creeping up from the roots like smoke but becomes a wild red blaze suddenly in one crucial moment.
And as he was choked with desire, his neck twitched like that of a snake in the burning forest, and his vision was clouded altogether. Breathing heavily, hot, suffocated, he lifted his elbows from the wooden railings on which they rested and tried to steady himself.
The woman had now picked up her child and was feeding him at her right breast as she sat cross legged on the ground. But the little one was whining, and shrieking, partly from the pain he had felt at having the thick crusts of grit removed from his eyes, but mainly because there was hardly any milk in his mother’s breasts.
Ganesh’s passion seemed to congeal as he heard the cries; he could feel an almost tangible loosening of his flesh, and though he was still soporific he realised that he must go and bathe and dress.
But, even as he was withdrawing his gaze after a furtive stare at her haunches, he saw her hit the child with the palm of her hand and trust the nipple of her left breast into the mouth of her son. As Ganesh lingered to see what her second breast looked like, he heard the child yelling continuously. And, now, as though it were a revelation, the fact dawned upon him that there was no milk in the woman’s breasts, and that her child, who gnawed at her like a hungry rat, was shrieking with the need of his young life for sustenance.
He stood tense, as though he had a vision, and his head was bent with a humility such as he had never known before, a craven, abject feeling of shame that a mother should have to hit her child in his presence because she had no milk in her breasts to give him, that she should have no milk because probably she had no food herself. The joke, if it was a joke, the leer of her mouth, as well as the general ridiculousness of the world, was far too grim a joke to be merely laughed at. And, though she was unknown to him, an utter stranger, here today and dead tomorrow, she concerned him, if only because he had allied himself in his mind with desire for her.
As soon as the passion had become compassion in his body he had decided upon a course of action.
He turned round with a face knotted as though with revulsion against himself, and rushed downstairs towards the kitchen. It was just possible that by some miracle his sister-in-law might still be having her bath or lingering over her prayers. If so, he could get to the storeroom and get out a bag of grain and give it to the woman and her family on the steps of the statue.
When he got to the kitchen, he found that the course was, indeed, clear. There was only Biju, the servant boy, peeling vegetables there. But the storeroom was locked and the keys, ostensibly, hung at one end of his sister-in-law’s sari.
‘Where is Bibiji?’ he asked the servant impetuously. ‘she is having a bath,’ Biju said, Ganesh swayed histrionically as though to yawn and stretch in order to bluff the boy. Then he drifted away up the stairs towards the bedroom occupied by his brother and sister-in-law. His brother would be away on his morning’s constitutional in the garden, and, with luck, his sister-in-law had undressed in the bedroom and left her bunch of keys there.
With beating heart and anxious face he sneaked into his brother ’s bedroom and looked around. He was lucky. The bunch of keys was on the dressing table. He took it.
But, before rushing down with it, as the wild cries of the begger woman’s child were terrorising him to do, he sought to cover his manoeuvre and to give himself time. He went towards his room and called out:
‘Will you be long in the bathroom, sister-in-law?’ He knew that she would be longer out of sheer cussedness if only he showed any anxiety to make use of the bathroom.
‘Yes, I am washing my hair,’ came the answer.
Ganesh’s face coloured with glee at the success of his ruse. The only thing that remained was to get the servant boy out of the way. So he called out from the inner balcony:
Biju, go and get me a packet of razor blades from the shop… ‘Here’s a rupee coming down.’
The servant boy knew that he could always keep any change that was left over from a rupee when Ganesh Sahib sent him shopping. He came eagerly enough into the compound and, picking up the money ran.
Ganesh went down quickly and opened the lock of the storeroom door. He felt he heard a chorus of accusing voices and paused for a moment, but realised that it was only his heart pounding against his chest. And though he could not remember the shrill cries of the beggar woman’s child any more, he remembered the way the little rat nibbled at his mother’s breasts. For a moment he felt a fool going into the storeroom, a place where he had seldom entered. But then he plunged into the dark.
His brother had hoarded quite a few bags of wheat and rice. So it was not difficult to spot them. Only, he didn’t know whether it would be a bag of wheat or rice that he would be taking away. He did not pause to deliberate any more, however. He merely strained to get a grip on the nearest bag.
After rubbing his hands, which were moist with perspiration, on his pyjamas, he caught hold of the bag and lifted it coolie-wise on his back. Then he scrambled out and made for a small alley on the side of the house.
Hardly had he got to the middle of the passage way when he met Biju, who had come back after buying the razor blades.
‘Let me carry it, Babuji, let me carry it,’ the boy said. Ganesh was in a panic.
‘Get away, get away,’ he said.
But as the boy persisted, he thought that he might as well give the load to Biju, as, at any rate, he himself wouldn’t look too dignified crossing the stretch between the opening of the gulley and the crowd of beggars by the statue.
‘Where shall I take it?’ Biju said.
‘Give it to the beggars out there,’ Ganesh said.
The servant boy looked askance but obeyed the orders. Ganesh returned towards the storeroom to lock it up and restore the keys to his sister-in-law’s dressing table.
‘Where are my keys?’ he heard a voice. But he thought that it was his own bad conscience shouting as it had done before.
‘Who has taken the keys? Biju? Where are you? Have you taken my keys?’
Ganesh could not now mistake the source of the voice. He drifted away from the storeroom door and ambling along as though he had come from a leisurely session in the lavatory below, he said:
‘ The storeroom is open. Your keys are lying here. Of course, the servant must have taken them…’
His heart beat like a tom in hell now that he had lied. And he cursed himself for his lack of self-control.
The sister-in-law returned to her room, thinking that the servant had, indeed, taken the keys to get some condiments out of the storeroom.
Ganesh waited for Biju to come back, so that he could conspire with the servant boy to cover up what he had done.
‘Don’t tell Bibiji about the bag of grain’ he said when the boy returned. ‘And where are the blades?’
Biju showed him both the blades and the change on the palm of his hands.
‘Keep the change,’ Ganesh said. And he proceeded upstairs.
Like all people who try to be cleaver and hatch plots to carry out a design, he forgot to do one or two things which were essential to bluff his sister-in-law. For instance, he did lot tell the servant boy the details of his plan about the bag of grain. Nor did he ask him to pretend that he, Biju, had taken the keys from the mistress’s table to open the storeroom door and get some condiments out. And when his sister-in-law arrived downstairs and asked for the keys, the servant boy innocently said he knew nothing about hem.
Of course, on sensing the real nature of the situation, he began to invent a lie to the effect that he had taken the keys from Ganeshji to fetch an empty bag out.
The lady of the house, was nothing if not a shrewd, knowing housewife, instinctively aware of the subterfuges, lies and innuendos of all the members of the household. She caught the servant boy in the trap of prevarications that he had begun to make. And, when, on top of incriminating evidence which Biju gave against himself Ganesh said he had seen him carry a bag of grain out of the house, the lady got her husband to beat the servant boy and throw him out, so that he could be free to join the beggars outside, whom he loved so dearly. In spite of the many more lies he told, the servant boy was, however, throughout, as stubborn in refusing to tell upon Ganesh as this gentleman was in concealing the truth which might have cleared up the matter.
The imperturbabl
e calm of Ganesh’s behaviour after this incident was only broken when he saw the beggar woman again the next morning. His neck twitched more furiously, and his heavy-lidded eyes blinked, as if someone were digging pins into them, especially because he saw the servant boy, Biju, seated by her almost as though he had taken complete charge of her.
* From The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and Other Stories.
Selected Bibliography
SHORT STORIES BY MULK RAJ ANAND
The Lost Child and Other Stories (London, 1934).
The Barber s Trade Union and Other Stories (Bombay, 1944).
The Tractor and the Corn Goddess and Other Stories (Bombay, 1947).
Reflections on the Golden Bed and Other Stories (Bombay, 1953).
The Power of Darkness and Other Stories (Bombay, 1959).
Lajwanti and Other Stories (Bombay, 1966).
Between Tears and Laughter (New Delhi, 1973). Selected Stories
(Moscow, 1955).
STORIES RETOLD
Indian Fairy Tales (Bombay, 1946). Aesop’s Fables (Bombay,
1960).
More Indian Fairy Tales (Bombay, 1961).
CRITICAL STUDIES OF THE SHORT STORIES OF MULK RAJ ANAND
Chapters in Books
Gupta, G.S.B., Mulk Raj Anand, A Study of his fiction in Humanist
Perspective (Bareilly, 1974).
Naik, M.K., Mulk Raj Anand (New Delhi, 1973).
Sinha, K.N., Mulk Raj Anand (New York, 1974).
Venugopal, C.V. The Indian Short Story in English: A Survey
(Bareilly, 1975).
Articles
Fisher, M., “The shape of Lostness: Mulk Raj Anand’s Short
Stories’, Journal of Indian Writing in English, II, i. 1974.
Gupta, G.S.B., “Woman in Anand’s Shorter Fiction” Karnataka
University Journal, Humanities, XIII, 1969.
Greatest Short Stories Page 20