Breakfast with the Nikolides

by Rumer Godden

  The shaggy old town of Amorra woke before the new.

  The first to wake in the bazaar were the cats; they ran along the drains under the steps and leaped over refuse and old tins and heaps of leaves without a sound, skirting the sleeping bodies on beds and mats or on the ground; and as they ran the light ran after them, drawing streaks across the houses. The sun came up and filled the light with warm yellow, and struck across the bathing tanks, where presently the people would go for their ablutions and to clean their cooking-pots.

  A dog sitting on a dung-heap stood up and stretched his hind legs; as the sun began to warm the street, a thousand indelicate smells rose to his nostrils. In every tree the crows began their cawing. Someone took the cloth off the cockatoo’s cage and it walked backwards and forwards along its perch examining its feathers that were green with purple points.

  A thin little boy was the first human to come out; he wore nothing but a coat that came to the top of his stomach and his stomach was blown out into the shape of a melon and his head was newly shaven except for one lock in the middle. He shivered, his eyes were dull with sleep and he went to the tap that stood in the street and began to splash his face. Two other boys ran out from a hut and hailed him; they left the door of the hut open and new smoke and scoldings came out after them and an old woman, bent so that her face was near her knees, brought out a basket. She stepped aside to blow her nose with her fingers, then went to the end wall of the hut and in the sun began to plaster dung cakes on the wall to dry; each cake was patterned with the print of all her fingers and she slapped them on one after the other with a heavy regular rhythm that was soothing in the early morning. The little boys began to play.

  Soon after the huts were awake the houses woke too. Soon the families came out on the verandahs.

  In a small house a thin old man came out to sit in the sun and near him he had a table of books. He shivered gently and wiped his nose and gathered his grey shawl round him and put on his spectacles and picked up a book. He was Professor Dutt from the College, and he had two extra classes to prepare; after his morning lecture he was to coach that brilliant, uncertain and rather tiresome student, Anil Krishna Banerjee, in his room; and at three o’clock he was to go to Mr Pool’s house, where, every afternoon, he taught certain subjects to the Misses Emily and Barbara Pool. That gave him a little welcome extra money every month, but it worried him; he could not decide if it were an honour or an ignominy that Sir Monmatha Ghose had recommended, and Charles had chosen, him; and he could not make up his mind what, and how much, the children ought to know or what, and how much, he ought to teach them, and he varied startlingly between the kindergarten and the academic; also he was terrified by Mrs Pool. She said ‘my children’ as if they were some rare sort of animal, she attended the lessons and interrupted them and had the effect, he noticed, of nonplussing Miss Emily as well as himself. He sighed as he turned over the pages in search of some small problems that would not harass the brains of the children too much and yet would please and impress Mrs Pool.

  A goat and two kids pattered down the road to the bazaar, past houses where oleanders showed in knots between the dusty little gardens, and cows were being milked in front of their suspicious owners. The goat had discharged her milk and now, with her udders done up in a neat white bag, she walked along in front of her disappointed kids. They walked in and out of the legs of fathers coming back from the family shopping, of cake-sellers and bread-sellers and the betel-leaf man. Water dropped on their heads and along their backs as the water-skins and pots were carried in for the day, and from the tanks the sound of splashings and scourings came to their ears.

  For the goat the bazaar was a pleasant place to wander, full of pickings and leavings, though her kids became entangled with legs and wheels and the butchers’ shops had heads and entrails and whole corpses of little kids hung up on hooks. The live kids filled the air with their hungry bleatings but no one heard them, they were only one more noise in the hubbub of noises; the kids danced on their miniature hooves over leaves and litter and betel stains and droppings and the goat stayed by the side of the road munching a succulent paper. The bull took no notice of any of them, nor of his patient relations the buffaloes, as they walked leadenly along with their carts, overloaded, hot and dusty. The bull swung his dewlap and went off to lick a pile of soft sugar in the sweet-shop; his horns were tipped with brass and he wore a necklace and a hump cap made of blue-and-white beads; and – another side of veneration – a little sick cow stood on three legs and shivered before it limped off starving down the road. Eventually it wandered into the College ground while the porter was round at the kitchens gleaning his morning meal.

  Anil saw it as he was getting up. He stood in his room with nothing on his body but a cotton cloth around his thighs. He had just come up from the privy and his Thread, the sacred Thread that hung from his left shoulder to his right thigh, was twisted round his ear. Slowly humming a song, he untwisted it and began to put on his clothes. At home he could not have dressed like this. There he went to wash himself in the tank beside the house; praying, then facing the sun, soaking himself with pourings from his lota, saying again the prayers prescribed as he poured, pouring water after he had prayed, thinking of the seven sacred rivers; and as he plunged finally into the water of the tank, as it closed around his shoulders, it was the water of the Mother of All Rivers, the River Ganges; he was bathing by intention in its waters, his spirit floated away to join it in its course.

  When he had finished, he turned towards the sun, taking the water in his hands, letting it run off his fingers. He came out of the water putting a pure cloth round his waist and on his shoulders and waited with his face turned to the East for the house priest, the Purohit, to touch his forehead with a paste of sandalwood making the red mark of his caste, and hang round his neck a string of flowers. After saying his last prayers he put on his clean clothes and carrying his lota and his flowers went towards the house. That was his morning ritual and now, getting up as he had done this morning, washing himself quickly and putting on his clothes as he looked out of the window, Anil felt slothful and impure … Why do I not keep to the rites in College? My father thinks I do, I vowed to him I would, then why don’t I? I do not know. Why do I think of this now? What suddenly has made me think of this? Narayan is always talking of it. Is it Narayan or is it that little cow tearing up the College grass as if she were in heaven?…

  ‘It is acknowledged that the poverty of the Indian breed of cattle is due to the fact that their slaughter is forbidden by ancient Hindu religion; old and useless herds are thus maintained that take from the healthy young animals their share of food.’ That is what Anil himself had written in his essays, but would he have killed the little cow outside? No, he would not … Would I prevent Narayan from killing it? I do not know. I do not know … And suddenly he found it was nearly eight o’clock and bent down to pick up his shoes. On his leg the red mark had nearly healed.

  Narayan sat in his office and made up his book. It was his case book and though he would not have shown it to Anil or anyone else, or mentioned its existence even, it was precious to him. It was a collection of notes on his cases, not for showing to officials but written for himself; they might even have been called notes on himself. Each one was a record of more than a case, each one was a battle; they were a series of small tough battles in which he had won through from the new deeply inhibited student to Dr Das, the young research man at the Government Farm, the marked-out Government servant …

  And it is quite right, said Narayan, I am good. At present I have to do routine jobs, I have to practise, but I shall get a better post and a better. And I shall deserve it. Each page I turn brings me nearer to that. The pages of the book were deeply serious to him – ‘A bullock … An imported goat … A cow in calf … An infected herd of buffalo.’

  When he was young Narayan had had the thoughtless terrible cruelty of most Indians to animals, a cruelty that reaches from high to low, that runs throu
gh high days and ordinary days; it stains the land with the blood of annual sacrifice in temples and holy places; it tortures the cows for their milk and starves their calves to death; it lets sores gather and stream under the yokes of bullocks and buffaloes and on the thin hard-driven tikka gharry ponies; it lets dogs lie out in the road when they have been run over till they die by slow hours, and throws kittens and blind puppies on the rubbish heaps to starve – native, thoughtless cruelty. Now he was not cruel and he was not kind. He was intensely practical and he was a good and skilful doctor; and besides his passionate ambition, and the research that lifted him towards it, lately he had liked his work. Every time he was called to the ordinary and routine work he was conscious of a new deep satisfaction. Even while he grumbled and pulled up his sleeves, the whole of him was filled with a good accustomed feeling of skill and ease.

  That was how he had first met Charles; it was soon after he came on the farm, one evening when he had managed to save a calf that might – so easily – have died. It was a hot evening and the shed stank after the calf birth, of blood and urine and soaked stale straw, but as he knelt on one knee over the calf Narayan had been full of ease and quiet peaceful emotion – emotion is too strong a word, happiness too light, but he was filled with serene and utter peace. He, who was usually obsessed with futility, in the shed that evening had a quiet responsible power, reasonable and just, capable of joy and strength and a wisdom of its own. In saving the calf he had in some part saved the world, and his, that evening, were the quiet and the strength of a saviour. At least till Charles came in. When Charles came in Narayan did not move but every hair of him altered and stiffened into defence. He waited for whatever it might be, a question or a criticism or an order, perhaps praise, because no one could deny that he had done good work with the calf – but it was nothing.

  Charles, who was smoking a pipe, leaned against the door of the shed and was completely silent, watching Narayan – watching his hands and watching the calf laid down on the straw and the cow turning her head on the rope to look, watching the sunset through the half-door; and the sun going down seemed to look back at him, winking on his eyeglass; imperceptibly, Narayan relaxed.

  The cowsheds were on the edge of the farm buildings; and over the half-door of the shed he could see outside, to the fields where the sun was going down behind the flat plain; the people were going home to their villages along the narrow raised partitions of the fields; they moved to the dim distance – a man driving two bullocks, his plough left standing till tomorrow in the earth; a child, a woman with a bundle on her head, a woman carrying a child; a man, a boy, a child. He could see the village in the distance raised in its clump of trees and the land stretching from it like a sea from an island. The flat land with its bare earth fields, for it was summer then, took for a moment the reflection of the sky; the last light lay on them turning them a deep Indian yellow; it was an unmistakably evening light, and somewhere near the shed, but out of sight, a cowherd began to play a tune upon a flute.

  The calf moved, jerking its legs, and Narayan forgot Charles; presently he lifted it and put it by the mother; it was dark cocoa colour streaked with white, it had white on its legs and a white star on its forehead. ‘Star of good luck,’ said Charles; ‘I didn’t think it would live.’

  ‘It will do now, I think,’ said Narayan.

  ‘It’s a good thing we have you and not old Babu Bhobatosh Babbletalk. That is one of our imported Friesians.’

  Narayan was so surprised at his knowing and using the students’ nickname for old Dr Bhobatosh that he forgot to answer. Charles was looking at him as Narayan wiped his hands on a towel.

  ‘You should have been a doctor.’

  ‘I should have – did funds permit.’ After a moment he added, ‘They did not permit.’

  ‘Perhaps that was lucky,’ said Charles, and gravely he looked at Narayan. ‘You couldn’t do any more important work than this.’ And he asked, ‘You go to the Onward Movement meetings, don’t you?’

  Narayan flushed. ‘I – have gone. But they are silly boys, I think.’

  ‘I wish you would go more often,’ said Charles and Narayan stared. ‘Tell them – tell them—’ said Charles, and his pipe smoked alone in his hand – ‘tell them that the future of India may lie in this – in this calf, or a pod, or a bud, or a healthy blade of rice. Tell them not to talk so much. Politicians talk, and they start at the top and they never reach bottom, or earth – or truth. Young men are talkative and they like to be politicians – tell them to forbear,’ said Charles; ‘tell them to start at the bottom with the soil. They have inherited it. It is theirs. They are always telling us that. Tell them they should learn how to use it.’

  That was what Charles had said – and each word struck a note from another world like it in Narayan. It was as if he had been tuned; and he flushed and cried, ‘I will tell them to hold their tongues and use their hands!’ As soon as he had said it, he saw the absurdity of what he had said and he burned with the ridicule of it so painfully that his eyes and his throat hurt him almost to tears; but Charles did not appear to have heard and presently Narayan was able to stammer: ‘That is – I – I think you should tell them yourself, Sir.’

  ‘I?’ said Charles and laughed. ‘They are frightened of me.’

  That was true. They found Charles disconcerting. He had a way, not of tripping them up, but of making them give an exact attention to everything they said; the mind of Narayan appreciated that, while his own cheeks burned, but the students were not robust enough for it, and those who loved hyperbole and smartness disliked Charles. Narayan had heard him in conference and debate and, from curiosity, had gone to hear him lecture; the lecture was vigorous and engrossing, Charles was magnetic and he had fired some of the students into action.

  They came to Charles after the lecture. ‘You need voluntary workers,’ they said grandly. ‘We shall go.’

  ‘Very well, go,’ said Charles.

  That left them in the air. They felt snubbed and they resented it. They felt entitled to his consideration; they had offered their services, free. ‘We said voluntary workers,’ they reminded him.

  ‘I said voluntary workers too,’ said Charles. ‘You know where the organization is. If you want to work, go there.’

  ‘Sir, if you do not want us—’

  Charles’s answer came swiftly and hard. ‘I don’t want you. It wants you. Don’t make it anything to do with me.’ But they did not understand and they were offended.

  Narayan wondered over this: Charles knew the young Bengalis; under their buoyancy they were deeply sensitive, and if he had been more gentle with his words would have gone twice as far. Narayan was certain he knew this, himself; then why was he not more gentle? He deliberately discouraged affection and Narayan, who had just begun to cultivate it, found this hard to accept. Charles was friendly to him, Charles was interested in his work, but Narayan felt that they were still waiting for their intimacy. He knew it was most unlikely that Charles should be his friend, but he felt, quite certainly, that presently this would be.

  He tried to interest him in Anil. ‘No, thanks, Das,’ said Charles, ‘I haven’t time for protégés,’ and Anil refused most firmly to further it either.

  ‘Let me show your poems to Pool, Anil?’

  ‘To Pool? To Charlie Chang? What a foolman you are, Indro. He only deals in seeds and cattle breeds’ – but under his lofty derision was the same note of fear.

  He had once encountered Charles; Narayan did not know that. It was at another lecture that Charles had given in the College. ‘And we must take a wider, broader view of what agriculture means to India,’ said Charles, concluding. And he asked, ‘Has anybody anything to say?’

  Anil always had something to say. ‘Sir,’ said Anil, standing up, ‘I see the whole pattern of agriculture as a circle …’

  Charles had never thought of it, but now he was suddenly and most definitely against that; if he saw a pattern at all, he saw it as a long, long line, like
a road beginning far back out of vision, continuing broader and broader out of sight.

  Anil was still speaking: ‘… Everything is a circle,’ said Anil. ‘The rhythm of the year, the season, make a rhythm of the land – the preparing of the land, the seeding, germination, ripening, harvest, the return to earth as seed again – full circle is come; and is it not strange,’ said Anil, waxing louder, ‘is it not strange that everything that is symbolic of the life of the people is also the shape of a circle? The grindstone, the feeding bowl, the basket, the wheel—’

  ‘What about a plough?’ asked Charles.