UNTOUCHABLE
Page 14
‘ Life is found in Jesus,
Only there ’tis offered thee ;
Offered without price or money
’Tis the gift of God sent free.’
Bakha was dumb with amazement, carried away by the confusion, feeling flattered, honoured by the invitation Which had come from the sahib, however much that sahib looked like a native. He followed willingly, listening to each word that the Colonel spoke, but not understanding a word :
‘ Life is found in Jesus,’
the Colonel sang again, absorbed in himself, and unconscious that he was in charge of a soul in trouble.
Jesus ! Who was Jesus ! The same as Yessuh Messih ? Who was he ? The sahib says he is God. Was he a God like Rama, God of the Hindus, whom his father worshipped and his forefathers had worshipped, whom his mother used to mention quite often in her prayers ? These thoughts gushed into Bakha’s mind, and he would have exploded with them had it not been that the Colonel was absolutely absorbed in his sing-song :
‘ Life is found alone in Jesus,
Only there ’tis offered thee ;
Offered without price or money
’Tis the gift of God sent free.’
‘ Huzoor,’ said Bakha, breaking in impatiently at the close of the third recitation, ‘ who is Jesus ? The same as Yessuh Messih ? Who is he ? ’
‘ He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood,’
answered the Colonel quickly, rhythmically, before Bakha knew what he had asked. He was still baffled. The answer, if it was an answer, was like a conundrum to him ; words, words. He felt overwhelmed and uncomfortable. But being, of course, too happy to be seen walking with the sahib, he bore all, trying to remember parts of the Colonel’s song and asking himself what they meant. But apart from the muffled sound of words he could not catch anything.
‘ Sahib, who is Yessuh Messih ? ’
‘ He is the Son of God,’ answered Colonel Hutchinson, coming down to earth for a moment. ‘ He died that we might be forgiven.’
And then he burst into song again :
‘ He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.’
‘ He died that we might be forgiven,’ thought Bakha. ‘ What does that mean ? He is the son of God ! How could anybody be the son of God if God, as my mother told me, lives in the sky ? How could He have a son ? And why did His son die that we should be forgiven ? Forgiven for what ? And who is this son of God ? ’
‘ Who is Yessuh Messih, Sahib ? Is he the God of the sahibs ? ’ Bakha asked, slightly afraid that he was bothering the white man too much. He knew from experience that Englishmen did not like to talk too much.
‘ He is the Son of God, my boy,’ answered the Colonel, ecstatically revolving his head. ‘ And He died for us sinners :
He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood.’
Bakha was a bit bored by this ecstatic hymn-singing. But the white man had condescended to speak to him, to take notice of him. He was happy and proud to be in touch with a sahib. He suffered the priest and even reiterated his enquiry :
‘ Do they pray to Yessuh Messih in your girja ghar, Sahib ? ’
‘ Yes, yes,’ replied the Colonel, breaking into the rhythm of a new hymn :
‘ Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me.
Let my sins be forgiven !
Let there be light,
Oh, shed Thy light in the heart of this boy.’
Bakha was baffled and bored. He did not understand anything of these songs. He had followed the sahib because the sahib wore trousers. Trousers had been the dream of his life. The kindly interest which the trousered man had shown him when he was downcast had made Bakha conjure up pictures of himself wearing the sahib’s clothes, talking the sahib’s language and becoming like the guard whom he had seen on the railway station near his village. He did not know who Yessuh Messih was. The sahib probably wanted to convert him to his religion. He didn’t want to be converted. But he wouldn’t mind being converted if he knew who Yessuh Messih was. The sahib, however, was singing, singing to himself and saying Yessuh Messih was the son of God. How could God have a son ? Who is God ? If God is like Rama, He has no son, for he had never heard that Rama had a son. It was all so puzzling that he thought of excusing himself by lying to the sahib that he had to go to work and couldn’t come with him.
The Colonel saw Bakha lagging behind and, realising that his new follower was losing interest, exerted the peculiar obstinacy of the enthusiastic missionary in him and dragging at the boy’s sleeve, said, ‘ Yessuh Messih is the Son of God, my boy. While we were yet sinners, He died for us. He sacrificed Himself for us.’ Then again he became rapt in his devotional songs :
‘ O Calvary ! O Calvary !
It was for me that Jesus died
On the Cross of Calvary !’
He sacrificed himself for us, Bakha reflected. His idea of sacrifice was something very certain and definite. He remembered that when some calamity brooded over the family, such as an epidemic of sickness, or starvation, his mother used to make offerings to the goddess Kali, by sacrificing a goat or some other animal. That sacrifice was supposed to appease the goddess’s wrath and the evil passed over. Now, what did this sacrifice of Yessuh Messih mean ? Why did he sacrifice himself ?
‘ Why did Yessuh Messih sacrifice himself, Huzoor ? ’ he asked.
‘ He died that we might be forgiven,
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heaven,
Saved by His precious blood,’
answered the Colonel, forgetting, as he had often done while he had been with Bakha, that the sweeper-boy didn’t understand a word of what he was singing. Then in a sane moment he recognised the look of anxious solicitude on the face of the boy and realised he had been babbling too much, and mostly to himself.
‘ He sacrificed Himself out of love for us,’ he said. ‘ He sacrificed Himself to help us all ; for the rich and the poor ; for Brahmin and the Bhangi.’
The last sentence went home. ‘ He sacrificed himself for us, for the rich and the poor, for the Brahmin and the Bhangi.’ That meant there was no difference in his eyes between the rich and the poor, between the Brahmins and the Bhangis, between the pundit of the morning, for instance, and himself.
‘ Yes, yes, Sahib, I understand,’ said Bakha eagerly. ‘ Yessuh Messih makes no difference between the Brahmin and myself.’
‘ Yes, yes, my boy, we are all alike in the eyes of Jesus,’ the Colonel answered him. But he began garrulously : ‘ He is our superior. He is the Son of God. We are all sinners. He will intercede with God, His Father, on our behalf.’
‘ He is superior to us. We are all sinners. Why, why is anyone superior to another ? Why are we all sinners ? ’ Bakha began to reflect.
‘ Why are we all sinners, Sahib ? ’ he queried.
‘ We were all born sinners,’ replied the Colonel evasively, the puritan in him shying at an exposition of the doctrine of original sin which seemed called for.
‘ We must confess our sins. Then alone will He forgive us, otherwise we will have to suffer the eternal torment of hell. You confess your sins to me before I convert you to Christianity.’
‘ But, Huzoor, I don’t know who Yessuh Messih is. I know Ram. But I don’t know Yessuh Messih.’
‘ Ram is the god of the idolaters,’ the Colonel said after a pause, and a bit absent-mindedly. ‘ Come and confess your sins to me and Yessuh Messih will receive you in Heaven when you die.’
Now Bakha was utterly bored. Never mind if it was a sahib who was giving him his company. He was afraid of the thought of conversion. He hadn’t understood very much of what t
he Salvationist said. He didn’t like the idea of being called a sinner. He had committed no sin that he could remember. How could he confess his sins ? Odd. What did it mean, confessing sins ? ‘ Does the sahib want some secret knowledge ? ’ he wondered. ‘ Does he want to perform some magic or get some illegal knowledge ? ’ He didn’t want to go to Heaven. As a Hindu he didn’t believe in the judgment day. He had never thought of that. He had seen people die. And he just accepted the fact. He had been told that people who died were reborn in some form or other. He dreaded that he should be reborn as a donkey or a dog. But all that didn’t disturb him. ‘ Yessuh Messih must be a good man,’ he thought, ‘ if he regards a Brahmin and a Bhangi the same.’ But who was he ? Where did he come from ? What did he do ? He had heard the story of Ram. He had heard the story of Krishna. But he hadn’t heard the story of Yessuh Messih. ‘ This sahib will not tell me the story,’ he said to himself. But he still hoped he might give him a pair of his cast-off trousers. And he followed him half unwillingly.
‘ Look, that is our home,’ said the Colonel, reaching the gate of a compound leading to a pile of mud-houses among the neem-trees with thatched and sloping roofs.
‘ I know, Sahib,’ said Bakha, who had often passed by it.
‘ It was a drug-house once, an opium distillery,’ said the Colonel with great pride. ‘ But five years ago we took it.’ He paused for a moment to recall the trouble it had cost him to acquire the piece of land to erect a building, and he burst out piously into an exclamation of his gratitude to Christ. ‘ O Lord, how great are Thy works, and Thy thoughts how deep ! God has indeed brought light into the world !’ Then turning from his thoughts to the young man, he said : ‘ He has cast out the heathen from the place.’
A muffled song proceeded from the tall mud-house in the centre of the compound, which Bakha knew to be the girja ghar. The Colonel gave it shape for the benefit of the young man by lifting his finger and reciting :
‘ Share your blessings, share your blessings,
Share them day by day ;
Share your blessings, all life’s long way ;
Share your blessings, though you’ve only one,
And it will surprise you how much good you’ve done.’
‘ George, George, tea is ready !’ came a shrieking, hoarse and hysterical voice, tearing the Colonel’s squeaky song to bits.
‘ Coming, coming !’ responded the Colonel automatically, standing where he stood, but with his arms and legs all in a flurry. He had heard his wife’s voice. He was afraid of her. He was confused. He didn’t know whether to go into the mud-house on the right which was his bungalow, and to take Bakha in there, or to take him to the church. He stood hesitating on the edge of a conflict.
‘ Where are you ? Where have you been all the afternoon ? ’ came the shrieking voice again. And behind it appeared the form of a round-faced, big-bellied, dark-haired, undersized, middle-aged woman, a long cigarette-holder with a cigarette in her mouth, a gaily-coloured band on her Eton-cropped hair, pince-nez glasses on her rather small eyes, a low-necked printed cotton frock that matched her painted and powdered face and reached barely down to her knees.
‘ Oh, is that what you’ve been doing, going to these blackies again !’ she shouted, frowning, her heavily-powdered face showing its layers of real, vivid scarlet skin underneath the coating. ‘ I give you up. Really you’re incorrigible. I should have thought you would have learned your lesson from the way those Congress wallahs beat you last week !’
‘ What is the matter ? I am just coming. I am coming,’ responded the Colonel, impatient, disturbed and embarrassed.
Bakha was going to slip away in order to save the Colonel the displeasure of his wife, for which, he felt, he was mainly responsible.
‘ Wait, wait,’ said the Colonel, holding the sweeper-boy’s hand. ‘ I’ll take you to the church.’
‘ So that the tea should get cold !’ exclaimed Mary Hutchinson. ‘ I can’t keep waiting for you all day while you go messing about with all those dirty bhangis and chamars,’ and saying this, she withdrew into her boudoir.
Bakha had not known the exact reason for her frowns, but when he heard the words bhangi and chamar he at once associated her anger with the sight of himself.
‘ Salaam, Sahib,’ he said, extricating his hand from the old man’s grasp before the missionary realised he had done so. And he showed his heels ; such was his fear of the woman.
‘ Wait, wait, my son, wait,’ cried the padre after him.
But in the white haze of the afternoon sun he hurried away as if the Colonel’s wife were a witch, with raised arms and crooked feet following him, harassing him.
The old man was piously reciting another hymn as he stood staring at Bakha’s receding figure :
‘ Blessed be Thy love, blessed be Thy name.’
‘ Everyone thinks us at fault,’ Bakha was saying to himself as he walked along. ‘ He wants me to come and confess my sins. And his mem-sahib ! I don’t know what she said about bhangis and chamars. She was angry with the sahib. I am sure I am the cause of the mem-sahib’s anger. I didn’t ask the padre to come and talk to me. He came of his own accord. I was so happy to talk to him. I would certainly have asked him for a pair of white trousers had the mem-sahib not been angry.’
He walked along, vacantly oppressed by the weight of his heavy cloud of memories. He felt a kind of nausea in his stomach—the spiritual nausea that seemed to rise in him when he was in difficulties. He was unnerved again as in the morning after his unfortunate experiences. Only, he was now too tired to care. He just let himself be carried by his legs towards the edge of the day. There was a faint smell of wetness oozing from the dusty earth which paved his way, a sort of moist warmth that rose to his nostrils. High above the far-distant horizon of the Bulashah dales the sun stood fixed, motionless and undissolved, as if it could not bring itself to go, to move or to melt. In the hills and fields, however, there was a strange quickening. Long rows of birds flew over against the cold blue sky towards their homes. The grasshoppers chirped in an anxious chorus as they fell back into the places where they always lay waiting for food. A lone beetle sent electric waves of sound quivering into the cool clear air. Every blade of grass along the pathway, where Bakha walked, was gilded by the light.
As he went on, striding lightly from his heavy rumps, his head bent, his eyes half closed, his lower lip pressed forward, he felt the blood coursing through his veins. He seemed full of a sort of tired restlessness. The awkwardness of the moment when the missionary’s wife emerged from her room on to the veranda of her thatched bungalow and glared at her husband, stirred in his soul the echoes of those memories which had shaken and stirred him during the morning. There was a common quality in the look of hate in the round white face of the Colonel’s wife and in the sunken visage of the touched man. The man’s protruding lower jaw, with its transparent muscles, shaken in his spluttering speech, came before Bakha’s eyes. Also his eyes emerging out of their sockets. The Colonel’s wife had also opened her little eyes like that, behind her spectacles. That had frightened Bakha, frightened him much more than the thrust of the touched man’s eyeballs, for she was a mem-sahib, and the frown of a mem-sahib had the strange quality of unknown, uncharted seas of anger behind it. To Bakha, therefore, the few words which she had uttered carried a dread a hundred times more terrible than the fear inspired by the whole tirade of abuse by the touched man. It was probably that the episode of the morning was a matter of history, removed in time and space from the more recent scene, also, perhaps, because the anger of a white person mattered more. The mem-sahib was more important to his slavish mind than the man who was touched, he being one of his many brown countrymen. To displease the mem-sahib was to him a crime for which no punishment was bad enough. And he thought he had got off comparatively lightly. He dared not think unkind thoughts about her. So he unconsciously transferred his protest against her anger to the sum of his reactions against the insulting personages of the morning.
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His attention was diverted to a black leper who sat swathed in tattered garments, exposing his raw wounds to the sun and the flies by the wayside, his crumpled hand lifted in beggary, and on his lips the prayer : ‘ Baba pesa de ’ (Oh, man, give me a pice). Bakha had a sudden revulsion of feeling. He looked away from the man. It was the Grand Trunk Road near the railway station of Bulashah. The pavements were crowded with beggars. A woman wailed for food outside one of the many cook-shops which lined one side of the road. She had a little child in her arms, another child in a bag on her back, a third holding on to her skirt. Some boys were running behind the stream of carriages begging for coppers. Bakha felt a queer sadistic delight staring at the beggars moaning for alms but not receiving any. They seemed to him despicable. And the noise they made through their wailings and moanings and blessings oppressed him.
He heard the rumbling thunder of a railway train which passed under the footbridge he was ascending. Almost simultaneously he heard a shout from the golbagh garden rend the still, leafy air. The shadow of the smoke-cloud that the engine had sent up to the bridge choked Bakha’s throat and blinded his eyes. Then the fumes of smoke melted like invisible, intangible flakes of snow, leaving a dark trail of soot behind. This too paled in the sunshine. The train had rushed into the cool darkness of the tin roof on Bulashah station.