Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  But as he entered deeper into the town, and saw some people like himself who had the aspect of hill folk, as they carried weights on their backs, he felt more surprised.

  He could not realize the significance of this world.

  There was an eager, fluttering sense of anticipation in his heart at the sight of the grand marble building by which Daya Ram had stopped to wait for him.

  ‘Salaam, Pir Din,’ Munoo heard his uncle say as he entered the high-pillared hall of the Imperial Bank.

  ‘Salaam, salaam, you are late. The Babu Sahib is angry because there was no one to go and fetch his food at mid-day,’ said Pir Din, coughing asthmatically, and smoothing his fiery, henna-dyed beard over the gold-braided red coat which he, too, wore. Munoo guessed this was the head peon his uncle had often spoken about.

  ‘Is the Babu in the office, then?’ asked Daya Ram, with more confidence than usual, guessing how urgent was the Babu’s need for a servant, and knowing he had a sure job for his nephew.

  ‘Han, han, he is there,’ grunted Pir Din, waving his hand. ‘But the bags of money are to go to the cantonment, and it is the English-mail day, and the lallas are coming in fast for their business. So you had better be quick.’

  ‘Han, Mian Sahib,’ said Daya Ram, flattering his colleague with a mode of address reserved for high-class Muhammadans. Then he turned to his nephew. ‘Come.’

  The boy followed his uncle into a large cool room, past brass bars around which men crowded, eager-eyed and eager-eared, to see and hear the jingling of bright silver rupees and the rustling of clean currency notes. They entered another room. Beneath a swiftly moving pair of wings, suspended by an iron rod from the centre of the ceiling, before a huge table, on a chair much too big for him, sat a little man with an irregular, sallow face, quite vague except for a flat nose, the white spots on his cheeks, and a thin, drooping black moustache, of which each hair seemed to stand out distinct.

  ‘I bow my forehead to you, Babuji,’ Daya Ram said, joining his hands and dusting his feet as he entered.

  The Babu lifted his head from the papers before him but did not reply.

  ‘Say “I bow my forehead before you” or “long live the gods” to Babuji,’ whispered Daya Ram audibly to Munoo.

  Munoo mumbled both the courtesies, confused by the pictures aroused in his mind by his entry into a strange world of jingling coins, shuffling paper money, brass bars, tables, chairs, carpets, and swiftly whirring fans. But he did not raise his head to look at the person he had addressed.

  There was an awkward silence, during which a faint smile of amusement hovered on the Babu’s lips before becoming a brief twisted smile of contempt. Munoo noticed it and looked down, half in fear, half in embarrassment.

  ‘Maharaj,’ said Daya Ram servilely as he turned to the majesty before him, ‘I have brought my little nephew for your service.’

  ‘Oh, is that he?’ the Babu asked, pointing to Munoo.

  ‘Han, janab,’ Munoo heard his uncle say, and then he heard the command: ‘Join your hands to the Babuji, rustic.’

  Munoo had been studying the black boots on the Babu’s feet as they jutted out from under the table, and he was wondering, as he stood bent in a strained posture of humility, when he would be able to possess such a pair.

  ‘Long live the gods,’ he suddenly broke out, joining his hands, a little too late to be seen in that reverent posture by the Babu, whose attention had been turned to a swift succession of ringing tones which had started on a black machine on the right of the table.

  ‘Yes, sir, yus, sir, fot not de junction be tehana . . .’ the Babu seemed to be saying to the tube into which he spoke, as he held a cap with a twisted cotton wire to his left ear. Munoo wondered whether the language that his would-be master was speaking was the Angrezi speech which the village school-teacher said should be learnt by all those who wanted to become babus. He reflected for a moment, and then he knew it was Angrezi.

  From wondering about the Babu’s speech he fell to admiring his clothes: the high, hard, white collar which he wore; the enormous turban wound round a pyramidal Kulah of red velvet embroidered with gold thread; the khaki coat with big pockets like money-bags; the wide cotton pyjamas; and the boots, the boots, the black boots. ‘If only I had had black boots like that,’ said Munoo to himself, ‘I would have walked much quicker and my feet would not have blistered.’

  ‘Acha!’ he heard the Babu say. ‘Take him to my house and put him in charge of Bibiji.’

  Daya Ram bowed obsequiously over his joined hands in homage to the Babu. Then he dragged the boy away from the contemplation of the Babu’s dress through the tidy and formal precincts of the Imperial Bank of India, up a steep circuitous road.

  They went to a block of windowless houses, squeezed one against another in an irregular pattern of uneven proportions, not without pretensions to a sort of suburban respectability, contradicted though this was by the broken bottles, rusted oil-tins, and leaking buckets that lay heaped here and there, with decaying vegetables and yellow paper, and piles of stones and crumbling bricks overgrown with moss.

  At the farthest end of the block was the Babu’s residence, a one-storeyed square house approached by a veranda on which a blackboard announced in white English letters to eastern civilization the glory of ‘Babu Nathoo Ram, Sub-Accountant, Imperial Bank, Sham Nagar.’

  The sight of some buff-coloured bungalows, perched higher up on the side of the tortuous hill road, lifted Munoo to a rare world of mystery, because these buildings lay enshrouded in an atmosphere of cool, shady trees, among neatly trimmed hedges, with small palms in green barrels, beds of even grass, and an abundance of many-coloured flowers. He wondered who lived there.

  But his gaze was soon diverted from the heights to which it had aspired by the apparition of a man with a big red face, shadowed by a queer, khaki, basket-like head-dress, a collar like the one the Babu had worn round his thick scarlet neck, a beautiful jacket which was, however, somewhat ridiculous, as it neither covered his big round paunch nor the heavy buttocks which were shamelessly exposed by the stretch of his khaki breeches, and strange, very strange, brown boots on his legs up to the knees. ‘An Angrez surely,’ Munoo said to himself.

  ‘Salaam, Huzoor,’ he heard his uncle say, abruptly striking his right foot against the left and standing erect.

  Munoo dared not look to see what the grim apparition did, but he saw the flourish of a cane and deliberately looked away downhill to the flat roofs of the houses in the town.

  ‘He is the burra Sahib of the Bank,’ said Daya Ram with a mingled gesture of fear, humility and reverence, in answer to his nephew’s inquiring eyes, when the man had walked down the hill beyond audible distance. Then he lunged forward and began to knock at the door of the Babu’s house.

  They waited in suspense for some time outside the door. Daya Ram knocked again, striking the latch against the worn-out grooves to produce a louder echo. Another little while passed. Daya Ram called, ‘Bibiji, open the door.’

  Then a chic lifted behind a side door and a woman appeared. She had a dark face, mobile and without any set form, except that which the tired smile on the corners of her thin lips gave it, and a sharp nose over which her brown eyes concentrated in a squint, and her forehead inclined with wrinkles. Her stern, flat-chested body was swathed in a muslin sari. He had seen none of the hill women drape it in that way, except Jay Singh’s mother, the wife of the landlord, who had originally come from town and who, the village women said, was not a woman but a collection of blandishments.

  Munoo waited in suspense, aware of the surprised stare in the lady’s face. He was frightened with the sense of strangeness that assailed him, not only from everything about the woman, but also from the polished corners of tables, chairs and pictures which showed themselves to his inquisitive eyes.

  ‘Bibiji,’ said Daya Ram with joined hands, ‘I have brought my little nephew to serve you. Here he is.’ Then he flashed an angry glance at Munoo and said: ‘Join your
hands, pig, and say “I fall at your feet” to Bibiji.’

  Munoo joined his hands, but he had hardly said, ‘I fall . . .’ when a loud, piercing shriek came from a child somewhere in the inner chambers. Bibiji retreated and exclaimed in a hard, rattling voice:

  ‘Oh baby, you have eaten my life! You can’t rest even while I am talking business to anyone! May you die! Of the evil star! Now what is the matter with you? What do you want? You . . .’

  And she would have continued, had Daya Ram not asked: ‘Will everything be all right then, Bibiji? Shall I leave him here?’

  Munoo waited anxiously for her answer. He was frightened of her. Her long neck stood out before his eyes like a hen’s.

  ‘Wait, Daya Ram,’ she cried, coming back from the room in which she had disappeared to qualify her curses with a slap on the face of the child, which made it howl the more. ‘Have you told the Babuji?’

  ‘Han, Bibiji, I took him to the office first,’ said Daya Ram, and Babuji said I was to bring him here and to put him in your charge.’

  ‘Acha,’ she said, ‘but there are vegetables to fetch from the bazaar for the evening meal. Will you . . .’

  At this the child in the back room, unable to draw attention by howling, began to shriek continuously, and the woman, retreating, let loose another series of curses.

  Munoo felt a strange emptiness in him, a kind of embarrassment. The picture of his aunt came before him. ‘But she never abused or cursed so much.’

  And, in his heart, there was a lonely song, a melancholy wail, asking, not pointedly, but in a vague, uncertain rhythm, what life in this woman’s house would prove.

  ‘Will you go and tell Babuji to buy the vegetables when he leaves the office and send them by the boy?’ came the voice of his mistress suddenly to Munoo’s ears.

  He did not attend to it for a moment. He was possessed by sadness and self-pity. He was tired after the long march through the hills. And he was hungry. He had thought that he would be able to sit down when he reached his destination, and that he would be given food, according to the custom which prevails in all Indian homes of offering food to guests and visitors at whatever time of the day they arrive. Instead he was being asked to go on an errand the very minute he arrived. ‘Perhaps the customs in the towns are different,’ he thought, with a sinking feeling.

  ‘Acha, Bibiji,’ said Daya Ram coolly. He had become too inured to the caprices of his masters to be resentful like his nephew.

  ‘Come, ohe Munoo,’ he said, walking along. ‘You will be looked after here. You will get plenty to eat in this home. And the Babu said he would pay us five rupees a month. I will show you my room near the office. Come down there on your day-off. Don’t forget to do your best for the masters. You are their servant and they are big people.’

  As Munoo listened to this, tears came rushing to his eyes. And through the tears he could see the high rocks, the great granite hills, grey in the blaze of the sun, and the silver line of the Beas, on the banks of which his herds had mooed defiance to the earth and the sky, wandering, wandering freely for miles and miles . . . .

  Overnight Munoo had lain huddled up in a corner of the kitchen of Babu Nathoo Ram’s house. He had had a disturbed night, for he had been very tired, and sleep does not come to the weary. And he had been given a ragged, old brown blanket which was hot in spite of the big rents in the sparse length and breadth. His tunic had become sodden with sweat. The mosquitoes had whined in his ears all night and bitten him in several places. Even now he could not keep his eyes closed, as he had been used to getting up early in the morning in his village.

  He sighed in vain for sleep to come to him. He could hear the Babu snoring loudly in another room. He did not know which room, because when he had come back with the vegetables from the market Bibiji had called him straight into the kitchen and given him a loaf of stale pancake, after which she had asked him to peel the potatoes and help her to cook. The meal was prepared, but who ate it, and where it was eaten, Munoo did not know, as, being fatigued, he had succumbed to sleep in the corner where he lay. The only thing he remembered was the shrill voice of his mistress, which had reached his ears when he had been sufficiently aroused by a few digs in the ribs:

  ‘Eater of your masters! Strange servant you are that you fall asleep before the sun sets! What is the use of a boy like you in the house if you are going to do that every day. Wake up! Wake up! Brute! Wake up and serve the Babuji his dinner. Or at least eat your food before you sleep, if sleep and die you must.’

  He looked around and scanned the various things that lay in utter confusion about him. There were plates of burnished brass with black-bottomed, bronze saucepans and tumblers of aluminium mixed with children’s toys, and glass bottles, big and small, bottles of medicine like the labelled bottles which Munoo had seen in the shop of the doctor of his village. Only these were dusty, while in the doctor’s shop everything was kept clean by the compounder. There were sacks of flour and lentils and huge wooden boxes and tins, containing Munoo knew not what. There were two dirty shirts and an alpaca jacket hanging from pegs in the walls, two enormous coloured pictures, the figures in which were hidden by the faded garlands of flowers that hung about them, and a large broken mirror covered with soot. Wood fuel lay heaped in one corner. And on a line suspended from the middle of the two walls, length-wise, were heaps of old and new clothes, while several bundles of quilts and blankets hung from the ceiling. On a separate shelf, a little further up, precariously balanced on an iron tray, lay utensils of polished ‘white chalk’, little round cups with handles, a big pot with a beak like a pig’s nose, and a jug.

  Munoo did not know for what these ‘white chalk’ utensils were used. But something in their glossy surface fascinated him, something about them vaguely promised him a surprise more significant than the open message reflected by the burning sheen of the brass and bronze utensils, which challenged him with an injunction: ‘You will have to polish us soon.’

  The rest of the junk, in spite of the glamour of the pictures and gaudy mirrors, confused him.

  For a moment he drew back into himself, into a sort of emptiness, only slightly disturbed by the waves of light that pervaded the room. Then he wanted to get up and see what was in the other parts of the house.

  His eyes lit with that impish curiosity which had always made him go out hunting for birds’ eggs in the trees, the bushes and the rocks. His heart fluttered with the light easy throb with which it had beaten when he had gone stealing fruit from the gardens. He felt the lure of adventure in his bones.

  With a sudden movement of his limbs he sprang to his feet and tiptoed to the door facing him. He applied an eye to the chink and saw a tiny room congested with two huge beds, several trunks and a little child’s vehicle. The Babu lay on a bed with his face sunk sideways into a pillow. The angular heap which curled up under a sheet on another bed was, Munoo guessed, Bibiji.

  Lest the mere act of looking on his part should arouse his master and mistress, he withdrew his gaze to peer through a half-open doorway on his right. On a clean white bed in the middle of the room lay a man, almost as white-faced as the sahib in the basket hat whom his uncle had saluted yesterday. There was a more interesting medley of objects in this room, all neatly arranged: a vast table in one corner, majestic chairs, like the thrones of which Munoo had seen pictures in his history books, photographs large and small, and calendars with dates written in black for ordinary days and red for the holidays, toys of coloured clay, among which the effigy of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of sagacity, worldliness and wealth, ruled supreme.

  Munoo’s eyes roved round and explored the potencies of civilization.

  He would have lingered to gaze endlessly, but he saw the man (the Babuji’s younger brother, he guessed, for he had heard Bibiji talk of Prem, the chota Babu) turn on his side and mutter in his sleep.

  ‘Vay, Mundu, are you awake?’

  Munoo’s heart beat faster. He was breathless for a moment. He wondered whet
her it was the thumping of his feet as he ran which had awakened Bibiji.

  ‘Han, Bibiji, I am awake,’ he said, adapting his hill accent to the diction of the lowlands.

  ‘Then get to work,’ the voice came. ‘Rake out the ashes in the fireplace, and scrub last night’s soiled utensils. You went to sleep, dead one, so early last night that you didn’t even do that! And light the fire. Then put the water on to boil in the saucepan for tea for Babuji. I will get up in a little while.’

  Presently there was a sob. The little child, Lila, had presumably been awakened. But she was lulled to sleep again. Munoo wondered where the elder girl, Sheila, was. She was supposed to have gone to a fair with her uncle yesterday, and he had not seen her yet.

  As he went towards the kitchen, Munoo felt uneasy. He did not know where to begin and how to set about doing things in this house. Besides, the first thing he had always done when he got up every morning in his village was to run out into the fields and relieve himself, then bathe at the well, come back and eat his food before going to school or taking his flock to graze at the riverside.

  Now he did not know where he should go to relieve himself. There were houses all about, and there were forbidding bungalows cresting the hill. And he could hear people walking on the road.

  He did not know where the people in the towns went.

  He hastened to the door leading out of the kitchen. He could not see any latrine attached to the house.

  By this time he was in a panic.

  He felt he could not control himself any longer.

  He felt he was going to spoil his loincloth.

  He ran to the wall outside the house and sat down there.

  ‘Where are you? Vay Mundu?’ came the voice of his mistress, that instant.

  A sudden fear seized him that she should come and see him. But he could not check himself and get up.

  The storm burst on his head as, hearing no response to her call, she appeared at the door, saw him, and, unable to bear the sight, withdrew. ‘Vay, shameless, shameless, vulgar, stupid hill-boy! May the vessel of your life never float in the sea of existence! May you die! What have you done? Why didn’t you ask me where to go? May you fade away! We didn’t know we were taking on an animal in our employ, an utter brute, a savage! What will the sahibs think who pass by our doors every morning and afternoon! The Babuji has his prestige to keep up with the sahibs. Hai! What a horrible, horrible mess he has made outside my door!’