Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

‘Make him confess his crime, Pande Khan,’ ordered the thanedar. ‘Arrested for non-payment of debt.’

  The sergeant stood at attention, saluted his officers, and retreating to a room behind a veranda, brought a cane.

  ‘Now, confess, rogue,’ he said, coming up to Prabha, where Teja Singh and Yar Muhammad still held him. ‘Confess, where have you buried your money? Come, own up!’

  ‘Huzoor,’ said Prabha, joining his hands, ‘I have no money buried anywhere. But I have stock. I only crave your forgiveness and I will pay up every pice that I owe to my creditors.’

  ‘You are barking an untruth! You lie! Lover of your mother!’ shouted Pande Khan. ‘Confess the truth!’

  And he dealt him one, two, three sharp strokes with his cane.

  ‘I have told the truth,’ wailed Prabha. ‘Huzoor, I do not lie!’

  ‘You are no angel, son of Eblis,’ shouted the sergeant, striking Prabha a blow on his face.

  ‘It is the truth, Sarkar. It is the truth,’ Prabha wailed, lifting his handcuffed hands.

  ‘Is the Thanedar Sahib lying, then, swine, and the Inspector Sahib, there?’ the sergeant growled. ‘Confess, dog! Confess!’

  And he struck him blow after blow in a wild orgy of excitement, his face set, his lips stiff and his body towering over the poor man’s frame.

  ‘Oh, don’t beat him, don’t beat him,’ cried Munoo and Tulsi. ‘It is Master Ganpat who is at fault.’

  The sergeant stopped to take breath.

  ‘Strike him! Strike him like this!’ shouted the Inspector of Police, striking the sergeant hard to show him how to do it. And then he turned round to the boys who stood at his heels, as much absorbed in looking at his white skin as in watching their master being beaten up, and he roared, ‘Jao!’

  ‘Run away, swine!’ roared the thanedar after him in an accent which tore his throat. ‘Run away,’ he said, ‘this is not a fair.’ And he struck them with his birch on their naked backs and feet.

  ‘Oh beat me, Huzoor, beat me!’ shrieked Prabha. ‘Beat me as much as you like, but spare those boys.’

  ‘Keep quiet!’ said the sergeant, waving the cane. ‘You look after your own skin and do not try to turn this into a regular fair. You have had me beaten for being mild to you. Take this, dog!’ And he lashed Prabha again, sharp, sharp, till the swish of the glistening cane was all that occupied the air.

  Prabha’s wails became one long howl: ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! Where are you?’

  Munoo, Tulsi, Bonga and Maharaj stood looking, now at their master, now at the flawless sky above them, a pain in their hearts but not a tear in their eyes. They could neither stifle nor express the hurt in their souls.

  It was as if someone had died when they returned home—as if Prabha, their master, had died. The tall long room seemed to echo the soft thud, thud, of their bare feet as they walked up from the courtyard in the residential part of the house. Especially Maharaj’s footsteps, and Bonga’s flat feet, fell heavily. And the atmosphere seemed to tremble with the anguish of their mistress’s tears.

  ‘Sit down, ohe Maharaj and Bonga,’ Tulsi said with a sense of propriety that betokened his sensitiveness to the undertones of grief.

  Munoo had begun to tiptoe towards the window overlooking the gully by which Prabha’s wife lay huddled. But he had hardly reached the middle of the room before he stopped. Somehow the sight of that woman broken down by grief was a barrier. He had been urged by a spontaneous feeling to go to her as he used to go to his mother when he came back home from play and found her crying. But something had happened to him now, something had changed within him. He had outgrown the natural unconsciousness of his childhood and begun to recognize his emotions. He could not go near the woman.

  ‘I will go and ask Ustad Ganpat if he will come and bail Ustad Prabha out,’ said Tulsi, coming up to Munoo.

  Munoo lifted his downcast eyes and stared at him.

  ‘Come, ohe Maharaj, ohe Bonga,’ said Tulsi, going to the door. ‘Come, I will take you to eat a little fresh air.’ He spoke to them as if they were small children, ignorant of the ways of the world. They got up wearily and followed him.

  For a moment there was a complete silence, the suspended, long-drawn-out, tense silence before a sob breaks out, overloaded with the memory of pain. One sound, one indelicate, awkward sound, Munoo felt, would be a violation.

  He looked round and surveyed the things in the room. The brass utensils glistened in a corner; the floral designs of two earthen pitchers wove an intricate pattern which puzzled him; the mango designs on the cover of a quilt which hung from a line among durries and blankets, sheets and eiderdowns obtruded on his gaze and annoyed him.

  Then the woman’s sob broke, rending his heart with its reverberations.

  He dragged his feet up to where his mistress lay.

  ‘Do get up! Do get up!’ he said, bending his head as he stood by her. She sobbed hysterically now, the flow of sympathy having relieved her suffering. He knelt down and, putting his hand on her arm, tried to raise her. ‘Do get up! Do get up!’ he said.

  She sobbed more bitterly than ever.

  ‘Oh, I do not know where to go, child,’ she cried. ‘I do not know what to do.’

  Slowly she lifted her head and leant on his shoulder.

  The warmth of her breath on his throat, the soft tender caress of her cheeks on his body, seemed to play on his mind. He felt stiff and uncomfortable.

  Then a faint tremor on her lips seemed to whisper the memory of some forgotten emotion he had felt in his sleep.

  He looked at her ebony face. The black hair which strayed over her forehead, over the dark lines of her eyebrows, was unadorned today with the gold flowers which usually framed it. Her high cheekbones were flushed and made the tears in her black eyes well like pools of light. Her jaws defined her open mouth with a gentle strength that failed at the chin.

  Munoo’s memory went back to the days when he had been ill and she had caressed him with embraces, kissed him on the forehead and soothed him with the haunting refrains of a hill song.

  He pressed her close to him. He felt her quivering. He had now thrown over the dumb burden of self-consciousness. He felt released. And, for a moment, he forgot himself in her warmth, so that only darkness, utter darkness, spread before his eyes. And his blood boiled with a love that crushed him with wild torture. The fire filled his eyes with hot tears. He broke into a passion of grief, more poignant, more heart-rending than he had ever known.

  ‘Oh, don’t cry,’ he said to her, ‘don’t cry!’

  ‘Don’t cry, my child, you should not cry,’ she said to him.

  There was a soft thud, thud of footsteps, and then a continuous heavy thud, thud, accompanied by voices in the fast-falling darkness.

  Munoo and his mistress still cried.

  ‘Look, ohe Munoo, Master Prabha has come back,’ came Tulsi’s voice. ‘Why are you weeping, both of you?’ said Prabha, sinking on the charpai near the door. ‘Did you think I was dead or something?’ His tone was slightly resentful. His face was pale and haggard. He lay down shivering.

  ‘Did they leave you then, Ustadji?’ asked Munoo, coming up to him impetuously.

  ‘Han, han, they had nothing against me, no warrant to arrest me,’ he said, more to his wife than to Munoo. ‘I am bankrupt, of course, and I will try to pay all my creditors at least half their money, but the police beat me for nothing. Hai, my bones ache and I feel cold. Give me a quilt or a blanket—’ And he continued to murmur incomprehensibly, deliriously.

  As he lay unconscious, the blue and swollen patches of his skin stared out of his tunic and dhoti, which were torn into rags, and the blood of sores on his body seemed to ooze forth a decayed smell.

  Prabha’s wife had rushed to the head of the bed and pressed his body as she struggled to stop her tears under cover of her head apron.

  Munoo covered him with blankets, while Tulsi went to fetch a doctor who lived at the top of Cat Killer’s Lane.

  After the doctor ha
d been, both Tulsi and Munoo went to the chemist in the Main Bazaar to fetch the medicines and ointments which he had prescribed.

  They had walked silently through the uneven darkness of the Cloth Bazaar, past a narrow lane which led on one side to the shrine of Saint Sain Das, and on the other to the Church of All Souls. There they took a turning by the high-domed Town Hall, past Sher Khan’s mosque, to the wide Main Bazaar, where Indian-styled shops gave place to feeble imitations of European houses. They thought about their master’s chances of living and of his possible death and they hung their heads down as they sped along.

  On the way back, however, the medicines which Sorabji, the Parsee chemist, gave them filled them with hope because of the ostentatious wrappings round them, and they relaxed.

  ‘Where did Maharaj and Bonga go?’ Munoo asked. ‘They did not come back with you.’

  ‘Master Ganpat kept them at his factory,’ said Tulsi. ‘He abused them and asked them to work for him. They were too afraid of him to come back.’

  ‘We will also have to go and sleep in the open at the Grain Market tonight if we are to get jobs lifting weights tomorrow and help Master Prabha out,’ Tulsi said.

  Munoo did not reply.

  The Master fell sound asleep after he had taken the medicine. He sweated and his breathing was regular. His wife sat by his side. She would keep a vigil, both Munoo and Tulsi knew. So they sauntered out into the night with a view to sleeping in the Grain Market, where the work of bearing weights was supposed to be easy to find.

  They emerged from Cat Killer’s Lane into the Papadum Bazaar, which reeks day and night of a blend of hot spices, lentils and cheese gone bad. Then they turned into the wide Bamboo Bazaar past Santokh Singh’s Dharamsalla and entered into the Salt Market, where the city bulls congregate to lick the blocks of salt which the pious Hindus leave for them outside their shops. The Grain Market was about a hundred yards away, connected by the Hanuman Street.

  They had walked blindly through the oppressive, hot night, scarcely illumined by the dim moon. They were half asleep and tired and heavy and broken, and their one thought was of rest. But the eerie noises of the Indian night—the sudden, jerky noises of consumptive throats clearing themselves of mouthfuls of spittle, as they leaned out of the windows of their tenement homes, or from the flat roofs of the houses, the electric shock of crickets and grass-hoppers chirping in a temple compound, the weird squeal of some unlucky cat frightened by the howling of a hungry dog, which itself had been startled in its sleep because a sacred bull belched like thunder: this grim and tense atmosphere charged with the spirits of all the dead, who according to the Hindus come to visit their homes at night, obtruded itself on the souls of the boys. And as they sank into the ruts of the last patch of muddy road, and then pushed their feet forward, the narrow twisted opening of the Grain Market disclosed a more oppressive scene.

  The square courtyard, flanked on all sides by low mud shops, flimsy huts and tall five-storied houses with variegated cement facades, arches, colonnades and cupolas, was crowded with rude wooden carts, which pointed their shafts to the sky like so many crucifixes, crammed with snake-horned bullocks and stray rhinoceros-like bulls and skinny calves bespattered with their own dung, as they sat or stood, munching pieces of straw, snuffling their muzzles aimlessly, or masticating the grass which they had eaten some hours before. Pressed against these were the bodies of the coolies, coloured like the earth on which they lay snoring, or crouching round a communal hubble-bubble, or shifting to explore a patch clear of puddles on which to rest. The smell of stagnant drains, rotten grains, fresh cow-dung and urine, the foul savour of human and animal breath and the pungent fumes of smouldering fuel cakes, along with the sight of sprawling naked bodies, glistening with sweat, or sheeted like ghosts in a vain attempt to escape the flies and mosquitoes, brought the bile of sickness to Munoo’s mouth.

  Munoo and Tulsi were already slapping their bare arms and legs where the mosquitoes had assailed them as they entered the courtyard, and they cursed furiously, ‘Oh, these mosquitoes, the seducers of their daughters!’

  ‘Who is this abusing?’ came the sharp voice of a coolie from among a group.

  Munoo and Tulsi were taken aback, as they had not noticed that they were cursing.

  ‘Abusing nobody, brother,’ said Tulsi tactfully, ‘only these mosquitoes.’

  ‘Who are you?’ another voice asked.

  ‘Coolies,’ answered Munoo, assuming a casual air because he thought Tulsi’s muslins might antagonize the labourers, while his own bare body would be a recommendation.

  ‘No room here for anyone,’ muttered a coolie, his naked body shining like black ebony, while he rubbed oil to keep the mosquitoes off.

  There was, indeed, no room, as the bodies here lay in a sort of row, resting their heads on the wooden beam of a doorstep.

  Munoo and Tulsi advanced cautiously through the jigsaw puzzle of fifteen or more corpses lying helter-skelter round a cart. Then they threaded their way through sacks of grain up to where they thought was a clearing.

  ‘Who is that? If you are thieves, beware!’ shouted a night watchman, who lay on a bedstead with his face aslant, a bamboo stick in his hand.

  ‘Coolies,’ answered Munoo.

  ‘Go away, away from the precincts of this shop. Lalla Tota Ram does not allow any coolies to lie about near here. There is a cash-box in this shop.’

  ‘All right, Maharaj,’ Tulsi said, and led the way towards the north of the square, hoping to find a patch somewhere among the hundreds of men who shifted and turned to and fro on their sides, as they whispered, coughed or sighed in the sweltering heat that stood even like some malevolent, obstinate clay god. The fantastic attitudes in which the coolies lay curled up here, unable to sleep and moaning ‘Ram, Ram’, ‘Sri Krishna’, or ‘Hari Hari’, irritated Munoo. He knew they were old, or middle-aged men, those who remembered the name of God, and Munoo was not feeling kindly towards the Infinite after having seen the devout Prabha suffer.

  So he dragged Tulsi away towards the middle of the compound, where a mound of grain sacks stood covered with a large sheet of canvas. After a stealthy prowl round the corners to see if there was not a chowkidar guarding the merchandise, he groped round for a foothold on the wall of the jute bundles. Not finding one, he crawled back to grope for something to climb up with. A pole stood some yards away, on top of which some merchant’s pigeons nested. Munoo was going for it. But Tulsi held him fast.

  ‘I will be the mare for you to climb up and then you can pull me to the top,’ he said. And he bent down. Munoo swiftly jumped on to his back and, balancing himself on Tulsi’s spine, scrambled up the heap. Then he dug his feet among the sacks and, wiping the sweat off his hands, stretched his right arm down and dragged Tulsi up. It strained every muscle in his body, but there was a hot blast of wind blowing up there and he sat feeling its warm breath caress his flesh. He surveyed the scene about him, half afraid that he and Tulsi might have been seen by the night watchman, who would order them down. But they were safe.

  ‘Don’t you want to sleep?’ asked Tulsi, who was already succumbing to the exhaustion produced by the activities of the day.

  ‘Han,’ said Munoo, but he kept on staring at the darkness emptily, unconsciously aware of the noises around him—the sighs which came mixed with the gurgling of water in someone’s hubble-bubble, the hum of conversation, the notes of a beetle and the hoarse cry of a frog. ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked himself. The answer came: ‘Nothing.’

  He lay down on his back. The surface of the sack of grain was round and comfortable. He faced the sky, a grey-blue sky with the dagger of the moon stabbing its side and shedding a few glistening drops of white-blooded stars. There was no meaning in the sky beyond that.

  He closed his eyes and a picture of the congested roof of his master’s house came to him: a picture of his own low bed among the lines of bedsteads. ‘And now,’ he said to himself, ‘I am here, far away from that home, and Prabha is lyin
g ill in the big room downstairs, and Ganpat is in a different part of the town. Maharaj and Bonga perhaps lie in the new factory sound asleep. The mistress will be thinking of us. She might be crying. Why did we come away? We should have stayed and been near the master and mistress. Supposing he should die.’ The picture of Prabha lying dead was something he did not want to contemplate. He closed his eyes and he had scarcely done so when he was asleep.

  He slept fitfully, contracting his hands into fists as if he were clutching at a last straw to save himself from drowning. His body writhed as he turned on his sides. His nose dilated as he drew large quantities of breath. He moaned once or twice, as if the curves of his soul were straightening from the coils caused by the impact of his horrible experiences.

  When the heat of the night dissolved into the cool of the dawn, the fever in Munoo’s flesh abated and he nestled close to the belly of a sack as if it were the body of his warm-blooded mother. Neither the crowing of cocks beyond the courtyard, nor the twittering of myriads of sparrows, nor even the insistent cawing of crows, awakened him or Tulsi, as they awakened the coolies, the bullocks, the dogs and the devout Hindu merchants.

  But the morning sun that came trembling with heat pierced his bare skin, and he awoke, his mouth parched, his eyelids glued, his limbs heavy and stale. He moved Tulsi’s body lazily.

  ‘Come, ohe Tulsi,’ he said peevishly, rubbing his eyes.

  Tulsi rose suddenly.

  Munoo surveyed the scene.

  Some of the coolies were bearing sacks of grain on their backs from the two loaded bullock-carts to a godown. Others sat smoking hubble-bubbles and biris, washed themselves at a pump, or still lay curled up in a miraculous sleep which looked like death in its complete negation of the hubbub about them. For life here, even before the business hours started, was a tide of seething humanity jostling in an ebb and flow of colourful cross purposes. There were lallas going about in fine starched muslins and tussores from shop to temple and temple to shop, muttering ‘Ram, Ram, Ram’, ‘Hari, Hari, Hari’, ‘Sri, Sri, Sri’, and other incantations. And there were dark copper-coloured men, wearing next to nothing, babbling, shouting, heaving, panting, or lying still.