Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘It is good,’ he said to himself, lowering his pale face weakly, philosophically. ‘It is as it should be. Man comes to this world naked and goes out of it naked and he doesn’t carry his goods away with him on his chest. It is best to travel light.’

  The pale afternoon sun that came through the iron bars of the window made his home look like a mine of pure gold, giving it a sort of fairy-world enchantment. But he religiously turned his back on it and, bent, weary, weak, worn-out and crushed, he walked out supported by his two protégés.

  His wife followed with her apron modestly drawn over her grief and her good looks.

  The neighbouring men and women had gathered in the courtyard to say farewell to the once most successful, and now the most broken of hill coolies.

  ‘Ram, Ram, brother Prabha Dyal,’ they consoled in sad, sombre tones. ‘Ram, Ram. It will be all right. You will come back again. You will come back after you have regained your health.’

  ‘And outlived my shame, the bankrupt’s shame!’ Prabha added with a sneer of mockery to torture himself, so completely had he accepted all business ideals and so convinced was he of having violated the laws of society, so humble in spite of the hard knocks he had received.

  And then, with tears in his eyes and a breaking voice, he waxed philosophical, reciting the familiar Indian proverb:

  ‘A wise dog should have smelt the threshold and run away.’

  The cavalcade passed through Cat Killer’s Lane under the amused and sympathetic gaze of men and women who had come to their doors to obtain yet another sensational topic for gossip.

  The bamboo cart driver cursed furiously when he found that his passengers were not rich lallas but a pack of coolies. And, under pretext of hurrying to catch the train, whereas he was really anxious to pick up better fare, he flayed his horse into a dangerous canter which made the high, closed structure jolt and sway as if it were a box in a fun-fair roundabout. Prabha was resigned, even though his heart was in his mouth with the violent knocking and with the hard impact of the springless seats.

  ‘Oh, go slowly, Sheikh Sahib,’ said Munoo flatteringly. ‘My master is ill.’

  ‘I am not your father’s servant,’ said the driver, ‘that I should wait about for you and miss the passengers on the Bombay Mail.’

  Munoo felt angry at this and wondered how a man could be so cruel to so good-natured a person as his master.

  He felt sadder at the station, sadder than ever.

  The train was on the platform, as Daulatpur was a junction. But the third-class passengers were kept penned up like cattle in the iron cage of the waiting-room, barred with steel doors, which were only opened five minutes before the engine gave its whistle.

  As they all sat on the cement floor among hundreds of other passengers, among hundreds of bundles, among the buzzing of swarms of flies and armies of mosquitoes, they all secretly prayed to God to allow them a safe place on the train.

  Nothing short of a miracle would save Prabha’s life in the blind rush of passengers to the platform out of this prison, Munoo divined. So he went off reconnoitering to see if there was a loophole through which they could escape to the train.

  A ticket-collector, with a white uniform adorned with nickel buttons, was proudly walking about on the look-out for bribes. He spotted Munoo and read the anxiety in his eyes.

  ‘Eight annas,’ he whispered, ‘and I will let you all in through a side door.’

  That was the sum of Munoo’s savings for some days. He slipped it into the babu’s hand.

  He felt afraid that the babu might not keep his word after accepting the bribe.

  But the man was quite honest, except that he was poor and took bribes. He not only slipped them through a side door, but saw them safely into one of the few third-class compartments that were attached to the train.

  Munoo stood sadly looking on at his master and mistress and Tulsi, who were now seated in the train. He felt miserable and alone, as if he had already been cut off from them for ever.

  ‘You go now, Munoo,’ said Prabha, dragging his wretched carcass out of the window and pressing a silver rupee into the boy’s palm. ‘Buy yourself some food and sleep at home, for the rent is paid to the end of this month.’

  ‘Jay, deva,’ said Munoo, joining his hands and overcome with gratitude and love for the man.

  ‘May you live, child,’ sighed Prabha, stroking his head.

  ‘I fall at your feet,’ Munoo said, turning his joined hands to his mistress.

  ‘May you live, child,’ she said, caressing his cheeks.

  ‘I will come back in two days, ohe Munoo, brother,’ said Tulsi.

  ‘Acha,’ said Munoo, and walked away embarrassedly.

  He fondled the silver rupee in his hand and felt elated. Then he was sad to realize how kind Prabha had been to him even in his misery.

  ‘He is surely a very religious man,’ he said to himself. ‘I wonder if he learnt to be kind by his devotions at the temple. I too shall go to the temple this evening. They give free food at the shrine of Bhagat Har Das. I shall save money that way and also become religious.’

  He was disturbed by the furious, stamping rush of the hordes of third-class passengers who had now been released from the waiting-room and were already storming the train.

  He slipped out of the railings on the side by squeezing his supple body, and came into the station yard, where the cart-drivers were shouting and raving: ‘To Clock Tower and Vishnu Temple’, ‘To Lohari Gate, Dilli Bazaar’, ‘To the Hira Mandi, Guru’s Dharmsalla’.

  ‘Vay, child, vay, child, will you lift this bag to Dr Sahib Singh’s bungalow at the hospital for me? I will give you two annas. It is only two hundred yards away.’

  ‘Han, mother,’ said Munoo eagerly, and reflected. ‘This is easy work; I shall come here again and lift bags for people rather than earn two pice for carrying vegetables in the market.’

  Now he was alone and had nothing else to do after he had taken the bag from the railway station to the hospital in the civil lines except to eat his evening meal. He knew he could get that free at the shrine of Bhagat Har Das. According to this design, and also wishing to become religious, he repaired to the temple of Vishnu, where he had been only once before, with Prabha on the day of his arrival.

  He entered it this time through the portals near the lofty houses of the rich merchants of the Antique Bazaar. The milk-white light of a full moon made the domed roof of the tall temple blossom out like a full-blown lotus, and the cornice shone from the middle of the tank.

  A vast concourse of gaily dressed people were moving around it, gilded by the lamps that mocked at the silver moonshine. Munoo joined the throng and began to walk in the direction of the mausoleum of Bhagat Har Das, whose polished marble shone out beyond the square of the tank, from a background of mouldering travertine. He wanted food more than the blessings of religion, and it was the hour when bread and lentils were distributed to the poor and holy at the kitchen of the shrine. It was this urge which had decided him not to buy flowers to offer at the temple. The vague desire to acquire holiness evaporated from his mind completely as he went along, noticing the vast shadows of the turreted and domed structure in the middle of the pond, playing with the reflection of the moon. The monumental structure inspired him with awe as if the spirit of God were torturing him with its magnificent, invisible presence. He began to walk hurriedly, his one desire being to get away from the oppressive spirit that brooded over the temple. The slow, tortoise speed of the crowd of devotees was a hindrance, but Munoo had become a past master in the art of slipping by the irregular pedestrians of the city of Daulatpur.

  He passed through a tunnel leading into the yard of the shrine of Har Das. There was a stand where a devout Brahmin was distributing free water in flat brass cups: nominally free, but really to be paid for, as Munoo found that all those who quenched their thirst threw a copper at the feet of the holy man who had turned menial, but had not lost the pride of his ancestral power. Munoo’s t
hroat was parched. And he lifted a cup to his mouth. But he did not throw a copper when he pushed the soiled cup away. The Brahmin scowled at him and muttered the proverb: ‘May the misers fade away.’

  Munoo did not mind being cursed. He had long since got used to abuse and no longer believed in its magical effect.

  He bolted under cover of the darkness to explore the possibilities of charity. He hoped people were not expected to pay for the free food too.

  ‘Food from the kitchen of God!’ shouted a man who held a pan by a string handle as he scurried to and fro, accompanied by an attendant with a basket.

  Munoo saw young mendicants and paupers running towards him, leaving the old ascetics hobbling along behind, and elbowing each other in their onrush. This surely was the dispenser of the free food. In a moment the crowd of beggars would be on the man.

  He ran and spread his hands before the dispenser of food.

  ‘Where is your plate?’ the man asked.

  ‘I haven’t got one, Maharaj,’ Munoo said with a tremor.

  The attendant had, however, already thrown him two chapatis, and the man with the pan had poured a huge spoonful of lentils on to the bread. They were surrounded by the pack of hungry beggars who whined abjectly for the food as they crowded panic-stricken round the dispenser of charity. Munoo almost droppped his roti in his effort to get away from the crowd.

  But he scraped through by exercising a strength which the mere sight of food seemed to put into him.

  He crossed the courtyard to the edge of a fountain playing before the summer-house of a garden. From the garden came a mixed aroma of fresh chambeli, champak, and molsari flowers. He sat down and began to eat.

  He was absorbed for a moment, relishing the taste of the lentils, crudely cooked as they were. But when the gnawing hunger in his belly was half-satisfied he looked around.

  The moon half veiled, half unveiled the superstructure of the summer-house, and disclosed the form of a fat yogi with shaven head, swathed in an orange-coloured robe, staring with unblinking eyes at the fountain. The yogi had assumed the sacred posture of the lotus seat with legs crossed and hands resting like newly opened flowers on his knees. Before him crouched an old woman dressed in a sombre grey apron and a pigeon-coloured skirt, and a young woman clad in all the finery of her bridal dress. Both seemed to be waiting for the yogi’s trance to break.

  Munoo got up and tiptoed towards the divine.

  ‘And what may be your business, oh brahmacharya, at the place where the yogi meditates on God? You should be playing with children of your age.’

  ‘Yogiji,’ answered Munoo, ‘tell me why you sit here so still and without moving an eyelid.’

  ‘Go away, go away, vay, fool!’ whispered the old woman.

  ‘Shanti! Shanti!’ the yogi said, lifting his hand with a deliberate saintliness and spiritual grace that belied the smile on his curled lips. ‘He is a good portent, mother. He is the image of the child that shall be born to your daughter-in-law. God has listened to my prayers and to yours. Never turn away the messenger of God.’

  ‘I, too, seek God, Yogiji,’ said Munoo impetuously. ‘Teach me to seek God. I want to walk his path.’

  ‘You are a child yet,’ said the yogi. ‘But come, we will make you a disciple and you may rise to be a saint if you serve your guru.’

  ‘A teacher is what I want,’ said Munoo, looking at the fruit offerings heaped up by the holy man.

  ‘Come, then, lift all the things that lie there and follow me,’ the yogi said. Then he leant forward to the old woman and whispered: ‘The full-moon night is propitious for the sowing of the seed. Follow this youth with your daughter-in-law at some distance from me. Come to my hut beyond the hall of Har Das’s shrine. Don’t follow too close, for the world is suspicious. A respectable distance, understand, mother.’

  Again he turned to Munoo and said: ‘Follow me at a distance of a hundred yards and bring those ladies to the back stairs of my rooms. Keep within sight of me and don’t lose your way, disciple.’

  Munoo did not know what the yogi intended, but he knew that he himself was out for adventure. The fruit he held smelt sweet and luscious, and his mouth watered at the sight of the grapes, pomegranates, bananas and ripe mangoes. He did exactly as the yogi had directed.

  The cavalcade passed through the outskirts of the garden. The leaves of the dense foliage of the hedges that made an avenue to the marble hall of the garden door were still.

  Munoo lost sight of the yogi as he turned sharply by the shops of the flower-sellers at the gate and entered a dark gully. Then he saw him beckoning from a window of the first storey of a house which looked down onto the crossroads. He waited for the women, who had lagged behind, and contemplated a tobacconist and betel-leaf seller’s shop, from which a huge mirror reflected the passing pageant of life at the meeting of the four roads. He would like to have bought a betel-leaf to chew, a luxury in which he had never indulged, and to smoke a cigarette, also to buy some snuff.

  But the women came up. And Munoo led them down the gully.

  The yogi had come downstairs to receive them with a hurricane lamp in his hand. He led the way up the dark narrow stairs and ushered them into what Munoo felt was a palace, with its white sheets and cow-tailed cushions and long-tubed hubble-bubbles.

  ‘I will go now,’ said the old woman, ‘and come back early at dawn.’

  ‘Yes,’ assented the yogi excitedly.

  The woman went.

  Munoo stood looking around embarrassed.

  ‘My life, do at least lift the apron from off your eyes and say a word to me,’ said the yogi, coming towards the young woman.

  Munoo stared at the man. The scales fell from his eyes and revealed the voluptuary where he had seen the saint.

  His heart beat with shame.

  He slipped out of the door to go and catch the old woman to tell her what he had seen.

  He innocently believed that, like him, she too would be shocked. He did not know that she was a go-between who arranged for the births of ‘sons of god’ to the wives of the merchant class.

  Munoo slept the night on the boards of a closed shop in a street near Cat Killer’s Lane, not daring to go into Prabha’s home for fear of meeting a ghost or being taken for a thief. And in the morning he went to the yard of the railway station, thinking that he would be able to earn enough money for the day by carrying a load from the station to the civil lines, as he had done yesterday.

  The morning was well advanced when he got there, and a slow train had just come in with hundreds of passengers: rich men and women who hired phaetons and tongas, middle-class men who bargained for seats in bamboo carts with loudmouthed drivers, and peasants who made up their minds to trudge the dusty roads to town with their belongings on their shoulders.

  Munoo looked round among the excited, eager crowd, hurrying to and fro.

  ‘May I lift your weight, Lallaji?’ ‘May I lift your weight, Maiji?’

  He tried to work out a theory in his mind that only a miser who did not want to pay for a seat in a carriage would engage him to bear his burden, or a person who had to go somewhere near the station in the civil lines. But he knew that the hire of a seat in a cart was only four annas and came to the conclusion that even the most miserly of misers would ride, and if he did not ride he would walk and bear his own burden.

  ‘Coolie! Coolie!’ some blue-uniformed porters were shouting in the hall. Munoo saw two men put trunks and beddings on their heads and walk away.

  He began to shout too: ‘Coolie! Coolie!’

  ‘Come here!’ a call came from the hall.

  He ran eagerly towards the corner whence the order had seemed to come, his bare feet tingling with the heat of the sand in the station yard and his face covered in sweat. He faced a police constable in khaki uniform.

  ‘Why, ohe illegally begotten! Where is your licence?’ the policeman hissed, catching hold of Munoo abruptly by the neck of his tunic.

  Munoo stood dumb before the c
onstable, his heart beating violently.

  ‘Answer me, where is your licence?’ said the constable, raising his voice from its first deliberation to a sudden hysterical pitch and waving his baton.

  ‘Sarkar,’ Munoo ventured, with a fallen face, ‘I. . . .’

  ‘You have no licence! Son of a pig! You were deceiving me!’ roared the policeman. ‘I have seen you lifting bundles here for a month, baseborn!’

  ‘No, Huzoor, I have been here only once before,’ Munoo ventured, afraid, and making a face as if to cry, for the policeman held him hard by the wrist.

  ‘You think I am lying then when I say I have seen you sneaking about here for well on a month?’ said the policeman with mock humility.

  ‘It must have been someone else, Sarkar,’ Munoo replied. ‘Someone like me. All we coolies look alike.’

  ‘Scum of the earth!’ the policeman thundered, twisting the boy’s arm. ‘Swine, trickster, I will put you in the lock-up. . . .’

  ‘Oh, Huzoor, Huzoor,’ Munoo cried at the word ‘lock-up’, recalling to mind the kotwali where Prabha was beaten.

  ‘Get out of here!’ the policeman said, hitting Munoo on the bottom with his baton. ‘Get away from here, lover of your sister! Government orders: no coolies are supposed to work here without a licence.’

  Munoo capered away as fast as his feet could carry him, only looking back once to see that the policeman was smoothing down his uniform and stiffening before he began to strut around again.

  The currents of thought and emotion which had been washed over by the fear of the policeman slowly emerged from the mainsprings that were welling up in him in defiance of authority. ‘Who is he that he should turn me out of the station yard?’ he exclaimed to himself. ‘The swine! He fancies himself to be a god because he is putting on a uniform. My uncle is also a servant of the Angrezi Sarkar. He is not the only one. I am not like Prabha, who let himself be beaten. I shall die rather than let him beat me. I shall live up to the name of my race. . . .’

  He instinctively turned round to measure the intensity of his thoughts, as if the mere act of willed defiance on his part had crushed the policeman out of existence. But he caught sight of the constable strolling towards the opening of the yard. He ran till he had entered the Mall Road, bordered on both sides by European shops.