Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  The engine was gathering speed. The previous rattling of the wheels had now become part of a uniform onward rush. The tall, five-storied houses of Daulatpur were left behind. The hot summer breeze came swishing in. The barking of the dogs was drowned in the roar of the engine.

  Munoo sat up on the canvas tent and looked around. Only the deep, dark foliage of fruit trees was distinguishable against the earth and the sky. The darkness had swallowed up the housetops, the minars, the domes, the irregular walls of Daulatpur.

  Lest his imagination conjure up visions of his past in the city, he lay back and sought to sleep and drown his memories in oblivion.

  The train halted only once at dawn, and Munoo’s slumber was slightly broken by the shouting and stamping of passengers and the rattling of trains on the adjoining platforms. ‘I wonder what station it is?’ he asked himself in his half sleep. But he made no effort to open his eyes. Through the voices of hawkers crying out ‘Hindu sweets’, ‘Muhammadan bread’, ‘Hot tea’, Cold water’, he could hear someone shout: ‘Ambala Junction, Ambala City. Change here for the Kalka line.’

  The rhythmic tone of a beetle mingled with the rattling of the train. The cool breeze of the dawn soothed his brain. The world faded out.

  He awoke at Delhi Station. Its tin roof gave no hint of the splendour of the capital of India, as Munoo had imagined it from his books.

  Suddenly he looked out and saw men, women and children surging up to the platform, shouting and struggling, as they sought to get into a compartment already crowded to overflowing.

  Munoo took advantage of this confusion to jump on the off side and to relieve himself by a water-pump among the intersecting railway lines. Then he came back and lay down for a second sleep.

  ‘Come, I will have to find room for you in a closed truck, as it will be hot here in the day. And here is some food which I have brought for you,’ came the elephant-driver’s voice.

  Munoo jumped down from the open carriage and followed his patron into a truck where hundreds of bamboo poles lay stacked.

  ‘Here’s the food,’ said the driver. ‘I will come and see you again at Ratlam.’ And he went.

  Munoo squatted on the hard, uneven seat provided by the bamboos, without thinking of the prospect of having to sit there all day.

  As he began eating the train steamed out of the station.

  Between chewing morsels of delicious fried bread and carrot pickle, Munoo thought of the generosity of the elephant-driver. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘are some men so good and others bad—some like Prabha and the elephant-driver, others like Ganpat and the policeman who beat me at the railway station?’ Then he gazed at the ruined fortresses, castles, shrines and mausoleums, which dug their heels into the barren earth among the gnarled roots of trees, cactus and wild shrub, fuming with a shimmering smoke without burning under the hateful glare of the all-consuming sun. The boy thought of the legend he had heard that Delhi was founded by a dynasty of kings who owed their origin to the sun. ‘Perhaps the sun, the father of the Rajput kings, who were dethroned by the Muhammadans, is taking revenge on the Mussulmans by blasting their forts and mausoleums,’ he said to himself naïvely. ‘Karma!’

  The emergence to his view of miles and miles of the prim red-brick buildings of new Delhi, arranged like fuel in a bonfire, confirmed the boy’s vague feeling. But it seemed doubtful that the sun would burn the houses built by the Angrezi Sarkar, because he recalled the phrase taught in his history books that the ‘Sun never sets on the British Empire.’

  The sight of two peasant boys, puny against the vast landscape as they goaded their buffaloes behind their uncouth wooden ploughs through the open country full of dust and sand, brought him down to earth. He thought of the lives of these people, who were cultivating the desert in a vain attempt to eke out a living.

  The steep rise of a cluster of hills of weathered stone and red clay barred his view of the world for a while. When the plain emerged to view, Munoo’s mind had become empty, and he just gazed at the monotone of sand which stretched endlessly before him under the metallic glare of the sun, in utter barrenness, except for the withered parched thorny bush interspersed at occasional intervals.

  A sudden squall arose, gathering dust and sand in its lap, and, rolling like a ball, disappeared behind a hillock.

  Munoo felt it was the ghost of some Rajput warrior, as he believed in the superstition that the spirits of the dead visit the earth in the form of dust-storms. But he felt secure sitting in the train as it was speeding along in defiance of the vast earth and the vaster sky, in defiance even of the meaningless sun, which blasted the landscape with its malevolent fire. ‘The railway is indeed a wonderful thing,’ he said to himself. ‘If there hadn’t been engines which pull trains I could never have escaped from Sham Nagar to Daulatpur, and I certainly should never be going to Bombay, because one could not walk all that way.’

  ‘But,’ it occurred to him suddenly to ask, ‘now that I am actually going to Bombay, what shall I do there? I know nobody. And how shall I find the work which brings thirty rupees a month which the coolie in the vegetable market spoke about? I would hate to be a beggar in the streets like the Bikaneris.’

  The picture of himself walking about like the black men, women and children of the desert, as they whined for the gift of a pice in the streets of Daulatpur, came before his eyes with the horror of the degradation it involved. ‘But I have a rupee in my loincloth,’ he said to assure himself, ‘and did not the coolie in the vegetable market say work was easy to get in Bombay?’

  He tried to picture the streets of Bombay. Tall buildings appeared before his mind’s eye, like those clean-cut, white-stone buildings in the civil lines of Daulatpur. Beyond that and the conception of broad streets his mind failed to imagine anything.

  The heat of the closed carriage and the rocking of the train made him tired and dizzy. He sought to counteract the urgings to sleep by staring out at the desert again. But the dancing shimmer of the heat-waves struck a kind of awe into his brain; his eyes closed against his will, and he succumbed to sleep.

  The sudden jolt of his car awoke him in the afternoon to read ‘Kotah Junction’, written on a black board in white Hindustani and English letters. He still dozed, however, bathed in sweat and rather stiff on the bamboo poles.

  ‘I have brought you some sweets and milk,’ the elephant-driver said, ‘and here is a sack for you to lie on at night. I don’t think you should sleep in the open truck tonight, because the Parsee Sahibs of the Company walk about on the platform in the evening. My elephant doesn’t need as much care as you do, but I am glad to help you, because when I was your age a man helped me to steal a ride from Calcutta to Madras. Now be careful and don’t fall out.’

  ‘Acha!’ Munoo said, looking greedily at the cream cakes, the sugar plums and the earthen jar full of milk.

  The train sped on again through the vast, vast surface of the desert, behind a brave, ferocious engine which whistled occasional warnings to the opposite trains passing like thunder.

  There was a subtle fascination about the desert under the afternoon sun. It seemed to come to life with its illusory mirages of sand and its extraordinarily sparse population of camels, tied tail to nose, nose to tail, as they threaded the wastes, behind the dour men who struggled on foot against hunger and drought. An occasional collection of tents or a ruined outhouse reminded Munoo of the caravanserais he had seen on the outskirts of Sham Nagar. And he tried to picture the rough life that the horse-dealers and buffalo-stealers lived. But the horizon was limitless, and the boy’s eyes ached at the impact of the hot air which came trembling, as if it had been belched out of a furnace.

  Towards evening the flat land gave way to sudden hills capped by forts, and to a plateau where the day’s strong colours melted lovingly on groves of acacia trees and low bushes at which stray goats nibbled and camels strained their long necks. And then beyond the empty beds of muddy rivers, little clusters of huts appeared; men who saluted the train as they l
eant on their staves, women who coyly covered their faces as they bore pitchers of milk on their heads, and children who stood with their eyes open in wonder, their fingers in their mouths, naked and unashamed.

  Munoo thought of the days of his childhood in the hills and recalled how often he had played around the cart roads with the distended-bellied Bishan, the lean Bishambar and that superior little Jay Singh. But the purple hills of Kangra were too closed in and there was no railway there to watch. ‘It was as well, in spite of the pain I have suffered,’ he said to himself, ‘to have come away from that world. I am now going to Bombay, and there must be wonderful things there; many more wonderful things than there were in my village or Sham Nagar or Daulatpur.’

  As he cogitated, the train left behind the mounds covered with brown grass, wild flowers, low scrub, and entered a glistening green valley, bordered on the far end by a range of sand-coloured mountains. ‘The old fort of Chitore may be in those hills,’ he thought, ‘where Padmini fought Ala-ud-Din, the slave king of Delhi, and where the heroes of Mewar donned yellow robes and performed Johur and the women committed sati with the Queen, rather than face dishonour at the hands of the conquerors. I wish I could see it, I wish I could go there. But I have no work there. I must go to Bombay—Bombay and work. I wonder when I shall get there?’

  The engine screamed into Ratlam, and with the suddenness of a surprise the day died in the darkness.

  When it tore through the veil of the evening’s violet air, time seemed to run fast past the telegraph poles, faster still as Munoo ate another meal which the elephant-driver had brought him. And it ceased to exist at all as the clear, still night settled over the sand dunes and the hill-tops. The sky was indigo black now, traced with a silvery sheen, and the world was full of a queer wonder, which shimmered eerily in the shadows and wrapped itself round Munoo, like the awful stillness with which the ghosts appear out of nothing. He fell asleep, cooled by whiffs of breeze, on the sacks which padded the uneven surfaces of the bamboo poles.

  He awoke to a rich world of palm trees and fertile green plains. The vast stretches of land, dotted here and there with sudden steep rocks, capped by giant temples and by huge buildings with tall funnels emitting smoke, filled him with a tense nervousness. He felt he was nearing his destination and he doubted whether he would be able to find his fate.

  As the silver line of a long water-course, which seemed to have no end, glimmered in the distance and broke up into a multitude of starry particles, his heart lightened for a moment with the joy of seeing the sea for the first time in his life. Soon the blue water-way ran at his feet, below the railway bridges, and his heart throbbed to it.

  The excitement of his newly discovered joy added its weight to the feeling of fear that, momentarily suppressed, burdened his soul. He shook his body violently in an attempt to work off the silent, brooding load of terror that almost dragged him down. He rose from the crumpled sack on which he had crouched and came to the window. The sea breeze fanned his face, but left a moist film of perspiration behind. He mopped himself with the edges of his dirty tunic. The particles of sand on his shirt irritated his soft, warm cheeks. He passed his hand through his hair and brought out small particles of coal-dust on his palm. He felt exasperated. He sighed. He could have cried. So alone and uncertain he felt. But he sat back and resigned himself to the contemplation of the magical landscape of green fields, washed clean in the sunlight and the shimmering dews of the water from the sea.

  ‘I shall try and look for some man from the North lands as soon as I get there. But how will I be able to find anybody in such a big city as this?’

  He saw that Bombay had already begun, as he read the sign-boards on the walls of factories, announcing in Roman letters, as well as in the hieroglyphs of a language curious to him, difficult names like Rustamji-Jamsetji, Kharimbhoy, and the letters BOMBAY. Never, throughout his long journey from North to South, had he seen the outskirts of a city extend for as many miles as this colossal world he was entering.

  The train rushed past groves of dates and palms, past the golden domes of temples, the long minarets of mosques, the tall spires of churches, the flowery facades of huge mansions, past mills, burning-ghats, graveyards, past stone-yards, past fish-drying sheds, past dying-grounds over which lay many miles of newly coloured silks and calicoes, past flocks of sheep and goats, herds of cows and buffaloes, past throngs of men, women and children dressed in clothes of the oddest, most varied shapes and colours.

  The panic in his soul grew. The motion of his belly quickened. There was a parched taste in his mouth. His eyes glanced furtively this side and that. He fidgeted on his hard seat and, lifting his legs, felt stiff and uncomfortable. His brain whirled with excitement. His blood welled so fast that it seemed to him he was running. His face paled. His body was covered with sweat. His head was empty and dark.

  Then, after flashing past station after station of the suburbs, the train whistled one last whistle, shrieked with a last tortuous pull at the brakes, and, puffing, panting, sighing hoarsely, as if it were dead beat, came to a standstill by an outlying platform of the huge Central Station.

  Munoo looked out uneasily at the empty trucks of a goods train, which stood on the off side of the platform. Should he wait for the elephant-driver to come or should he run towards the godown, at whose large doors some coolies pushed bales of merchandise and through which it seemed possible to escape into the streets?

  ‘Come, brother, you have reached the land of your heart’s desire,’ said the elephant-driver. ‘The circus will soon go to the Ballard Pier, where we mount the ship that is to carry us across the black waters to Vilayat. Here is some food. Come, I will show you a way by which you may get out of the station unnoticed.’

  Munoo jumped down.

  Now that he was face to face with the man who had been good to him, he could not even thank him. Instead he felt embarrassed and wanted to get away from him as soon as possible. He followed him.

  ‘The bigger a city is, the more cruel it is to the sons of Adam,’ the elephant-driver said, crawling under the buffers of a train. ‘You have to pay even for the breath that you breathe. But you are a brave lad.’

  They had reached the godown.

  ‘Go through there as if you were an ordinary person. God be with you.’

  Munoo looked up to the man. The ugly face was a mask. The boy walked on as he was told, his heart breaking with the weight of gratitude and fear. When he looked round he had walked into a square.

  Munoo emerged from the Central Station. Before him was Bombay; strange, complex, Bombay, in whose streets purple-faced Europeans in immaculate suits, boots and basket hats rubbed shoulders with long-nosed Parsis dressed in frock-coats, white trousers, dome-like mitres; in which eagle-eyed Muhammadans with baggy trousers, long tunics and boat caps mingled with sleek Hindus clothed in muslin shirts, dhotis and white caps; in which the saris of Parsi women vied with the colourful loads of garments on rich Hindu women and put to shame the plain white veils of purdah women and the flimsy frocks of masculine European women; in which electric motor-horns phut-phutted, victoria and tram bells tinkled tinga-linga-ling; in which was the press of many races, and the babble of many tongues which he did not know at all.

  He stared at this confused medley of colour and shapes and sizes, heard varied sounds, and smelt a smell different from all the perfumes, aromas and stinks he had ever smelt: the mixed smell of damp and sticky sweat, dust and heat, musk and garlic, incense and dung.

  He hurried towards a quiet pavement. He looked around to measure the strength of his frame against the world. The huge domes and minarets of the General Post Office on his right, the vast domes and minarets of the railway station on his left, the great domes and minarets of the University and the Law courts beyond, all vying with each other to proclaim the self-conscious heights attained by their architecture, challenged him to decide which of them was the most splendid, not knowing in their vanity that he was only a modest hill-boy impetuously
impelled by every big building to believe it to be great, and easily daunted by such grandeur into believing himself completely insignificant and small.

  Oppressed and overcast, the boy walked along the street, wiping streams of sweat off his face, till he sighted a bench at the foot of a marble statue of the short, stocky, broad-bottomed Victoria with a scroll in her hands and a crown on her head, on which a blue-black crow cawed defiance to the world as it hopped and fluttered after relieving itself.

  He sank into a corner of the bench and sought to collect himself and to partake of the food which the elephant-driver had given him.

  He opened the packet of sweets in his hand and contemplated first the yellow colour of the boondi, the chocolate of the rasgullas and the white of the cream cakes. His mouth watered. They were delicious. And there was an empty space in his belly. He ate mouthfuls, ruining the taste of the food. He could not swallow it fast enough.

  When only one cream cake lay in the leaf bag in his hand he felt thirsty, and looked aside to see if there was a pump where he could go to drink water. Hardly had his gaze been diverted when the crow which sat on Queen Victoria’s head swooped down and carried the bag out of the boy’s unconscious hands and threw it on the pavement.

  Munoo came back to himself with a half-amused, half-chagrined smile, and cursed, ‘Son of a thief.’

  Just then a swarm of crows came soaring over his head and, cawing brazenly, fell on the sweets which had dropped out of the bag on to the pavement, and fluttered back to their eminent porch on Queen Victoria’s head, in her arms, and around her large proportions.

  Munoo got up confused and, straining not to attract anyone’s notice, thought: ‘The son of a thief must have known that I wouldn’t pick up food from the pavement, where the shoes have been, and so he waited till I wasn’t looking. The cunning rogue!’