Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘No,’ Munoo said. ‘You keep it, Hari. I owe you that for my food and rent.’

  ‘No, brother, why should you suffer? You take your portion,’ insisted Hari.

  ‘All right, give him five rupees for pocket expenses,’ suggested Ratan to end their war of courtesy.

  ‘Ratan,’ called out the foreman.

  The wrestler rose and swaggered up to the pay desk. And he forestalled the foreman.

  ‘No damaged cloth, Sahib,’ he said. ‘And no interest, because I don’t borrow money on compound interest.’

  ‘Twenty-nine rupees!’ said the foreman. ‘One rupee cut for being late at the factory.’

  ‘Thirty rupees!’ shouted the wrestler, summoning all the power of his colossal frame into a deliberately restrained manner. ‘Not a pice less.’

  The foreman looked up at Ratan and blinked to meet the hard glint of the wrestler’s flaming eyes. He felt uncomfortable and began to twist the ends of his moustache. His face went purple and pale like the back of a chameleon under the glare of the sun.

  ‘Acha!’ he said to save his dignity. ‘This time you are excused. Your thumb.’

  ‘I can write,’ said Ratan sternly.

  The foreman gave him a pen, laid currency notes of thirty rupees by the side of the desk, and waited eagerly for the man to be off.

  Ratan took his own time about it. He slowly wrote his name in Hindustani, stood and counted the notes, and saying ‘Mehrbani Sahib,’ showed his back, contrary to the custom of the coolies, who bowed abjectly as they retreated.

  Hari and Munoo were not to be found when he returned to where they had squatted among the crowd of coolies. He thought that they had proceeded home. He marched out of the factory.

  As soon as he jumped the little ditch which separated the badly paved road from the damp field he espied a tall Pathan with his hand on Hari’s neck, while a short, stocky Muhammadan was threatening the old coolie with loud abuse and the butt-end of his rifle. Munoo was nowhere in sight.

  ‘So you thought you would give us the slip,’ Ratan heard the short Pathan say, jumping towards Hari. ‘Son of an ass! Heathen! You thought we would not see you under the legs of the other coolies. Pay up, pay up Nadir Khan’s debt, since he is not here to exact it.’

  Hari had opened the fold of his dhoti and yielded two silver coins as the tall Pathan kicked him in the behind and pulled at the neck of his tunic so hard that the old coolie’s teeth rattled.

  ‘That is not all,’ the Pathan said. ‘The interest alone is more than that. There is money in your loincloth. Give it to me.’

  ‘My wages have been cut, Khan Sahib,’ said Hari, joining his hands with the notes pressed between them. ‘I had some money deducted for damaged cloth. I can’t pay this month. I shall pay next month.’

  The short Pathan snatched the note out of his hand and the tall Pathan was about to kick Hari off, when Ratan walked up slowly and caught hold of the Pathan by the collar.

  ‘Leave him go, ruffians!’ he said.

  ‘What has this to do with you, Pahlwan?’ snarled the short Pathan.

  ‘Everything!’ Ratan shouted. ‘He has paid you the money. What more do you want? Why do you show off your strength to an old man? Come, give me a fight, bullies.’

  ‘Acha! Acha! Pahlwan Sahib,’ said the tall Pathan, releasing Hari from his grasp because he felt the shadow of Ratan’s presence behind him, and the powerful hold of the wrestler’s hand on his neck.

  ‘Acha! Acha!’ repeated the short Pathan, shaking his head a little nervously. ‘The rest of the money shall be added to the capital. We shall put it in the book. Go!’

  Hari broke into a short shuffling run, his heart breaking, his eyes full of tears, and his frame hanging loose.

  Ratan loosened his grip of the tall Pathan’s neck. The two Pathans strode away towards some other coolies, trying to keep their heads from hanging low with humiliation.

  Ratan came abreast of Hari. So afraid was the old man of the Pathans following him, however, that he started, staggered and fell.

  ‘Hari! Hari! Don’t be afraid! It is I, Ratan,’ the wrestler said, helping him up. And in complete silence they proceeded homewards.

  As they came to the tenement house, through the viscid, noisome mud, they saw the chowkidar and Munoo standing by the staircase.

  ‘He wants the rent,’ Munoo said, coming towards his friends. ‘I told him that Shibu would pay.’

  Hari handed out three rupees from the knot of his loincloth and said: ‘You pay two rupees, brother. We will settle the account later with Shibu.’

  Munoo handed over the rupees.

  ‘This is my share towards the rent,’ said Ratan, handing over two rupees to the chowkidar.

  Hari struggled up the staircase, his face pinched, his body lifeless and heavy, his legs shaking precariously. He sank to the floor of the room on the third floor with a sigh. Lakshmi came and began to press his knees reverently.

  Ratan began to smoke a biri.

  Munoo, who had hitherto enjoyed the delights of smoking only surreptitiously, stretched his hands towards Ratan for a smoke. Unfortunately, the very first puff he took made him cough. He was amused at his own discomfiture. But Ratan roared with laughter like a child.

  ‘They have cut five rupees from Hari’s pay for damaged cloth,’ Shibu said coming in. ‘This is no occasion for mirth-making.’

  ‘They dared not cut any money for damaged cloth out of my pay,’ Ratan said. ‘You ought to be manly enough to stand up for yourself. Or you should come with me and join the Union. You are all so lazy.’

  ‘I will join the Union,’ Munoo said. ‘Tell me where it is.’

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go and get your names enrolled. There is no time to lose.’

  ‘Acha, Lakshmi,’ said Hari, whose fatigue had been somewhat alleviated by his wife’s attentions. ‘I have enough strength now. I will go and enrol my name in the Union, too.’

  ‘I will come, too,’ said Shibu.

  ‘Acha,’ said Ratan. ‘And then I will take you for a drink at the toddy shop.’

  The friendship between Munoo and Ratan grew, as friendship can only grow between two spontaneous, naïve, warmhearted men of the Punjab. It had arisen quickly, developed fast, so that they were now calling each other ‘friends-since-the-days-when-they-wore-langotis-in-their-cradles’.

  The circumstances of their lives cemented the bond in a way which was unique, for brotherliness was the only compensation for the bitterness of life in the factory and in the home in which they lived, worked and had their being.

  A twelve-hour day wears one down.

  And to live in a small room, cramped on the floor, amid the smoke and smell of cooking and of the food eaten, amid a chaos of pots and pans, old beds and crawling children, in the publicity of the common staircase, the common washing-place, the common latrines, and amid the foul smell of sewage that filtered over the pathways, is conducive to comradeship.

  It was the few hours outside this hell that, more than anything else endeared Ratan to Munoo.

  He found it so hard to get up in the morning. And there was no way of getting to the factory except to walk. It took nearly an hour, as he had to complete his toilet in the fields and have a dip in the swamp. That meant crawling out of bed at about half-past five. By the time he had eaten a little bread left over from last night, walked to the pool, relieved himself, washed and walked to the mill, it was six. Of course, Nadir Khan, the warder, kept a record of what time every coolie came, and could get his pay docked.

  At night, when the six o’clock whistle blew, there was the walk home again. It was eight or nine by the time the females, tired after the day’s work, could cook a meal. To get eight hours’ sleep it was necessary to go to bed immediately. It was not hard to go to sleep.

  But a boy like Munoo did not want to go to sleep at nine. The fields, the toddy shop, the town, attracted him ever since Ratan had introduced him to them. Often it was midnight before he slept.

>   It was these hours spent in companionship, in the actual act of living, sentient contact with other coolies, that seemed to him the happiest. He felt he was learning to be a grown-up man. He believed he would soon be a full man. Everything he heard, said or did during these hours was important.

  He always burst out with happiness on a holiday. And he joined the general exodus of coolies to the town, to see the wonderful things that were sold there, to caress them in his heart, since he could not buy them, with the warm hope that one day he would be able to possess them.

  Munoo and Ratan went together on these outings on Saturdays.

  The dusty road that led from the mill land to the outskirts of Bombay yielded quickly under the eager rush of coolies’ feet. The smell of tanning hides, of carcasses of dead dogs and cats on rubbish-heaps, the odour of decaying dung, which lay in the fields and in fissures and folds, gave place to the palm-lined highways and tamarind tree groves, hedged by rows of sweet peas and roses. Great houses loomed up against the green parks and towered over the beds of gulmohur, which grew in profusion everywhere. The deformed, hollow-eye, hollow-cheeked bodies of the workers began to mingle with the expensively costumed pedestrians of the town. The traffic of victorias, motor taxis and privately owned limousines increased without warning. And the habitués of mill land insinuated themselves like the oncoming twilight into the busy bazaars of Bombay city.

  ‘I will show you a tamasha today,’ said Ratan to Munoo as they sat in a toddy shop, his face suddenly lighting up with an embarrassed smile.

  And, draining the last draught of beer from a bottle before him, he led Munoo, under the glare of electric lights in Abdul Rahman Street, past the gas lamps of the Bhendi Bazaar, through a dimly lit lane into Grant Road.

  Munoo followed Ratan enthusiastically into the quaint, narrow, old street whose dirt was hidden by the dark, whose unsavoury smells mixed with the perfume of the flower-stalls, and whose squalor was camouflaged by the forms of the thickly painted, profusely bejewelled, gorgeously attired women who sat on low stools, padded with cushions, in the windows and balconies, over curious little shops, smiling strange smiles and winking at the swarms of men who walked along, leisurely, gaily dressed and chewing the betel leaf or betel nut, while they looked out for a whore.

  ‘Isn’t that a lovely scene?’ Ratan bent down and remarked. ‘Aren’t you happy to have come with me? And now tell me, which of these women do you like?’

  Munoo smiled to cover his embarrassment. His heart was beating with the eager urge that Ratan’s words aroused in his body. He felt warm and happy, and stared at his friend with a wonderfully innocent light in his eyes, as if he were wrapped in a wild, sensual dream.

  ‘Come,’ Ratan said. ‘I know where to take you. We will go to Piari Jan.’

  Munoo followed his friend, along wave upon wave of human passion that surged up and down the street, the gay, rustling, white, black, brown swarms that ebbed and flowed to the rhythm of a silent song, the song of desire which sought in music, dance, love, an escape, a death, a kind of culmination, howsoever temporary and partial, from the loneliness of the soul. The boy did not know how miserable, how brow-beaten, how utterly wretched was this humanity that crowded the street of pleasure. He was taken in by the glamour of the masquerade, and thought it to be a carnival like those fairs in the country, where people went to show off their gaudiest clothes. He had no certain aim or object himself, and thought that all these people wandered too without aim or object.

  But before he knew where he was, Ratan had dragged him through a dark alley, into an evil-smelling courtyard, and led him up a narrow, dark flight of steps into an open salon, brilliantly lit with tall chandeliers and decorated with paper-chains and imitation flowers from the dome to the walls, where large oleographs of His Majesty King Edward VII and his eldest son, the King-Emperor George, hung, side by side with lithographs of the monkey god Hanuman and large photographs of a woman, ostensibly Piari Jan, as she appeared in the heyday of her prosperity, when she had a salon in the best part of Grant Road, and when she had danced for all the big merchants of Bombay, and was not the broken, middle-aged, used-up creature who now sat at the window, swathed in cheap, tawdry, imitation silks and draperies, and nose, ear, hand and neck ornaments.

  ‘Aao, welcome, Pahlwanji. Where have you kept yourself hidden for so long? My eyes have gone blind looking at the way along which you were to come to grace my house,’ Piari Jan said with a smile that hid the obvious insincerity of her speech.

  ‘I have been working hard,’ said Ratan. ‘Also, the foreman cut some of my pay last month,’ he lied.

  ‘I hope he hasn’t cut any this month,’ she said laughing.

  ‘No, no, don’t you be afraid for your share,’ said Ratan, matching her question with a vague promise. And then he twisted the embarrassing situation with mild good humour, saying: ‘Look, I have brought you a handsome young gallant.’

  She advanced toward Munoo and laying her hand on his head said: ‘A veritable god himself in beauty! What a big boy! Is he your son?’

  ‘No, he is your lover!’ said Ratan. ‘He is my rival.’

  Munoo felt ill-at-ease in the face of this vision of transparent gauzes and glittering jewels. And the draughts of perfume that oozed from her body made him a bit dizzy. But he was curious to know, to feel the lure of her love. And he stood excited.

  ‘Be seated then, Pahlwanji,’ said Piari Jan. ‘You are always mocking, are you not?’

  ‘Well then, I am qualified for the job of a clown in your household,’ said Ratan, keeping the conversation up in order to conceal the slight awkwardness he felt, and sinking on to the white-sheeted floor with Munoo.

  ‘You are my honoured patron,’ Piari said. ‘How could I presume to ask you to join my troupe? I am your servant.’ And she deftly changed the conversation to bring her customer to the point. ‘Now will your Grace have some sherbet and hear some music?’

  ‘Han! Han!’ Ratan rallied to the point, appreciating that his pleasure meant only strict business to her. ‘Here is a bottle of the kind of sherbet that I think you will like,’ he added, producing a bottle of local brew.

  ‘It is very kind of you, Pahlwanji,’ she said. ‘You are generous like Hatam Tai. I will get some glasses.’ And she went towards a niche where a large bed stood with that beautifully painted woodwork which is a speciality of the North Indian carpenters.

  Coming back with four small bowls, she leaned over to the hall and called: ‘Ni Janki, ni Gulab Jan! Vay Bude Khan!’

  ‘We are going to have some dancing, too, then?’ Ratan asked. ‘But you are taking a great deal of trouble. Come and sit down by me for a while.’

  ‘May I be your sacrifice,’ said Piari, coming mockingly and sitting in his lap. ‘I am your servant.’

  Munoo smiled nervously at this exhibition of love. He had never seen a man and woman so near to each other. His uncle had always slept in a separate bed from that of his aunt. And though Prabha’s bed used to lie alongside Parbati’s, he had never seen them touch each other. As for Hari and Lakshmi, they seemed to belong to two different worlds. He felt a queer movement in his entrails and an affection in his chest which seemed to melt his thoughts and to intoxicate him more intensively than the bitter liquid he had shared with Ratan.

  Two lovely apparitions darted into the salon, their legs encumbered by the glittering sequins of silken trousers, their upright bodies swathed in the thin folds of flashing, starched pink aprons, and with brave smiles on their faces which scarcely hid the pathos of their broken spirit. They stood for a moment embarrassedly looking backwards into the hall, affecting a histrionic suspense in expectation of Bude Khan, who soon appeared, a black, toothless, dim-eyed creature, clad in clean clothes, which did not disguise his procurer’s soul.

  ‘Salaam! Salaam! Pahlwanji,’ said the pimp. ‘You have graced our house after a very long time. We must make haste to entertain you. Now what about it, girls?’ And he sat down, pressing the keys of the harmonium
which he had planted before himself.

  The instrument uttered a long-drawn-out, plaintive note, lent it seemed to produce an atmosphere in which the two dancers lost their nervousness.

  Piari dragged a couple of drums and began to tune them with the brisk thumps of her heavy hands.

  Then the harmonium released a soft note of longing and the drums reverberated like the slow thunder of a waterfall, and the two dancers began to sway their hands, which had hung loose, and to move their feet, painted red with henna, so that it seemed that they were burning with an invisible fire.

  As the music rose dolefully in the air and became a sustained, palpitating rhythm, like the beating of Munoo’s heart, Piari began to sing the first accents of a folk song, while the dancers advanced like the rippling of water in a pool, striking their heels together, so that the bells on their ankles tinkled in tune with the song, and the whole atmosphere was charged with the presence of a force which bound them all in a curious connection.

  The insistence in Piari’s voice on the amorous phrases of the song, as well as the insidious fire of the dancers, lost in a maze of movement, the undertones of the harmonium, and the overtones of the tambourines, travelled through the twin hearts of Ratan and Munoo, till, when the elements of music rose to a shrill height and the dancers spun round in the most tender, affecting, weirdly disturbing circles of joy and pain, and the whole atmosphere reached a wild hysterical pitch of emotion, Ratan undid the upper folds of his loincloth and threw a rupee on to the harmonium with a shout of ‘Wah! Wah! You have made me happy, Piari, my life, my love!’

  Piari moved away from the tambourines and sank felinely into Ratan’s lap, saying: ‘I am glad I have pleased you. But I want you to please me.’

  ‘I am not the Rustum of Hindustan for nothing,’ said Ratan.

  Bude Khan leered round at this, extending the corners of his dim eyes furtively. The two nautch-girls, who had sunk to the floor and sat huddled against each other, arm in arm, head to head, in a kind of ecstasy at the wrestler’s phrase.