Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  Another volley of shots followed behind him.

  Munoo turned on his feet and ran up a steep alley. He could see the palm trees waving on the crest of the Malabar Hill. He made for it, drawn as it were, by a mysterious faith in the safety of mountain tops, which seemed to be confirmed by the tranquillity of the bungalows on its edges. The sound of firing had ceased by this time, but the weird noises of the riot followed him. When he reached the end of the road he sighted an uprise. This, his instincts told him, would lead him to safety, for there the din of the shooting seemed to have receded.

  The sun was blazing and there was very little shade on the way.

  Munoo sweated. He felt faint with fatigue and hunger. His body seemed no longer his own, because it lagged behind his will to go on. ‘What has happened to me?’ he asked himself. ‘Where has my strength gone?’

  Then he thought of the men whom he had seen falling dead behind him. They must have been shot by the police and the soldiers. Their friends and families would mourn for them. He, too, was sorry for them. He felt he knew the pain a man must feel when he was writhing in the agony of death. At least, he thought he had tasted that pain whenever he was hurt, and the memory of a goat moaning while she was being butchered by the Muhammadans of his village on their Id festival came to his mind. But no occasion on which he had felt or seen death was as real as this. Before, he had always been unconscious of suffering. Now, the feeling of pain seemed to tinge everything. For the first time in his life he realized the hardness of life.

  As he walked along he looked for one of those moving stalls which sell roasted gram and cheap sweets to the servants of sahibs in the European quarters of Indian towns. There was not one in sight. He continued tiredly through the long avenue of the palm trees with branches flattened by the wind. On his left was the sea, on his right the bungalows of the rich, standing like inviolable fortresses on the promontories of the Malabar Hill; above him were the hanging gardens; and below, the panorama of the island and harbour of Bombay.

  He stared across the drive of a square-fronted house which lay covered with close-clipped ivy, beyond to the beds of a garden guarded by a double belt of trees. There was something frightening to Munoo’s humble mind in the self-conscious complacency of this building. So he withdrew his gaze and, standing right in the middle of the road, looked down to the island at his feet.

  He stood dazed with the beauty of the scene. Through the dim haze of a far horizon could be discerned forests of masts, and sails swelling with the breeze that seemed invisible. Nearer, the shapeless mass of city buildings rested under coconuts and palms, while the fern-covered rocks bravely guarded the pearl-like bay in the shell of a transparent mist. The city, the bay, the sea, at his feet, had an unearthly aura about them.

  The loud honk of a car—and, before he could jump aside, he was knocked down. He rolled down the hill, urged by an instinct to avoid hurt, but soon he lost consciousness.

  ‘Oh, what a thing to happen to us!’ exclaimed Mrs Mainwaring. ‘Right on the day of my arrival from “home”, too. First the riots and then this accident. I hope he isn’t dead! Let me see!’ She applied her hand to his heart and passed it over his head with the skill of the woman who had taken a first-aid diploma. ‘His pulse is all right,’ she affirmed.

  ‘Oh Mummy, what can we do?’ cried little Circe Mainwaring.

  ‘He is a waif; let us leave him here,’ urged the chauffeur.

  ‘No, let us put him in the car,’ said Mrs Mainwaring. ‘For if someone sees him they will stone us to death. You don’t know what these hooligans are! If he has no place to go, I want a servant.’

  The chauffeur, a Muhammadan, recognized Munoo to be a Hindu, and, excited beneath his apparent reserve by strong religious sentiments, he did not care if the boy died or what happened to him. If he had met him alone, he might have killed him deliberately. As it was, he thought he had done so accidentally. He would have left him lying there, but he was afraid of the Memsahib. So he lifted the heathen and deposited him in the car.

  ‘Pick up the luggage at the Taj,’ said Mrs Mainwaring, ‘and let us be on the way as quickly as possible. Avoid the city and skirt round to the Agra Road.’

  5

  MUNOO REVIVED BEFORE THE MOTOR-CAR IN WHICH MRS MAINWARING WAS travelling to Simla emerged from the outskirts of Bombay. And, during the leisurely, luxurious three days’ journey up to Kalka, the boy recovered his health somewhat.

  But really he was mentally and physically broken. And as he thought of the conditions under which he had lived, of the intensity of the struggle, and the futility of the waves of revolt falling upon the hard rock of privilege and possession, as he thought of Ratan and Hari and Lakshmi, and the riots, he felt sad and bitter and defeated, like an old man.

  To Mrs Mainwaring, however, he was not the old man he felt himself to be, otherwise she would have had no use for him, and would perhaps have left him where she had found him. He was not old to Mrs Mainwaring, nor even middle-aged, nor even a brute of a young man. He was to her a young boy with a lithe, supple body, with a small, delicate face, and with a pair of sensitive eyes. ‘What is your age, boy?’ she had asked him. ‘Fifteen, Memsahib,’ he had answered. And she had looked into his dark eyes for a moment with her own dark brown ones, pinched him on the arm with a playful flourish of her long, thin hands, patted him on the forehead, and drawing her olive-ivory Modigliani face backwards till it compressed her thin lips into a voluptuous pout, smiled at him and giggled. For a boy of fifteen was just what she wanted. And however old Munoo felt inside him, she neither cared to know nor had the capacity to know. He was just the boy for her, just the right servant. She would be good to him, which was easy, because she was good-hearted.

  Mrs Mainwaring was descended from an old Anglo-Indian family of four brothers, who had served as soldiers of fortune in the pay of the East India Company during the English wars of conquest in India. Her grandfather, the only survivor, had fought by the side of John Nicholson during the Mutiny, and begot her father, William Smith, through a Moslem washerwoman. William Smith became a sergeant in the Monroe infantry, a privately owned regiment of Eurasians. On the reorganization of the Indian army by the British Government in the sixties this irregular force was disbanded and the soldier-adventurer in Sergeant Smith sought the prizes of service in a feudatory native state. Knowing that it was easy for a white man to get a higher rank, even if less pay, in the Nawab of Zalimpar’s army than he would get in the British-Indian army to which he was being transferred from the Monroe infantry, he had gone and secured a direct Colonelcy in Zalimpar. Here he had married the daughter of an English engine-driver. May was the only child of the union, for the Colonel’s wife left him a year after May’s birth because she was expecting another child by someone else.

  May was looked after in her early childhood by the wife of a Catholic missionary and then sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Simla. As she grew up in the hill station among the children of English officials, who were continually talking of ‘home’, May developed a tremendous inferiority complex about her origin. She vaguely knew that she was English only at fourth remove, and that there was Indian blood in her from her grandmother’s side, but she had to pretend to be ‘pukka’ in order to cope with the snobbery of the other children. She built up a fairy-tale picture of her family’s estates in Western Ireland and sought to disguise her dusky hue under thick coats of powder and the camouflage of a Celtic origin. Since this did not convince the smarter among the other girls of her purely white pedigree, she was miserable at school and ultimately ran away from it to Zalimpar, obsessed with the ambition of going to England to whitewash her colour if possible. Her father, of course, could not afford to send her to the Cheltenham Ladies’ College where she wanted to go, and there was an awful scene between the two of them. But May’s ambition to become ‘pukka white’, which was at the back of her desire to go to Europe, was satisfied more easily. A young German photographer, Heinrich Ulmer, who did a splendid busi
ness in Zalimpar by flattering the vanity of the princess and courtiers with large, life-size portraits, fell in love with the very dusky hue which was causing her all this trouble. May persuaded herself that an alliance with a thoroughbred German was as easy a way of legitimizing her ‘pukkahood’ as going to Cheltenham. And, though her early training under the care of the parson’s wife and her schooling in the Convent of the Sacred Heart had instilled into her mind a horror of sex, she married Heinrich Ulmer.

  Unfortunately, however, the war broke out two years after May’s marriage and the German was interned in a concentration camp. May already had a daughter by Heinrich Ulmer, romantically named Penelope, and a son was born to her soon after the outbreak of the war.

  For a time she mourned the loss of her husband. But she had never really gone out to him. For although she had outdone him in her display of physical passion, she had really remained a virgin at heart, as if pulled back always by the fear of sin which had sunk deep into her subconsciousness through her early Christian training. Her warmth, her ardour, her intense capacity for desire, must have been due to the blood of her pagan Indian grandmother in her; her curious coldness of mind, the frigidity which had once made her jump into a bath of ice water in order to quell the passion in her body, was conditioned by the idea of sin. The fundamental contradiction in her nature resulted in perversity. She indulged in a strange, furtive, surreptitous promiscuity. She gave herself to people at the least felt impulse and, of course, invariably regretted having done so afterwards.

  She exerted her female charms on the Education Minister of the Zalimpar State and got a job teaching in a children’s school. To keep her job she had to please other men. And, being a pretty woman and one of the few emancipated women in a world where the female sex is veiled off from the sight of the male, she was the object of admiration of rich courtiers, high officials, eminent judges, both English and Indian. If her mind had not been reacting against the deep-rooted belief in the sin of sex, she might have had an integrity of character which would have saved her from the onslaughts of all these men, but, vacillating between a belief she felt to be wrong and a desire which was continually insistent, she became a bitch to all the dogs that prowled round her bungalow.

  Aga Raza Ali Shah, a Persian captain in the Nawab’s army, who was somewhat of a poet, was caught in the mesh of her black locks. He got her to divorce Heinrich Ulmer and married her. He really loved her and would have made her happy, since he was a better lover than any she had met, more cultured than Heinrich and all the toadies and bloated idiots of the court, and a tall, handsome man with abounding energy and vigour. But now, suddenly, the ambition to regain her English nationality again began to disturb her. She played havoc with his feelings by frequenting the barracks and officers’ bungalows of the English regiment in the cantonment of Zalimpar. Aga Raza Ali Shah beat her in a fit of jealousy one day and kicked her out of his bungalow.

  She was not unhappy about it, because she had then been carrying on with a young subaltern of the Royal Fusiliers, a thoroughbred Englishman named Guy Mainwaring, much younger than herself and therefore easier to blackmail than an older man would have been. She told him she was expecting a child which she believed to be his. Guy Mainwaring was too ‘decent’ and chivalrous an Englishman not to be taken in by this.

  A Muhammadan divorce is easy to obtain. She married Guy and proposed that they should spend their honeymoon at ‘home’ in England. Guy took six months’ leave of absence and took her and her children to London. Here she presented him with a baby girl of a darker hue than Guy expected his child to be. And he had a suspicion that it looked more like Captain Raza Ali Shah than himself, a suspicion which was confirmed by May when one day, in a hysterical fit of abject humility, she broke down and confessed. Guy Mainwaring’s parents, who were supremely conscious of their true-blooded, blue-blooded, upper middle-class Englishness, had already heard of the boy’s blunder and refused to see him. Guy was lonely. He was miserable. In his utter helplessness he sought relief in May’s embraces as a child in his mother’s. And, having inherited with his blue blood the traditional English habit of escaping from reality, he buried his head in the sand like an ostrich, and decided to forget all about life in his dedication to duty. He would muddle through this business anyhow, and never face the facts squarely with regard to May, however sensible he might be in other things.

  May insisted on staying on at ‘home’, the heaven she had gained after all these years of waiting, when Guy’s leave was up and he had to rejoin his regiment at Peshawar, on the North-Western frontier of India. She made the excuse that she wanted to get a diploma in teaching at the Polytechnic and to look after the children a bit before they went to secondary school. But it was really to regain the spiritual heritage of her race by frequenting the theatres, the cocktail bars and the nightclubs.

  Guy, the young fool, was taken in again. He was haunted by memories of the ineffable bliss he had enjoyed in May’s embraces. He became a slave to her, indulging her every whim, every fancy, every capricious desire that she expressed. He voluntarily made an allowance of half his pay to her and settled on her half the fortune he inherited from his mother, who had suddenly died of disappointment and chagrin at the mess he had made of his life. And he wrote her the most tender, sentimental love-letters from Peshawar, where he was in a funk fighting against the Mohmand tribesmen and guarding the frontiers of the Empire.

  Guy had been writing to her regularly, imploring her to come back to India. She had always pleaded the care of Penelope and Ralph and the baby. Then, when that excuse did not work, and realizing in a fit of thoughtfulness how good Guy had been to her, she conceded in so far as to agree that she would return to India for a year with the baby, the elder children being fixed up at a boarding school. It was summer, however, and she said she could not bear the heat of the plains and be with him in Peshawar. So he rented a flat near Annandale at Simla for the season for her. And, while he grilled in the plains, she was now going up with Munoo and the baby to live at the capital of the Government of India. Guy said he would be able to snatch a fortnight’s leave and run up to the hills.

  Munoo contemplated her with a restrained wonder, sufficiently exciting to thrill him to the marrow of his bones. No white woman, no woman even had condescended to look at him quite like that. True, he had felt strange, inexplicable urges in his being about little Sheila at Sham Nagar, and had enjoyed sitting in the lap of Prabha’s wife, and loved Lakshmi, but what he felt in response to the pinching, patting and the coquettish smiles of the Memsahib was something different.

  Of course, he dared not think of anything bolder in his callow, subservient soul. And he stood half afraid, on the borders of happiness, complimenting himself on the good luck he felt he had come across, and wondering if there was any significance in the Memsahib’s familiar behaviour, apart from mere kindness. They had reached Kalka, at the foot of the Himalayas. Mrs Mainwaring had gone to the station restaurant for breakfast. Munoo looked across at the mountains with a love for high altitudes which was in his bones, as he waited in the yard with the Muhammadan chauffeur, who was more friendly now than he had been at first.

  The steep hills rose sheer before him, overgrown with an abundance of cool, green vegetation, reverberating with the delicate refrains of small waterfalls. The spring air was crisp and the sun rose almost as it used to rise over the burning, iridescent hills of Kangra, except that a few porous clouds rolled swiftly across the sky and rested like huge flakes of cotton on the peaks of these Himalayas.

  The Memsahib came flustering, blustering, to assimilate her female trappings, losing her bag, finding it, dropping her pin and not finding it, trying to keep little Circe under control and exasperated because she strayed, buying fruit here, sweets there, giving instructions to Munoo to do a hundred different things on the platform, where the English soldiers on police duty whistled to her and made her uncomfortable, asserting herself by exchanging memories with the old stationmaster, whom she kne
w, walking past the narrow-gauge toy railway, chockful of English men, women and children, native clerks and shopkeepers and hillmen with their baggage, which stood in readiness to depart, and nervously ordering the chauffeur to fill up enough oil and petrol for the journey ahead of them.

  At last the car was on its way, skirting the hairpin bends of the wonderful cart-road which seemed even to Munoo a miracle of achievement as it belted the zigzag courses of mountains and granite rocks.

  He was pleased with life, especially as the Memsahib had, with her own hands, given him some apples and bananas and sweets. And now he devoured the landscape with those restless brown eyes of his which seemed to have an insatiable zest for experience.

  He was wonder-struck at the baby railway, which he had seen standing at Kalka Station, ascending the gigantic heights with strange puffs such as a toddling child utters when he first learns to walk, crawling through long tunnels and circling up and up even with the car, so slow though it seemed in its movement. He wished they had been travelling in that train, his child’s heart excited by the playful interest which little Circe took in the toy thing.

  The sight of stray houses on the slopes of the mountains took him back to his own home, and he had the feeling that it was only yesterday that he had left the village in the valley. A ruined fortress which capped a far-distant peak encouraged the illusion because it looked like the crumbling temple of Durga, near Hamirpur, and the angry nullahs that gorged their way through the vastnesses of these mountains completed the vague similarity. He saw himself in his mind’s eye climbing the uphill paths and gaining steep precipices. It seemed to him that he was ploughing the terraced fields before sowing barley or wheat. He was beginning to feel in his proper element.