Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  But the air became cooler and crisper as the car ascended higher altitudes and the deodars and cedars that grew on the flat inclines shattered the illusion. The sight of the strange modern Solon Bazaar with its shops and restaurants, and the hotel where Mrs Mainwaring rested for tea, gave him something new to think about. He wished there had been a bazaar like that in his own village, for then he would not have wanted to go to all the big cities.

  The endless lengths of the mountains, the far stretches of sky-high peaks covered with snow, the colossal solidity of their shapely masses, aroused in him the feeling which he always used to have in his childhood, the urge to say how very fecund God was when He created the huge mountains and the vast sheets of waters which were the rivers.

  He did not want to make fun of God, though, because he saw some coolies and hillmen trudging up to Simla, borne down beneath the sacks of foodstuffs on their backs, and he thought that it was the blessing of the Almighty that he sat comfortably, being carried in a motor-car. It was nice to be hurried along, past trees and houses, ponies and men, up, up and up to the heavenly heights above the clouds.

  And when the Chevrolet sped past the stupendous castle which Mrs Mainwaring pointed out to her daughter as the Viceroy’s residence, when it passed under the shadow of an amorphous world of huge offices, bungalows and huts spread on the back of a magnificent plateau, when Munoo stood securely and proudly while coolies clamoured for the right to bear the passenger’s luggage, when he was driven down to Annandale in a rickshaw by coolies, he was very happy in his heart.

  Munoo found that as the Memsahib’s servant he had to fit into a new state of existence. His exact duties were not defined. He was to remain at his mistress’s beck and call, to do anything and everything that her ladyship desired at a particular moment. But, in spite of the miscellaneousness of his duties, his life at Bhujji House resolved itself into a kind of pattern.

  He was awakened early at dawn by Ala Dad, the khansamah, from the corner of the small dark room in the servants’ quarter, twenty yards below the bungalow, which served as the kitchen for the household and as a bedroom and living-room for the two of them. He had to light a fire in the primitive kitchen range and to put the kettle on to boil for the Memsahib’s tea. Ala Dad himself sat nursing his white beard and smoking the hubble-bubble before going to the lavatory.

  Munoo hurriedly made tea, showed the tray to Ala Dad to see if he had put everything in order, and bore it up to the Memsahib’s bedroom.

  Little Circe was already up, running round in her pyjamas, clamouring for breakfast.

  Mrs Mainwaring, who had gone to bed at two or three o’clock in the morning, cursed at her daughter for disturbing her sleep, and bullied her to clean her teeth and wash her face if she wanted her chota hazri. As the child was self-willed, obstinate and disobedient, and wanted to be noticed all the time, Mrs Mainwaring smacked her and sent her down to the servants’ quarter. She herself put on a dirty black skirt over her pyjamas and a red polo jumper over her night-coat, and with Michael Arlen’s Green Hat in her hand, sipped her cup of tea.

  Munoo began to sweep the sitting-room and veranda, happy in the contemplation of the green, rain-soaked verdure of Annandale at his feet, and intoxicated by the deep, rich smell of the pine cones and resin.

  Mrs Mainwaring saw him, self-contained and absorbed, brushing the carpets, dusting the furniture, sweeping the floor, and she wondered what he was thinking, or whether he thought at all. She would love to have asked him to come and talk to her. But he was a mere servant. How could she think of such a thing? And yet she felt she was like Michael Arlen’s Iris Storm, a much-misunderstood woman. ‘Why didn’t the world understand,’ she said, ‘how a woman gives herself in love, in hate, in pity, in tenderness, in playfulness and in a hundred different moods? What right had people to judge one? Why can’t I give myself to this boy?’ she asked. The regular curves of his young body, its quick sudden flashes of movement stirred the chords of her being in a strangely disturbing manner. But she, more than Iris Storm, had a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind. And she blamed the air of Simla which was so conducive to thoughts of pleasure. So she rose and lazed about the bedroom, doing her long black hair, which was prematurely streaked with white, powdering and rouging her face.

  Munoo, who was naturally interested in the mysteries of her toilet, stole round the bedroom arranging things, but always at some distance from her.

  Mrs Mainwaring’s heart palpitated with the ache of that desire which she had sought to stifle by occupying herself at the dressing-table.

  ‘Fetch me the scissors from the gol kamra, boy,’ she ordered in a tone calculated to suppress her dim awareness of the tenderness she felt for him.

  ‘Han, Memsahib,’ Munoo answered, and proceeded to obey her command.

  When he came back with the scissors, she took them and, deliberately taking hold of his hand, which she knew to be dirty from dusting, exclaimed:

  ‘You unclean boy, look at your hands, they are filthy. And look at your nails, they have never been cut for ages. Go and wash your hands and come back. I will file your nails for you.’

  Munoo did as she asked, willingly, for he had seen her the previous night manicure her own hands with strange instruments which she kept in a velvet box.

  May treated his hands with tender movements, smiled at him, and flourished a silken handkerchief which she had soaked in eau-de-Cologne. Then she looked at him with a wild flutter in her eyes, and, completing the manicure with protracted blandishments, said:

  ‘Beautiful boy! Lovely boy! You only want a wife now!’

  Munoo smiled with the quivering ripples of affection that the contact of her hands had produced in him. He felt dizzy with the intoxicating warmth that her coquettish movements had aroused in him. He hung his head down to avoid the embarrassment which he felt, and yet unable to control the fire in his blood, he fell at her feet in an orgy of tears and kisses. She pushed him away suddenly, shouting:

  ‘What impertinence! What cheek! Go to your work! Go and get your work done. Get the breakfast ready.’

  Munoo rushed away to the servants’ quarter feeling very guilty, and wondered how he could face the Memsahib again. But he had to, because the breakfast was ready to be laid out. Only Circe made it difficult for him by asking him when he came to lay the table:

  ‘Why are you crying? Has Mummy beaten you?’

  Still, he forgot about his misery during breakfast, for this had always been a celebrated meal in Mrs Mainwaring’s household, wherever that household had happened to be during the last three years. It started at eight o’clock and finished at twelve to half-past twelve. The delights of a rich breakfast of fruit, recommended under doctor’s orders as a cure for an illness that turned out only to have been imaginary. By the time she had finished breakfast and lounged around, the bottles of gin that lay on the sideboard tempted her. And after these appetizers lunch was announced.

  For Ala Dad, the khansamah, was punctual to a minute, whatever else he might or might not be. He pretended that it was in the Memsahib’s interest for him to be ‘up to taime’, though the cunning old fellow knew that it was also in his own interests, because if the tiffin was out of the way and the afternoon wore on the Memsahib would offer to do the shopping and come to know the bazaar prices, and he would lose the commissions he received from the various shopkeepers on the purchases. The thirty rupees pay which ‘Maining’ Sahib gave him was not even sufficient to feed his wife and daughter and to keep his son at school, he thought. How could he save up for his old age, if not by earning a few rupees in commissions? And there was no harm in robbing the rich. These Sahibs had plenty of money; only the Indians were poor.

  ‘Memsahib, what will Huzoor desire for dinner?’ said Ala Dad, standing serenely by the table in his white coat and turban with a red cummerbund round his waist. ‘Tum-tum (tomato) soup, Machi (fish), Stickania (steak and onions), Plumpud (plum pudding), orright?’

  ‘No, Ala Dad,’ said Mrs Mainwa
ring. ‘Dinner with the Stuart Memsahib downstairs tonight. But you come and serve.’

  ‘Orright, Memsahib,’ said Ala Dad, rather crestfallen and peeved. This Memsahib knew too much. She was a kali (black) Mem, natu (native). The real Sahibs did not know the prices in the market. If he had known that the ‘Maining’ Sahib was a black Mem, he thought, he certainly would not have taken this job. However, he was going to endure it as long as possible, and see how much she knew, because even the all-knowing did not know all that he knew.

  ‘Ask the boy to get a rickshaw from the stand,’ ordered Mrs Mainwaring. ‘Only three coolies,’ she continued, ‘the boy is to be the fourth.’

  ‘Yes, Huzoor,’ said Ala Dad, bowing with a weird light in his ordinarily dim eyes.

  While Mrs Mainwaring dressed, Munoo and the three other coolies he had engaged came with the rickshaw and waited on the drive.

  The boy wished there was a motor engine attached to the carriage, as he was not looking forward to pushing it uphill to the Mall.

  Indeed he was in difficulties as he pushed the rickshaw on this first day. For, though Mrs Mainwaring had never heard of the rickshaw men receiving a training for their jobs, because it did not seem to her to require any, Munoo was finding it not altogether an unskilled occupation.

  Mohan, a young coolie, had told him that rickshaw-pulling is an art which, as he himself had known from recent experience, could only be learnt from continued employment. He had said that one had to develop strong ‘wind’, and to learn to handle the rickshaw so as to keep it in balance; that one had to develop a sense of judgment and surefootedness, which is so necessary at turnings and steep gradients. Munoo had waived this advice aside. Now he was beginning to realize that Mohan was right.

  As he puffed and panted the coolies encouraged him with ‘Shabash! Shabash!’ And when they found that the hill was too steep and was straining him, they pulled and pushed harder and took the responsibility of the rickshaw on to themselves. They were kind to him.

  The rickshaw ascended past the military barracks, where the Viceroy’s bodyguard lay encamped for the season, up the circuitous road to the Railway Board offices, and proceeded to the Mall. From now onwards it was less strenuous for the coolies to pull the vehicle, because the ascent up the Mall is more gradual. And once the vehicle had reached the new Post Office where the upper English Bazaar forks away from the lower Indian Bazaar, Munoo became quite excited about his job.

  For, always sensitive to the straight, prim beauty of English shops, he found himself pushing the rickshaw by the varied showrooms and windows of Whiteway Laidlaw; Lawrence and Mayo; Sahib Singh and Co., chemists; the Modern Bookshop; Jones and Jones, silversmiths and jewellers; Muhammad Gul, the furrier; Ho Wang, the Chinese shoemaker; and other fashionable purveyors of goods suited to European tastes.

  After being borne across the Mall once so that everyone should see her, Mrs Mainwaring directed the coolies to pull up by Davico’s restaurant, where she had asked Mrs Stuart to tea that afternoon.

  The coolies took the rickshaw away to a stand near the YWCA to wait till they were called again.

  Munoo was curious to know how the Angrezi log behaved among themselves, and from where he sat, he looked into the wonderful restaurant, where sweets were arranged in huge glass cages on one floor, and small tables and cane chairs on the other.

  ‘Oh! Look, Mummy! Our coolies are there!’ cried little Circe impetuously, just as Mrs Mainwaring was being introduced into polite society.

  Her mother shushed her and asked her to behave. The sight of the rude, dirtily clad, bare-legged creatures, some crouching round a hubble-bubble, some lying flat on the edge of the roadway and on the tin top of the shed, was a challenge to the complacency of the ladies and gentlemen who had tea at Davico’s. But, of course, the coolies, except for a new arrival like Munoo, did not care, as they rested content in any position in which they found themselves, slight, lissome, strangely still as if empty and dead.

  Munoo had fever when he came back after his first day’s work as a rickshaw coolie.

  He had felt his legs breaking with fatigue all the way back. When he got to his room he felt listless. His limbs sagged. He stretched them, but there seemed no relief. He felt that his throat was parched. So he drank a jug of water. But his hands felt crippled and his legs seemed to sink beneath him. A complete inertia had taken possession of his bones. And the blood in his body was boiling hot.

  He crouched by the fire in the kitchen and tried to ignore what he felt was only a little fatigue. His head was aching, however, and he felt like reclining on something.

  He lay down on his back and curled up to receive the full glow of the fire, for he was now shivering.

  Ala Dad came back from the bazaar and almost stumbled on Munoo’s body in the dark. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. And, in answer, heard the boy’s soft moaning and writhing. He knew he had fever. He ran up to acquaint the Memsahib of the catastrophe.

  Mrs Mainwaring was very concerned. She was a mother, and felt towards this boy as she had felt towards Ralph when he had been ill. She had him removed upstairs and put him into bed where ‘baby’ slept, in spite of Munoo’s protestations that he was only a servant and could not sleep upstairs. And she called a doctor, no less a person than Major Marchant, the Health Officer of Simla, who stayed near Annandale.

  Major Marchant came, took Munoo’s temperature, prescribed some aspirin and, leaving the boy with the cheering words ‘You will soon be well,’ hastened to satisfy his curiosity about Mrs Mainwaring. For there seemed to him something strange in this dark-hued lady who had put her servant boy to sleep in her flat.

  Marchant was a young Indian Christian. He was originally a cobbler’s son, whom an English mission had brought up and educated. During the course of his adventurous career in the hands of the padres he had always secretly enjoyed the thrill of rubbing shoulders with Englishmen. When he had gone to England and become inured to meeting the English people on a basis of equality, he had begun to regard himself as an Englishman, a belief encouraged by the faultless accent he had acquired, the young chorus-girl he had married, and the complete adaptability to European conditions that he had easily cultivated. He had changed his name from Mochi (cobbler) to Marchant. He had forgotten the low-caste boy he was when he first fell into the hands of the Mission, and only recognized the successful young IMS officer he had become. The only price he had had to pay for his rise from pariahdom to the position of a dignified member of one of the Imperial services in India was the regular allowance of half his pay, which he had to send to his wife, who preferred to stay in England. As he had been very poor in his childhood, the loss of seven hundred rupees a month troubled him. He was stingy and spent little on himself, using his position as the Medical Officer of Simla to get hospitality freely. But, apart from the regret of spending money on the chorus-girl, which inclined him sometimes to thoughts of seeking a divorce and drove him often into the arms of other men’s wives, he was very satisfied with himself. He saw that Mrs Mainwaring was almost the same colour as he, or rather the colour he would have liked to be: a dusky hue such as could be brightened into a pink by constantly rubbing a towel on the cheeks. She must be a Eurasian, he thought, and he knew that it was more easy for an Indian Christian to find an affinity with a Eurasian than with either the natives or with the thoroughbred English.

  ‘Who is this boy, Mrs Manning?’ he asked, as he came into the drawing-room.

  ‘He is a servant I picked up in Bombay,’ she replied, and continued, ‘By the way, my name is Mainwaring—Mrs Mainwaring.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry, the khansamah said Maina or something like that, and I guessed it might be Manning.’

  ‘No, it is Mainwaring,’ she said. ‘Rather a difficult name to pronounce, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I am glad you are not a difficult person. Some of the Anglo-Indian community in Simla are the very limit, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Mainwaring. But she did not want to critici
ze the community of which she aspired to be a member.

  For that matter, Major Marchant had not wanted to institute differences between himself and the English community either, but he was trying to make conversation.

  ‘How long have you been here, Mrs Mainwaring?’ asked Marchant. ‘Oh, I only came from “home” a few days ago.’

  ‘Really,’ said Marchant.

  ‘Oh, won’t you sit down and have a drink, Doctor?’ suggested Mrs Mainwaring, divining the gleam of admiration in the major’s eyes.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Marchant, sitting down eagerly. ‘Do tell me, how was everything at “home”?’

  And they talked of ‘home’ till it was time for Mrs Mainwaring to go to dinner with the Stuarts downstairs. They had so much more to say to each other than could be said in a quarter of an hour, that Mrs Mainwaring asked the Major to tea the next day, on the pretext of telling him about her illness.

  Meanwhile, Munoo lay, happy to be privileged to sleep in the bungalow, though his temples palpitated with the fever.

  But the glow of that happiness soon evaporated as the soft tremor of fatigue came creeping up his legs, as the fever ran up and down his body and turned into a clammy sweat, as he tossed about the bed uncomfortably, sighed and remembered his mother.

  Mrs Mainwaring came back from dinner and rubbed eau-de-Cologne on his face and pressed his head. She even massaged his body. She was very kind to him.

  When Munoo had sweated out his fever and recovered, he had to revert back to his position as a servant boy and rickshaw coolie again. He did so quite willingly, since, however kind the Memsahib had been to him, the deep-rooted feeling of inferiority to the people who lived in bungalows and wore Angrezi clothes had never been dispelled.

  He went on from day to day without a break, attending on Mrs Mainwaring as she entered the gay round of pleasurable existence in Simla.

  Apart from sweeping and dusting the bungalow and running errands for the Memsahib and the khansamah, he drove the rickshaw as a fourth coolie when his mistress went shopping, or for an evening drive.