At first he went out quite often with his uncle and the two came back late in the night, very drunk and very friendly. But the friendship did not last long, and soon the uncle came to be tired of feeding a large, strong, healthy nephew who made no attempts to find another job. Quarrels between them became more and more frequent: watched by women cowering against the wall and clutching their hair, the two of them flung bitter words against one another; until one day the nephew ended another such quarrel by smashing his fist in his uncle’s face and, stepping over the prostrate body, disappeared out of the house. When he next reappeared, he was wearing a beautiful suit of smuggled silk and a big ring on his little finger and was working in some rather shady capacity for a big business magnate. But though he now really seemed to be earning a lot of money, he made no attempts to take away his mother and his younger brother and sisters. Nor did he come to see them very often or, when he did, speak much of his affairs; so that it was only by devious routes that they finally discovered him to be spending much of his time and most of his money on a very beautiful young Muslim lady, who employed her abilities at singing and dancing to entertain at certain kinds of parties. His mother took this news as she had taken all her other afflictions: with tears, with resignation, with pleas to God to lighten her lot.
Meanwhile Ram Kumar too was growing up, and his mother tried to turn her hopes to him. But, unlike his brother, he was not very promising. Where Vijay was broad and strong and good-looking, Ram Kumar was small and weak, with a pinched face to go with his pinched body. And he was always afraid. At the little charity school he attended he was afraid both of the master and of the other boys. He worked feverishly so that the master should have nothing with which to reproach him, and he hunched himself up to an even smaller size in the hope that the boys would not notice him. He was so successful that nobody, neither master nor boys, ever did notice him, and he remained unknown, unbefriended and – which was what he had aimed for – unmolested.
At home he tried the same tactics, though less successfully. The whole family lived together in one room and one veranda. There were Ram Kumar, his mother and his two sisters – his elder sister had been married to a policeman in Saharanpur, and Vijay, of course, was no longer living with them – the postal inspector uncle with his wife and children, as well as one widowed aunt and a grandmother.
Their room was in a row of six quarters built on one side of a courtyard which had on its other side the workshop of a dry-cleaner and the office with cyclostyle of an Urdu weekly of limited circulation. On summer nights all the families slept outside in the courtyard, but summer days were hot and long and the room small, and even Ram Kumar could not always escape notice. He suffered especially from his thin, hard, old grandmother and the widowed aunt, who looked just as old as the grandmother. They were often angry with him and beat him and abused him while he cowered in a corner and wept into his hands.
There was no one who could protect him against them. His mother could not even put in a good word for him because, if she had done so, they would have begun to beat and abuse her too. As it was they did this often enough. They pinched her and pulled her hair and poked her with sharp cooking-irons. ‘Evil eye’, they called her, ‘killer of your husband, bringer of death’. She had to accept everything, for it was true she was a widow and guilty of the sin of outliving her husband. Ram Kumar had to watch the beatings meted out to his mother as she had to watch his; but it did not bring him any closer to her. On the contrary, he even resented her because she was weak and could not protect him. So when she tried to comfort him after his beatings, petting and stroking and whispering to him, he sat there passive and unmoved with his face closed and the tear-marks on his cheeks; and when she whispered into his ear, ‘When you are grown up and are earning a lot of money, you will take me away to live with you’, he did not reply and even tightened his lips, for though he had, in his wilder moments, hopes of going away himself, he never entertained the idea of taking her with him.
He liked to sit on the opposite side of their courtyard, in the poky little office of the old man who wrote, cyclostyled and distributed the Urdu weekly. The old man sat on the floor with a tiny desk in front of him and lingered lovingly with a quill pen over the flowering Urdu script in which he wrote his paper. Ram Kumar was not interested in what he was writing, but he liked the peace and order of the little room – the smell of black ink and the gentle sucking noise the old man made between his teeth as he wrote. Very few visitors ever came to disturb him; but it was through one such visitor, a relative of the old man’s, that Ram Kumar got a job. It happened that the relative sat talking to the old man about this and that – a sick sister, a journey to Lucknow – and mentioned in passing that a boy was wanted to help in the shop in which he was employed. The old man jerked his head back to where Ram Kumar sat quietly behind the cyclostyle and said, ‘Take him.’ Ram Kumar was startled: he was not used to the old man taking any notice of him. But that ‘Take him’ came at a right time. He had left school, his uncle was trying to find him a job, his grandmother and aunt abused him for being idle. So he went gratefully to the shop.
He loved it from the first. It was a draper and outfitter’s shop, but not an ordinary shop, not one of the little booths in the city bazaars which was the only kind of shop he and his like ever visited. This was in the fashionable shopping centre of New Delhi, where the rich went, and it was a big shop with a door to go in by and two glass windows in which were displayed samples of all the beautiful things sold inside. There were two counters inside, and behind the counters stood the assistants, serving the customers. Ram Kumar watched them with eager eyes, he darted forward to be of assistance to them in taking the goods from the shelves, his lips moved with theirs as they offered the customers all there was at their disposal. It did not take him long to know more about stock and prices than any other employee in the shop; for though he was only the general boy, hired to go out on errands, wrap parcels and tidy up counters, he had soon learned so much that the others began to rely on him, and it was he who was asked, ‘Ram Kumar, has the new voile come in yet?’ ‘Ram Kumar, is there a baby vest, size 2?’ ‘Ram Kumar, how much for Hind Mill sheets, single-bed size?’
After about a year, they began to allow him to change the goods in the windows. He spent sweet hours displaying newly arrived stock, not with taste but with love; reverently he laid out or hung up materials, blankets, ladies’ underwear and children’s clothing. Inside the shop, on the edge of one of the counters, stood a pale wax doll, two feet high and rather peeling, with a mouse-tooth smile, one hand with a finger missing outstretched, its feet painted with white socks and black anklestrap shoes. Once a week, Ram Kumar changed its clothes, making it display now a pink satin frock with lace trimmings, now a boy’s sailor suit or a hand-embroidered skirt with cap to match. He loved the doll and loved dressing it, but there was no element of play in the way he handled it; this was work for him, something important and deadly earnest.
He did not spend much time at home any more. He left early in the morning, carrying the little parcel of food which his mother had cooked for him at dawn, and he returned late in the night, so tired that he could only eat his supper and roll up in his corner to sleep. He slept well, and was not easily disturbed. Only sometimes, when the noise in the room rose to a pitch, he woke up and opened startled eyes to scenes which, though he had seen them all his life, were still scenes of horror to him. His uncle might be reeling round the room, drunk, bedraggled, desperate, shouting: ‘Let me be! Let me live!’ tearing his hair and then knocking his head against the wall and whimpering in anguish. Hands clutched at him, his wife, his sister, his mother; shrill tearful voices implored him to lie down and sleep, till suddenly he broke loose and roared like a madman: ‘They are eating me up!’ in a voice of pain and despair. The women reeled back and it was always at that point that he began to beat his wife. He struck out at her wildly, staggering and falling like a wounded animal, sometimes hitting and someti
mes missing, while she screamed on one long high-pitched note and dodged him fairly successfully. ‘I will kill her!’ he shouted, hitting out with both arms and tears streaming down his face. ‘Kill them all!’ he sobbed. Ram Kumar, woken up from his sleep, clutched his tattered blanket to his chest and stared with horrified eyes at the drunken man and the screaming women, the little flame in the kerosene lamp flickering and dying for want of oil, and the grandmother on her knees praying with uplifted hands to God to save them all.
But in the shop it was different. Here there were comfortably well-to-do customers, courteous assistants, and the proprietor who sat all day at a table in a corner of the shop. Ram Kumar had a great respect for the proprietor. He admired the way he sat poring over business letters and accounts while remaining alert to everything that went on in the shop, every now and again rapping out an order or rising himself to help satisfy a difficult customer. He was a morose man, with a clean blue shave and rimless spectacles, who never talked much and suffered from a bad stomach. If he had any personal feelings, he never showed them in the shop: an inefficient assistant was got rid of, however piteously he might plead poverty and promise reform; salaries were docked with ruthless impartiality for a damage to stock and unpunctuality. But he showed the same impartiality in recognizing merit. Ram Kumar found himself step by step promoted, first to assistant salesman, then to salesman, then to deputy head salesman and finally, after seven years, when he was twenty-two years old, to head salesman and staff manager.
He was earning good money now. His status in the family increased and, with his, his mother’s. Nobody beat her now, nobody called her ‘evil eye’; she was no longer the widow of her husband but the mother of her son and, as such, worthy of respect. She held her head high, bought a new sari and gave sharp answers. But she was not yet satisfied. She still wanted, as she had wanted ever since her widowhood, to be taken away by her son and set up in a home of her own. Every night she urged this on him, in cajoling whispers; every night he made no reply but turned over in his corner and went to sleep. He wanted a different domestic life, but he was always too tired, after his day at the shop, to formulate thoughts of getting it. But one day she told him she had heard of a place they could have at low rent, and after that he began to think about it. And with his mother nagging him and pleading constantly, it was easier to give way than to hold out. So they moved, he and his mother and his two younger sisters, to a ground-floor room in a tenement, and he became head of a family.
Here he had his first taste of domestic bliss. It was good to come home, late in the evening, to the quiet room which the women kept scrupulously clean, and to eat the food they had prepared for him with such love and care. They treated him, their sole support, with high respect and he, in return, took his responsibility towards them very seriously. His senior position in the shop had already given him an air of authority, a certain dignity of bearing, which he could now afford to take home with him. He had also borrowed his employer’s somewhat sour expression of face, and his principles were strict. Not that he was very sure of any principles; but he knew how life should not be and deduced from that how perhaps it should. He was sure it should not be as he had known it in his uncle’s house – disorderly, dirty and violent; and in opposition he set up an ideal of quiet and orderliness, of meekness and domestic piety. To this he wished his women to adhere. He liked to think of them quietly following their household duties, taking in some sewing work and keeping themselves modestly to themselves.
This last was perhaps the most important: for the tenement was full of people who led the sort of lives he wanted to get away from. On the top floor was a Muslim insurance clerk whose two wives were for ever quarrelling and abusing one another, and underneath them a crippled astrologer, who augmented his income by selling love potions and whose dissatisfied clients frequently reported him to the police. Next to Ram Kumar on the ground floor lived a traveller in rugs and carpets, whose wife and daughter, left often alone, did not conduct themselves with the decorum Ram Kumar could have wished for in his neighbours. They stood out in the street and laughed and joked, the mother as well as her daughter, showing off their big breasts and healthy cheeks. It was this family that Ram Kumar feared most, for they made overtures of friendliness and the girl was the same age as his sisters. He found it necessary to instruct his mother to avoid all contact with them, which she agreed to do, denouncing them with some fervour for loose morals and shameless conduct.
In appearance Ram Kumar remained as he had been as a child – small, weak and wholly unremarkable. Yet he was getting the habit of authority: at home there was no one but he who counted; in the shop he was next only to the proprietor. He became exacting, tight with money and slightly bad-tempered. His mother forbade everything to his sisters in his name – ‘Your brother will be angry’ – and every evening, just before his homecoming, she as well as the two girls began to fidget about the room, tidying everything up more than was necessary. And Ram Kumar looked round, pursed his lips and thrust out his thin stomach, and felt himself master of the house.
Except when his brother was there. Vijay came to see them sometimes, and his presence had what Ram Kumar felt to be a deplorable effect on the household. For Vijay, with his silk suit, his big ring, his oiled and scented hair, at once upset that prim orderliness which Ram Kumar had imposed. The mother and sisters became flushed and excited, they hovered around Vijay, listened to his stories, tittered and fussed and were restrained only by the presence of Ram Kumar, at whom they threw frequent guilty glances. Vijay himself hardly noticed his brother. As far as he was concerned, Ram Kumar’s status had not changed from the time he had been the puny and insignificant younger brother who kept out of everyone’s way. Sometimes, in the face of his contempt, Ram Kumar felt like asserting himself: after all, it was he who was now the head of the family and kept the mother and sisters, not Vijay, who did nothing for them. Yet most of the time he was glad not to be noticed by Vijay; for he was still afraid of him.
There was to him something alien and terrible about his elder brother. He was not sure quite what work he did for the big business magnate who kept him in his retinue, but he sensed that it was something rather shady of which no one ever spoke. And that to him characterized Vijay’s life altogether – it was something of which one could not speak and should not even think about. Where did he live, and with whom? A shudder passed through Ram Kumar when he thought of this. He could never forget the young Muslim lady they had been told about, who sang and danced. The tunes Vijay hummed he had perhaps first heard from her, this liquor of which he smelled he had drunk with her, the ring he wore had been given by her, when he smiled like that and smoothed his hair he was thinking of her. And all this he brought with him into their room, it was behind his eyes and voice as he joked with the mother and sisters, and Ram Kumar could do nothing and say nothing and wait only for him to be gone again.
Sometimes Vijay did not go so quickly. It seemed there were periods when he was out of work or had temporarily quarrelled with his employers or simply did not feel like working, and then he hung around his brother’s home, unwashed and dishevelled, sleeping with abandon, going out at nights to drink with his friends. Ram Kumar suspected that during these periods his mother supplied him with funds out of her housekeeping money, but he dared not ask and pretended not to notice. He pretended also not to notice the suppressed excitement which shone in the faces of the mother and her daughters, as if they were having a much better time than they wished him to know. But he did not wish to know and was even afraid of knowing. He went to the shop and lost himself in work. There was comfort in dressing the doll in a different outfit and hovering tender fingers over a newly arrived stock of silk underwear.
Once, on coming home, he found the wife and daughter of the traveller in rugs and carpets in the room. They all seemed to be on the friendliest terms together. Ram Kumar’s mother and his sisters looked shocked when he came in, but Vijay and the visitors went on talking
and laughing undisturbed. Their laughter was loud and improper, and the girl flung back her head from a strong, healthy throat and let Vijay look down into her bosom. Ram Kumar retired into a corner and ate his food, while his mother whispered to him, ‘What could we do? They came to visit.’ He did not answer. When she lied, his mother’s face bore a prim, innocent expression. He hated her and hated his sisters and hated the home he had made. The traveller’s daughter looked at him over her shoulder; she looked sly and laughing, and her little gold earring shook against her plump cheek. He knew she was laughing at him and he felt ashamed for not being like Vijay. Yet he was angry too, because it was he who supported the family and paid the rent of the room in which they sat enjoying themselves, not Vijay.
After that, he often thought about the neighbours. He thought about the plump, shameless girl and felt indignant. He also felt it was time for him to marry off his sisters. His mother had been telling him so for some time: ‘Find someone for my girls,’ she told him in the urgent whisper she always used when she wanted something; ‘it is time they were off your hands.’ Then she looked coy, gazing at him with her head on one side and too sweet a smile on her lips: ‘And after that is finished, we can start thinking of you.’ She tried to stroke his face but he turned it away. He was not ready to think of his own marriage yet.
At the End of the Century Page 2
