But he set earnestly and methodically about doing something for his sisters. He studied the matrimonial advertisement columns in the newspapers, inserted an advertisement of his own and, after some correspondence, settled things to everyone’s satisfaction. For their dowries he had to borrow from a moneylender at the usual rate of interest, but he knew that with his salary he would have little difficulty in repaying this by monthly instalments. He was pleased with himself, so was his mother. Her hints about his own marriage became more frequent, and he was more ready to listen to her.
He often saw the wife of the traveller in carpets nowadays, and her daughter. They always seemed to be outside their room when he passed in the mornings and in the evenings. The mother was very obsequious to him; she smiled humbly and inquired after his health, while the daughter hovered behind her, her head covered by her sari with a becoming, if uncharacteristic, air of modesty. Ram Kumar never looked at her, but when he passed her, he could not help thinking of the way she had glanced at him over her shoulder that night when he had seen her in his room, and her earring shaking against her round, glowing cheek.
His mother began frequently mentioning these neighbours to him; at first hesitantly, but when she saw that he was inclined to listen, more fully and boldly. He had been, she said, mistaken about them. They were decent, respectable people, and the girl a jewel of a girl – modest and skilled in household duties; and moreover, the father, travelling around in a hired horse-drawn carriage with his rugs and carpets rolled up at the back, earned good money, he would be able to give a fine dowry with his only daughter. Ram Kumar listened and felt flattered. It was he who was being persuaded to take this plump pretty girl, he who was wanted for her husband, not someone else, not Vijay. Every night his mother talked to him, every morning and night he saw the girl and her mother waiting for him outside their door. His face remained sour and perhaps he even exaggerated his frown of ill humour, to hide the strange feelings that were growing inside him. These surprised him, for he had not known that one could have such feelings.
He did not have them for long after he married her. She soon stopped smiling for him, and his mother soon stopped finding any virtue in her. Every day the two women quarrelled, and the girl’s mother would rush in and take her daughter’s part. When Ram Kumar came home, his mother at once began complaining to him against his wife, who, tossing her head and keeping a menacing silence, glowered at him as if she dared him to say anything to her. And he never did dare; instead he got angry with his mother, and told her not to worry him with her women’s quarrels.
He was afraid of his wife in the same way as he was afraid of Vijay. He knew that his high position in the shop and the important frown he wore on his face did not impress her. When he came to her with his passion, she pushed him away as one would push away a troublesome little animal; and even when she let him come to her, she remained aloof and impatient, so that afterwards he was ashamed and turned from her with an embarrassed look on his face. He could refuse her nothing, not because he loved her any more but because of this fear he had of her. When she wanted money, he had to give it, though it was always painful for him to part with money. Sometimes he dared to protest – ‘I have given money for the household’ – but it was never any use; in the end he had to fumble in his pocket, feeling unhappy and defeated, while she stood there with one hand on her hip and the other insolently outstretched; and his mother, whom he had always kept very short, looked on with hungry, angry eyes.
When Vijay came, Ram Kumar’s wife was quite different. Then all her contempt and nonchalance dropped from her; she smiled again as she had smiled before she was married, dimples appeared in her fat cheeks and her sari was allowed to slip from her bosom. And Vijay looked at her with a knowing air, which made her laugh more and put up a hand to caress her hair and turn herself casually to show off her hips. Ram Kumar was in the shop all day and it was easy for him there not to think about them. When he was at home, he frowned in his usual way and pretended to notice nothing. He did not talk to anyone, and only his mother tried to talk to him.
It was difficult to know how his mother felt about the situation. At times she looked at Vijay with pride and gentle, wistful, motherly sighs; and at others at Ram Kumar with what was perhaps pity. She tried to talk to Ram Kumar sometimes; and strangely enough, always about his father, the long-dead printer. ‘What a man,’ she would say; and she sighed and smiled and wiped at a tear. She may have been talking about him in his gentle family-man respect; yet it seemed more likely – from her tone of womanly respect and the way she looked, pityingly and comparingly, at Ram Kumar – that she was referring to him in his role of swaggering drunkard and lusty wife-beater. What Ram Kumar still liked best in the shop, after all these years, was serving the customers. He stood waiting behind the counter, with just the right mixture of dignity and obsequiousness, his hands folded in repose at chest-level and inclining his body in a brisk, neat bow. He brought out the requisite goods almost before his customer had finished asking for them, and spread them with respectful triumph on the counter. He did not have to say, ‘This is the best you can buy anywhere’: his quiet, pride, his attitude of caressing reverence towards his goods, made that clear enough. But at the least sign of hesitation on the part of the customer, he was ready to push aside the first item and startle with something even more suitable. He reached up, reached down, swooped here and darted there to bring out more stock, snapped his fingers in the air for one of the assistants to whom he delivered terse and almost silent commands, and all this so unobtrusively, and as it were with his left hand, that his customer never for one moment felt released from his ardent attention. Sometimes, in the most respectful manner possible, he put forward a question-mark of discreet suggestion and if this met with a favourable response, began gently to guide his customer’s desires. His patience and solicitude never slackened, and he remained all-absorbed till the last moment when he handed back change and cash-memo and bowed his customer off the premises with the same self-immolating grace, his hands folded, his eyes lowered, with which he had welcomed him. He felt himself alive and significant with the customers. Here he was the salesman, perfect in his role, whom no one could ignore or despise or challenge in authority.
His wife had children whom he could not care for as much as he might have done if he had been sure that they were his. Yet he provided for them, clothed them and sent them to school. He provided for everybody. His uncle, the postal inspector, died, and while his widow and smaller children went into the care of a grown-up son, the grandmother and aunt, tough old roots who lived for ever, were sent to Ram Kumar. Vijay was now often not working. He lay around in Ram Kumar’s home and quarrelled with Ram Kumar’s wife. He had become bloated and morose. Though he still went on his drinking bouts at night, he could not carry his liquor so well and often, when he came home, he could be heard to retch and moan right up till morning. He was mostly in a depressed mood nowadays. He sat against the wall, with his knees drawn up and his head lowered, wiping his hands in his tousle of dank hair, and grew philosophical. ‘All the good things in life,’ he would say, ‘are like shaky teeth in the mouth, which will drop out and leave us.’ Gold ring, silk suit, Muslim lady – all had gone. He was a tired, ageing man and mostly out of work. It seemed the business magnate had withdrawn his protection, and Vijay now only got work here and there from old associates. Whatever he earned, he spent, and then he wheedled Ram Kumar’s wife, who abused him but finally got him what he wanted from her husband. Money began to be very short in the house. Ram Kumar found he often had to turn to moneylenders, and the debts mounted and so did the interest on them. Sometimes he could not keep up with the monthly repayments and then the moneylenders came to the house and had to be cajoled.
His relations with the proprietor of the shop had never changed, in all the years he had worked there. The proprietor sat, sour and impersonal, behind his table, doing his accounts and keeping an eye on what was going on in the shop; Ram Kum
ar as head assistant was his right-hand man but by no means his confidant. They had no private relationship at all. Ram Kumar had shyly revealed his marriage and, later, the birth of his wife’s first son, but both these items of news had been received too non-committally for him ever to venture to impart any other. He respected his employer’s complete lack of interest in the lives of his employees. He understood there was a barrier as between a king and his subjects, or a guru and his disciples, and that was right to maintain that barrier. Yet he felt closer to the proprietor than to anyone else in the world. They shared one overriding passion – their passion for the shop – and this to Ram Kumar seemed like a deep source of orderliness and virtue, of Goodness and Truth.
And yet, as he got older and things at home became more hopeless, he began to want something further from the proprietor. He felt sometimes, as they were checking stock together or counting the day’s takings, that there were other things he wished to talk about besides the business in hand. He was not sure quite what those other things might be, and yet he felt an urge to start talking from the heart; to say, perhaps, ‘Sir, my wife has always been unfaithful to me’, or ‘Sir, I have my mother, my grandmother, my aunt, my brother to support’. And, still more, he wanted to ask questions. There was a new why in his life that he wanted to put to someone. He could not understand how things had come to this pass: he had always worked so hard; had wanted to keep everything decent and orderly and different from what it had been in his uncle’s house. Yet, in spite of his efforts, the same disorder there had been in his uncle’s house, the same sense of too much and too violent a humanity, had come to swallow his own life. He felt as if everything were closing in on him – the Muslim wives fighting upstairs, the crippled astrologer and, in his own room, the monstrous shapes of his mother, his wife, his grandmother, the shrill voices, the quarrels, dirt and poverty and moneylenders who had to be cajoled. He remembered how his uncle had clutched at his head and screamed: ‘They are eating me up!’ and that was how he was feeling himself, devoured and eaten.
He did not know any way in which to tell this to the proprietor, so that there was nothing for him to do but push back his rising heart and continue checking stock. And afterwards, when the shop closed at night, he wandered round by himself, his lips moving slightly as he talked in imagination to the proprietor, explaining himself fully and without reservation. Often, when he got home, his wife at once began to ask him for money; and when he had to refuse her, for it frequently happened nowadays that he really had nothing, she was angry and shouted at him, while his mother listened with tightdrawn lips.
Once he tried to defend himself, he waved trembling hands in the air and cried, ‘But what can I do?’
That drove her to such fury that she began to look round for something to strike him with; and she would undoubtedly have found something, if Vijay had not at this point intervened.
He turned to Ram Kumar and said, ‘Why don’t you ask for more money in your shop?’
But that suggestion shocked Ram Kumar; he had got to the top of the salary scale, and the salary scale was to him like a law of God or Nature, incontrovertible.
Vijay laughed at him and his wife shouted, ‘What is it to him if we all starve!’
Vijay mocked, ‘He belongs to his shop, not to us’; but after a time he stopped mocking, and his face assumed the bitter expression which nowadays was the most characteristic of him. He said, ‘Yes; all your life you have slaved for the shop, and where are you now?’
Ram Kumar’s wife said, ‘The fool, his own family is nothing to him—’
‘Keep quiet,’ Vijay said, without even turning round to her; she looked sullen, but said nothing further. ‘Look at both of us,’ said Vijay to his brother. ‘You have worked all your life and I—’ here he stopped and laughed, with an echo of his old free laughter in which there was also some surprise and admiration at all the things he had done in his life. ‘And now we are both here,’ he said.
Ram Kumar listened to him, which was not something he had often done before; but now, for the first time, he felt almost a kind of response to what his brother was saying.
After that, he listened more frequently when Vijay sat on the floor in his bitter moods, running his hands through his hair and muttering against the world. ‘The world sucks the juice out of us and then spits us out like an empty shrivelled skin,’ said Vijay. And Ram Kumar pretended to be minding his own business, as usual, but inwardly he nodded. It was so, he knew now; he had always worked and hoped hard, but had got nothing. His attitude towards the shop and the proprietor changed, and he began to doubt whether they really represented all goodness and virtue, as he had so unquestioningly believed all these years. He still worked as hard as ever and received customers with the same grace and ceremony; but now he went about these things stiffly and hollowly and without joy, like a man who has lost his faith.
One day Vijay, when returning from one of his drinking bouts, was knocked down by a motorcycle-rickshaw. He was brought to a hospital where it took him three days to die. They covered him with a red cloth and carried him on a plank down to the Jumna. The pall bearers were Ram Kumar and several cousins and brothers-in-law. Behind them walked other male relatives and friends. Everyone chanted: ‘God, God, you are Truth!’ Ram Kumar chanted too, but he did not believe it; he did not believe there was any God or any Truth or anything at all.
Since Vijay had no sons, it was Ram Kumar who had to feed the fire of his brother’s pyre. He ladled in clarified butter and heard its sizzle and saw the flames shoot up; and it was not long before it was all finished and they could go home again. At home the women were mourning. They wailed and screamed and knocked themselves against the floor and walls to hurt themselves. Ram Kumar’s wife clutched at her own throat as if she wished to strangle herself and screamed to her dead and burned brother-in-law: ‘Stand up just once more!’ The mother hit her fist against her forehead and chanted about the feelings she had when she was carrying Vijay, and about his childhood and beautiful manhood. The grandmother, who was very old and not sure who was dead, stamped her feeble feet and wrung her hands to Heaven. Even very distant relatives, who had hardly known Vijay, showed extravagant grief. It was what was done at every death – what must have been done, though Ram Kumar could not remember it, at his own father’s death, what had been done at his uncle the postal inspector’s, and what no doubt would be done at his own death, by these women who went on for ever.
There was no spark in him to kindle him into a rebel. And yet, as he smiled and bowed to customers, he asked himself sometimes, why am I doing this; and he looked at the proprietor – sitting at his table, blue-shaved, with rimless spectacles, growing every year richer and more sour – and strange feelings rose in his heart. Meanwhile at home money became tighter and tighter. His mother developed some disease, which made her feet and hands swell up. She had to be taken to doctors, and the doctors had to be paid money, which Ram Kumar did not know how to come by. Once she said to him, ‘If I could die, son, things would be easier for you’; she could no longer walk and sat all day on a piece of matting, looking down in astonishment at her purple, swollen hands that lay in her lap like dead animals. At last Ram Kumar asked for a rise in salary. The salary scale had, like everything else, ceased to be sacred to him, so it was no longer impossible for him to ask; but he expected to be refused, which he was.
His one act of rebellion was quite unpremeditated and came as a surprise even to himself. He was dressing the doll, changing its attire from a silk blouse and velvet shorts to a blue dressing-gown with braidings, when he dropped it. He never quite knew whether he had done it on purpose. He remembered thinking, just before the fatal accident, that the doll’s mouse-tooth grin was rather stupid; he also remembered the surge of pleasure when it went hurtling, with some violence, down from the counter. Everyone in the shop gasped and came crowding round; the proprietor rose from his table. They all stood and looked at the broken fragments and from them at Ra
m Kumar, who kept his eyes lowered and said nothing. He would not apologize, would not say he did not know how it could have happened. He was almost enjoying this little unexpected moment, though he would no doubt have enjoyed it more if he had not known that the cost of a new doll would be taken, month by month, out of his salary.
The Widow
Durga lived downstairs in the house she owned. There was a small central courtyard and many little rooms opening from it. All her husband’s relatives, and her own, wanted to come and live with her; they saw that it would be very comfortable, and anyway, why pay rent elsewhere when there was that whole house? But she resisted them all. She wouldn’t even allow them to live in the upstairs part, but let it out to strangers and took rent and was a landlady. She had learned a lot since she had become a widow and a property owner. No one, not even her elder relatives, could talk her into anything.
Her husband would have been pleased to see her like that. He hated relatives anyway, on principle; and he hated weak women who let themselves be managed and talked into things. That was what he had always taught her: stand on your own, have a mind, be strong. And he had left her everything so that she could be. When he had drafted his will, he had cackled with delight, thinking of all his relatives and how angry they would be. His one anxiety had been that she would not be able to stand up to them and that she would give everything over into their hands; so that his last energies had been poured into training her, teaching her, making her strong.
She had grown fond of him in those last years – so much so that, if it hadn’t been for the money and independent position with which he left her, she would have been sad at losing him. That was a great change from what she had felt at the beginning of her marriage when, God forgive her, she had prayed every day for him to die. As she had pointed out in her prayers, he was old and she was young; it was not right. She had hated everyone in those days – not only her husband, but her family too, who had married her to him. She would not speak to anyone. All day she sat in a little room, unbathed, unkempt, like a woman in mourning. The servant left food for her on a tray and tried to coax her to eat, but she wouldn’t – not till she was very hungry indeed and then she ate grudgingly, cursing each mouthful for keeping her alive.
At the End of the Century Page 3
