Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts… and Other Stories

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘Do you remember Master Kanshi Ram?’ asked Gama, laughing. ‘When we were in the fifth primary class...’

  Nur smiled in answer. He did remember for he had suffered from Kanshi, who had established a vendetta against him, because he refused to accept the privilege of taking private tuition from the Master, alongwith the sons of the rich merchants of the cloth market. Kanshi charged ten rupees a month from each of the boys and Nur didn’t know how he could ask his father for the money, specially as it was well known that the Master made immoral suggestions to the boys when they went to his house to be coached. One day when he had been left alone in the classroom filling his satchel at the end of the school session, Kanshi had even tried to kiss him and because he had refused to be kissed, the Master had beaten him on the knuckles with a ruler the next morning by making the flimsiest excuse about his pronunciation as he read aloud. Nur had told Gama, who had caught hold of Kanshi by the scruff of the neck that very afternoon and threatened to kill him if he didn’t behave, after which, indeed, Nur had been safe.

  ‘I often see him about,’ Gama said. ‘He has got grey hair now but he is incorrigible. He still goes about chasing boys. I regret that I didn’t beat him up, the old sod...’ There was a slight bravado in his voice and he chuckled to think of his exploits of those days when he was a wild, free creature, respected for his courage, and not the slave harnessed to Sheikh Fateh Ali’s tonga, like a skinny horse. Then he bent his head again and seemed to retreat into himself.

  ‘What is the talk?’ Nur asked, feeling the slow burning of a fever in his flesh. He turned his side and saw a basket of fruit by his bed which apparently Gama had bought. ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘There is no talk of that, brother,’ said Gama. ‘You will get well and we won’t care for the limp lord. After all, you used to let me copy the sums from your notebooks during the vacations — although do you remember the occasion on which my father almost broke my bones when he caught me copying your answers and I ran away to Calcutta...?’ And he laughed.

  ‘Yes, I remember,’ Nur said.

  It was not so much the memory of Gama’s troubles that he recalled, however, as those of his own. But how far away seemed those endless days when he had trudged to and back from school from this house in Dhab Khatikan, through the narrow deep-rutted intricate bazaars, full of puddles of rain water, where the carts got stuck against each other and held up the traffic for hours; days of utter loneliness only relieved by the few hours of play and an occasional fair to which he was taken by his grandmother; when he had been baulked by the terror of jinns and bhuts and churels and other denizens of the nether worlds over which, the Koran said presided His Satanic Majesty, the Devil, days when he had become conscious of the dearth of books and friends and of his father’s poverty which was responsible for them, dull, irrelevant days when he was obsessed by the desire to grow up as quickly as possible. He had wanted the dignity of age.

  ‘I have written, rather thought of, the first line of a poem this morning,’ Nur said.

  ‘Who is there? Who is that with you?’ came the voice of his grandmother from the top of the stairs. ‘It is not your father, is it ?’

  ‘No, grandma...’ he called back.

  ‘It’s me, Gama, grandmother,’ the visitor shouted so that Nur might not strain himself by answering, and he turned to his sick friend to see if he had been disturbed by his shout.

  Nur’s face was glowing with a pale light though there was a distant look in his eyes, as if he was excited by the visit of his friend, and yet beyond caring for company. So few of his old college friends came to see him, that his whole body seemed thrilled by this contact.

  ‘Are you sure that I am not tiring you?’ said Gama. Nur moved his head in negation and smiled.

  ‘Achha then, what is this that you have written, my poet?’ asked Gama half-mockingly.

  ‘I offer the beginning,’ Nur said, affecting the elaborate manner of Urdu poets.

  ‘Why did you drag me into the dust by making me an M.A...’

  And then, half closing his eyes, he sought to control the muscles of his mouth which were weakening. But he was overcome by self-pity and he felt the tears come to his eyes. He tried to show a brave face by grinding his teeth as if he were swallowing some poisonous physic which was soon going to twist his body into an ugly horror.

  Gama sat still for a moment, looking away, then he leant on the bed and laid a limp hand on Nur’s chest.

  Across the barriers of pain that sundered him from everyone, Nur strained to touch his friend, but his regret for his failures held him back.

  He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.

  In a flash he could see the cool mango-groves where he had gone with Gama. The boy had been kind to him, getting him baskets of fruits from the gardeners to bring home, but he used to beat other people viciously. From the time Gama had left school, why even before that, because he was the son of a vegetable stall-keeper in Chowk Farid, one of the most disreputable quarters of the town, the violence of his deeds had become legendary, and Nur had never really regarded his friend’s life as in any way consistent with inner goodness, and had always been afraid of his hooliganism. The hulking shape of the boy’s huge frame and the profession he had adopted after years of vagabondage were against him too, and Nur recalled how often, since going to college, he had cut him so as not to get a bad name. Now he felt his own superiority lie like a blot upon his heart...

  ‘Nur, little one, may I go and fetch the Doctor?’ Gama asked with a broken voice.

  ‘No, you sit here and talk to me a little — that is, if you are not losing fares all the time,’ Nur said. ‘The Doctor will soon come on his morning visit, and then you can go.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t feel bad?’ Gama asked.

  ‘Yes, I am all right,’ Nur said, seeking to ease the strain he felt in accepting the gesture of his friend’s tenderness. ‘You know,’ he continued, to excuse his separateness, ‘the physical exhaustion leaves me so apathetic that I feel as if my back was broken.’

  But even as he said so he knew that it was the hardening of his heart through his disillusionment and not the apathy that made him incapable of lifting his hand from under the sheet and putting it into Gama’s.

  ‘It is strange that you say:

  ‘Why did you drag me into the dust by making me an M.A.?’

  ‘Gama said to overcome the sudden gulf between them. ‘Didn’t you like going to college? I...’ But he didn’t finish what he was going to say: that though he had made capital out of his failures at school and his consequent inability to go to college by developing a roughness of action and passion, he would have liked to have gone through a long educational course if only to evade the responsibility of having to earn a living for some more years, especially as one could indulge in any vice and never get a bad name if only one disguised oneself under the name of ‘student.’

  ‘Yes, brother,’ Nur said and then, sensing the reason for Gama’s hesitation, added, ‘The unattainable seems great. But if you are poor you can’t get anywhere; if you can’t keep pace with the fashions invented by the rich students, they dub you mean and cut you. Achha, there couldn’t be any worse snobbery in the world than that of the...’ And he impatiently twisted his face as if the very thought of poverty evoked in him a kind of disgust, and there was the knowledge of all the little pinpricks and humiliations to his self-respect that he had suffered because he was a confectioner’s son.

  For a moment he lay confused. Then he felt his temples throb with the fretting and he tried to calm himself by looking away. His eyes stared at the dilapidated ceiling where the cobwebs hung to their nets among the thick coils of soot, and his face seemed to become enchantingly childlike, as if it had never suffered the pang of a sigh.

  ‘It was a lucky escape from the prison of that school, where I h
ad always been afraid of being beaten,’ he said smiling. ‘Nobody could beat you at college and the professors treated everyone as gentlemen. And in a way it was as Azad might have said,

  ‘a golden summer during which I plucked the blossoms from the orchards of many colourful nights and days...’

  ‘Oh, you mean Azad, the Teddy Sahib, who was your friend, the son of the Health Officer who went mad because he failed to become a deputy collector. Or do you mean the poet, Maulana Muhammad Husein Azad?’ Gama asked with a slight trace of mockery in his voice.

  ‘I mean Teddy,’ Nur said wistfully. ‘Isn’t it terrible that he should go off his head? He was a marvel, you know...’

  ‘He must have been, that’s why he went mad, I suppose,’ said Gama with a trace of malice. He had been jealous of Nur’s friendship with Azad.

  ‘No, really, Gamian,’ Nur said, rising excitedly to the defence of his friend, ‘he was the only friend I made at college, and he was really wonderful. He was driven to madness by people and our kind of bullock’s life...’ He opened his mouth to say something loudly, but thought better of it and sank back, coughing, biting his lips and churning the froth in his mouth.

  Gama rubbed his chest slowly, soothingly and contemplated his face, rather frightened. But Nur opened his eyes, breathed a few deep breaths and smiling, lay still for a moment and said: ‘Since the last few days, I have been getting these choking breaths. Yesterday my breathing was better, but I don’t know why I am gasping this morning.’

  ‘You must not worry about anyone,’ Gama said, ‘You must lie still.’

  ‘I am all right,’ Nur said slowly. ‘And really I must tell you about poor Azad. You never liked him, you see, you didn’t meet him. He was really maddened by our kind of existence... I remember that the first time I saw him come up to college, dressed in his khaki shirt, shorts, and khaki polo topee[2], an impetuous little fellow, on a rusty old bicycle, I thought the same as you... But the older boys were making fun of the first year fools and they hid Azad’s bicycle and his hat when he went to see the Principal. And when he came out they ragged him by making rude noises, as he looked for his belongings. He could see it in their eyes that they had hidden the things and he asked them smilingly to give them to him. But they refused to own up and just mocked. You would have been sorry for him if you had been there and you would have admired what he did. He challenged them all and fell upon them. I have never seen anything like it — the glint of fire in his eyes when the boys became indecent... He leapt upon them with a quivering face... I knew that none of them would dare to attack me because of you, and I rescued him and showed him where his hat and bicycle were. It was because of that that we became friends and not as people maliciously said later that we had formed a “conspiracy of beloveds.” He was a very affectionate person...’

  Gama bent his head with the silent shame of a memory of a year ago when he himself had mocked at Azad, crying out in the bazaar, ‘Hai Babuji,’ with a rude simulation of the tone of a lover sighing for his beloved.

  ‘He was fond of making speeches,’ Nur said, remembering an evening when Azad had lifted him out of his loneliness by his speech when he won the Ruchi Ram Sahni Declamation Prize, remembering the very colour, and the ring of those words of Azad’s, when with a face transfigured with eagerness he had summed up the universe.

  ‘ “The whole world is in search of happiness,” he used to say,’ Nur began.

  ‘What then?’ Gama asked.

  Nur paused embarrassedly on the edge of the words as they rang in his ears across the space of six years. He didn’t want to repeat them, as they might easily lend themselves to Gama’s mockery, and yet he couldn’t restrain himself.

  ‘The whole world is in search of happiness,’ he repeated, loudly, though he knew for certain from the light in Gama’s eyes that if he would not mock, he would certainly not be able to understand the whole meaning of those words. ‘The whole world is in search of happiness, all mankind seeks the privileges of glory and power and wealth. But it is vulgar, I tell you, it is vulgar and stupid, the way in which society distributes her favours. The bitch has no morals. She yields herself to the embraces of any robber, brigand or cheating idiot who has secured for himself the traditional right to a vested interest. And these conscienceless swines have forgotten death, the cancer which grows slowly and surely within them, the cancer of their own decay, the germ of their own decay that they bear within them; and they shall be annihilated long before they have earned their pensions or retired to enjoy their ill-gotten gains...’

  Nur paused to look at Gama and to see if he were listening to the words. Gama’s attention was drifting but Nur went on nevertheless as if he were talking aloud to himself.

  ‘ “But death comes to everyone, you will say, gentlemen,” he had himself posed the question and then burst out with that querulous impatience which characterised him: “Yes, yes, death comes to everyone, but there are two ways of avoiding it. Some form silent conspiracy to forget it; they are the imbeciles who build on graft and extortion and cunning and sheer might and so blacken their souls in the struggle for self-aggrandisement that they daren’t enjoy the gains of their perfidy, and who therefore combine holiness with business like our Lallas, and talk of the things of the spirit even as they pass the hand of satisfaction over their bellies. And then, there are the men who are willing to accept a share in the total gain of the struggle for existence of the community, who want to organise the fight against nature, and who, though afraid of death, seek to conquer it... They will...” I don’t remember the rest,’ Nur said faltering and flushed but exhilarated as if his soul was dancing to the sound of that rhetoric with a recklessness which frightened him.

  ‘You have said the truth, ‘Why did you drag me in the dust by making me an M.A.’ said Gama quoting the beginning of Nur’s poem against Azad.

  ‘But really, really, believe me,’ said Nur, ‘I know he went mad because the torn and battered soul of India was struggling inside him, because he seemed to have understood the hopelessness of our lot. Really, he knew and suffered. We used to talk during our long walks, and it is curious that we felt we knew what was wrong with India and with ourselves, but couldn’t do anything, and only sank deeper and deeper into despair. I must say I owe him a great deal...’

  ‘Your illness, for instance,’ said Gama.

  ‘No, really,’ protested Nur. ‘It may be that he awakened me to the misery of our condition and made me suffer, but he also released all the stifled impulses I had never suspected in myself before...’ And he was going to say that Azad had made him talk as he had never talked before, laugh, weep, read, think, feel, do things, live and breathe to a new rhythm, that he had broken all the barriers of self-consciousness that separated him, the confectioner’s son, from everyone else, but he felt he was being naive and Gama was antagonistic. And yet he couldn’t restrain himself from resuscitating the truth about Azad in an attempt to obliterate Gama’s prejudice: ‘He initiated me into the mysteries of poetry and philosophy,’ he continued, sweating in the warm glare of the sun that burnt hotly outside now. ‘It was really the way he talked. The passion, for instance, which he put into the reading of books, suiting his intonation to the slow gradation of Heine’s love poems, to the lyrics of Goethe and Iqbal, to the broad histrionic gesture of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, to the comic overtones of Dickens and the polished undertones of Flaubert, all names to you, as they were to me, because the only literature I had known was the High-roads of History and Southey’s Life of Nelson which I had read for the Matric, Rawlinson’s Selection of Essays and selections from Boswell’s Life of Johnson which were the texts for the first and second year at college, and the cribs and questions and answers by Sheikh Abdul Qadir...I don’t know where he got to know all these things...’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t know them at all and it was really the way he talked,’ said Gama laughing.
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br />   ‘No,’ Nur said, ‘he spent most of his time in odd corners of the college, while all of us just wasted our time ragging each other and gossiping as we sat in the fields outside the college buildings during the free hours. You see, the boys who passed out from our school, specially Sarjit and Mathra, formed a group and they resented my friendship with Azad. But when I went and sat with Sarjit and company they only talked scandal about which boy was in love with whom, and what Professor had an alliance with which boy, and whether so and so shouldn’t be ragged if he came that way, and what time they would get to the club, for tennis and ping-pong. One day I decided to break away from that crowd and joined Azad who was sitting writing poetry in the dome of the college. And he opened my eyes to realities.’

  ‘Childling, you are easily led astray,’ said Gama, out of a clash of kindness for Nur, a contempt for Azad and a sense of inferiority. ‘All those speeches of his are no use. We want a worker’s raj just as it is prevailing in Russia, because the condition here will be as it is in Russia. There was a time when the Czar ruled Russia as the Badshah of Vilayat rules us. But one day he was shot down. And the peasants and labourers are ruling there. I have joined a tonga-wallahs’ branch of the Labour Federation. The labourers of Hindustan are realising that the Sarkar can’t go on.

  ‘Ohe bachu, you will be put into prison,’ Nur said, laughing but earnest.

  ‘I don’t care for the limp lord,’ said Gama with a swagger. But then he smiled embarrassedly as if he were not sure of himself.

  Nur looked at a feather dropping from the top of a house across the shadow which cut the fierce sun outside, and he saw the shimmering of an azure and scarlet and yellow spectrum of light before him as he had often done lying in this bed. He felt the monotony of his existence and the ceaseless discomfort which his body had endured through the burning sun. The only high spots had been those baths in the canal with Azad when they were at college, or the times when they had lifted their heads towards the clotted greenery of the city gardens, specially when they had worked together for their finals. Otherwise, one commonplace day had followed another, the oppressive daylight sucking the strength out of one’s bones and leaving one weak and tired and uninterested. It was perhaps the heat which made him so apathetic now... ‘But it is no use thinking of that,’ he said to himself, ‘it only makes me impatient.’ And he turned to Gama, though he knew that the lengthy conversation was straining him.