Best Loved Indian Stories of the Century, Volume 1

by Indira Srinivasan

  But as he was departing, after negotiating his business, he noticed that though one end of the bania’s moustache had come down at his behest, the other end was still up.

  ‘A strange trick you have played on me,’ the Khan said.

  ‘I have paid you the best value for your trinket, Khan, that any moneylender will pay in these parts,’ the bania said, ‘especially in these days when the sarkars of the whole world are threatening to go off the gold standard.’

  ‘It has nothing to do with the trinket,’ said Azam Khan, ‘but one end of your moustache is still up like my tiger moustache though you have brought down the other to your proper goat’s style. Bring that other end down also, so that there is no apeing by your moustache of mine.’

  ‘Now, Khan,’ said the bania, ‘I humbled myself because you are doing business with me. You can’t expect me to become a mere worm just because you have pawned a trinket with me. If you were pledging some more expensive jewellery I might consider obliging you a little more. Anyhow, my humble milk-skimmer doesn’t look a bit like your valiant tiger moustache.’

  ‘Bring that tip down!’ Khan Azam Khan roared, for the more he looked at the bania’s moustache the more the still upturned tip seemed to him like an effort at an imitation of his own.

  ‘Now, be sensible, Khan,’ the moneylender said, waving his hand with an imperturable calm.

  ‘I tell you, turn that tip down or I shall wring your neck,’ said the Khan.

  ‘All right, the next time you come to do business with me I shall bring that tip down,’ answered the moneylender cunningly.

  ‘That is fair,’ said Chaudhri Chottu Ram, the landlord of the village, who was sitting under the tree opposite.

  ‘To be sure! To be sure!’ some peasants chimed in sheepishly.

  Khan Azam Khan managed to control his murderous impulses and walked away. But he could not quell his pride, the pride of the generations of his ancestors who had worn the tiger moustache as a mark of their high position

  To see the symbol of his honour imitated by a bania—this was too much for him. He went home and fetched a necklace which had belonged to his family through seven generations and placing it before the bania, said:

  ‘Now will you bring that tip of your moustache down?’

  ‘By all means, Khan,’ said the bania. ‘But let us see about this necklace. How much do you want for it?’

  ‘Any price will do, so long as you bring the tip of your moustache down,’ answered Azam Khan.

  After they had settled the business the moneylender said: ‘Now Khan, I shall carry out your will,’ And he ceremoniously brushed the upturned tip of his moustache down.

  As Azam Khan was walking away, however, he noticed that the other tip of the bania’s moustache had now gone up and stood dubiously like the upturned end of his own exalted tiger moustache. He turned on his feet and shouted, ‘I shall kill you if you don’t brush that moustache into the shape appropriate to your position of a lentil-eating bania!’

  ‘Now, now, Khan, come to your senses. You know it is only the illusion of a tiger moustache and nowhere like your brave and wonderful adornment,’ said the greasy moneylender.

  ‘I tell you I won’t have you insulting the insignia of my order!’ shouted Azam Khan. ‘You bring that tip down!’

  ‘I wouldn’t do it, Khan, even if you pawned all the jewellery you possess to me,’ said the moneylender.

  ‘I would rather I lost all my remaining worldly possessions, my pots and pans, my clothes, even my house, than see the tip of your moustache turned up like that!’ spluttered Azam Khan.

  ‘Achha, if you care so little for all your goods and chattels you sell them to me and then I shall turn that tip of my moustache down,’ said the moneylender. ‘And, what is more, I shall keep it flat. Now, is that a bargain?’

  ‘That seems fair enough,’ said the landlord from under the tree where he was preparing for a siesta.

  ‘But what proof have I that you will keep your word?’ said Azam Khan. ‘Some oily lentil-eaters like you never keep your promises.’

  ‘We shall draw up a deed, here and now,’ said the moneylender.

  ‘And we shall have it signed by the five elders of the village who are seated under that tree. What more do you want?’

  ‘Now, there is no catch in that,’ put in the landlord. ‘I and four other elders will come to court as witnesses on your behalf if the bania doesn’t keep his moustache to the goat style ever afterwards.’

  ‘I shall excommunicate him from the religion if he doesn’t keep his word,’ added the priest, who had arrived on the scene on hearing the hubbub.

  ‘Achha,’ agreed Azam Khan.

  And he forthwith had a deed prepared by the petition writer of the village, who sat smoking his hubble-bubble under the tree. And this document, transferring all his household goods and chattels, was signed in the presence of the five elders of the village and sealed, and the moneylender forthwith brought both tips’of his moustache down and kept them glued in the goat style appropriate to his order.

  Only, as soon as Khan Azam Khan’s back was turned he muttered to the peasants seated nearby: ‘My father was a Sultan.’

  And they laughed to see the Khan give the special twist to his moustache, as he walked away maintaining the valiant uprightness of the symbol of his ancient and noble family, though he had become a pauper.

  Who Cares?

  SANTHA RAMA RAU

  The only thing, really, that Anand and I had in common was that both of us had been to college in America. Not that we saw much of each other during those four years abroad—he was studying business management or some such thing in Boston and I was taking the usual liberal arts course at Wellesley, and on the rare occasions we met, we hadn’t much to say—but when we got back to Bombay, the sense of dislocation we shared was a bond. In our parents’ generation that whole malaise was covered by the comprehensive phrase ‘England returned’, which held good even if you had been studying in Munich or Edinburgh, both popular with Indian students in those days. The term was used as a qualification (for jobs and marriages) and as an explanation of the familiar problems of readjustment. Even after the war, in a particular kind of newspaper, you could find in the personal columns, advertisements like this: ‘Wanted: young, fair, educated girl, high caste essential, for England-returned boy. Send photograph.’ The point is that she would have to prove herself—or rather, her family would have to demonstrate her desirability—but ‘England-returned’ would tell her just about everything she needed to know about the boy: that his family was rich enough to send him abroad for his education, that his chances for a government job or a good job in business were better than most, that his wife could probably expect an unorthodox household in which she might be asked to serve meat at meals, entertain foreigners, speak English, and even have liquor on the premises. She would also know that it would be a ‘good’ (desirable that is) marriage.

  ‘England returned’, like that another much-quoted phrase, ‘Failed BA’, was the kind of Indianism that used to amuse the British very much when it turned up on a job application. To Indians, naturally, it had a serious and precise meaning. Even ‘Failed BA’, after all, means to us not that a young man had flunked one examination, but that he had been through all the years of school and college that led to a degree—an important consideration in a country where illiteracy is the norm and education a luxury.

  In the course of a generation that became increasingly sensitive to ridicule, those useful phrases had fallen out of fashion, and by the time Anand and I returned to Bombay, we had to find our own descriptions of our uneasy state. We usually picked rather fancy ones, about how our ideas were too advanced for Bombay, or how enterprise could never flourish in India within the deadly grip of the family system, or we made ill-digested psychological comments on the effects of acceptance as a way of life. What we meant, of course, was that we were suffering from the England-returned blues. Mine was a milder case than Anand’s, p
artly because my parents were ‘liberal’—not orthodox Hindus, that is—and after fifteen years of wandering about the world in the diplomatic service, were prepared to accept with equanimity and even a certain doubtful approval the idea of my getting a job on a magazine in Bombay. Partly, things were easier for me because I had been through the worst of my readjustments six years before, when I had returned from ten years in English boarding schools.

  Anand’s England-returned misery was more virulent, because his family was orthodox, his mother spoke no English and distrusted foreign ways, he had been educated entirely in Bombay until he had gone to America for postgraduate courses, and worst of all, his father, an impressively successful contractor in Bombay, insisted that Anand, as the only son, enter the family business and work under the supervision not only of the father but of various uncles.

  Our families lived on the same street, not more than half-a-dozen houses from each other, but led very different lives. Among the members of our generation, however, the differences were fading, and Anand and I belonged to the same set, although we had never particularly liked each other. It was a moment of boredom, of feeling at a loose end, and a fragmentary reminder that both of us had been in America that brought Anand and me together in Bombay.

  It was during the monsoon, I remember, and the rain had pelted down all morning. About noon it cleared up, and I decided to spend my lunch hour shopping instead of having something sent up to eat at my desk. I started down the street towards Flora Fountain, the hideous monument that is the centre of downtown Bombay, and had gone about halfway when I realized I had guessed wrong about the weather. The rain began again, ominously gentle at first, then quickly changing into a typical monsoon downpour. I ducked into the first doorway I saw, and ran slap into Anand, a rather short, slender young man, dressed with a certain nattiness. It was the building in which his father’s firm had its offices, and Anand stood there staring glumly at the streaming street and scurrying pedestrians. We greeted each other with reserve. Neither was in the mood for a cheery exchange of news. We continued to gaze at the rain, at the tangle of traffic, the wet and shiny cars moving slowly through the dirty water on the road.

  At last, with an obvious effort and without much interest, Anand said, ‘And what are you up to these days?’

  ‘I was going to go shopping,’ I said coolly, ‘but I don’t see how I can, in this.’

  ‘Damn rain,’ he muttered. I could hardly hear him over the sound of the water rushing along the gutters.

  I said, ‘Mm,’ and, as a return of politeness, added, ‘And you? What are you doing?’

  ‘Heaven knows,’ he said, with a world of depression in his voice. ‘Working, I suppose.’ After another long pause, he said, ‘Well, look, since you can’t shop and I can’t get to the garage for my car, suppose we nip around the corner for a bite of lunch.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, not knowing quite how to refuse.

  Anand looked full at me for the first time and began to smile. ‘Okay,’ he repeated. ‘Haven’t heard that in some time.’

  Weraced recklessly down the street, splashing through puddles and dodging people’s umbrellas, until we arrived, soaked and laughing, at the nearest restaurant. It was no more than a snack bar, really, with a counter and stools on one side of the small room and a few tables on the other. We stood between them, breathless, mopping our faces ineffectually with handkerchiefs and slicking back wet hair, still laughing with the silly exhilaration such moments produce. We decided to sit at a table, because Anand said the hard little cakes with pink icing, neatly piled on the counter, looked too unappetizing to be faced all through lunch.

  Our explosive entrance had made the other customers turn to stare; but as we settled down at our table, the four or five young men at the counter—clerks, probably, from nearby offices, self-effacing and pathetically tidy in their white drill trousers and white shirts (the inescapable look of Indian clerks)—turned their attention back to their cups of milky coffee, and their curry puffs. The Sikhs at the next table, brightly turbaned and expansive of manner, resumed their cheerful conversations. The two Anglo-Indian typists in flowered dresses returned to their whispers and giggles and soda pop.

  When the waiter brought us the menu, we discovered that the restaurant was called the Laxmi and Gold Medal Café. This sent Anand into a fresh spasm of laughter, and while we waited for our sandwiches and coffee, he entertained himself by inventing equally unlikely combinations for restaurant names—the Venus and Sun Yat-sen Coffee Shoppe, the Cadillac and Red Devil Ice-Cream Parlor, and so on—not very clever, but by that time we were in a good mood and prepared to be amused by almost anything.

  At some point, I remember, one of us said, ‘Well, how do you really feel about Bombay?’ and the other replied, ‘Let’s face it. Bombay is utter hell,’ and we were launched on the first of our interminable conversations about ourselves, our surroundings, our families, our gloomy predictions for the future. We had a lovely time.

  Before we left, Anand had taken down the number of my office telephone, and only a couple of days later he called to invite me to lunch again. ‘I’ll make up for the horrors of the Laxmi and Gold Medal,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to the Taj, which is at least air-conditioned, even if it isn’t the Pavillion.’

  He had reserved a table by the windows in the dining room of the Taj Mahal Hotel, where we could sit and look out over the gray, forbidding water of the harbour and watch the massed monsoon clouds above the scattered islands. Cool against the steamy rain outside, we drank a bottle of wine, ate the local pâté de foie gras, and felt sorry for ourselves.

  Anand said, ‘I can’t think why my father bothered to send me to America, since he doesn’t seem interested in anything I learned there.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ I said, longing to talk about my own concerns.

  ‘Can you believe it, the whole business is run exactly-the way it was fifty years ago?’

  ‘Of course I can, I mean, take the magazine—’

  ‘I mean, everything done by vague verbal arrangements. Nothing properly filed and accounted for. And such enormous reliance on pull, and influence, and knowing someone in the government who will arrange licences and import permits and whatever.’

  ‘For a consideration, naturally?’

  ‘Or for old friendship or past favours exchanged or—’

  ‘Well, it’s a miracle to me that we ever get an issue of the magazine out, considering that none of the typesetters speaks English, and they have to make up the forms in a language they don’t know, mirrorwise and by hand.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all hopelessly behind the times.’

  ‘You can see that what we really need is an enormous staff of proofreaders and only a tiny editorial—’

  ‘But at least you don’t have to deal with the family as well. The amount of deadwood in the form of aged great-uncles, dimwitted second cousins, who have to be employed!’

  ‘Can’t you suggest they be pensioned off?’

  ‘Don’t think I haven’t. My father just smiles and says I’ll settle down soon. Oh, what’s the use?’

  Our discussions nearly always ended with one or the other of us saying with exaggerated weariness. ‘Well, so it goes. Back to the salt mines now, I suppose?’ I never added that I enjoyed my job.

  That day we didn’t realize until we were on the point of leaving the Taj how many people were lunching in the big dining room whom we knew or who knew one or the other of our families. On our way out, we smiled and nodded to a number of people and stopped at several tables to exchange greetings. With rising irritation, both of us were aware of the speculative glances, the carefully unexpressed curiosity behind the pleasant formalities of speech. Anand and I sauntered in silence down the wide, shallow staircase of the hotel. I think he was trying to seem unconcerned.

  It was only when we reached the road that he exploded into angry speech. ‘Damn them,’ he said. The prying old cats! What business is it of theirs, anyway?’

&
nbsp; ‘It was the wine,’ I suggested. ‘Even people who have been abroad a lot don’t drink wine at lunchtime.’

  ‘So? What’s it to them?’

  ‘Well, Dissolute Foreign Ways, and besides—’

  ‘And besides, they have nothing to do but gossip.’

  ‘That, of course, but besides, you’re what they call a catch so it’s only natural that they wonder.’

  Anand frowned as we crossed the road to where his car was parked against the sea wall. He opened the door for me and then climbed in behind the steering wheel. He didn’t start the car for a moment or two, but sat with his hands on the wheel and his head turned away from me, looking at the threatening light of the early afternoon, which would darken into rain any minute. I thought he was about to tell me something—about a disappointment or a love affair—but instead, he clenched his fingers suddenly and said, ‘Well, the devil with them. Let them talk, if they have nothing better to do.’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, who cares?’ I said, hoping it didn’t sound as though I did.

  He smiled at me. ‘That’s the spirit. We’ll show them.’

  We lunched at the Taj several times after that, but on each occasion a bit more defiantly, a bit more conscious of the appraising looks, always knowing we were the only ‘unattacheds’ lunching together. The others were businessmen, or married couples doing duty entertaining, which, for some reason, they couldn’t do at home, or ladies in groups, or foreigners.

  As we stood outside the doors of the dining rooms, Anand would pause for a second, and then grip my elbows and say something like, ‘Well, come along. Let’s strike a blow for freedom,’ or ‘Throw away the blindfold. I’ll face the firing squad like a man.’ He didn’t deceive me—or, I suppose, anyone else.

  Bombay is a big city—something over two million people—but in its life it is more like a conglomeration of villages. In our set, for instance, everyone knew everyone else at least by sight. At any of the hotels or restaurants we normally went to we were certain to meet a friend, a relative, an acquaintance. We all went to the same sort of party, belonged to the same clubs. People knew even each other’s cars, and a quick glance at a row of parked cars would tell you that Mrs Something was shopping for jewellery for her daughter’s wedding, or that Mr Something-else was attending a Willingdon Club committee meeting. So, of course, everyone knew that Anand and I lunched together a couple of times a week, and certainly our families must have been told we had been seen together.