UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  ‘ Well then go and do so ! why do you eat my head ? ’ snapped Lakha peevishly.

  ‘ Is your pain very bad ? ’ asked Bakha ironically, to make his father conscious of his bad temper. ‘ I will rub your side with oil if you like.’

  ‘ No, no,’ said the old man irritably, turning his face to hide the shame which his son’s subtle protest aroused in him. He had no pain at all in his side, or anywhere, and was merely foxing, being in his old age ineffectual, and excusing himself from work like a child. ‘ No, no,’ he said, ‘ you go and attend to the work. I’ll be all right.’ And he smiled gently.

  Meanwhile the mixture of tea-leaves, water, milk and sugar was ready. Sohini poured some of it into two earthen bowls, glazed on the inside. Bakha came, and lifting one, gave it to his father. Then he picked up the other and put it to his lips in hot haste. The sharp, warm taste of the liquid sent forth a queer delight spreading into his flesh. His tongue was slightly burnt with the small sips because he did not, as his father did, blow on the tea to cool it. This was another of the things he had learnt at the British barracks from the Tommies. His uncle had said that the goras didn’t enjoy the full flavour of the tea because they did not blow on it. But Bakha considered that both his uncle’s and his father’s spattering sips were natu habits. He would have told his father that the sahibs didn’t do that. But he was too respectful by habit to suggest such a thing, although, of course, for himself he accepted the custom of the English Tommies and followed it implicitly. After he had drunk his tea and eaten a piece of bread from the basket which Sohini put before her father, Bakha went out. He picked up the big broom of thin, very thin cane sticks with a stump of a wooden handle, and the basket with which his father used to go out sweeping the roads. Then he walked away towards the town, realising, for the first time, the strange coincidence of his morning’s wish with his father’s sudden injunction.

  The lane leading to the outcastes’ street was soon left behind. It seemed such a short lane to him to-day. Where the lane finished, the heat of the sun seemed to spread as from a bonfire out into the empty space of the grounds beyond the outcastes’ colony. He sniffed at the clean, fresh air around the flat stretch of land before him and vaguely sensed a difference between the odorous, smoky world of refuse and the open, radiant world of the sun. He wanted to warm his flesh ; he wanted the warmth to get behind the scales of the dry, powdery surface that had formed on his fingers ; he wanted the blood in the blue veins that stood out on the back of his hand to melt. He turned his hands so as to show them to the sun. He lifted his face to the sun, open-eyed for a moment, then with the pupils of his eyes half closed, half open. And he lifted his chin upright. It was pleasing to him. It seemed to give him a thrill, a queer sensation which spread on the surface of his flesh where the tincture of warmth penetrated the numbed skin. He felt vigorous in this bracing atmosphere. Instinctively he rubbed his face in order to make it warm enough to take in the rays of the sun, to open out its pores. So he adjusted the broom and the basket under his arms and caressed his face with the palms of his hands. A couple of brisk rubs and he felt the blood in his cheeks rising to the high bones under the shadow of his eyes and into the ears which shone red-tipped and transparent at the sides of his head. He felt as he used to do when, on winter Sundays in his childhood, he used to strip himself naked, except for a loin-cloth, to stand in the sun, and rub mustard oil on his body. Recollecting this he looked up at the sun. He caught the full force of its glare, and was dazed. He stood lost for a moment, confused in the shimmering rays, feeling as though there were nothing but the sun, the sun, the sun, everywhere, in him, on him, before him and behind him. It was a pleasant sensation in spite of the disconcerting suddenness with which it had engulfed him. He felt suspended, as it were, in a region of buoyant tenseness.

  As he emerged from the world of that rare, translucent lustre into which he had been lifted, he stumbled over a stone and muttered a curse. Looking ahead he saw that he was being observed by Ram Charan, the washerman’s son, by Chota, the leather-worker’s son, and his own brother, Rakha. He felt abashed at being seen absorbed in talking to himself. They always made a butt of him, ridiculing the weight of his body, the shape of his clothes, his gait, which was a bit like an elephant’s, on account of his heavy, swaying buttocks, and a bit like a tiger’s, lithe and supple. He thought they would mock at him if they saw him massaging his face or talking to himself, especially as he knew they knew that he was a devotee of ‘ fashun,’ a weakness which they shared with him and yet for which they ridiculed him. Bakha would always retaliate by pointing at the washer-boy’s lashless, browless eyes and saying : ‘ That comes of using too much soap to whiten your skin.’ And there were other peculiarities about Ram Charan, the fact that he had Gulabo for a mother, and a rather pretty flirtatious sister, the fact that he was a very bony, thin little figure, and drove an ass, blind of one eye, to the waterside, which made the basis of a good joke. Chota he could not attack, for that regular-featured lad was the smartest fellow about the lane, with his neatly oiled hair, khaki shorts and white tennis shoes. Almost a model ‘ gentreman ’ Bakha thought him, the kind of person he admired and wanted to follow. With him, therefore, he had an intimate understanding which made the jokes they cut about each other always more tolerable.

  ‘ Come, o bey brother-in-law,’ greeted Ram Charan, blinking his lashless eyes and looking up.

  ‘ I want to be your brother-in-law if you will let me ’, said Bakha, turning the washer-boy’s light abuse into a mild joke based on the fact that he was known to everyone to be an admirer of Ram Charan’s sister.

  ‘ Well, she is being married to-day, so you are too late,’ replied Ram Charan, pleased to contemplate that Bakha would never be able to make the same joke again.

  ‘ Oh, is that why you are wearing such nice clothes to-day ! ’ remarked Bakha. ‘ I see ! What a fine waistcoat that ! Only a bit frayed, that gold thread on the velvet. Why don’t you iron it ? And oh, I like that chain ! By the way, is there a watch attached to it or is it merely for “ fashun ” ? ’ Ram Charan flushed red and subsided. Chota sat quietly smiling at the interchange. Rakha was apparently feeling cold from the way he had made muffs for his hands of the long sleeves of the torn and battered overcoat he had inherited from Bakha and from the manner in which he was hugging his arms close to his chest. A few other outcastes were busy killing lice from the pleats of their shirts and trousers and too comfortable in the sun to bother to look up. As they sat or stood in the sun, showing their dark hands and feet, they had a curiously lackadaisical, lazy, lousy look about them. It seemed their insides were concentrated in the act of emergence, of a new birth, as it were, from the raw, bleak wintry feeling in their souls to the world of warmth. The taint of the dark, narrow, dingy little prison cells of their one-roomed homes lurked in them, however, even in the outdoor air. They were silent as if the act of liberation was too much for them to bear. The great life-giver had cut the inscrutable knots that tied them up in themselves. It had melted the innermost parts of their being. And their souls stared at the wonder of it all, the mystery of it, the miracle of it.

  It was some time before they nodded a greeting to Bakha. But he understood them like that. For though he considered them his inferiors since he came back with sharpened wits from the British barracks, he still recognised them as his neighbours, the intimates with whose lives, whose thoughts, whose feelings he had to make a compromise. He didn’t expect them to be formal. And as he stood for a while among them, he became a part of the strange, brooding, mysterious crowd that was seeking the warmth of the sun. One didn’t need to employ a courtesy, a greeting to become part of this gathering as one does in the world where there is plenty of light and happiness. For in the lives of this riff-raff, this scum of the earth, these dregs of humanity, only silence, grim silence, the silence of death fighting for life, prevailed.

  Once Bakha was with them, however, his own and their queer reactions to the beauty of the morning emerged.


  ‘ Why, O Bakhe,’ said Chota, beaming with the happiness of the sun of which he seemed a favoured child as the light played on his dark, greasy face : ‘ Where are you off to-day ? ’

  ‘ My father is ill,’ replied Bakha, ‘ so I am going to sweep the roads in the town and the temple courtyard in his stead.’ Then he turned to his brother and said : ‘ Oh, Rakhia, why did you run away early in the morning ? Father is ill and there is all the work at the latrines to do in my absence. Come, my brother, run back home. Sohini has kept some hot tea for you, too.’

  Rakha, a short, long-faced, black, stumpy little man, seemed to resent his brother’s reprimand. But he quickly got up and sullenly faced the path leading homewards.

  ‘ Don’t you go ! Don’t go !’ called Ram Charan naughtily after him. ‘ This, your brother, wants to be a “ gentreman ” and to work on the roads while he wants you to do the dirty work at the latrines.’

  ‘ Don’t buk buk, o bey brother-in-law,’ said Bakha good-humouredly. ‘ Let him go and work for a bit.’

  ‘ Come and play khuti !’ said Chota, turning to a packet of ‘ Red-Lamp ’ cigarettes he had fished out of a shirt pocket, to see how many it contained before offering one to Bakha. ‘ Come,’ he said, ‘ we will go and join the others.’ He referred to Clayton, a black-skinned bandsman, and Godu, the carpenter’s son, who were playing marbles round a hole in the ground.

  ‘ Come,’ urged Chota, ‘ we shall win some money.’

  ‘ No, I must go to my work,’ Bakha said, sternly declining the suggestion. ‘ My father might see me and he will be angry.’

  ‘ Forget the old man, come for a while,’ Chota insisted persuasively.

  ‘ Come, come,’ seduced Ram Charan.

  They were truants and expected the call of their parents any time. But they believed in dangerous living and had never missed a morning’s sun, however much they were rebuked at home, or even beaten. Bakha had principles. With him duty came first, although he was a champion at all kinds of games and would have beaten them hollow at khuti. He seemed intent on his work and he was going to move on.

  ‘ All right, wait,’ said Chota. ‘ There, I see the son of the burra babu coming. What about hockey to-day ? The boys of the 31st Punjabis sent a “ challenge ” to play a match against us.’

  ‘ I shall come if my father allows me,’ said Bakha. Then he looked aside and seeing two white-clad, delicate young boys, greeted them by raising his right hand to his forehead.

  ‘ Salaam, babu ji,’ he said respectfully.

  The elder of the two boys, a simple, innocent, rather plain child of ten, angular, bony, with a flat nose and prominent cheek-bones, smiled back kindly. There was a twinkle of recognition in the dark eyes of the little one, about eight years of age, with a mischievous egg-shaped face, alive in every feature from his big forehead to his pouting, thick lower lip and his determined little chin.

  ‘ Come, you boys !’ greeted Ram Charan and Chota with an impudent swagger. ‘ What about hockey to-day ? There is a match with the boys of the 31st Punjabis.’

  ‘ We shall play in the afternoon,’ said the little one enthusiastically jumping where he stood, holding his brother’s finger. He was hardly big enough to hold a stick and he ignored the fact that he hadn’t been asked, because he knew the boys never allowed him to play, saying he was too small, and that they were afraid he would get hurt and would go and tell on them.

  ‘ All right, will you give us the sticks ? ’ asked Ram Charan, cunningly taking advantage of the child’s enthusiasm to exact a promise which, though it was more likely to be repudiated than kept, might serve as a precaution against the child’s obstinacy if that mood came upon him that afternoon, as it often did when he was not asked to play.

  The sons of the babu, being influential with the captain of the regimental hockey team, because of the exalted position of their father, had had a dozen or so discarded hockey sticks given to them. The boys of the neighbourhood who composed the 38th Dogras boys’ eleven, were mostly the poor sons of the Untouchables, dependent on the bounty of the babus’ sons for the loan of a stick every afternoon for a practice game. The elder of the two was always a very obliging boy. He willingly suffered his mother’s abuse for playing with the outcastes. But the younger one had to be humoured before he would yield.

  ‘ Yes, I have brought a nice new stick from Havildár Charat Singh,’ he said, ‘ and a new ball.’ Then all of a sudden he turned peevishly to his brother, nudged him and exclaimed : ‘ Come, don’t you want to go to school ! We will be late ! ’

  Bakha noticed the ardent, enthusiastic look that lighted up the little one’s face. The anxiety of going to school ! How beautiful it felt ! How nice it must be to be able to read and write ! One could read the papers after having been to school. One could talk to the sahibs. One wouldn’t have to run to the scribe every time a letter came. And one wouldn’t have to pay him to have one’s letters written. He had often felt like reading Waris Shah’s Hir and Ranjah.1 And he had felt a burning desire, while he was in the British barracks, to speak the tish-mish, tish-mish which the Tommies spoke.

  His uncle at the British barracks had told him when he first expressed the wish to be a sahib that he would have to go to school if he wanted to be one. And he had wept and cried to be allowed to go to school. But then his father had told him that schools were meant for the babus, not for the lowly sweepers. He hadn’t quite understood the reason for that then. Later at the British barracks he realised why his father had not sent him to school. He was a sweeper’s son and could never be a babu. Later still he realised that there was no school which would admit him because the parents of the other children would not allow their sons to be contaminated by the touch of the low-caste man’s sons. How absurd, he thought, that was, since most of the Hindu children touched him willingly at hockey and wouldn’t mind having him at school with them. But the masters wouldn’t teach the outcastes, lest their fingers which guided the students across the text should touch the leaves of the outcastes’ books and they be polluted. These old Hindus were cruel. He was a sweeper, he knew, but he could not consciously accept that fact. He had begun to work at the latrines at the age of six and resigned himself to the hereditary life of the craft, but he dreamed of becoming a sahib. Several times he had felt the impulse to study on his own. Life at the Tommies’ barracks had fired his imagination. And he often sat in his spare time and tried to feel how it felt to read. Recently he had actually gone and bought a first primer of English. But his self-education hadn’t proceeded beyond the alphabet. To-day as he stood in the sun looking at the eager little boy dragging his brother to school, a sudden impulse came on him to ask the babu’s son to teach him.

  ‘ Babu ji,’ he said, addressing the elder boy, ‘ in what class are you now ? ’

  ‘ In the fifth class,’ the boy answered.

  ‘ Surely now you know enough to teach.’

  ‘ Yes,’ the boy replied.

  ‘ Then, do you think it will be too much trouble for you to give me a lesson a day ? ’ Seeing the boy hesitate, he added : ‘ I shall pay you for it.’

  He spoke in a faint, faltering voice, and his humility increased in depth and sincerity with every syllable.

  The babu’s sons didn’t get much pocket-money. Their parents were thrifty and considered, perhaps rightly, that a child should not eat irregularly, as the low-caste boys did, buying things in the bazaar. The elder boy had developed a strong materialistic instinct, hoarding the stray pice or two he received from anyone.

  ‘ Very well,’ he said. ‘ I will. But the… ’ He wanted to change the topic, to make his suppressed desire for money less obvious. Bakha knew from his glance what he meant.

  ‘ I will pay you an anna per lesson.’

  The babu’s son smiled a hypocritical smile which seemed queer in so young a person. And he signified his assent, adding as an afterthought the conventional money-lover’s phrase : ‘ Oh, the money doesn’t matter.’

  �
�� Shall we begin this afternoon ? ’ pleaded Bakha.

  ‘ Yes,’ the boy agreed, and was inclined to stand to talk and cement the bond with pleasant words, but his brother was now very peevish and tugged at his sleeve, not only because he thought they were late for school, but also because he hated the idea of his brother becoming rich, was jealous of the money he would be earning.

  ‘ Come,’ shouted the little one, ‘ the sun is almost overhead ! We will be beaten for being late at school.’

  Bakha divined the nature of the child’s anger and tried to placate him by offering a bribe.

  ‘ You will also teach me, won’t you, little brother ? I will give you a pice a day.’

  Bakha knew this would appease the boy’s jealousy and obviate any chance of his telling upon his elder brother for spite. He knew if the little one told his mother that his elder brother was teaching a sweeper to read, she would fly into a rage and turn the poor boy out of the house. He knew her to be a pious Hindu lady.

  The little one was too flurried to appreciate the value of the bribe. He looked towards school and was obsessed by the lateness of the hour. He pulled at the lower edge of his brother’s tunic and dragged him away.

  Bakha saw them depart. He felt elated at the prospect of the lesson he was to take in the afternoon and proceeded to go.

  ‘ Stop, O Babu ! Now you are going to be a very big man,’ shouted Ram Charan ironically. ‘ You won’t even talk to us.’

  ‘ You are mad,’ answered Bakha jovially. ‘ I must go, the sun is “ coming on.” And I have to clean the temple approach, and the courtyard.’

  ‘ All right, let me show you my madness at hockey to-day.’

  ‘ Very well,’ Bakha said as he headed towards the gates of the town, his basket under one arm, his broom under the other, and in his heart a song as happy as the lark’s.

  Tan-nana-nan-tan, rang the bells of a bullock-cart behind him as, like other pedestrians, he was walking in the middle of the road. He jumped aside, dragging his boots in the dust, where, thanks to the inefficiency of the Municipal Committee, the pavement should have been but was not. The fine particles of dust that flew to his face as he walked and the creaking of the cart-wheels in the deep ruts seemed to give him an intense pleasure. Near the gates of the town were a number of stalls at which fuel was sold to those who came to burn their dead in the cremation ground a little way off. A funeral procession had stopped at one of these. They were carrying a corpse on an open stretcher. The body lay swathed in a red cloth painted with golden stars. Bakha stared at it and felt for a moment the grim fear of death, a fear akin to the terror of meeting a snake or a thief. Then he assured himself by thinking : ‘ Mother said, it is lucky to see a dead body when one is out in the streets.’ And he walked on, past the little fruit-stalls where dirtily clad Muhammadans with clean-shaven heads and henna-dyed beards cut sugarcane into pieces, which lay in heaps before them, past the Hindu stall-keepers, who sold sweetmeats from round iron trays, balanced on little cane stools, till he came to the betel-leaf shop, where, surrounded by three large mirrors and lithographs of Hindu deities and beautiful European women, sat a dirty turbaned boy smearing the green, heart-shaped betel leaves with red and white paint. A number of packets of ‘ Red-Lamp ’ and ‘ Scissors ’ cigarettes were arranged in boxes on his right and whole rows of biris native tobacco rolled in leaf on his left. From the reflection of his face in the looking-glass, which he shyly noticed, Bakha’s eyes travelled to the cigarettes. He halted suddenly, and facing the shopkeeper with great humility, joined his hands and begged to know where he could put a coin to pay for a packet of ‘ Red-Lamp.’ The shopkeeper pointed to a spot on the board near him. Bakha put his anna there. The betel-leaf-seller dashed some water over it from the jug with which he sprinkled the betel leaves now and again. Having thus purified it he picked up the nickel piece and threw it into the counter. Then he flung a packet of ‘ Red-Lamp ’ cigarettes at Bakha, as a butcher might throw a bone to an insistent dog sniffing round the corner of his shop.