UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  Bakha picked up the packet and moved away. Then he opened it and took out a cigarette. He recalled that he had forgotten to buy a box of matches. He was too modest to go back, as though some deep instinct told him that as a sweeper-lad he should show himself in people’s presences as little as possible. For a sweeper, a menial, to be seen smoking constituted an offence before the Lord. Bakha knew that it was considered a presumption on the part of the poor to smoke like the rich people. But he wanted to smoke all the same. Only he felt he should do so unobserved while he carried his broom and basket. He caught sight of a Muhammadan who was puffing at a big hubble-bubble sitting on a mattress spread on the dust at one of the many open-air barbers’ stalls that gaudily flanked the way.

  ‘ Mian ji, will you oblige me with a piece of coal from your clay fire-pot ? ’ he appealed.

  ‘ Bend down to it and light your cigarette, if that is what you want to do with the piece of coal,’ replied the barber.

  Bakha, not used to taking such liberties with anybody, even with the Muhammadans whom the Hindus considered outcastes and who were, therefore, much nearer him, felt somewhat embarrassed, but he bent down and lit his cigarette. He felt a happy, carefree man as he sauntered along, drawing the smoke and breathing it out through his nostrils. The coils of smoke rose slowly before his eyes and dissolved, but he was intent on the little white roll of tobacco which was becoming smaller every moment as its dark grey and red outer end smouldered away.

  Passing through the huge brick-built gate of the town into the main street, he was engulfed in a sea of colour. Nearly a month had passed since he was last in the city, so little leisure did his job at the latrines allow him, and he couldn’t help being swept away by the sensations that crowded in on him from every side. He followed the curves of the winding, irregular streets lined on each side with shops, covered with canvas or jute awnings and topped by projecting domed balconies. He became deeply engrossed in the things that were displayed for sale, and in the various people who thronged around them. His first sensation of the bazaar was of its smell, a pleasant aroma oozing from so many unpleasant things, drains, grains, fresh and decaying vegetables, spices, men and women and asafoetida. Then it was the kaleidoscope of colours, the red, the orange, the purple of the fruit in the tiers of baskets which were arranged around the Peshawari fruit-seller, dressed in a blue silk turban, a scarlet velvet waistcoat, embroidered with gold, a long white tunic and trousers ; the gory red of the mutton hanging beside the butcher who was himself busy mincing meat on a log of wood, while his assistants roasted it on skewers over a charcoal fire, or fried it in the black iron pan ; the pale-blond colour of the wheat shop ; and the rainbow hues of the sweetmeat stall, not to speak of the various shades of turbans and skirts, from the deep black of the widows to the green, the pink, the mauve and the fawn of the newly-wedded brides, and all the tints of the shifting, changing crowd, from the Brahmin’s white to the grass-cutter’s coffee and the Pathan’s swarthy brown.

  Bakha felt confused, lost for a while. Then he looked steadily from the multi-coloured, jostling crowd to the beautifully arranged shops. There was the inquisitiveness of the child in his stare, absorbed here in the skill of a woodcutter and there in the manipulation of a sewing-machine by a tailor. ‘ Wonderful ! Wonderful !’ his instinct seemed to say, in response to the sights familiar to him and yet new. He caught the eye of Ganesh Nath, the bania, a sharp-tongued, mean little man, in view of whose pyramids of baskets full of flour, native sugar, dried chillies, peas and wheat he had sat begging for the gift of a tiny piece of salt and a smear of clarified butter. He withdrew his gaze immediately, because there had recently been a quarrel between the bania and his father on account of the compound interest Ganesh had demanded for the money Lakha had borrowed on the mortgage of his wife’s trinkets to pay for her funeral. That was an unpleasant thing ! He resisted the memory and drifted in his unconscious happiness towards the cloth shop where a big-bellied lalla (Hindu gentleman), clad in an immaculately white loose muslin shirt, and loin-cloth was busy writing in curious hieroglyphics on a scroll book bound in ochre-coloured canvas, while his assistants unrolled bundles of Manchester cloth one after another, for inspection by an old couple from a village, talking incessantly the while of the ‘ tintint ’ and ‘ matchint,’ just to impress the rustics into buying. Bakha was attracted by the woollen cloths that flanked the corners of the shop. That was the kind of cloth of which the sahibs’ suits were made ; the other cloth that he had seen lying before the yokels he could imagine turning soon into tunics and tehmets. All that was beneath his notice. But the woollen cloth, so glossy and nice ! so expensive-looking ! Not that he had any intention of buying, or any hope of wearing a kot-patloon suit ; he felt for the money in his pocket to see if he had enough to pay an instalment on the purchase of cloth. There were only eight annas there. He remembered that he had promised to pay the babu’s son for the English lesson. He crossed the street to where the Bengali sweetmeat-seller’s shop was. His mouth began to water for the burfi, the sugar candy that lay covered with silver paper on a tray near the dirtily-clad, fat confectioner. ‘ Eight annas in my pocket,’ he said to himself, ‘ dare I buy some sweets ? If my father comes to know that I spend all my money on sweets,’ he thought and hesitated, ‘ but come, I have only one life to live,’ he said to himself, ‘ let me taste of the sweets ; who knows, to-morrow I may be no more.’ Standing in a corner, he stole a glance at the shop to see which was the cheapest thing he could buy. His eyes scanned the array of good things ; rasgulas, gulabjamans and ludus. They were all so lushly, expensively smothered in syrup, that he knew they certainly could not be cheap, certainly not for him, because the shopkeepers always deceived the sweepers and the poor people, charging them much bigger prices, as if to compensate themselves for the pollution they courted by dealing with the outcastes. He caught sight of jalebis. He knew they were cheap. He had bought them before. He knew the rate at which they were sold, a rupee a seer (two pounds).

  ‘ Four annas’ worth of jalebis,’ Bakha said in a low voice as he courageously advanced from the corner where he had stood. His head was bent. He was vaguely ashamed and self-conscious at being seen buying sweets.

  The confectioner smiled faintly at the crudeness of the sweeper’s taste, for jalebis are rather coarse stuff and no one save a greedy low-caste man would ever buy four annas’ worth of jalebis. But he was a shopkeeper. He affected a casual manner and picking up his scales abruptly, began to put the sweets in one pan against bits of stone and some black, round iron weights which he threw into the other. The alacrity with which he lifted the little string attached to the middle of the rod, balanced the scales for the shortest possible space of time and threw the sweets into a piece torn off an old Daily Mail, was as amazing as it was baffling to poor Bakha, who knew he had been cheated, but dared not complain. He caught the jalebis which the confectioner threw at him like a cricket ball, placed four nickel coins on the shoe-board for the confectioner’s assistant who stood ready to splash some water on them, and he walked away embarrassed, yet happy.

  His mouth was watering. He unfolded the paper in which the jalebis were wrapped and put a piece hastily into his mouth. The taste of the warm and sweet syrup was satisfying and delightful. He attacked the packet again. It was nice to fill one’s mouth, he felt, because only then could you feel the full savour of the thing. It was wonderful to walk along like that, munching and looking at all the sights. The big signboards advertising the names of Indian merchants, lawyers and medical men, their degrees and professions, all in broad, huge blocks of letters, stared down at him from the upper stories of the shops. He wished he could read all the luridly painted boards. But he found consolation in recalling the arrangement he had made for beginning his lessons in English that afternoon. Then his gaze was drawn to a figure sitting in a window. He stared at her absorbed and un-self-conscious.

  ‘ Keep to the side of the road, you low-caste vermin !’ he suddenly heard someone shouting at him
. ‘ Why don’t you call, you swine, and announce your approach ! Do you know you have touched me and defiled me, you cockeyed son of a bow-legged scorpion ! Now I will have to go and take a bath to purify myself. And it was a new dhoti and shirt I put on this morning !’

  Bakha stood amazed, embarrassed. He was deaf and dumb. His senses were paralysed. Only fear gripped his soul, fear and humility and servility. He was used to being spoken to roughly. But he had seldom been taken so unawares. The curious smile of humility which always hovered on his lips in the presence of high-caste men now became more pronounced. He lifted his face to the man opposite him, though his eyes were bent down. Then he stole a hurried glance at the man. The fellow’s eyes were flaming and red-hot.

  ‘ You swine, you dog, why didn’t you shout and warn me of your approach ! ’ he shouted as he met Bakha’s eyes. ’Don’t you know, you brute, that you must not touch me !’

  Bakha’s mouth was open. But he couldn’t utter a single word. He was about to apologise. He had already joined his hands instinctively. Now he bent his forehead over them, and he mumbled something. But the man didn’t care what he said. Bakha was too confused in the tense atmosphere which surrounded him to repeat what he had said, or to speak coherently and audibly. The man was not satisfied with dumb humility.

  ‘ Dirty dog ! Son of a bitch ! The offspring of a pig !’ he shouted, his temper spluttering on his tongue and obstructing his speech, and the sense behind it, in its mad rush outwards. ‘ I… I’ll have to go-o-o… and get washed—d—d… I… I was going to business and now… now, on account of you, I’ll be late.’

  A man had stopped alongside to see what was up, a white-clad man, wearing the distinctive dress of a rich Hindu merchant. The aggrieved one put his case before him, trying to suppress his rage all the while with his closed, trembling lips which hissed like a snake’s :

  ‘ This dirty dog bumped right into me ! So unmindfully do these sons of bitches walk in the streets ! He was walking along without the slightest effort at announcing his approach, the swine ! ’

  Bakha stood still, with his hands joined, though he dared to lift his forehead, perspiring and knotted with its hopeless and futile expression of meekness.

  A few other men gathered round to see what the row was about, and as there are seldom any policemen about in Indian streets, the constabulary being highly corrupt, as it is drawn from amongst rogues and scoundrels, on the principle of ‘ set a thief to catch a thief,’ the pedestrians formed a circle round Bakha, keeping at a distance of several yards from him, but joining in to aid and encourage the aggrieved man in his denunciations. The poor lad, confused still more by the conspicuous place he occupied in the middle of the crowd, felt like collapsing. His first impulse was to run, just to shoot across the throng, away, away, far away from the torment. But then he realised that he was surrounded by a barrier, not a physical barrier, because one push from his hefty shoulders would have been enough to unbalance the skeleton-like bodies of the Hindu merchants, but a moral one. He knew that contact with him, if he pushed through, would defile a great many more of these men. And he could already hear in his ears the abuse that he would thus draw on himself.

  ‘ Don’t know what the world is coming to ! These swine are getting more and more uppish !’ said a little old man. ‘ One of his brethren who cleans the lavatory of my house, announced the other day that he wanted two rupees a month instead of one rupee, and the food that he gets from us daily.’

  ‘ He walked like a Lat Sahib, like a Laften Gornor ! ’ shouted the defiled one. ‘ Just think, folks, think of the enormity ! ’

  ‘ Yes, yes, I know,’ chimed in a seedy old fellow, ‘ I don’t know what the kalijugs of this age is coming to !’

  ‘ As if he owned the whole street !’ exclaimed the touched man. ‘ The son of a dog !’

  A street urchin, several of whom had pushed their way through people’s legs to see the fun, took his cue from the vigorous complainant and shouted : ‘ Ohe, you son of a dog ! Now tell us how you feel. You who used to beat us !’

  ‘ Now look, look,’ urged the touched man, ‘ he has been beating innocent little children. He is a confirmed rogue !’

  Bakha had stood mute so far. At this awkward concoction of the child’s, his honest soul surged up in self-defence.

  ‘ When did I beat you ? ’ he angrily asked the child.

  ‘ Now, now mark his insolence !’ shouted the touched man. ‘ He adds insult to injury. He lies ! look !’

  ‘ No, Lalla ji, it is not true that I beat this child, it is not true,’ Bakha pleaded. ‘ I have erred now. I forgot to call. I beg your forgiveness. It won’t happen again. I forgot. I beg your forgiveness. It won’t happen again !’

  But the crowd which pressed round him, staring, pulling grimaces, jeering and leering, was without a shadow of pity for his remorse. It stood unmoved, without heeding his apologies, and taking a sort of sadistic delight in watching him cower under the abuses and curses of its spokesman. Those who were silent seemed to sense in the indignation of the more vociferous members of the crowd, an expression of their own awakening lust for power.

  To Bakha, every second seemed an endless age of woe and suffering. His whole demeanour was concentrated in humility, and in his heart there was a queer stirring. His legs trembled and shook under him. He felt they would fail him. He was really sorry and tried hard to convey his repentance to his tormentors. But the barrier of space that the crowd had placed between themselves and him seemed to prevent his feeling from getting across. And he stood still while they raged and fumed and sneered in fury ; ‘ Careless, irresponsible swine !’ ‘ They don’t want to work.’ ‘ They laze about !’ ‘ They ought to be wiped off the surface of the earth !’

  Luckily for Bakha, a tonga-wallah came up, goading a rickety old mare which struggled in its shafts to carry a jolting, bolting box-like structure and shouted a warning (for lack of a bell or a horn) for the crowd to disperse as he reined in his horse in time to prevent an accident. The crowd scattered to safety, blurting out vain abuse, exclamations of amusement and disgust, according to age and taste. The touched man was apparently not yet satisfied. He stood where he was though aware that he would be forced to move by the oncoming vehicle, as for the first time for many years he had had an occasion to display his strength. He felt his four-foot-ten frame assume the towering stature of a giant with the false sense of power that the exertion of his will, unopposed against the docile sweeper-boy, had called forth.

  ‘ Look out, eh, Lalla ji,’ shouted the tonga-wallah with an impudence characteristic of his profession. The touched man gave him an indignant, impatient look and signed to him, with a flourish of his hand, to wait.

  ‘ Don’t you thrust your eyeballs at me,’ the tonga-wallah answered back, and was going to move on, when, all of a sudden, he gripped his reins fast.

  ‘ You’ve touched me,’ he had heard the Lalla say to Bakha. ‘ I will have to bath now and purify myself anyhow. Well, take this for your damned irresponsibility, you son of a swine ! ’ And the tonga-wallah heard a sharp, clear slap through the air.

  Bakha’s turban fell off and the jalebis in the paper bag in his hand were scattered in the dust. He stood aghast. Then his whole countenance lit with fire and his hands were no more joined. Tears welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. The strength, the power of his giant body glistened with the desire for revenge in his eyes, while horror, rage, indignation swept over his frame. In a moment he had lost all his humility, and he would have lost his temper too, but the man who had struck him the blow had slipped beyond reach into the street.

  ‘ Leave him, never mind, let him go, come along, tie your turban,’ consoled the tonga-wallah, who being a Muhammadan and thus also an Untouchable from the orthodox Hindu point of view, shared the outcaste’s resentment to a certain degree.