UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  Bakha hurried aside and putting his basket and broom down, wrapped the folds of his turban anyhow. Then wiping the tears off his face with his hands he picked up his tools and started walking.

  ‘ You be sure to shout now, you illegally begotten !’ said a shopkeeper from a side, ‘ if you have learnt your lesson !’ Bakha hurried away. He felt that everyone was looking at him. He bore the shopkeeper’s abuse silently and went on. A little later he slowed down, and quite automatically he began to shout : ‘ Posh keep away, posh, sweeper coming, posh, posh, sweeper coming, posh, posh, sweeper coming !’

  But there was a smouldering rage in his soul. His feelings would rise like spurts of smoke from a half-smothered fire, in fitful, unbalanced jerks when the recollection of some abuse or rebuke he had suffered kindled a spark in the ashes of remorse inside him. And in the smoky atmosphere of his mind arose dim ghosts of forms peopling the scene he had been through. The picture of the touched man stood in the forefront, among several indistinct faces, his bloodshot eyes, his little body with the sunken cheeks, his dry, thin lips, his ridiculously agitated manner, his abuse ; and there was the circle of the crowd, jeering, scoffing, abusing, while he himself stood with joined hands in the centre. ‘ Why was all this ? ’ he asked himself in the soundless speech of cells receiving and transmitting emotions, which was his usual way of communicating with himself ‘ Why was all this fuss ? Why was I so humble ? I could have struck him ! And to think that I was so eager to come to the town this morning. Why didn’t I shout to warn the people of my approach ? That comes of not looking after one’s work. I should have begun to sweep the thoroughfare. I should have seen the high-caste people in the street. That man ! That he should have hit me ! My poor jalebis ! I should have eaten them. But why couldn’t I say something ? Couldn’t I have joined my hands to him and then gone away ? The slap on my face ! The coward ! How he ran away, like a dog with his tail between his legs. That child ! The liar ! Let me come across him one day. He knew I was being abused. Not one of them spoke for me. The cruel crowd ! All of them abused, abused, abused. Why are we always abused ? The santry inspictor and the Sahib that day abused my father. They always abuse us. Because we are sweepers. Because we touch dung. They hate dung. I hate it too. That’s why I came here. I was tired of working on the latrines every day. That’s why they don’t touch us, the high-castes. The tonga-wallah was kind. He made me weep telling me, in that way, to take my things and walk along. But he is a Muhammadan. They don’t mind touching us, the Muhammadans and the sahibs. It is only the Hindus, and the outcastes who are not sweepers. For them I am a sweeper, sweeper — untouchable ! Untouchable ! Untouchable ! That’s the word ! Untouchable ! I am an Untouchable !’

  Like a ray of light shooting through the darkness, the recognition of his position, the significance of his lot dawned upon him. It illuminated the inner chambers of his mind. Everything that had happened to him traced its course up to this light and got the answer. The contempt of those who came to the latrines daily and complained that there weren’t any latrines clean, the sneers of the people in the outcastes’ colony, the abuse of the crowd which had gathered round him this morning. It was all explicable now. A shock of which this was the name had passed through his perceptions, previously numb and torpid, and had sent a quiver into his being, stirred his nerves of sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste, all into a quickening. ‘ I am an Untouchable !’ he said to himself, ‘ an Untouchable !’ He repeated the words in his mind, for it was still a bit hazy and he felt afraid it might be immersed in the darkness again. Then, aware of his position, he began to shout aloud the warning word with which he used to announce his approach : ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming.’ The undertone, ‘ Untouchable, Untouchable,’ was in his heart ; the warning shout, ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming !’ was in his mouth. His pace quickened and it formed itself into a regular army step into which his ammunition boots always fell so easily. He noticed that the thumping of his heavy feet on the ground excited too much attention. So he slowed down a little.

  He became conscious that people were looking at him. He looked about himself to see why he was arousing all that attention. He felt the folds of his turban coming loose over his forehead. He wanted to retreat to a corner and tie it up properly. But he couldn’t stop right in the middle of the street. So he walked to a corner. Feeling that he might be observed, he assumed a look of abstraction, as if he was harassed by the thought of some important work he had in hand. And he stared round. He felt a fool knowing that he was acting. He unrolled his turban and began to wrap it hard round his head.

  A bright, busy scene surrounded him where he lingered. The burning inside had emptied his mind of its content and he stood firm, struggling to express each shock as it impinged on his tight-stretched senses. A huge, big-humped, small-horned, spotted old brahminee bull was ruminating with half-closed eyes near him. The stink from its mouth as it belched, strangely unlike any odour which had assaulted Bakha’s nostrils that day, was nauseating. And the liquid dung which the bull had excreted and which Bakha knew it was his duty to sweep off, sickened him. But presently he saw a well-dressed wrinkled old Hindu, wearing, like a rich man, a muslin scarf over his left shoulder, advance to the place where the bull was enjoying its siesta and touch the animal with his forefingers. That was a Hindu custom, Bakha knew. What the meaning of it was, he didn’t know. His truant memory ran back to a scene which he had seen occur so many times in the town. The figure of a bull roaming aimlessly about, then walking leisurely up to a vegetable stall, sniffing at the row of baskets and getting away with a mouthful of cabbage, spinach or carrots. The keeper only abused it mildly, threatened it with his hand, without striking it. The bull moved a yard or two away munching the mouthful of vegetables it had purloined, and then it renewed its attack on the shop as soon as the keeper had turned his head away. ‘ How queer, the Hindus don’t feed their cows although they call the cow “ mother ” ! ’ Bakha thought. ’Their cattle which go to graze at the brookside are so skinny and feeble. Their cows can’t yield more than two seers of milk a day.’ He recalled with great self-righteousness, how when his father had a buffalo given him in charity (or rather out of superstition) by a rich Hindu merchant who desired sons and was advised by the Brahmins to bestow some cattle on the sweepers, they used to feed it daily with grain and tended it so well that it yielded twelve seers of milk a day. And these people feed their cows on mere remainders of food and even on the grain, sifted, as he well knew (for he had to do the sifting), from the cow-dung. ’But they are kind to the cows. This bull must enjoy making its daily haul on those onions. That is why it smells.’

  So far he had succeeded in isolating himself from his surroundings, but a cart came loaded with turnips and carrots and was emptied on to the ground. He stepped forward a few yards hurriedly. But a heap of decaying, rotten vegetables were littered over the baskets here. The putrid stink of this decomposing waste made him hurry away. He stared blankly for a while as he went along, without stirring his eyelids. The hot and crowded bazaar blazed with light. He was perspiring. His broad, frank face ordinarily so human, so variable, so changing, with its glistening high cheek-bones, its broad nose, the nostrils of which dilated like those of an Arab horse, his fine full quivering underlip so alive always, was set and impassive, silent, a bit grim and deathly.

  ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming,’ he whispered as he resumed his steps and advanced into what was neither a broad, busy street nor a narrow alley, but something of both, with a few odd shops occupied by companies of native bandsmen who play European instruments of music under the leadership of some retired army bandmaster, and are greatly in demand at the marriage and birth parties held in the gulleys of crowded cities. A stray grocer’s shop or the betel-leaf-seller’s punctuated the ‘ four-faced street ’ as it was called, and there was a modern flour mill to which went those fastidious old Indian women who loved coarse flour and could not digest the fine which was sold in the shops, or who loved economy and bou
ght wheat wholesale and had it ground. An ancient oil-mill stood in a corner, in a large, dark room, in which the bullock went round and round revolving a wooden pestle into a wooden mortar fixed in the centre from the ceiling. Bakha had known this street ever since his childhood, was used to the deep pits and admired its straight barrack-like look. The English musical instruments and the gold-embroidered uniforms that hung from the band shops, especially in the shop of Jehangir, the celebrated owner of the finest band in the city, were very congenial to his English-apeing mind. He felt sobered by the comparative quiet of this street. The few shops in it made no claims on his attention and he felt less confused in its atmosphere. The sight of the brass instruments and uniforms in the band shop took his mind back to the military band of the 38th Dogras which he saw almost every day practising in the cantonment, and he partly forgot the insult and the injury which he had suffered ; he felt soothed ; his grief was assuaged.

  Out of the silent street, he turned the corner under a house which bridged the thoroughfare and he went along a row of stalls where cheap nickel jewellery was being electroplated. As a child, Bakha had often expressed a desire to wear rings on his fingers, and liked to look at his mother adorned with silver ornaments. Now that he had been to the British barracks and known that the English didn’t like jewellery, he was full of disgust for the florid, minutely studded designs of the native ornaments. So he walked along without noticing the big ear-rings and nose-rings and hair-flowers and other gold-plated ornaments which shone out from the background of green paper against which the smiths had ingeniously set them. A seller of cloth remnants loaded on a three-wheeled box-like carriage was haggling with some white-aproned Hindu women right in the middle of the street. Bakha waited for a minute to see if they would clear the road to enable him to pass. He was too tired to shout and stood awhile contemplating the cheap German lithographs of Hindu deities which a Sikh craftsman was fixing into expensive-looking frames. The picture of an Englishwoman, very scantily dressed and reclining with a flower in her hand, seduced Bakha’s eyes away from the Hindu deities. The shopkeeper, noticing the basket and broom in Bakha’s hand, gave him a stern look of disapproval and asked him to move on. The sweeper-boy lifted his face and pushing ahead called ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming ’ to the throng of buyers at the remnant-seller’s stall. Dragging at the pieces of cloth and loudly bargaining, it was with difficulty that the irritable Mohammedan keeper of the stall could wrest his wares from the grasp of his customers or apprise them of the coming of the Untouchable. When, at last, he managed to do so, they dispersed, talking, whispering, furious, happy, melancholy, ahead of Bakha, and thronged round the bangle-sellers, who were shaking their glass wares to dazzle and attract the young brides in the crowd, who timidly walked behind their mothers and mothers-in-law, adorned in their gold-embroidered silk aprons and Benarsi skirts towards the temple where Bakha was going. He shouted his call again, a little wearily, ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming.’ But the eager ardent women had forgotten the instigation of their last move and talking vociferously from their heaving, opera-star chests, did not listen till he reiterated his shout more vigorously.

  At length he was allowed right of way and sighted the temple, a colossal, huge turreted structure of massive stone and carved masonry, the florid exuberance of whose detailed and intricate decoration struck a strange kind of awe into his being. Bakha had never quite got over his sense of fear born of the respect for these twelve-headed and ten-armed gods and goddesses which was inculcated in him in his childhood. And as he looked up from the shadow of the high wall falling on the courtyard through which he was walking, he was impressed by some unknown force that seemed to lurk there and to make the place too heavy to breathe in. A few slate-coloured pigeons flew and rested in the little empty niches among the profuse carvings. The sight of them, so cool in their fawn-blue, and the sound of their cooing seemed to calm him. He surveyed the courtyard with the pertinacity of his sweeper’s instinct, surveyed the droppings and the flowers, the heap of leaves and dust which he had come to clear.

  He threw the basket and the broom he had in his hand on the ground and girt up his loins to attack his job as he stood in the shadow of a banyan-tree that spread its dense foliage over the temple courtyard. A brass cage of a miniature temple with the beautifully polished image of a snake enclosed in it, lay on a small stone structure which surrounded the giant trunk of the banyan-tree. It arrested his attention. ‘ What is that snake image ? ’ he asked himself casually. ‘ What does it mean ? Perhaps a snake lives at the root of the tree,’ his naïve mind answered. And he was slightly afraid, stepping away from the place instinctively. Then as he saw a regular stream of people pass through the courtyard after touching the foot of the altar of the miniature temple under the banyan-tree, his nerves were steadied. He drew near to the place where he had dropped his basket and his broom, shouting his call the while, lest the disaster of the morning be repeated through his negligence. This crowd was much more orthodox, this crowd which passed up and down the big broad stairs, in and out of the open doorway, this dense crowd, jostling in its blue, white, red and green trappings of cotton and silk. Bakha stared beyond the throng with his inner eye, not daring to look beyond the gate with the overt, lifted eye of the ordinary man curious to know, to solve a mystery, but like the slave stealing an enquiry into the affairs of his master. ‘ What have these people come here to worship ? ’ he asked himself.

  ‘ Ram, Ram, Sri, Sri, Hari, Narayan, Sri Krishna,’ 1 a devotee sang as he almost brushed past the Untouchable. ‘ Hey Hanuman jodah,2 Kali Mai.’ 3

  Bakha had got his answer. The word ‘ Ram ’ he had heard very often, also ‘ Sri, Sri,’ and he had seen a red shrine with a monkey carved on a wall, caged from without with brass bars—that he knew was called the shrine of Hanuman. The black shrine showing a jet-black woman with a flaming-red tongue, ten-armed and with a garland of skulls round her neck—that was called the shrine of Kali. Krishna was the blue god who played the flute in the coloured pictures of the betel-leaf-seller’s shop in the street. But who was Hari, Narayan ? And he was more completely baffled when a man passed by repeating : ‘ Om, Om, Shanti Deva.’1 Who was Shanti Deva ? Was he in the temple ?

  ‘ There is no chance of seeing anything if I stand here,’ he mused. ‘ I shall go and look.’ But he hadn’t the courage to go. He felt weak. He realised that an Untouchable going into a temple polluted it past purification. His father would be angry if he knew that he hadn’t done any work this morning. Somebody might come and see him roaming about and think he was a thief.

  But the edge of his curiosity became more and more acute as he stood there. He suddenly dismissed his thoughts and with a determined, hurried step went towards the stairs, looking to this side and that, with a tense, heavy head, but unafraid. A murderer might have advanced like that, one confident in his consummate mastery of the art of killing. But he soon lost his grace in the low stoop which the dead weight of years of habitual bending cast on him. He became the humble, oppressed under-dog that he was by birth, afraid of everything, creeping slowly up, in a curiously hesitant, cringing movement. After he had mounted the first two steps, he stood completely demoralised with fear and retreated to the place from which he had started. He picked up his broom by its short wooden handle and began to sweep the ground. The particles of dust flew in a small, very small cloud before him, pale white and radiating bright gleams of gold where the sun-rays touched them. But Bakha didn’t notice that. To him the litter of banyan leaves, flower petals, the droppings of pigeons, stray sticks and the dust, which his broom soon collected in its sweep, was more immediate, though even of this he was fairly unmindful till the dust flew to his nostrils and he tied the edge of his turban across his nose. And he jogged along, slowly and slowly, step by step, with an apathy peculiar to him. This was a slow business as compared to the work at the latrines, but though slow and wearying, not so unpleasant.

  He collected the litter in small heaps, because he knew h
e could not push any more of it with his small broom, right round the courtyard. He had purposed to collect these small heaps, one by one, in his basket later on. When the heaps were ready, he waited for a moment to wipe the sweat off his brow. The temple stood challengingly before him. He bent down and began to collect the heaps which his broom had piled up. The unfailing sense of direction of his inner impulse landed him near the steps of the temple again. But now he was afraid. The temple seemed to advance towards him like a monster, and to envelop him. He hesitated for a while. Then his will strengthened. With a sudden onslaught he had captured five steps of the fifteen that led to the door of the temple. There he stopped, his heart drumming fiercely in his chest, which bent forward like that of an athletic runner on the starting-line, his head thrown back. The force of another impulse pushed him a step or two further up. Here he was almost thrown out of equilibrium by an accidental knock on his knee and stood tottering, threatened with a fall. But he gripped the steps hard, and recovering his balance, rushed headlong to the top step. From here, as he lay, he could peer through with his head raised above the marble threshold, lowered (luckily for him) by the rubbings of the heads of the devout, and affording a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the sanctuary which had so far been a secret, a hidden mystery to him. In the innermost recesses of the tall, dark sanctum, beyond the brass gates, past what seemed a maze of corridors, Bakha’s eyes probed the depths of a raised platform. There, from a background of gold-embroidered silk and velvet draperies, stood out various brass images dimly shrouded in the soft tremors of incense that rose from a dish at their feet. A priest sat half naked, with a tuft of hair on the top of his shaven head, unduly prominent as it tied itself in an inscrutable knot. An open book lay on a bookstand before him, amidst the paraphernalia of brass utensils, conch-shells and other ritualistic objects. A tall man, evidently also a priest, naked save for a loin-cloth, dark-haired and supple, with a sacred thread throwing into relief the beautiful curves of his graceful body, got up and blew a conch-shell. Bakha saw, peered, stared hard, and realised that the morning service had begun. After the loud soprano of ‘ Om, Shanti Deva ’ 1 the seated priest lifted his hard voice, jarring on the bell which tinkled in his left hand, into unison with the brass notes of the conch. The quiet little shrine of a moment ago had become a living, feeling reality. Worshippers flocked from the inner corridors of the temple towards the platform of the gods, and stood beneath the dome, singing ‘ Arti, Arti… ’ 2 in a chorus. The loud flourish of the first conch note floated into a sweet, lingering melody, soft and clear, yet potent with a strength of the most mysteriously affecting kind, a strength sustained enough to raise one’s hair, as it proceeded to a finish in the last hoarse shout of triumphant worship : ‘ Sri Ram Chandar ki Jai ’ (Long live the Great God Ram).