UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  ‘ Alakh, alakh ’1 came a call and awoke him. The dream completely faded out in the glare that the sunshine cast leaning over the tall houses. Bakha knew it was noon and that just at that time every holy man and beggar seeks the doors of the devout for alms which he has earned by the dedication of his person to God. Almost at once he collected himself together, rubbed his eyes and felt : ‘ I shall soon get bread.’ He knew that the housewives sat waiting for the ash-smeared sadhus (ascetics) and did not eat their food before dispensing hospitality to the holy men. ‘ I shall soon get food,’ he thought, and he looked up at the sadhu without getting up. The man was staring down at him. Bakha fell back into the drowsy listlessness of a moment ago.

  ‘ Bham, bham, bhole Nath,’ 2 cried the sadhu in the peculiar lingo of Sadhuhood, shaking the bangles on his arms, which brought two women rushing to the terraces of their house-tops.

  ‘ I am bringing the food, sadhu ji,’ shouted the lady at whose doorstep Bakha was at rest. But she stopped short when she saw the sweeper’s body knotted up on the wooden platform outside her house.

  ‘ You eater of your masters,’ she shouted, ‘ may the vessel of your life never float in the sea of existence ! May you perish and die ! You have defiled my house ! Go ! Get up, get up ! You eater of your masters ! Why didn’t you shout if you wanted food ? Is this your father’s house that you come and rest here ? ’

  Bakha got up as abruptly as the woman’s tone had changed from kindness to the holy man to cruelty to him. And rubbing his eyes and trying to shake off the lethargy that lay thick like hot air about him, he apologised.

  ‘ Forgive me, mother. I shouted for bread, but you were perhaps busy and didn’t hear me. I was tired and sat down.’

  ‘ But, you eater of your masters ! why did you sit down on my doorstep, if you had to sit down at all ? You have defiled my religion ! You should have sat there in the gulley ! Now I will have to sprinkle holy water all over the house ! You spoiler of my salt ! Oh, how terrible ! You sweepers have lifted your heads to the sky, nowadays ! This bad luck on a Tuesday morning too ! And after I had been to the temple !… ’ She saw the sadhu waiting and checked her copious flow of remonstrance and abuse. Bakha didn’t look up to her but he knew she was dark with anger.

  ‘ Be patient, sadhu ji,’ her voice came again. ‘ I shall just go and get you your food. This eater of his masters has even burnt the bread I was baking by detaining me here.’ She retreated from her vantage point on the terrace.

  Meanwhile the other woman, as quiet as she was heavy, came down the stairs with a handful of rice in one hand and a chapati in the other. The first she put into the holy man’s bag, the second she handed over to Bakha, adding kindly : ‘ My child, you shouldn’t sit on people’s doorsteps like this.’

  ‘ May you live long and all your family prosper !’ said the sadhu as he received the alms. ‘ Isn’t there a little lentil of which you could make the holy man a gift ? ’

  ‘ Yes, sadhu ji,’ she said, ‘ to-morrow, from to-morrow, you shall have lentil ! I am busy cooking.’ And she rushed upstairs saying she was busy cooking.

  The owner of the defiled house came down now, as voluble as she was short of volume. She stared eagle-eyed at Bakha and remonstrated : ‘ Wah ! You have wrought strange work this morning, defiling my home !’ Then she turned to the holy man and heaped a steaming hot vegetable curry and a potful of cooked rice onto the sadhu’s black skull of a begging-bowl. ‘ Please accept this,’ she said, ‘ the house is all right ; he didn’t really pollute it. I wonder if you have a cure for my son’s fever which you could bring me.’

  ‘ May the gods bless you and your children,’ said the holy man. ‘ I will bring you some herbs in the morning.’ And he turned his back after having exacted his dues for looking after the souls of his disciples.

  ‘ May you die,’ the woman cursed Bakha, thinking she had acquired enough merit by being good to the holy man, and wouldn’t lose much of it by being unkind to the sweeper. ‘ What have you done to earn your food to-day, you or your sister ? She never cleaned the lane this morning, and you have defiled my home. Come, clean the drain a bit and then you can have this bread. Come, do a bit of work now that you have defiled my home.’

  Bakha looked at the lady for a while. Then cowed down by her abuse, he set to work to sweep the gutter with a small broom which, he knew, his sister always hid under the wooden platform where he sat.

  ‘ Mother,’ shouted a little child from the top of the house, ‘ I want to go to the lavatory.’

  ‘ No, you can’t go,’ replied the mother, who stood superintending the sweeper’s work. ‘ You can’t go upstairs, it will lie there all day,’ she said. ‘ Come here, come downstairs, quick, and go here in the drain. The sweeper will clear it away.’

  ‘ No,’ insisted the obstinate boy, who felt shy to sit in a public place.

  His mother rushed up to fetch him. She had forgotten to give Bakha the bread she had brought for him. On reaching the top of her house she sent her son without the bread, and since she didn’t want to undertake another journey down, she called to Bakha while he was in the middle of his job.

  ‘ Vay Bakhya, take this. Here’s your bread coming down.’ And she flung it at him.

  Bakha laid aside the broom and tried hard to be the good cricketer he usually was, but the thin, paper-like pancake floated in the air and fell like a kite on to the brick pavement of the gully. He picked it up quietly and wrapped it in a duster with the other bread he had received. He was too disgusted to clean the drain after this, especially as the little boy sat relieving himself before him. He threw the little broom aside and made off without saying a thank-you.

  ‘ Aren’t they a superior lot these days ! ’ exclaimed the lady, disappointed at not receiving a courtesy. ‘ They are getting more and more uppish.’

  ‘ I have finished, mother,’ her son shouted.

  ‘ Rub yourself on the ground, my child, if there is no one to give you water at the pickle-maker’s next door,’ she said, and she went back to her kitchen.

  All the accumulated fury of the morning was in Bakha’s soul and the rage of this fresh insult. He felt that he had got up from his sleep almost cured of the unpleasant memories of the morning, but now there was an ache in the back of his head. A subtle heat was mounting from his spine, drying the blood in his body and shrinking his face. ‘ I wish that hadn’t happened at the temple,’ he said to himself. ‘ Then Sohini would have come for the bread. Why did I come to the lane ? ’ He moved in a sort of trance. Black and filthy, yet orderly with that dignity and decorum which his exotic dress gave him, he was possessed by a curious fire. ‘ I shouldn’t have picked up that bread from the pavement,’ he said, and he sighed. That seemed to relax him.

  Meanwhile he began to feel hungry as if rats were running about in his belly searching for food. He began to spit a white flocculent spittle on the dust as he hurried out of the town, homewards : His limbs sagged. He felt the sweat trickling down his face from under his turban as soon as he got into the open. He looked up to the sun. It stood right above him. Bakha’s face quickened with the awareness of the sun ‘ coming on.’ His body had a wonderful time sense, as it really had a sense of other things. ‘ How can I go home with only two chapatis under my arm ? ’ the feeling came to him. ‘ Father will be sure to ask if I have brought any delicacies. It isn’t my fault that I have only two cakes. He is sure to ask why Sohini didn’t go down to get the food. I shall have to tell him the whole story. He will be angry !’ He remembered how, when he was a child, his father had abused him because he came and reported that a sepoy had frightened him. ‘ Father always takes sides with the others. Never with his own family. How can I tell him about the priest ? He won’t believe it. And he will burst out if I say anything about the incident in the street : “ The only day that I send you down to the town to work, you go and pick a quarrel.” That is what he will say : “ When will you learn to do your job properly ? ” ’ Bakha felt that rather than bear t
his he would go and tell a lie. ‘ But then he is sure to know because Sohini didn’t go to fetch the food. He must have asked her why she came home so early. Perhaps it will be best not to say anything. But he is sure to ask. Oh, never mind, let come what may.’ And he closed his mind to the conflict, and became absorbed in a stray eagle and a few specks of cloud.

  With a mind occupied by things, Bakha didn’t find the way home very long. He could see his family basking in the sunshine outside the house. There was no provision for lights in the sweepers’ street, so most of the inhabitants compensated themselves for the nights spent in utter darkness amid the smoke of smouldering hearth fires in their small congested houses, by spending most of their time in the open air. In the summer, of course, this was difficult, even though they made awnings of the string beds on which they slept at night, by covering them with coarse, unwanted rags of jute cloth, and sat under them all day. During the winter, however, they came out of their homes as soon as the sun was up and lived out in it till the evening fell and it was too cold.

  Sohini had kept up the outdoor kitchen which her mother had made adjoining the door of her house. It was not strictly a kitchen in the Hindu manner, for there were no four lines defining its limits, according to those laws of hygiene which are the basis of Hindu piety. A couple of brooms stood out next to the fireplace, an empty refuse-basket, a can, two earthen pitchers and a chipped enamelled jug lay scattered about. Most of the utensils were of clay, darkened by the soot of many fires, and never washed since Bakha’s mother had died, for Sohini was young and inexperienced, and had a great deal too much work to do outside the house to devote herself assiduously to housework. Besides, there was a scarcity of water. And since, on account of their profession and the filthy surroundings in which they were forced to live, they needed more than a pitcherful of water, but could not get it, they just did without ; till sanitation, cleanliness and hygiene had lost its meaning for them.

  ‘ Where is Rakha ? ’ Bakha asked his sister, as he gave her the duster containing the bread.

  She kept quiet, but Lakha, his father, answered :

  ‘ The rascal has gone to get food at the langar (the kitchen) in the barracks.’

  The old man was sitting on his bedstead, now stretched out near the kitchen, puffing away at his hookah, each puff a short asthmatic cough. He looked well groomed. He had evidently been plucking superfluous hair from his face with a pair of tweezers which he always kept under his pillow near a painted native looking-glass, because his bristling white beard looked trimmed up into clean edges and sides. There was a kindly look in his eyes due probably to the easy and comfortable morning he had had. But his lips were tightly set and his brow was wrinkled under his cleanly tied blue turban. Grumpiness was not too far away from him to summon if need be.

  ‘ Have you brought anything nice to eat ? ’ he asked Bakha. ‘ I am just hungering for some pickles, spinach and maize-flour bread.’

  ‘ I have brought only two chapatis,’ replied Bakha. The feeling came to him which had possessed him throughout his journey, of the struggle between making a clean breast of it all and lying.

  ‘ You are a good-for-nothing scoundrel,’ muttered Lakha. ‘ I hope that the rascal brings something nice from the barracks.’

  As he said so the Jemadar’s mouth watered and his mind travelled to the great big piles of cooked food which he had received on the occasion of marriages in the alleys of the city. There were fried bread and chingri puffs, vegetables, curries and semolina pudding, sweets and tasty pickles—remainders from the trays of high-caste men, and sometimes portions direct from the kitchens. Those were unforgettable days, so pleasing to Lakha that he had always watched the development of each and every girl in the alleys where he worked and asked their parents when the auspicious occasion of their marriage would be celebrated. It may be that Lakha is to blame for most of the child marriages in Bulashah. The parents of the potential brides always remembered Lakha, giving him a suit of clothes and generous portions of food. Another occasion he remembered was when the regiment, to which he was attached, came back from the war, for during the rejoicings on its return there were grand feasts, and he, as the Jemadar of all the sweepers, was in charge of the distribution of the remainders of food. He recalled how the wooden box where his wife kept sweets was never empty that year.

  ‘ I don’t know the people in the town very well, and I didn’t call at all the houses for food,’ said Bakha to excuse himself to his father. The remark disturbed Lakha’s gastronomic fantasy.

  ‘ You should try and get to know them. You have got to work for them all your life, my son, after I die.’

  Bakha felt the keen edge of his sense of anticipation draw before his eyes the horrible prospect of all the future days of service in the town and the insults that would come with them. He could see himself being shouted at by a crowd ; he could see a little priest fling his arms in the air and cry, ‘ defiled, defiled.’ He could see the lady who had thrown the bread down at him reprimanding him for not cleaning the gutter. ‘ No, no,’ his mind seemed to say, ‘ never,’ and there appeared before him the vague form of a Bakha clad in a superior military uniform, cleaning the commodes of the sahibs in the British barracks. ‘ Yes, much rather,’ he said to himself to confirm the picture.

  It was a queer mixture of awe and romance, the alternation of his hatred for his own town and the love for the world to which he looked out. Men get used to a place, become familiar with it, and then comes a stage when the fascination of the unknown, the exotic, dominates them. It is the impulse which tries to create a new harmony, frowning upon the familiar which has grown stale and dreary with too much use. The mind which has once peeped into the wonderland of the new, contemplated various aspects of it with longing and desire, is shocked and disappointed when living reality pulls in the reins of the wild horse of fancy. But how pleasant men find it to look at the world with the open, hopeful, astonished eyes of the child ! The vagaries of Bakha’s naïve tastes can be both explained and excused. He didn’t like his home, his street, his town, because he had been to work at the Tommies’ barracks, and obtained glimpses of another world, strange and beautiful ; he had grown out of his native shoes into the ammunition boots that he had secured as a gift. And with this and other strange and exotic items of dress he had built up a new world, which was commendable, if for nothing else, because it represented a change from the old ossified order and the stagnating conventions of the life to which he was born. He was a pioneer in his own way, although he had never heard of that word, and was completely unconscious that it could be applied to him.

  ‘ What is the matter with you to-day ? ’ asked Bakha’s father, noticing the wild light in the boy’s eyes and his listless manner. ‘ Are you tired ? ’

  This started a panic in Bakha’s soul. Should he tell or should he not ? The sympathetic tone of the enquiry stirred the chords of his soul deeply. He could have wept at the apprehension implicit in his father’s manner. He hesitated for a moment. Then, in a struggle to maintain the secret, he answered :