UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  Come, let’s go,’ put in Ram Charan, who was slightly embarrassed by Bakha’s narrative, and growingly afraid that his mother would curse him if he absented himself from home too long. ‘ I’ll have to put in an appearance at home before I can come and play hockey,’ he said, looking from Chota to Bakha.

  ‘ Come,’ urged Chota soothingly, with a deep strain of melancholy in his voice.

  Bakha got to his feet and the three of them began to walk quietly homewards.

  Ram Charan was beginning to feel very embarrassed by the silence, so embarrassed that he thought it no fit occasion to remain adorned with such a symbol of greatness as his solar hat. So he lifted his strange, large headgear off its small, uneasy seat and followed sheepishly.

  Bakha’s soul seemed to lie bare before his friends, bruised and tender. Chota felt with him. He allied himself with Bakha’s mood.

  The sympathy that the repetition of his narrative evoked from his friends accentuated Bakha’s self-pity. He began, as he walked along, to feel the heart-burnings of the morning. He felt furious, his fury heightening with the invisible strength that the presence of his two friends gave him. ‘ Chota and I could teach that immoral wretch of a Brahmin a lesson,’ he reflected.

  ‘ What do you say to our catching hold of the swine one day ? ’ put in Chota.

  This is strange, Bakha felt, that Chota should think of the same thing at the same time as I. But he felt unequal to the suggestion as he felt unequal to his own desire.

  ‘ What is the use ? ’ he replied, sighing. He didn’t want to refuse to wreak his vengeance too openly. And then he felt sad and pensive, because he couldn’t rise to the realisation of his own urges. He resolved to tighten himself. He gnashed his teeth. A warmth rose to his ears. He felt a quickening in his blood. Then came the sweep of his ever-recurring emotions. He boiled with rage. ‘ Horrible, horrible,’ his soul seemed to cry out within him. He felt the most excruciating mental pain he had ever felt in his body. He shivered. His broad, impassive face was pale with hostility. But he couldn’t do anything. He hung his head and walked with a drooping chest. His frame seemed to be burdened with the weight of an inexpressible, unrelieved power. He was deliberately trying to hide his stature in his stoop, as if he were afraid of being seen at all.

  ‘ Where is that brother-in-law, Ram Charan ? ’ said Chota to relieve the tension.

  ‘ Looking for mushrooms,’ Bakha joked. With this his knitted brows relaxed and his furrowed forehead became uncreased. The cowed defiance of his manner gave place to an easy, natural air. He was absorbed in the spectacle of the town of Bulashah sleeping snugly in the afternoon hush at the foot of the hill. From the clump of trees, visible beyond the distant north gate, to the cantonment in the south, from the mango groves in the east to the little group of houses of the outcastes’ colony, the white-blue lower sky was defined into a lovely pattern by the golden domes of the temples, the flat roofs of the houses and the carved terraces with big blue clay flower-pots fixed to their sides. And then the thatched hut of his home in the swamps and shallows presented itself to his gaze. The contrast of the tremulous line of foliage which lay near him and beyond, the green, green mango orchards and the marshland which surrounded his home, was a stark one.

  ‘ I think I shall also go and show my face at home before I come to play hockey,’ said Chota suddenly. ‘ There is too much sunshine yet.’

  ‘ All right, Havildar Charat Singh said he would give me a hockey stick if I called this afternoon,’ Bakha said. ‘ I shall go and get it.’

  ‘ All right, you go and get the stick,’ agreed Chota. ‘ Charan and I will join you before the match begins. Meanwhile we shall take this footpath.’

  They had reached a small lane which led to the outcastes’ colony through cactus hedges. They branched off.

  Bakha strode along in the open through the stones in the old river-bed that stretched itself between the hills and the barracks of the 38th Dogras. He felt that he had just invented this business with Charat Singh because he didn’t want to go home, because he didn’t want to see his father, his brother, his sister, because he didn’t want to go and work at the latrines—at least, not to-day. For a moment he felt a compunction that he was trying to escape. But he had grown out of his surroundings and he just hated the thought of being in the neighbourhood of his mud-house. Somewhere in him he felt he could never get away from it, but to the greater part of him the place didn’t exist. It had been effaced clean off the map of his being.

  There was not a soul to be seen about in the compound of the barracks. Even the quarter-guard seemed empty and forlorn, except for the two dummy-like sentries who walked up and down the veranda outside the magazine which Bakha knew to be behind the locked doors. Only a solar topee seemed to Bakha alive, instinct with life, there, as it hung on the wall. There were many legends current about this hat. Some said it was a symbol of authority of the sahib logs (white men) who ruled over the regiment. Others said that the hat had been forgotten in the regimental office by a sahib (officer) once, and since, being a sahib (rich man), he didn’t care to reclaim his lost property, it had been kept on at the quarter-guard. Again, it was rumoured that a sahib had once been court-martialled for shooting a sepoy, and since he was a white man and could never be put behind the bars in the lock-up at the quarter-guard, his hat and belt and sword had been imprisoned instead. The sahib had suddenly disappeared. Some people said he had been helped by the officer commanding the regiment to escape overnight in order to evade the sentence of imprisonment pronounced by the judges, and only the hat had remained at the quarter-guard. If, on the other hand, you asked one of the sentries whose hat it was, they always told you it belonged to a sahib (an officer) who had just gone into the grounds and would be soon returning to take it. But nobody ever asked questions about this hat except the children of the 38th Dogras. The younger among these children believed what the sentries said and ran away, for great was the fear attaching to the persons of the sahibs, like the dread of pale-white ghosts, ghouls and hobgoblins, because they were rumoured to be very irritable, liable to strike you with their canes if you looked at them. The elder boys knew it was a lie invented by the sentries to drive the curious little boys away, as they remembered having seen that hat for years in the same place, and realised it couldn’t have been just left there by a sahib every time they saw it.

  But even they didn’t really know why the sentries invented the lie. They didn’t realise that the sepoys too wanted the hat, not because they could wear it, either with their uniform or their mufti, but because they thought of the wonder it would arouse in the hills at home, the interest it would arouse among the villagers. People would come to see it for miles, as they came to see their vardi (uniform) and their white clothes, with ogling eyes and admiring glances. How proud, they thought, they would feel carrying this symbol of Sahibhood in their luggage, going home to Kangra or Hoshiarpur.

  But why had all these stories about the solar hat got round ? Because there wasn’t a child about the 38th Dogras who hadn’t cast lingering eyes at this hat. The spirit of modernity had worked havoc among the youth of the regiment. The consciousness of every child was full of a desire to wear Western dress, and since most of the boys about the place were the sons of babus, bandsmen, sepoys, sweepers, washermen and shopkeepers, all too poor to afford the luxury of a complete European outfit, they eagerly stretched their hands to seize any particular article they could see anywhere, feeling that the possession of something European was better than the possession of nothing European. A hat with its curious distinction of shape and form, with the peculiar quality of honour that it presents to the Indian eye because it adorns the noblest part of the body, had a fascination such as no other item of European dress possessed.

  Bakha had for years looked with longing at the solar topee that hung on the peg in the veranda of the 38th Dogras’ quarter-guard. Ever since he was a little child he had contemplated it with the wonder-struck gaze of the lover and the devotee
. Whenever he was given the chance of going out sweeping in the compounds of the 38th Dogras’ barracks, he invariably chose the quarter-guard side, for there he could steal glances at the object he coveted, and plan various devices to win it. Those were nice thoughts, those connected with the schemes he concocted in order to possess that hat.

  One of the ways in which it could be acquired, he had thought, was to make friends with one of the noncommissioned officers in charge of the quarter-guard. But it was impracticable. There was never the same noncommissioned officer in charge of the quarter-guard for two days and nights together. The guard changed every twelve hours, and considering it was one N.C.O. from one of the many platoons of one of the twelve companies in the regiment, you could never hope to see the same noncommissioned officer at the quarter-guard twice in your life.

  That scheme failing, Bakha had thought of asking one of the sentries. When he was a child he had once dared to do that, but then the sentry had sent him away with the yarn about the sahib who had left it for a moment while he was in the grounds, and who would soon come back to get it. Now, however, he dared not ask. Some of the sepoys gave themselves such airs. ‘ They might abuse me,’ he said to himself. ‘ Better any time to ask a Havildar. Every Havildar is an experienced person with long service and surely knows my father, the Jemadar of the sweepers. He will be kind even if he doesn’t actually give me the hat.’ But he could not bring himself to ask, he just couldn’t. ‘ Why is it,’ he had often asked himself, ‘ that I can’t go and ask now but dared to do so when I was a child ? ’ He couldn’t find the answer to this. He didn’t know that with the growth of years he had lost the freedom, the wild, careless, dauntless freedom of the child, that he had lost his courage, that he was afraid.

  Then he deceived himself by believing that he didn’t really want the hat, because he could get any number of them at the rag shop or from some Tommy in the British barracks. But he still longed for the hat. For years he had pined for it. And now he stood contemplating it with the same interest, the same curiosity, the same desire to possess it, with which he had looked at it during these years. It was not too clean a topee. The dust of years had settled on it. The khaki cloth-cover, with the quilt-like pattern, had faded to a dirty white, and, of course, no one knew what it was like inside.

  Bakha stared at it hard, as he stood in a corner of the quarter-guard off the track where the sentries paraded to and fro. It didn’t seem to move any nearer towards him. ‘ What can I do ? ’ he asked himself. ‘ Go and ask that sentry,’ his mind told him. ‘ But no, he might not understand,’ the doubt arose, ‘ he might not understand what I am talking about if I, a sweeper, suddenly put it to him that I want the hat. He looks rather stern. There is no chance of getting near him.’

  He looked round to see if there were anyone else about. There wasn’t a soul. He guessed that everyone was having a siesta. He felt an irresistible desire to go and steal the hat. If only that sentry was not there. ‘ One could do it,’ he thought, ‘ when the sentry turns his face away and walks to the other end of his beat. But someone might come and surprise me. It is too big a thing, this hat, to conceal. Besides if I stole it, I could never wear it. Everyone in the regiment knows about it. No, it is impossible. No, there is no way of getting it.’ Once more he cast a loving glance at it and walked away towards the barracks at the nearer end of which, he knew, lived Havildar Charat Singh.

  It wasn’t far. A hundred yards or so. The time involved in covering this space Bakha occupied with a picture of himself playing hockey with the solar topee on. He saw himself running about in it. How important he looked, the idol of all the boys. Then it occurred to him that solar topees are not worn at hockey. ‘ How foolish my thoughts are,’ he said. He was slightly ashamed of his predilection in favour of English dress, but he derived consolation from the fact that he had never made such a fool of himself as Ram Charan did by wearing a hat and shorts at his sister’s marriage.

  He crossed through a ditch and was in sight of the long rows of barracks. The particular one he wanted was only ten yards ahead of him. It had a long veranda. He reached the room at the near end of it. That was Havildar Charat Singh’s place. He walked past it, because he was embarrassed. He was always ashamed of being seen. He felt like a thief. Luckily for his self-consciousness, the door of the room was shut. There was no way for him to know whether the Havildar was at home. An ordinary person could go and shout for the Havildar, or could go and strike the latch. He was a sweeper and dared not go within defiling distance of the veranda. Bakha wished that the system which the Emperor Jehangir had invented, if the story of the babu’s son was right, now prevailed, of a bell in the Emperor’s house which was attached to a string at the outer gates and by the pulling of which the King could be informed of the applicants waiting for admission. He had to shout for his food in the town. He had no way of getting into touch with Ram Charan or Chota when he went to their houses except by shouting, and that meant Ram Charan’s mother and Chota’s father recognising his voice, and shouting back abusively at him for trying to seduce their sons to play truant. And now, of course, he couldn’t shout or do anything. The Havildar might be asleep. The sepoys might be having their siesta too. And they would be disturbed.

  He walked to and fro outside the veranda. Then he lay down under a tree. His thoughts began to drift. ‘ I don’t know what I can do. I hope he remembers the promise he made this morning. Otherwise all this time will be wasted for nothing. My father must be cursing me. I haven’t worked all the afternoon. But never mind. Let Rakha do it for a change. I have been doing it all this while. What if I take an afternoon off ? ’ His eyes drifted to the kitchen where the food for Charat Singh’s company was cooked. He remembered he had been there quite often to get food when he was a child, when his father was attached to ‘ B ’ company as an ordinary sweeper. The figures of the hockey-playing members of this company passed through his mind. There was Hoshiar Singh, who played centre-half, the pivot of the team. There was Lekh Ram, who played centre-forward. There was Shiv Singh, who played right full-back. And, of course, there was the redoubtable Charat Singh, who kept goal. He recalled the story current about Charat Singh, that the days he didn’t spend playing hockey he spent in hospital, suffering from the wounds and bruises he received playing hockey. He could picture the man keeping goal in the matches against the British regiment. He always stood leaning by the goalpost till the ball came his way and he just fell upon it. The number of scars he had on his body equalled in number, said the babu’s son, the marks of sword and lance on the body of the Rajput warrior Rana Sanga, the conqueror of Akbar, the great Moghul. And the most delightful of the injuries which he had ever sustained was to have had his teeth knocked out, for he had had them replaced with a row of false ones, mounted with gold, which had led to many a joke, when someone ingeniously suggested that the proverb ‘ A straw in the beard of a thief ’ should be changed to ‘ Gold teeth in the mouth of the thief.’

  Bakha had not fully given himself up to his reverie when he saw Charat Singh come out of his door, brass jug in hand. The Havildar sat down on the veranda profusely splashing water into his eyes and on his face. Too absorbed in his toilet and still half asleep, he didn’t notice Bakha sitting under the Kikir tree. The sweeper-boy got up with a half-embarrassed, half-daring look, and lifting his hand to his brow, said : ‘ Salaam, Havildar ji.’

  ‘ Come, ohe Bakhia, how are you ? ’ said Charat Singh enthusiastically. ‘ I have not seen you about at the regimental hockey matches lately. Where do you keep yourself hidden ? ’

  ‘ I have to work, Havildar ji,’ Bakha replied.

  ‘ Oh, work, work, blow work !’ exclaimed Charat Singh, forgetful in the manifestation of his present goodwill that he had himself shouted at Bakha for neglecting his work that morning.

  Bakha was conscious of this anomaly. But he was altogether too favourably inclined towards Charat Singh to let anything stand in the way of his admiration for the hockey hero. There was a comfor
table, homely glow radiating from the smile that the Havildar wore. Bakha felt happy in his presence. ‘ For this man,’ he said to himself, ‘ I wouldn’t mind being a sweeper all my life. I would do anything for him.’

  Charat Singh got up and wiped his face with the edge of his coarse homespun loin-cloth. Then he picked up a little hookah with a coco-nut shell for a water-basin, and a delicately-carved marionette-like stem crowned by a red clay basin for charcoal and tobacco. He separated the earthen pot from the neck of the hubble-bubble and said to Bakha :

  ‘ Go and get me two pieces of coal from the kitchen.’

  The boy stood wonder-struck. That a Hindu should entrust him with the job of fetching glowing charcoal in the chilm which he was going to put on his hookah and smoke ! For a moment he looked as if an electric shock had passed through him. Then the strange suggestion produced a pleasant thrill in his being ; it exhilarated him. He took the chilm from Charat Singh and, wrapped in an atmosphere of delight, walked towards the kitchen fifty yards away.

  ‘ Call the cook also to me,’ shouted Charat Singh after him, ‘ and tell him to bring my tea.’

  ‘ Very good, Havildar ji,’ said Bakha, and walked away without looking back, lest he should prove unequal to the unique honour that the Hindu had done him by entrusting him with so intimate a job as fetching coal in his clay basin. ‘ What ? Is it wet or dry ? ’ he asked himself. ‘ Could it be defiled, I wonder ? ’ The answer came back to him : ‘ Oh, yes, the tobacco is wet. Of course it could be defiled.’ For a moment he doubted whether Charat Singh was conscious and in his senses when he entrusted him with the job. ‘ He might be forgetful and suddenly realise what he had done. Did he forget that I am a sweeper ? He couldn’t have done, I was just talking to him about my work. And he saw me this morning. How could he have forgotten ? ’ Thus reassured he was grateful to God that such men as Charat Singh existed. He walked with a steady step, with a happy step, deliberately controlled, lest he should excite anyone’s attention about the barracks, and be seen carrying the Havildar’s clay basin. It was with difficulty, however, that he prevented himself from stumbling, for his soul was full of love and adoration and worship for the man who had thought it fit to entrust him, an unclean menial, with the job and his eyes were turned inwards.