UNTOUCHABLE

by Unknown

  For the first time he became conscious that he had been walking alone. He looked around. Only the sparrows on the waste land of the sweepers’ lane twittered accusingly at him in the pale afternoon light. With a sudden shudder of unutterable weariness he clutched the stick which he carried under his arm, and turned into a by-path leading to his home across decayed walnut leaves.

  Before he came within sight of his home, he stopped and looked for a convenient spot where he might hide his hockey stick. He couldn’t take it home. His father would at once fly into a rage about his wasting valuable time playing when there was all the work to do at the latrines. There was a long hedge of cactus away from the path. He turned towards it. There was a convenient hollow in the middle of the bush. He stepped over with a high stride into the hollow and laid the stick there. Then he bent down a few oar-shaped cactus leaves on to it and covered it against bad weather. After that he hurried, lest he should be seen hiding the stick by someone who might come later and filch it.

  When Bakha returned his father sat smoking his hubble-bubble in the English wicker-chair. For a moment Lakha was unaware of his son’s presence. Then suddenly he seemed to rise from his seat and wave his close-fisted hand menacingly at Bakha and to shout :

  ’You son of a pig ! You son of a dog ! You ran away ! You have been away all the afternoon and now you come back ! You illegally begotten ! Have you become a nabob that you go wandering about when you know that there is work here for you to do ? The sepoys have been shouting !’

  Bakha was cool in the face of this warm reception. He was too wearied by the succession of revived memories to cope with anything now. He stood obstinately still while his father’s invective continued.

  ‘ Son of a pig ! You have no care for your old father. You go out in the morning and you come back at night. Who is going to do the work at the latrines ? I brought you up. Won’t you give me some rest in my old age ? There you go trying to be a sahib when you are a sweeper’s son. You illegally begotten ! Dog ! Pig !’

  Bakha moved slowly under the rain of abuse towards the latrines. He was going to pick up a broom but he saw that his brother Rakha held it. He stopped short and looked up at his brother.

  ‘ So you have come back,’ shouted Rakha self-righteously. He stared hard at his elder brother. There was the pride of the favourite in his glance.

  Bakha knew that the boy was preening himself because he had put in an afternoon’s work and had won his father’s partiality. He didn’t hate him for his overbearing manner, however. He thought of him as a child, as he really loved him. And he would have borne his impudence and his father’s abuse as his due, but the boy refused to give him the broom and his father persisted in his denunciation.

  ‘ Son of a pig ! illegally begotten ! He has no sense of shame ! Play, play, play and wander all day. As if he has nothing else to do !’

  Bakha felt he couldn’t bear the constant iteration of the same sentiments. He knew the way in which his father nagged him, persistently, stubbornly, without waiting for breath. He made for the latrines.

  ‘ Get away, you swine, run away from my presence,’ shouted his father. ‘ Don’t touch that broom or I shall kill you. Go away ! Get out of my house. And don’t come back ! Don’t let us see your face again !’

  Before now, Bakha had often borne the brunt of his misery with a resigned air of fatalism. He had quietly suffered his father’s abuse and satire, and even occasional beatings with a calm that betokened his intense docility and gentleness. He would never lift his head, or his hand, to defend himself against anyone. To-day, however, he had had more than enough. The spirit of fire which lay buried in the mass of his flesh had ignited this morning and lay smouldering. A little more fuel and it flared up, like a wild flame.

  He tore across the plain without even looking back. It was as though a demon had taken possession of him. He was not conscious of the shattering moment which had suddenly determined his flight. Nor was he aware of the feeling of revulsion that had filled the moment. It seemed as if the demon in him held a cruel sword with which it hacked everything in its way and, by the force of the hacking, acquired a more sinister power, frightening in its intensity and weirdly fascinating in its transmutation of Bakha’s body into a wild yet marvellously controlled medium.

  He advanced eagerly. The old river lay on his right like a stormy sea of discontent whose mountainous waves the wind had swept, till the boulders and rocks reared up in knife-edges against the sky or rolled quietly over the earth. So different from what was on his left, the monotone of dusty plain, with short patterns of mauve and silver and grey where the sun’s rays played upon the crest, and deep purple shadows in its fissures and its folds.

  As he moved over the fringe of flat earth facing the plain, the rim of the upturned sky was taking on the gold and silver hues of the afternoon sun, and the world lay encircled in a ribbon of crimson. Here he slackened his pace, for it was here that he had felt the first glow of the early morning sun creeping into his bones. It was through this plain that he had gone out to the world, full of the spirit of adventure.

  The wide expanse was empty except for the interminable thread of men entering the mud-houses which clustered in the north like mushrooms, surrounded by rubbish-heaps, filled with broken bottles, old tins, dead cats and deep in mud. So lofty did he feel in his mood of righteous indignation that he had the strange sensation of being a giant, of commanding a full view of everything in the hollows and the hills.

  ‘ Unlucky, unlucky day ! What have I done to deserve all this ? ’ he cried in exasperation.

  A sepoy on his way to the latrines was approaching. He jumped aside into a ditch so as not to be seen. He didn’t want to meet anybody. He wanted to be alone and quiet, to compose himself. When the man had passed, he crept out of the ditch and made for a pipal-tree which stood in the plain surrounded by a clay platform. He sat down under it, facing the sun.

  Now he felt desolate and the fact dawned on him that he was homeless. He had often been turned out like that. As a matter of fact when his father was angry he always threatened him and his brother with eviction. He remembered that once after his mother’s death his father had locked him out all night, for not looking after the house properly. It was a winter night. The east wind blew and he was sleepy. He was tired from the day’s work and yawned as he curled himself up in his overcoat behind two refuse-baskets. How he had smarted under the pain of that callousness and cruelty. Could he be the same father who, according to his own version, had gone praying to the doctor for medicine ? Bakha recalled he had not spoken to his father for days after that incident. Then his grief about his unhappy position had become less violent, less rebellious. He had begun to work very hard. It had seemed to him that the punishment was good for him. For he felt he had learnt through it to put his heart into his work. He had matured. He had learnt to scrub floors, cook, fetch water besides doing his job cleaning the latrines and carting manure for sale to the fields. And in spite of the poor nourishment he got, he had developed into a big strong man, broad-shouldered, heavy-hipped, supple-armed, as near the Indian ideal of the wrestler as he wished to be.

  But this present disgrace ! This could do no good, he thought. It was undeserved. Why should his father object to his taking a half-holiday once in his life, especially as he knew he had been insulted in the town this morning and didn’t feel like working ? Then he had not spent the afternoon uselessly. He had got a new stick. But that, it occurred to him, was something which his father could not appreciate. He didn’t like him to play hockey. That was what all the trouble was about. ‘ Rakha must have told on me,’ he muttered, ‘ because he could not go to play. What a day I have had ! Unlucky, inauspicious day ! I wish I could die !’ And he sat nursing his head in his hands, utterly given up to despair.

  He had sat for a long while like that, his head in his hands. He felt sick and stifled with the knowledge that he was homeless and unwanted even by his own father. He had unconsciously chosen to sit down i
n a place where Chota or Ram Charan or someone from the outcastes’ colony might recognise him. As time passed and he became conscious of the emptiness around him, he felt that the sympathy he longed for would never come.

  But he was mistaken. Colonel Hutchinson, chief of the local Salvation Army, was never very far from the outcastes’ colony. To his rather irreligious wife he always made the excuse that he was going out for a walk in the hills where the kingdom of Heaven was waiting to be found, though actually he went out wallowing in the mire for the sake of Jesus Christ, talking to some Untouchable among the rubbish-heaps about divinity and trinity. You couldn’t miss him even if you saw him from a mile off, for he was one of the few living members of the band of Christian missionaries in India who had originated the idea that the Salvation Army ought to be dressed in the costume of the natives and live among them, if it was to achieve the true end of proselytising. And he had designed the Colonel’s uniform he wore : a pair of white trousers, a scarlet jacket, a white turban with a red band across it. He had been a strong man once, if he wasn’t quite the image of Eugene Sandow now. In the old days, he had plenty of hair on his head. Now, unfortunately, he was bald, his wife said, because of the infernal turban he wore, and because he was so fond of study. He also once had a turned-up moustache of the real Colonel kind, bushy and black. Now, though it was bushy, it was grey and drooped, his malicious wife said, in defeat, because she alleged that the proselytising mission of Christianity had, in his hands, been a complete failure. the number of conversions to his credit for the last twenty years being not more than five, and those five mainly from among the dirty, black Untouchables. But in justice to the Colonel’s moustache, it must be said that his wife was being catty because she had a personal grievance against him. He had charmed her in his youth with his well-groomed, immaculate bearing, a conspicuous feature of which had been his fine black, upright moustache. She was a barmaid in Cambridge and had developed an aesthetic taste for the gem-like, glistening drops of wine that adorned the hair of Hutchinson’s moustache when he had had a drink. She had married him for that. India, however, had embittered her. For not only did she hate the ‘ nigger ’ servants in her house, but she discovered that her husband was too studious for her gay card-playing, drinking and love-making tastes. Still, she had borne with him for a great many years, on the strength of whisky, but then Hutchinson’s moustache had grown grey and it had begun to droop under the weight of age, the Colonel now being turned sixty-five. Despite all that his wife said, therefore, we must give credit to Colonel Hutchinson for his unflinching devotion to duty and loyalty to the cause which he had taken up. He was marvellously active for his three-score years and five, laying himself in hiding as of yore in deep pits of filth or behind heaps of dung, to wait for some troubled outcaste who might be tired and hungry and would listen in his despair to the gospel of Christ. He always carried a number of copies of the Hindustani translation of the Bible under his arm, and he stuffed the pockets of his jacket and overcoat with the gospel of St. Luke, to thrust into the hands of any passer-by, be he willing or unwilling. He was a short fellow, pitiably weak and hobbling along on his stick. But the edge of his tongue was like a pair of scissors which cut the pattern of Hindustani into smithereens as a parrot snips his food into bits. The impulse that had made him think of learning Hindustani before he started his mission was a noble one considering that his work lay among the natives ; the habit of muddling through the language, and never learning it properly during the thirty years of his stay in India, was most disastrous in its consequences.

  ‘ Tum udas ’ (You are sad), said the Colonel, puttinghis hand on Bakha’s shoulder.

  The sweeper-boy had the shock of his life to hear the broken Hindustani of a person he presumed to be an Englishman. He looked up with a start. He had expected that Chota or Ram Charan might come and console him, or someone from the outcastes’ colony. He had not the foggiest notion that he would be surprised by Colonel Hutchinson, who although he freely mixed with the natives and had thus lost some of the glamour attaching to the superior, remote and reticent Englishmen, was yet a sahib who wore trousers and used a commode. Bakha felt honoured that the sahib had deigned to talk Hindustani to him, even though it was broken Hindustani. He felt flattered that he should be the object of pity and sympathy from a sahib. Of course, he at once recognised the Colonel. Who didn’t know the missionary ? But it was the first occasion on which he had found himself face to face with him. Being of a very retiring disposition and full of a feeling of inferiority he had never talked to Hutchinson, although he remembered that the Colonel often visited his father when he (Bakha) was a child. His father, he recalled, also talked of the sahib, sometimes if he saw him in the distance, saying that the old sahib had wanted to convert them to the religion of Yessuh Messih and to make them sahibs like himself, but that he had refused to leave the Hindu fold, saying that the religion which was good enough for his forefathers was good enough for him.

  ‘ Salaam, Sahib,’ said Bakha, putting his hand to his forehead as he got up.

  ‘ Salaam, salaam, you sit, don’t disturb yourself,’ squealed the Colonel in wrong, badly accented Hindustani, patting Bakha affectionately the while.

  There was something wonderful in the brave effort the Colonel seemed to make to be natural in this unnatural atmosphere. But he was not self-conscious. He had thrown aside every weight—pride of birth and race and colour in adopting the customs of the natives and in garbing himself in their manner, to build up the Salvation Army in India. And he had swamped the overbearing strain of the upper middle-class Englishman in him by his hackneyed effusions of Christian sentiment, camouflaged the narrow, insular patriotism of his character in the jingo of the white-livered humanitarian.

  ‘ What has happened ? Are you ill ? ’ the Colonel asked, bending over.

  Bakha felt confused, embarrassed by the flood of kindness. ‘ Charat Singh,’ he thought, ‘ was kind to me this afternoon ; the sahib is generosity itself.’ And he wondered if he were dreaming. He looked and saw the form of the Colonel real enough before him. And hadn’t he heard the strange, squeaky voice of the Englishman speaking Hindustani ? good Hindustani, Bakha thought, considering it was spoken by a sahib, for ordinarily he knew the sahibs didn’t speak Hindustani at all, only some useful words and swear words : ‘ Acha (good) ; jao (go away) ; jaldi karo (be quick) ; sur ka bacha (son of a pig) ; kute ka bacha (son of a dog) !’

  ‘ Nothing, Sahib, I was just tired,’ said Bakha shyly. ‘ I am sweeper here, son of Lakha, Jemadar of the sweepers.’

  ‘ I know ! I know ! How is your father ? ’

  ‘ Huzoor, he is well,’ replied Bakha.

  ’Has your father told you who I am ?’ asked the Colonel, coming to the point in the practical manner of the Englishman.

  ‘ Yes, Huzoor. You are a sahib,’ said Bakha.

  ‘ No, no,’ pretended the Colonel. ‘ I am not a sahib. I am like you. I am padre of the Salvation Army.’

  ‘ Yes, Sahib, I know,’ said Bakha, without understanding the subtle distinction which the Colonel was trying to institute between himself and the ordinary sahibs in India whose haughtiness and vulgarity was, to his Christian mind, shameful, and from whom, on that account, he took care to distinguish himself, lest their misdeeds reflect on the sincerity of his intentions for the welfare of the souls of the heathen. To Bakha, however, all the sahibs were sahibs, trousered and hatted men, who were generous in the extreme, giving away their cast-off clothes to their servants, also a bit nasty because they abused their servants a great deal. He knew, of course, that the Colonel was a padre sahib, but he did not know what a padre did except that he lived near the girja ghar (church) and came to see the people in the outcastes’ colony. To him even the padres were of interest because of their European clothes. This padre did not wear a hat like the padre in the barracks of the British regiments. But that was of little account. He wore all the other items of clothes that the sahibs wore. He was a sahib all right. And t
his sahib had condescended to pat him on the back, to speak kind words to him, even to ask him why he was looking so sad. He could have cried to receive such gracious treatment from a sahib, cried with the joy of being in touch with that rare quality which was to be found in the sahibs. In spite of it all, however, he seemed to be vaguely aware of the difference the Colonel was trying to define.

  ‘ I am a padre and my God is Yessuh Messih,’ emphasised the Colonel. ‘ If you are in trouble, come to Jesus in the girja ghar.’ He was seeking vainly to paraphrase the promise : ‘ Come all ye that labour and I will give you rest.’

  Bakha was struck with the coincidence. How did the padre know he was in trouble ? ‘ And who is Yessuh Messih to whose religion my father told me this padre wanted to convert us ? I wonder if he lives in the girja ghar ? ’ He recalled that the girja ghar had seemed to him a mysterious place whenever he had passed by.

  ‘ Who is Yessuh Messih, Sahib ? ’ Bakha asked, eager to allay his curiosity.

  ‘ Come, I shall tell you,’ said Colonel Hutchinson. ‘ Come to the church.’ And dragging the boy with his arm, babbling, babbling, all vague, in a cloud, and enthusiastic as a mystic, he led him away on the wings of a song :