A Suitable Boy, Page 74

  The guppi wiped his plump face, which was sweating with excitement and the effort of recall.

  ‘Then the ringleader—who was still in the compartment—pulled out his pistol, and fired. Dhaaaaaaam! . . . The shot went through the Pathan’s arm and lodged in the compartment wall. There was blood everywhere. He raised the pistol again to fire. Everyone in the compartment was frozen with fear. Then the Pathan spoke in the voice of a tiger to the passengers: “Bastards! I, one man alone, beat up three of them, and no one raised a hand to help me. I’m saving your money and your wealth for you. Isn’t there anyone among you who can hold his hand to stop him from firing again?”

  ‘Then they all came to their senses. They grabbed the bandit’s hand and stopped him from killing the Pathan—and they beat him up—dharaaaash! dharaaaash!—till he cried for mercy and wept in pain—and then they thrashed him even more. “Do it properly,” said the Pathan, and they did—until he was a mass of blood. And they threw him on to the platform of the next station, a broken pulp. Like a discarded, rotting mango!

  ‘Then the women were all over the Pathan: bandaging his hand, et cetera, et cetera. They treated him as if there was only one man in the whole train. Beautiful women, all filled with admiration.’

  The guppi, seeking approval, looked over towards Maan, who was feeling mildly sick.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ asked the guppi, after a long silence.

  ‘Mmmmh,’ said Maan. There was a pause, and he continued: ‘Tell me, why do you tell such outrageous stories?’

  ‘But they are all true,’ said the guppi. ‘Basically true.’

  Maan was silent.

  ‘Look at it this way,’ continued the guppi. ‘If I merely said, “Hello” and you said, “Hello. Where have you come from?” and I said, “From the direction of Baitar. By train”—well, how would the day pass? How would we get through these boiling afternoons and hot nights? So I tell stories—some to keep you cool, some to make you hotter!’ The guppi laughed.

  But Maan was not listening any longer. He had sat up at the word ‘Baitar’, as galvanized by it as the guppi had been by ‘Bombay’. A wonderful idea had struck him.

  He would write to Firoz, that was it. He would write to Firoz and enclose a letter to Saeeda Bai. Firoz wrote excellent Urdu and had none of Rasheed’s puritanism. Firoz would translate Maan’s letter and send it on to Saeeda Bai. She would be astonished to get his letter: astonished and delighted! And she would write back to him by the next post.

  Maan got up from the charpoy and began pacing up and down, composing the letter in his head, adding here and there a couplet or two from Ghalib or Mir—or Dagh—for ornamentation or emphasis. Rasheed could have no objection to mailing a letter to the son of the Nawab of Baitar; Maan would simply hand him the closed envelope.

  The guppi, puzzled by Maan’s erratic behaviour and disappointed that he had lost his audience, wandered off into the darkness.

  Maan sat down once again, leaned against the edge of the verandah, and listened to the hiss of the lantern and the other sounds of the night. Somewhere a baby cried. Somewhere a dog barked, and other dogs joined in. Then all was quiet for a while, except for the drift of a voice or two from the roof, where Rasheed’s father spent his summer nights. Sometimes the voices seemed to be raised in argument, sometimes subdued; but Maan could make out nothing of what was being said.

  It was a cloudy night, and the papiha or brainfever bird called from time to time from a distant tree, its series of triple notes growing tauter and higher and more intense until it reached a climax and dropped into sudden silence. Maan did not think of the romantic associations of the sound (‘pee-kahan? pee-kahan?’ Where is my love? Where is my love?). He wanted the bird to be quiet so that he could concentrate on the voice of his own heart.

  8.10

  That night there was a violent storm. It was a sudden summer thunderstorm of the kind that builds up when the heat is most unbearable. It lashed through the trees and fields, whipped away thatch and even a few tiles from the houses in the village, and drenched the dusty ground. Those who had looked up at the clouds—so often bringers of nothing but the occasional gust of wind—and had decided to sleep outside anyway to avoid the heat, had picked up their charpoys and rushed inside when, without more warning than a heavy drop or two, the clouds had burst over their heads. Then they had gone out again to bring in the cattle tethered outside. Now they all steamed together in the darkness of the huts where most of the villagers lived, the cattle lowing plaintively in the front rooms, the humans talking together in the back.

  Kachheru, the chamar who had worked for Rasheed’s family since childhood, and whose hut consisted of only a single room, had judged the arrival of the storm to the hour. His buffalo was inside, and safe from the lashing rain. She snorted and urinated from time to time, but these were reassuring sounds.

  A little rain came through the roof and fell on Kachheru and his wife, who were lying on the ground. There were many roofs that were flimsier than his, and some that would be blown away in this kind of storm, but Kachheru said sharply:

  ‘Old woman—what use are you if you cannot even save us from the rain?’

  His wife said nothing for a while. Then she said: ‘We should see how the beggar and his wife are doing. Their hut is on low ground.’

  ‘That is none of our business,’ retorted Kachheru.

  ‘On nights like these I think of the night when Tirru was born. I wonder how he’s doing in Calcutta. He never writes.’

  ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep,’ said Kachheru wearily. He knew the work that lay ahead of him the next morning, and he did not want to waste his hours of sleep in idle and disturbing chatter.

  But for a while he lay awake with his own thoughts. The wind howled and ceased and howled again, and water continued to leak in. In the end he got up to improvise some temporary repair to his wife’s inefficient thatching.

  Outside, the solid world of huts and trees, walls and wells, was now a shapeless, threatening roar of wind, water, moonlight, lightning, clouds and thunder. The land on which the untouchable castes lived was on the northern outskirts of the village. Kachheru was lucky; his own hut, though small, was not on the lowest land; it was in fact on the edge of a low escarpment of earth. But further below him he could see the rain-blurred outlines of huts that would be awash with water and filth by morning.

  When he woke up, it was not yet light. He put on his dirty dhoti, and made his way through the slush of the village lanes to Rasheed’s father’s house. The rain had stopped, but the neem trees were still sprinkling droplets of water on him—and on the sweeper-women who were moving silently from house to house removing the garbage left outside at night by the women of the house. A few pigs grunted their way through the lanes, gobbling up whatever scraps or excrement they could find. All the dogs were silent, though a cock crowed occasionally in the waning darkness.

  Gradually it became lighter. By now Kachheru, who had been walking slowly but in a deliberate manner along the slightly drier edges of the slushy lanes, was no longer near the scene of the worst damage, damage that sometimes distressed him as much as it did his wife, but which he had learned to ignore.

  Kachheru looked around when he got to Rasheed’s father’s house. He could not see anyone, but he assumed that Baba at least was awake; he was a stickler for the pre-dawn prayer. A couple of people were sleeping on charpoys on the covered verandah; they must have been sleeping in the courtyard and had probably been caught in the sudden rain. Kachheru passed his hand over his wrinkled face and allowed himself to smile.

  Suddenly there was a desperate mixture of quacks and clucks. A duck, king of the courtyard, with its head craned forward aggressively, but with an incongruously pacific expression on its face, was chasing (by turns) a cock, a couple of hens, and a few large chicks across the brick and mud—towards and then away from the cattle-shed, around the neem tree, and across the lane to the house where Baba and his younger son lived.


  Kachheru rested on his haunches for a while. Then he went to the water-pump and splashed some water over his bare and muddy feet. A small black goat was butting its head against the shaft of the water-pump. Kachheru scratched its head. Its cynical yellow eyes looked back at him, and it bleated in complaint when he stopped.

  Kachheru climbed the four steps to the door of the room where the ploughs were stored. Rasheed’s father had three ploughs, two local or desi ones with pointed wooden shares and one mishtan plough with a curved metallic share which Kachheru ignored. He left open the door to the room, and pulled the desi ploughs into the light of the entrance. Then he sat down on his haunches once again and examined the two ploughs. Eventually he placed one on his shoulder and walked across the courtyard to the cattle-shed. The cattle turned their heads at his approach, and he, pleased to see them, said, ‘Aaaah! aaaaah!’ in a low and comforting tone.

  First, he fed all the cattle, mixing a little more grain than usual into the mush of hay and straw and water that was their fare in the hot weather. Even the black water buffaloes—usually sent out to forage for themselves under the supervision of a herdboy—were fed, since it was difficult for them to find enough to graze on in this season. Then he adjusted muzzles and ropes to the necks and noses of the pair of intelligent white bullocks he most liked to work with. He picked up a long stick that was leaning against the wall of the cattle-shed and drove them out gently. Aloud, but so that no one would hear him, he said:

  ‘If it weren’t for me, you’d be finished.’

  As he was about to yoke the bullocks together he suddenly remembered something. Telling them sternly to remain exactly where they were he went back across the courtyard to the room opposite. He got out a spade and carried it across. The bullocks had not strayed. He praised them, then yoked them, and placed the plough upside down on the yoke, letting them drag it along while he shouldered his spade.

  It was expected of Kachheru that whenever there was rain during the dry summer months he would go for the next day or two into his master’s fields and plough them while there was still water in the soil. He was to go from field to field, and plough from morning till evening in order to take full advantage of this temporary moisture. It was exhausting labour, and it was not paid for.

  Kachheru was one of Rasheed’s father’s chamars, and was on call at any time he wanted, not just for farming tasks but for any odd jobs—whether it was pumping water for a bath or taking a message to the other end of the village or hauling arhar stalks on to the roof of the house to dry for cooking fuel. Unlike other strangers he was granted the special and very occasional dispensation of entrance into the sanctum of the house, especially if something needed to be lugged on to the roof. After the death of Rasheed’s elder brother, it had become necessary to have help in the house for the heavier tasks. But whenever Kachheru was called in, any women at home locked themselves in one of the rooms or slipped out into the vegetable garden at the back, staying as close to the wall of the house as possible.

  In return for his services, he was taken care of by the family. This meant that he was given a certain amount of grain at harvest time: not enough, however, to provide for even a basic diet for himself and his wife. He had also been allowed a small plot of land to farm on his own, whenever his time was not required by his master. His master also lent him the use of his plough and bullocks if he felt he could spare them, as well as spades, hoes, and other tools, none of which Kachheru possessed or felt it worthwhile indebting himself to buy in order to till his small plot.

  He was overworked, but it was not so much his mind as the exhaustion of his body that told him this. As the years had passed and he had never raised his head in rebellion or rudeness, he was now treated more politely by the family he had served for forty years, ever since he was a boy. They told him what he had to do, but did not shout at him in the voice of insulting command appropriate for the subservient caste to which he belonged. Rasheed’s father sometimes called him ‘my old one’, which pleased Kachheru. He was given a kind of pre-eminence among his chamars, and was asked to supervise them from time to time during the busiest farming seasons.

  Yet when his only son Tirru had said that he wanted to get out of Debaria and its caste-ridden, poverty-stricken, unrelievedly back-breaking, hopeless life, Kachheru had not objected. Kachheru’s wife had pleaded with her son not to go, but her husband’s unspoken support had weighed heavily on the other side.

  What future lay for their son in the village? He had no land, he had no money, and it was only at great sacrifice to the family—which had had to forgo the income that the boy would have brought in by herding cattle—that he had been educated to the sixth class at the government primary school a few miles away. Was this in order that he should kill himself working in the burning heat of the fields? Whatever Kachheru thought of his own life, he did not wish it upon his son. Let the boy go to Brahmpur or Calcutta or Bombay or wherever he chose and find work there: any kind of work, whether as a domestic servant or as a factory- or mill-hand.

  At first Tirru had sent back money, and had written affectionate letters home in Hindi which Kachheru begged the postman or the bania at the shop—when they had the time—to read out for him. Sometimes he asked them to read them out several times, until they were irritated and puzzled. Then he would dictate replies which he would beg them to transcribe on a postcard. The boy had returned for the wedding of his two younger sisters, and had even helped with their dowries. But for the last year there had been no letters from Calcutta at all, and several of Kachheru’s letters were returned to sender. Not all, though; and so he continued to write a monthly letter to their son’s old address. But where he was, what had happened to him, and why he had stopped writing he could not imagine—and feared to. It was as if their son had half-ceased to exist. His wife was distraught. Sometimes she wept to herself in the dark, sometimes she prayed at a small orange-stained niche in a pipal tree where the village deity was said to live and where she had taken her son to be blessed before his departure. Every day she reminded Kachheru of how she had foreseen it all.

  Finally one day he suggested to his wife that he would seek his master’s permission and financial support (though he knew this meant falling into a bottomless pit of debt) to go to Calcutta to search for their son. But she had fallen weeping on the ground, full of nameless terrors. Kachheru had rarely even been to Salimpur, and never to the district town of Rudhia. Brahmpur, let alone Calcutta, was entirely outside his imagination. She, for her part, had only known two villages, the village into which she had been born and the village into which she had married.

  8.11

  It was cool, and there was a morning breeze. From the pigeon-house came the sound of unfrantic, heavy cooing. Then a few pigeons began to fly around: some grey ones with black bands, some brownish ones, one or two white ones. Kachheru hummed a bhajan to himself as he walked the bullocks out of the village.

  A few poor women and children, mostly of his own caste, had come out with baskets to glean the fields that had been harvested yesterday. Ordinarily by coming out as early as this they would have stolen a march on the birds and small animals that picked the fields bare. But now the gleaners were looking for grains of food in a morass of mud.

  It was not unpleasant to be ploughing at this time of day. It was cool, and walking ankle-deep in cool water and mud behind a pair of well-trained and obedient bullocks (Kachheru had trained this pair himself) felt fine. He rarely needed to use his stick; unlike many peasants, he did not enjoy using it at all. The pair responded to his repertory of calls, moving anticlockwise in intersecting circuits around the field, as close to the edge as possible, drawing the plough slowly behind them. Kachheru continued to sing to himself, interrupting his bhajan with ‘wo! wo!’ or ‘taka taka’ or other commands, and then picked up the tune not from where he had left off but from where he would have been had he never stopped singing. After the whole of the first field was covered with furrows—a field twice as large
as the one he farmed for himself—he was sweating with exertion. The sun had now risen about fifteen degrees in the sky, and it was becoming warm. He let the bullocks rest, and went around the untouched corners of the field, digging up the earth with his spade.

  As the morning progressed he stopped singing. A couple of times he lost patience with the bullocks, and gave them a stroke or two with the stick—especially the outer one, who had decided to halt when his fellow did, instead of continuing to wheel around as he had been ordered to.

  Kachheru was now working at a steady pace, using with care his finite energy and that of his cattle. It had grown unbearably hot, and the sweat poured down from his forehead into his eyebrows and trickled down from there into his eyes. He wiped it from time to time with the back of his right hand, keeping steady his hold on the plough with the left. By midday he was exhausted. He led the cattle to a ditch, but the water there, though they drank it, was warm. He himself drank from the leather bag that he had filled at the water-pump before setting out.

  His wife came out into the fields when the sun was at its height, bringing him rotis, salt, a few chillies, and some lassi to drink. She watched him eat in silence, asked him if he wanted her to do anything else, and returned.

  A little later Rasheed’s father turned up with an umbrella that he used as a parasol. He squatted on a low ridge of mud that divided one field from another, and said a word or two of encouragement to Kachheru. ‘It’s true what they say,’ he said. ‘There’s no work as hard as farming.’ Kachheru did not answer, but nodded respectfully. He was beginning to feel ill. When Rasheed’s father left, the fact of his presence was marked by the red-stained earth where he had spat out his paan-juice.