The Author

MULK RAJ ANAND (1905-2004), novelist, short story writer, essayist and art critic, alongwith Raja Rao and R.K. Narayan, is frequently referred to as ‘founding father’ of Indo-English writing. He began his career by writing for T.S. Eliot’s Criterion and went on to win international fame with his heart-warming portraits of the Indian landscape and its people. By injecting Indian colloquial sounds into his writings, he anticipated Salman Rushdie’s supposed breakthrough in Midnight’s Children by more than four decades.

Author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, and critical writings, Mulk Raj Anand was honoured with Sahitya Akademi Award, the coveted Indian award for literary writing, and held the Tagore Chair at the Punjab University.

‘Anand’s historic importance has already been established... his works guide us through the multitudinous complexity of India with more verve than any other prose writer of his time.’

Alistair Niven in The Hindu

Copyright

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Print ISBN-13: 9788122204141

Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts ...and Other Stories

© Mulk Raj Anand

Published by

Orient Paperbacks

(A division of Vision Books Pvt. Ltd.)

5A/8 Ansari Road, New Delhi-110 002

www.orientpaperbacks.com

Table of Contents

The Author

Copyright

Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts

Appearance and Reality

Boots

Professor Cheeta

The Lady and the Pedlar

Glossary

Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts

Dedicated to Marian Evans

‘Ohe what is your condition?’ Nur heard the voice of his father through his broken half-sleep as from faraway. His eyes opened against his will. In the stillness of that hour the gigantic, padded-faced, wry-mouthed presence of the Chaudhri, terrifying like Nero, seemed inauspicious. Nur closed his eyes, dipping them into the comfort of sleep and escaping from the fear that his father’s form sent through him...

‘Ohe, what is your condition? I am asking you,’ said the Chaudhri advancing from the foot of the bed. And, without waiting for an answer, he continued: ‘Have you been comfortable in the night? You haven’t had any blood, I hope?’

Nur was terrified that his father would come nearer. Half opening his eyes, he said in a whisper: ‘Better.’ And, as if to ward off the Chaudhri’s stare, he what is your condition?’ Nur heard the voice of his father through his broken half-sleep as from faraway. His eyes opened against his will. In the stillness of that hour the gigantic, padded-faced, wry-mouthed presence of the Chaudhri, terrifying like Nero, seemed inauspicious. Nur closed his eyes, dipping them into the comfort of sleep and escaping from the fear that his father’s form sent through him...

‘Ohe, what is your condition? I am asking you,’ said the Chaudhri advancing from the foot of the bed. And, without waiting for an answer, he continued: ‘Have you been comfortable in the night? You haven’t had any blood, I hope?’

Nur was terrified that his father would come nearer. Half opening his eyes, he said in a whisper: ‘Better.’ And, as if to ward off the Chaudhri’s stare, he tried to assume the casual tones of the healthy person which he knew he was expected to be.

‘Why can’t you answer properly, swine? Why do you sulk all the time?’ the Chaudhri said, his grey-green eyes flashing. ‘You should try and make an effort to get well, as I can’t go on breaking myself to pay the Doctor’s fees every morning?’

‘I am better, Chaudhriji,’ Nur said, still assuming a normal manner. ‘I am much better.’

‘Achha then, wake up now and mention the name of Allah-mian for a change,’ the Chaudhri said softening. And he hesitated for a moment, looked round the bed and added: ‘Your grandmother will be coming down soon...’

Then shaking his head and making a grimace, he swerved on his feet and walked away.

Nur closed his eyes so as not to see his retreating form. A moment before the Chaudhri had turned, the boy’s gaze had fallen on the prickly silver bristles of his unshaven beard and he recoiled. He could hear the stamping of the Chaudhri’s feet going down the stairs. He quavered, struggling to throw off the spell of fear which his father cast on him. He twisted his lips as waves of resentment warmed his heavy, sleepy limbs. ‘No, I don’t want to live,’ he said with the obstinate spite of a child, and then to strengthen his sense of opposition, added: ‘I wish I were dead.’ And as soon as he said it he wanted to stifle the thought: his father’s footsteps were out of the reach of his ears now.

The body of death lingered on the sick bed, wrapped in a white shroud...

Waking in a hot sweat from his half-sleep he could see it lying there, on the giant bed in the narrow front room on the first floor of his father’s congested two-storied house. It was his own body; it looked like a corpse because he had gathered the sheet tight round him at night, and because he was dying, dying of consumption.

A slight tremor of panic ran through him at the thought, with a subtle violence. He stirred on his back and shuffled his legs about. Then, quickly loosening the sheet from his side, as if he were arranging himself in readiness for the visit of the Doctor, he spread the cloth till it sagged into a ruffled disorder, and sought to still the ache of apprehension.

If only his heart would stop fluttering, he thought impatiently. ‘You mustn’t talk of death,’ as grandma would say, ‘May I be your sacrifice; and what an inauspicious talk they do.’

He moved his head, but couldn’t shake off the vision, so he began to hum the melody of a verse written by Iqbal, his wife’s namesake, a favourite tune of his. The half-serious, half-playful sentiment in it was so appropriate.

‘Your love has straightened all the curves of my life...’

He didn’t complete the verse; the lack of faith in his voice betrayed the fear for his lungs.

He was becoming obsessed again now...

His fine face, with the slightly dilated nostrils, with the brown eyes bulging out of the deep sockets and the indrawn cheeks, was flushed, not with the rich pink of the Sahibs, as it had always been flushed since his childhood, but with the shame of a rose which has withered before it has begun to bloom. His body was limp except for the spine, which ached as it had ached increasingly through having to lie in bed day after day for five months, and the hard ribs and collarbone which seemed to crack as they rose out of his transparent flesh like the dry roots of a bare tree still sound at the heart. But he was calm as if his whole body, eaten through by the germ, was sensitive to his doom; the clear forehead that sighted with cool composure each anxious thought in his fevered brain, wrestling with the problem of how to get well; the skeleton of his chest which rose and fell with the nervous heartbeats beneath it as if eager to know how to get better; the tender eyes that bent their light, now inwards, now outwards, and the dry lips on which the ghost of a sigh waited to become evanescent.

During the past months he had felt his perceptions become acuter: he had noticed the change from summer to autumn in almost every shade of air, as it touched his eyes, his lips, his ears and the cells of his body. But lucidity of this knowledge was being continually baulked by the fear, the obsession which possessed him.

He turned over and felt the terror of falling from the terrace at the top of the house. Only it was like a fall in a slow motion picture, slipping slowly past every fraction of an inch. If only one could catch hold of the projection of the terrace, or if only there was an obstruction on the way, one might be saved. Why didn’t the Chaudhri have wooden awnings built on the top of the windows? They would have arrested the glare of the sun during the day, and they would have checked a fall if someone, anyone, a child or, no, a cat fell.

He made an effort to stop the morbid run of his thought, shook his head as if to deafen his own cries and blinked his eyes at the phantom of peril.

‘Life is short and art is long,’ he muttered tiredly a phrase he had learnt at college. Then he lifted his head and looked at the bars of light which shone like the silvery spokes of the day through the chinks of the closed windows. ‘Grandmother will be coming down from the kitchen to see me,’ he said to himself.

She always came down first thing in the morning, the poor old woman, and again the last thing at night. And when he was a child, she had told him lots of fairy stories. He remembered that one which she had told him after his mother had died and which he had retold her with several variations during the holidays.

‘How did it run?’

Once upon a time there was a little boy whose father was a confectioner in the bazaar and whose mother was a beautiful houri. And he had an old grandmother who loved him very much and who used to take him to his father’s shop to eat a sweet pancake and semolina every morning. And he used to toddle and walk holding the hand of his father among the grease and the grime, among the soot of steaming cauldrons and deep black-bottomed pans, full of treacle and clarified butter, and the mud of coolies’ feet bearing sacks of sugar, fruit and flour. And then he had learnt to speak. And when he spoke it was such a pretty speech that they said to his father: ‘He ought to be sent to the Government school when he grows up, for he will surely become a babu with his pretty speech.’ And because he had a lovely pink face, with dark brown eyes and sleek brown hair, they said: ‘He will surely pass his MA and become a deputy collector sahib.’ And he had been so happy to hear their prophecies, and he had become so naughty and enthusiastic, that he would smack anybody who did not give him a pice just as if he were already a deputy collector. But when he was five, the cruel angel Izrael had come and taken away his mother. And he had cried when his mother, who was a houri, did not come back from the heaven where she had gone visiting. And another woman had come into their house instead, who, his father had said, was his new mother. But she was only a little bigger than he and he could not call her mother as she quarrelled with him over the toys when they played together. And he had been sad as he had never been sad before. But his grandmother loved him and doted upon him just like his mother, and she laid him in her arms as she made garlands for sale in the bazaar. And then, one day, his father had come to him and said to him that he was grown up now and must go to school to learn to be a big babu and get an MA pass, and that he would receive a pice a day for his pocket if he did his lessons well, and that if in addition he came home and learnt the Koran and said the five prayers prescribed by religion, he would get two pice. And that was the day he had started to be a ‘Master of Arts’.

‘But, oh, why did they drag me into the dust by making me a Master of Arts?’ he wearily protested, falling back exhausted, the words trailing like a long pain though they had emerged quite casually in a spontaneous new rhythm.

There was the glow of revelation about them, about the ordinary but natural and expressive sequence into which they had flowed, even though they were born of the doom which sat on him. And the memories of his past seemed to come back to him in their track as if they were an ‘open sesame’; seemed to come back with the force and vivacity of rapiers thrust in the raw wounds of his heart. For from the first cry at birth his life had been pain-marred.

‘Sh, sh,’ his mother had warned the world and consoled him, the inconsolable: ‘What is it’ then, ‘didums, di, di, mother’s darling, di, didi, dum...’ then ‘he is hungry... don’t cry,’ then, ‘mother’s dearest, loveliest darling... he has been neglected’ then... ‘my pet... my darling... don’t cry then...’ And she had swayed him in her arms, cheek to cheek, flesh to flesh in tenderness... slow glory of touch crept into the rapture of smiles, bubbling with the joy of being borne and tickled to laughter...

‘Oh mother, oh mother, where are you now?’

Beyond the corpse in the darkness of the grave she had become a ghost. In the silence of his doom he wondered whether through the barriers of all these years, her heart could still beat with a piteous sound for him, whether it could still bleed with warm love and anguish at the sound of his tears. ‘In the name of the merciful and the compassionate God,’ she used to say, and gather him into her arms if he woke up in the night, gather him with a surging agony of warmth, answered only by his cries, and still patient when his father heaped all the curses and all the abuse, all the complaints of the mortal wrongs he had suffered to be awakened by the row... Ebbing with time, receding into thin air, remote she was now, buried under the mound of earth in the cemetery outside Lohgarh gate, which was surrounded by the aura of fear in the night, of suspense in the still whiteness of the noon, except on Fridays when people went to visit the Pir who kept guard on the graves and muttered charms to keep the ghosts away, in return for the gifts and for the pice tendered to him. He remembered the horror of a moment when his grandmother had taken him there and he had seen a skull beside a crumbling mound in the empty sockets of which millions of ants were crawling. He had wondered whether his mother had become an ugly demon with a malevolent steady stare in the pits of her head and a terrible changeless grin on the thrusted teeth exposed from hard, indrawn lips.

But surely she wasn’t eaten by the worms... No, no, not his mother... though why not?

He jerked his body and compressed his lips tight so that he shouldn’t moan, shouldn’t even sigh, and he took the fingers of his right hand to his left to feel the pulse, though he didn’t listen to the verdict, only mechanically registering the pumping of the blood.

Far off from this dawn, remote, half forgotten, ages before now, before the high school and college, there was a queer impatience, in the feel of early mornings, the fear of being late at school, the violent motion in the belly even as he had gulped hot tea and swallowed mouthfuls of fried parathas dipped in mutton gravy... Thank God, one was rid of that, though it had taken him a long time, for he was seldom ill even though he had prayed in secret to be ill... As he had hurried on his way to school, the dizzy vision of the Master’s perpendicular rod had blotted out space and time, while the clothes stuck to the flesh in the clammy heat and perspiration of summer mornings. His grandmother had no sense of time and did not start cooking his meal until she had said her prayers and swept the rooms of the house from the top storey to the ground floor... He had begged his father to buy him a watch, one of those nice shiny watches with a chain which he could carry in the pocket of his waistcoat to school, as all the other boys had watches and wouldn’t show them to him except from a distance, affecting to be superior Sahibs like Mercado Sahib, the Headmaster. But his father had said, that he ought to get up by the muezzin’s call at dawn and say prayers every morning. And then this additional trouble had been added to his difficulties as a kind of reward for his attempt to be happy and fashionable. For, as the fat mullah in the mosque at the end of the narrow lane, in which the flies buzzed over the children’s yellow excretions in the drain, sounded the muezzin’s call, he had to shake himself out of the bed lest his father might beat him for disobeying. And, although he did not know how to say the prayers, he had to run to the mosque to do the wuzu, wash himself, join the congregation and follow it in the various postures: sit, stand, kneel, rub his forehead on the ground and murmur the verses in Arabic which the mullah had taught him by rote during the special lessons he gave him in the evenings, in return for the rich meals, the new turban, the shirt, the shalwar[1], the shawl, the shoes and other ‘presents’ which he received for looking after the spiritual welfare of the Chaudhri’s son. ‘God gives man gifts to obtain his own ends.’ He muttered the proverb ironically.

What was the use of all those prayers, he had never been able to discover in his life. He had never been able to learn Arabic well enough to understand the Koran, though he had repeated the Suras from the first page to the last hundreds of times. What was the use of cleaning and purifying oneself, for instance, if the clothes one wore when saying prayers were soiled by all the dirt of the streets and the sweat of the body at night... And though he had never told anyone, while he was saying prayers on a constipated belly he had involuntarily discharged a stinking wind which had fairly resounded back from the walls of the mosque to his own ears, so that it had made him burst out with an embarrassed laugh, though the elders in the congregation who were themselves used to letting loose wind had carried on with their prayers, only turning their eyes a little. He had been afraid that God must have heard it, but then he had reassured himself that since he discharged wind because of the exercise involved in kneeling, bending, standing, sitting and kneeling again, which was the prescribed method of saying prayers, surely God would forgive him for his sin. ‘Thus is the word of thy Lord verified against those who commit abomination!’ What a fool he had been to grieve over the wrath of that impotent oracle of blind vision, ‘the merciful and the compassionate God, to whom all praise belongs, who is the Lord of all worlds, the ruler of the Day of Judgment, whom all humanity serves and whom it asks for aid and to whom the fat mullah calls out in deafening cries every morning, noon, afternoon, evening and night!’

‘In the face of the falsehood and lure of the world, I could laugh,’ he said to himself.

And yet he felt cheated to be fading away imprisoned in this room with his allotted hours and days, how many he did not know, being conscious only of his heart beating, pounding at his chest in the silence of the morning, mingling with the hum of a long-drawn wail, far off like the din of his soul in strife, and near, as near as where the cock crowed on the roof of someone’s house in the gulley.

The illness seemed to have deafened his ears as if the burnt-up tissue in his body had risen in the haze and clogged that sense, but otherwise he felt lighter, more transparent. He applied his ears and listened attentively, his gaze fluttering as though he were looking for something which he had lost in this room or was trying to remember something which he had forgotten.

‘Allah-ho-Akbar,’ came the voice of the mullah.

‘Dur, dur, dog,’ Nur murmured rising out of his resignation, angered by the groans of a dry as dust formalist fed by the food of charity.

‘Call the faithful to prayer, call them to prayer, you dog. I hate you and I hate your God. I hate you all! To incur your wrath I spit on your face and I spit on the face of your God!’ And he was about to raise himself from his pillow to give his words the confirmation of the act when a choking cough seized him and he was caught in the paroxysms of an agony that seemed as if it would be his last.

‘Nur, Nur, my child, what is it my son? What is it, my darling son?’ his grandmother called, coming down the stairs.

She had the lines of her seventy odd years written on her face and hobbled miserably, shaking her head as if she were drunk.

He coughed and the effort seemed to stir each fibre of his being, the scourge of that uncertainty which had possessed him for months.

His grandmother bent her twisted, wrinkled face, straining to touch his forehead with her lips, but unable to do so as the salt tide of tears dimmed her sight. Her hands shook convulsively with the effort of bending.

‘What is it, my child? What is it, my son? May I be your sacrifice!’ she soothed with pouting lips.

‘Nothing, grandmother, nothing is the matter,’ he said gasping for breath as if he had lost a heartbeat. ‘I am all right, I am all right. You go and rest.’

‘Do have some of the tea I have made for you, my son,’ she said, ‘do have a sip. . . I will open the windows — the sun is shining outside.’ But as he had closed his eyes and paled for a moment, she opened her mouth, frightened and looked at him dazedly.

‘Achha, achha,’ he sighed impatiently lest she should fuss. ‘But don’t open the windows. You go and rest.’

She hobbled by the side of the bed and relaxed. Then with indifferent fingers she pulled the quilt, which he had thrown away on one side during the night, over his legs. Glancing around to see whether everything was in order she scanned his face casually, as if she had come to accept the deathlessness of his sick body, and she lingered by the bedside.

He felt oppressed by her presence as if she had disturbed him and brought on his spasm of coughing.

‘It isn’t that I am a child anymore, grandma,’ he said. ‘I will be all right, you go and rest.’

‘You are still a child to me, my son,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you will be all right? There is your tea. I have put it on the shelf. Now are you sure? I will see to the meal then. I will go.’ And looking around and under the bed, she lifted the chamber and said again: ‘Achha, I will go. But call me if you need anything...’

As the image of her hobbling, bent form receded, he pitied and hated her. She was his father’s mother. And always he had pitied and hated her. The pride of his love for his dead mother had never overcome the barrier of the wrong she had done him in allowing his father to marry again. And since she had aged too he had never been able to overcome her ugliness; and the weight of her doting affection had only increased the barrier.

In the prolonged weariness of five bedridden months the ebb and flow of his hope in life had infused in him a strange tenderness for everyone and he had loved her for her devotion. She was old and stupid and stumbling, but there was something so pitiable about her that he had let her take the place of his mother. And yet the bitterness of her calm acceptance of his father’s brutality persisted, the bitterness of those howls which he had uttered when his father beat him and the tears he had shed, tears of shame and chagrin when he had been made to accept the humiliation of orders from his stepmother, of the suffering they had all tried to extract from him.

‘They all tried to oppress me, they have broken and crushed me and left me destroyed, and now they make a fuss of me and fetch me medicines and run here and there trying to save my life, the hypocrites!’  he muttered under his breath, and looked away at the books that lay by the bottles of medicine on the narrow shelf, crowded by the odds and ends of his stepmother, her looking glass, and her assortment of glass bangles.

As he turned over he felt the weakness of his lungs go silently to his head, and he lay still in a sleepy inertia through which the bundles of dirty clothes that hung like festoons from the coloured pegs on the walls, the stacks of cheaply painted trunks and the sacks of sugar over which the rats had pissed in stinking green patterns, seemed to become unbearably depressing. The whitewashed walls blackened by the soot of slow hearthfires in the gulley seemed to be crowding in on him and the feeling that he could never get up and escape from the sordid reality of his home into the world of tall mirrors and gilded chairs and mahogany tables depicted at the Mahna Singh Theatre, made him hopeless.

A fresh twitching of the lungs frightened him. He closed his eyes and tried not to move even the fraction of an inch, obsessed by the superstitious awe which the Doctor’s orders not to excite himself in anyway had spread over him.

And, for a moment, he lay resigned and apathetic like a corpse which does not care about the soil it is laid on, though his eyelids pressed heavily and his nerves quivered as if his inside had become more acutely sensitive to the fear and sorrow that had crushed him through the last months.

He felt a hard knot of saliva settling in the passage of his throat.

He stirred his throat and half opening his eyes, spat into the spittoon. He closed his eyes, afraid to see the dark-red-white flame trailing down from his mouth. He fell back exhausted. It was terrible to be so weak. He sought to rest again, closing his eyes in the warmth through which swirled the noise of sparrows twittering in the lane. He lent himself to the soothing warmth of the pillows beneath his head and accepted his helplessness.

‘What was I thinking before Grandma came?’ he asked himself. But there was no answer from the depths of his body which now seemed stretched in a repose morbidly expectant. His heavy heart beatout a refrain; ‘I must get well, I must get well,’ as if it were still drugged with its obstinate belief in existence. And there was a quickening at the back of his head.

In the dim light of the half-sleep which came over him, beyond the massed clouds of darkness, he was walking by the thick, muddy, sewage stream overflowing with slime, that ran in the shadow of the town’s red brick wall and into which people emptied rats, live snakes, dead dogs and cats... There was the foul reek of dung and urine from the trolley train which ran from the houses of the sweepers through the town wall past the gate of Lohgarh to the vast valley near the Bhagtanwallah Gate, where the refuse was burnt... He had often wanted to become an engine driver so that he could drive the little engine of this train... But the vision of the black-skinned, white-clad Master with a primly cut, scraggy beard had remained. The Master stood in the classroom, by the shoemakers’ houses, the corners of his eyes shot red with rage as if he were made of some unearthly clay, and he, Nur, had entered late. In one fearful moment he had trembled merely to see the fresh cane which lay on the table; he had known that the accusation in the Master’s eyes was coloured by revenge rather than by the anger at his lateness: the Master had asked him to bring him a basket of sweets from his father’s shop and when he had begged his father to give him the gift to offer to the Master, the Chaudhri had refused, saying, ‘I don’t keep a shop for the purpose of charity, it is hard enough for me to make a living and pay your school fees.’ And, of course, he had never dared to tell this to the Master... The dread of the greedy dog, as he stood there, grimly seeped into his bones. And when the demon actually lifted the cane, he began to shriek in agony, whereupon the Master shouted to him, ‘Be quiet or I will give you one stripe more for everyone after which you howl!’ And as he howled and cried, ‘Oh spare me, oh spare me, Masterji,’ long before the sweep of every blow from the cane shimmered before his terror-stricken eyes, the ghost of the devil had worked himself up to an even grimmer rage so that his words tumbled over each other as he numbered the blows, while he begged, prayed, supplicated to the cruel tyrant, drifting further and further and shouting the more, though he knew that his protest would increase the sum of his punishment...

In a corner of the room he sat alternately hating his mother, who stood in the chamber of horrors, in the oblivion of her hell raging with fire and water, for not coming to his rescue, and loving her as she stood with tears of despair in her eyes and arms outstretched, appealing to the angel Gabriel to help her son. ‘Oh mother, don’t be silly; don’t whine like a pauper,’ he said as he nursed his smarting limbs, unable to lift his eyes for shame, as the tears welled in them against his will. ‘We have some prestige. The Chaudhri is respected by the whole bazaar and I shall ask him to report to the Head Master...’ But if the Chaudhri saw the Head Master the Munshi would become far more revengeful... Already he had made a slip at spelling and the Master was putting pencils between his fingers and pressing them hard, hard, harder, and Nur could see himself writhing and shrieking and crying as he rolled on the floor to release his cracking bones from the Master’s grasp...

The torment flushed his face above the dream which strayed vaguely back from the school compound to the cement tank in which the devout at the mosque washed their feet in muddy water...

He was swaying up and down, reading the Suras aloud by the light of the cotton wick soaked in olive oil in the earthen saucer lamp in a corner of the mosque, the Koran laid on a bookrest before him, when he felt himself dozing from the fatigue of a long day. Suddenly from the darkness behind him there was a kick in his ribs and Maulvi Shahab-Din stood, caressing his beard and shouting: ‘Beware, son of a swine, and recite the Suras or else your mean, dirty father will tell me that I don’t deserve any new clothes this year because I haven’t taught you to remember the Suras...’ And coming home through the dark, dirty lane where bulls roamed and fakirs prowled, he slipped into the gutter and bruised his elbow and cried to his grandmother. His father was in the lavatory upstairs and terror seeped into the house. The Chaudhri came down suddenly and gave him two slaps for complaining and whining all the time, and he was sulking with the shame of his humiliation, not showing his face to anyone, refusing to eat his food and abusing grandma, and she was saying she would buy him some sweets at a shop which stock English peppermints.

Now the barren waste of a flat plain arose, rank with cactus and brown burnt grass smouldering in the heat of the day, beyond which loomed a fortress, dirtied by time to an ochre, brown cinnabar, except for the crimson cupolas and battlements overgrown with moss. He was wandering alone in it, making for the moat which was full of stones and splinters and knife-edged grass, and as he drifted across it, sulking and forlorn, he was whimpering in a broken, self-pitying voice: ‘Why doesn’t God give me death?’ The fortress became the formal red brick building of the Government High School and beyond were two mounds like pyramids in the desert of Kerbala; a caravan of camels, tied nose to tail, tail to nose, was travelling slowly in the torrid glare of a blue sky whitening with the hot sighs of the burnt earth and with his sobs, as he ran to and fro, looking for the shade of a palm tree, on bare feet blistering with the fire of the bright yellow sand... He was weeping with broken, spluttering cries, the sweat was pouring down his body, and he was tired of his fruitless search for the oasis in the barren expanse of the sun-soaked land. Now he was on the outskirts of the Railway Station, and by a dump of iron girders, wooden beams, the cinders of burnt coal and rubbish, stood a grove of trees surrounding a tank. He stooped and put his mouth to the pool in the forest like an animal and drank off the liquid till his belly was bursting.

As he turned round to look at the jungle it was Gol Bagh where he had gone to play cricket with his friends during the school days... He was alone and it was twilight and he was hurrying home, afraid that his father would beat him if he had happened to come home from the shop to relieve himself and found that Nur hadn’t returned. But not all the alacrity he put into his steps could shorten the long dusty distance to Lohgarh past the fuelwood stalls, past the dirty, greasy cookshops for travellers, compared to which his father’s shop was a luxury palace, past the pedlars who hawked cabbages, turnips, cucumbers and melons as they bent over their three-wheeled, square, box-structured wheelbarrows, to guard against the pilfering Hindu women who refused to move without getting something for nothing after they had made their purchases, past the panting Kashmiri coolies, loaded with sacks of flour on their back, their brows glistening with sweat and feet coated with mud, and past the stream of dead Hindus swathed in red cloth painted with golden stars borne hurriedly along for a late funeral by groups of men chanting, ‘The name of God is Truth...’ The slow chant seemed to become muffled, turning into the whisper of a breeze which was creeping into him with the premonition that one of the ghosts, which according to the Hindus strayed about the earth before rising to heaven, was following him and would pounce on him if he looked back...

Though there were people about, though he had walked far away from the funeral ground enclosed by a high wall where the dead were burnt, he was possessed by the dread, so that he started running fast, heading straight for his father’s shop instead of going home under the lonely shadow of the city wall... In the sullen eyes, staring out of the Chaudhri’s body was a cruel power. ‘Where have you been, rape mother?’ and Nur trembled to see the sweat pouring down his father’s hot, angry face in the light of the smoking kerosene lamp. ‘Where are your shoes, swine? Where have you lost them? Where have you been eating the dust?’ the Chaudhri burst out as he caught hold of a rope and came to hit him. ‘There is no talk, Chaudhriji, forgive him,’ a customer interceded, taking Nur under shelter. Whereupon the Chaudhri swung back to his seat scattering the flies off the foodstuff and cursing: ‘What is the use of having a son! He goes about loafing! As if I was a millionaire and he had nothing to do. It wouldn’t occur to him to come to help me for a few hours. And now he has lost his shoes! Where did you lose your shoes?’ Nur was dumb with terror and began to sob, feeling as if one of the evil ghosts had come and taken possession of his father and would probably follow him home and kill him in the dark of the lane. ‘Why don’t you speak?’ the Chaudhri said and leapt upon him dealing blows till the whole bazaar crowded round to save him from his father’s wrath. The customer who had been shielding him had lifted him and brought him home... He was still weeping and didn’t want to face anyone, not even his benefactor nor his grandmother. He only wanted to sleep... But there was broad daylight out of the windows and the air didn’t seem sinister... What was that?...

He opened his eyes with a start, so suddenly that the pupils under his heavy-eyelids smarted and there was a cracking ache at the back of his head. There stood Gama, a tall black boy who had been a class-fellow of Nur’s since the Infant form till he had been left behind in the fifth class through successive failures, and had given up schooling to become a tonga-driver for Fateh Ali, the contractor.

‘Still asleep, Nur, childling?’ Gama asked. ‘How are you now? I was passing this way. I thought I would look in and see you.’

‘Come, do sit down,’ Nur said in a slow voice. ‘I was just dozing, just thinking, half dreaming, curiously enough I was dreaming about our old school.’

‘And I opened the windows and let in the sunshine on that purgatory,’ Gama said with a mischievous light in his eyes. Then sitting down on an edge of the bed, he bent his head and continued: ‘What is there in education, brother? Waste of time.’ He was half chagrined as he had never been able to outlive the reproach of having failed in his education, and half-audacious because of a genuine contempt for learning that he had achieved since he had become a tonga-driver.

‘Education, education, brother,’ said Nur affecting a learned voice, ‘education means wisdom; wisdom means the correlation of the growth of body and mind: the correlation of the growth of body and mind is achieved through knowledge and knowledge is power: if you have enough recommendations, that is.’ After this he smiled a nervous, apologetic smile as if he were afraid that in spite of his faint mockery, Gama might think he was showing off his superior knowledge, for his friend, in spite of the fact that he was earning more than hundreds of MAs, had a feeling of inferiority engendered by the exaggerated respect for degrees that people had, specially as he was employed in a profession which was well known for its low hooliganism. Seeing, however, that Gama was smiling good humouredly, Nur added: ‘You are right, brother. You are right.’ And he heaved a deep breath and changed his side as if to shake off his lethargy. Gama’s visit had surprised him.

‘Do you remember Master Kanshi Ram?’ asked Gama, laughing. ‘When we were in the fifth primary class...’

Nur smiled in answer. He did remember for he had suffered from Kanshi, who had established a vendetta against him, because he refused to accept the privilege of taking private tuition from the Master, alongwith the sons of the rich merchants of the cloth market. Kanshi charged ten rupees a month from each of the boys and Nur didn’t know how he could ask his father for the money, specially as it was well known that the Master made immoral suggestions to the boys when they went to his house to be coached. One day when he had been left alone in the classroom filling his satchel at the end of the school session, Kanshi had even tried to kiss him and because he had refused to be kissed, the Master had beaten him on the knuckles with a ruler the next morning by making the flimsiest excuse about his pronunciation as he read aloud. Nur had told Gama, who had caught hold of Kanshi by the scruff of the neck that very afternoon and threatened to kill him if he didn’t behave, after which, indeed, Nur had been safe.

‘I often see him about,’ Gama said. ‘He has got grey hair now but he is incorrigible. He still goes about chasing boys. I regret that I didn’t beat him up, the old sod...’ There was a slight bravado in his voice and he chuckled to think of his exploits of those days when he was a wild, free creature, respected for his courage, and not the slave harnessed to Sheikh Fateh Ali’s tonga, like a skinny horse. Then he bent his head again and seemed to retreat into himself.

‘What is the talk?’ Nur asked, feeling the slow burning of a fever in his flesh. He turned his side and saw a basket of fruit by his bed which apparently Gama had bought. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘There is no talk of that, brother,’ said Gama. ‘You will get well and we won’t care for the limp lord. After all, you used to let me copy the sums from your notebooks during the vacations — although do you remember the occasion on which my father almost broke my bones when he caught me copying your answers and I ran away to Calcutta...?’ And he laughed.

‘Yes, I remember,’ Nur said.

It was not so much the memory of Gama’s troubles that he recalled, however, as those of his own. But how far away seemed those endless days when he had trudged to and back from school from this house in Dhab Khatikan, through the narrow deep-rutted intricate bazaars, full of puddles of rain water, where the carts got stuck against each other and held up the traffic for hours; days of utter loneliness only relieved by the few hours of play and an occasional fair to which he was taken by his grandmother; when he had been baulked by the terror of jinns and bhuts and churels and other denizens of the nether worlds over which, the Koran said presided His Satanic Majesty, the Devil, days when he had become conscious of the dearth of books and friends and of his father’s poverty which was responsible for them, dull, irrelevant days when he was obsessed by the desire to grow up as quickly as possible. He had wanted the dignity of age.

‘I have written, rather thought of, the first line of a poem this morning,’ Nur said.

‘Who is there? Who is that with you?’ came the voice of his grandmother from the top of the stairs. ‘It is not your father, is it ?’

‘No, grandma...’ he called back.

‘It’s me, Gama, grandmother,’ the visitor shouted so that Nur might not strain himself by answering, and he turned to his sick friend to see if he had been disturbed by his shout.

Nur’s face was glowing with a pale light though there was a distant look in his eyes, as if he was excited by the visit of his friend, and yet beyond caring for company. So few of his old college friends came to see him, that his whole body seemed thrilled by this contact.

‘Are you sure that I am not tiring you?’ said Gama. Nur moved his head in negation and smiled.

‘Achha then, what is this that you have written, my poet?’ asked Gama half-mockingly.

‘I offer the beginning,’ Nur said, affecting the elaborate manner of Urdu poets.

‘Why did you drag me into the dust by making me an M.A...’

And then, half closing his eyes, he sought to control the muscles of his mouth which were weakening. But he was overcome by self-pity and he felt the tears come to his eyes. He tried to show a brave face by grinding his teeth as if he were swallowing some poisonous physic which was soon going to twist his body into an ugly horror.

Gama sat still for a moment, looking away, then he leant on the bed and laid a limp hand on Nur’s chest.

Across the barriers of pain that sundered him from everyone, Nur strained to touch his friend, but his regret for his failures held him back.

He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment.

In a flash he could see the cool mango-groves where he had gone with Gama. The boy had been kind to him, getting him baskets of fruits from the gardeners to bring home, but he used to beat other people viciously. From the time Gama had left school, why even before that, because he was the son of a vegetable stall-keeper in Chowk Farid, one of the most disreputable quarters of the town, the violence of his deeds had become legendary, and Nur had never really regarded his friend’s life as in any way consistent with inner goodness, and had always been afraid of his hooliganism. The hulking shape of the boy’s huge frame and the profession he had adopted after years of vagabondage were against him too, and Nur recalled how often, since going to college, he had cut him so as not to get a bad name. Now he felt his own superiority lie like a blot upon his heart...

‘Nur, little one, may I go and fetch the Doctor?’ Gama asked with a broken voice.

‘No, you sit here and talk to me a little — that is, if you are not losing fares all the time,’ Nur said. ‘The Doctor will soon come on his morning visit, and then you can go.’

‘Are you sure you don’t feel bad?’ Gama asked.

‘Yes, I am all right,’ Nur said, seeking to ease the strain he felt in accepting the gesture of his friend’s tenderness. ‘You know,’ he continued, to excuse his separateness, ‘the physical exhaustion leaves me so apathetic that I feel as if my back was broken.’

But even as he said so he knew that it was the hardening of his heart through his disillusionment and not the apathy that made him incapable of lifting his hand from under the sheet and putting it into Gama’s.

‘It is strange that you say:

‘Why did you drag me into the dust by making me an M.A.?’

‘Gama said to overcome the sudden gulf between them. ‘Didn’t you like going to college? I...’ But he didn’t finish what he was going to say: that though he had made capital out of his failures at school and his consequent inability to go to college by developing a roughness of action and passion, he would have liked to have gone through a long educational course if only to evade the responsibility of having to earn a living for some more years, especially as one could indulge in any vice and never get a bad name if only one disguised oneself under the name of ‘student.’

‘Yes, brother,’ Nur said and then, sensing the reason for Gama’s hesitation, added, ‘The unattainable seems great. But if you are poor you can’t get anywhere; if you can’t keep pace with the fashions invented by the rich students, they dub you mean and cut you. Achha, there couldn’t be any worse snobbery in the world than that of the...’ And he impatiently twisted his face as if the very thought of poverty evoked in him a kind of disgust, and there was the knowledge of all the little pinpricks and humiliations to his self-respect that he had suffered because he was a confectioner’s son.

For a moment he lay confused. Then he felt his temples throb with the fretting and he tried to calm himself by looking away. His eyes stared at the dilapidated ceiling where the cobwebs hung to their nets among the thick coils of soot, and his face seemed to become enchantingly childlike, as if it had never suffered the pang of a sigh.

‘It was a lucky escape from the prison of that school, where I had always been afraid of being beaten,’ he said smiling. ‘Nobody could beat you at college and the professors treated everyone as gentlemen. And in a way it was as Azad might have said,

‘a golden summer during which I plucked the blossoms from the orchards of many colourful nights and days...’

‘Oh, you mean Azad, the Teddy Sahib, who was your friend, the son of the Health Officer who went mad because he failed to become a deputy collector. Or do you mean the poet, Maulana Muhammad Husein Azad?’ Gama asked with a slight trace of mockery in his voice.

‘I mean Teddy,’ Nur said wistfully. ‘Isn’t it terrible that he should go off his head? He was a marvel, you know...’

‘He must have been, that’s why he went mad, I suppose,’ said Gama with a trace of malice. He had been jealous of Nur’s friendship with Azad.

‘No, really, Gamian,’ Nur said, rising excitedly to the defence of his friend, ‘he was the only friend I made at college, and he was really wonderful. He was driven to madness by people and our kind of bullock’s life...’ He opened his mouth to say something loudly, but thought better of it and sank back, coughing, biting his lips and churning the froth in his mouth.

Gama rubbed his chest slowly, soothingly and contemplated his face, rather frightened. But Nur opened his eyes, breathed a few deep breaths and smiling, lay still for a moment and said: ‘Since the last few days, I have been getting these choking breaths. Yesterday my breathing was better, but I don’t know why I am gasping this morning.’

‘You must not worry about anyone,’ Gama said, ‘You must lie still.’

‘I am all right,’ Nur said slowly. ‘And really I must tell you about poor Azad. You never liked him, you see, you didn’t meet him. He was really maddened by our kind of existence... I remember that the first time I saw him come up to college, dressed in his khaki shirt, shorts, and khaki polo topee[2], an impetuous little fellow, on a rusty old bicycle, I thought the same as you... But the older boys were making fun of the first year fools and they hid Azad’s bicycle and his hat when he went to see the Principal. And when he came out they ragged him by making rude noises, as he looked for his belongings. He could see it in their eyes that they had hidden the things and he asked them smilingly to give them to him. But they refused to own up and just mocked. You would have been sorry for him if you had been there and you would have admired what he did. He challenged them all and fell upon them. I have never seen anything like it — the glint of fire in his eyes when the boys became indecent... He leapt upon them with a quivering face... I knew that none of them would dare to attack me because of you, and I rescued him and showed him where his hat and bicycle were. It was because of that that we became friends and not as people maliciously said later that we had formed a “conspiracy of beloveds.” He was a very affectionate person...’

Gama bent his head with the silent shame of a memory of a year ago when he himself had mocked at Azad, crying out in the bazaar, ‘Hai Babuji,’ with a rude simulation of the tone of a lover sighing for his beloved.

‘He was fond of making speeches,’ Nur said, remembering an evening when Azad had lifted him out of his loneliness by his speech when he won the Ruchi Ram Sahni Declamation Prize, remembering the very colour, and the ring of those words of Azad’s, when with a face transfigured with eagerness he had summed up the universe.

‘ “The whole world is in search of happiness,” he used to say,’ Nur began.

‘What then?’ Gama asked.

Nur paused embarrassedly on the edge of the words as they rang in his ears across the space of six years. He didn’t want to repeat them, as they might easily lend themselves to Gama’s mockery, and yet he couldn’t restrain himself.

‘The whole world is in search of happiness,’ he repeated, loudly, though he knew for certain from the light in Gama’s eyes that if he would not mock, he would certainly not be able to understand the whole meaning of those words. ‘The whole world is in search of happiness, all mankind seeks the privileges of glory and power and wealth. But it is vulgar, I tell you, it is vulgar and stupid, the way in which society distributes her favours. The bitch has no morals. She yields herself to the embraces of any robber, brigand or cheating idiot who has secured for himself the traditional right to a vested interest. And these conscienceless swines have forgotten death, the cancer which grows slowly and surely within them, the cancer of their own decay, the germ of their own decay that they bear within them; and they shall be annihilated long before they have earned their pensions or retired to enjoy their ill-gotten gains...’

Nur paused to look at Gama and to see if he were listening to the words. Gama’s attention was drifting but Nur went on nevertheless as if he were talking aloud to himself.

‘ “But death comes to everyone, you will say, gentlemen,” he had himself posed the question and then burst out with that querulous impatience which characterised him: “Yes, yes, death comes to everyone, but there are two ways of avoiding it. Some form silent conspiracy to forget it; they are the imbeciles who build on graft and extortion and cunning and sheer might and so blacken their souls in the struggle for self-aggrandisement that they daren’t enjoy the gains of their perfidy, and who therefore combine holiness with business like our Lallas, and talk of the things of the spirit even as they pass the hand of satisfaction over their bellies. And then, there are the men who are willing to accept a share in the total gain of the struggle for existence of the community, who want to organise the fight against nature, and who, though afraid of death, seek to conquer it... They will...” I don’t remember the rest,’ Nur said faltering and flushed but exhilarated as if his soul was dancing to the sound of that rhetoric with a recklessness which frightened him.

‘You have said the truth, ‘Why did you drag me in the dust by making me an M.A.’ said Gama quoting the beginning of Nur’s poem against Azad.

‘But really, really, believe me,’ said Nur, ‘I know he went mad because the torn and battered soul of India was struggling inside him, because he seemed to have understood the hopelessness of our lot. Really, he knew and suffered. We used to talk during our long walks, and it is curious that we felt we knew what was wrong with India and with ourselves, but couldn’t do anything, and only sank deeper and deeper into despair. I must say I owe him a great deal...’

‘Your illness, for instance,’ said Gama.

‘No, really,’ protested Nur. ‘It may be that he awakened me to the misery of our condition and made me suffer, but he also released all the stifled impulses I had never suspected in myself before...’  And he was going to say that Azad had made him talk as he had never talked before, laugh, weep, read, think, feel, do things, live and breathe to a new rhythm, that he had broken all the barriers of self-consciousness that separated him, the confectioner’s son, from everyone else, but he felt he was being naive and Gama was antagonistic. And yet he couldn’t restrain himself from resuscitating the truth about Azad in an attempt to obliterate Gama’s prejudice: ‘He initiated me into the mysteries of poetry and philosophy,’ he continued, sweating in the warm glare of the sun that burnt hotly outside now. ‘It was really the way he talked. The passion, for instance, which he put into the reading of books, suiting his intonation to the slow gradation of Heine’s love poems, to the lyrics of Goethe and Iqbal, to the broad histrionic gesture of Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, to the comic overtones of Dickens and the polished undertones of Flaubert, all names to you, as they were to me, because the only literature I had known was the High-roads of History and Southey’s Life of Nelson which I had read for the Matric, Rawlinson’s Selection of Essays and selections from Boswell’s Life of Johnson which were the texts for the first and second year at college, and the cribs and questions and answers by Sheikh Abdul Qadir...I don’t know where he got to know all these things...’

‘Perhaps he didn’t know them at all and it was really the way he talked,’ said Gama laughing.

‘No,’ Nur said, ‘he spent most of his time in odd corners of the college, while all of us just wasted our time ragging each other and gossiping as we sat in the fields outside the college buildings during the free hours. You see, the boys who passed out from our school, specially Sarjit and Mathra, formed a group and they resented my friendship with Azad. But when I went and sat with Sarjit and company they only talked scandal about which boy was in love with whom, and what Professor had an alliance with which boy, and whether so and so shouldn’t be ragged if he came that way, and what time they would get to the club, for tennis and ping-pong. One day I decided to break away from that crowd and joined Azad who was sitting writing poetry in the dome of the college. And he opened my eyes to realities.’

‘Childling, you are easily led astray,’ said Gama, out of a clash of kindness for Nur, a contempt for Azad and a sense of inferiority. ‘All those speeches of his are no use. We want a worker’s raj just as it is prevailing in Russia, because the condition here will be as it is in Russia. There was a time when the Czar ruled Russia as the Badshah of Vilayat rules us. But one day he was shot down. And the peasants and labourers are ruling there. I have joined a tonga-wallahs’ branch of the Labour Federation. The labourers of Hindustan are realising that the Sarkar can’t go on.

‘Ohe bachu, you will be put into prison,’ Nur said, laughing but earnest.

‘I don’t care for the limp lord,’ said Gama with a swagger. But then he smiled embarrassedly as if he were not sure of himself.

Nur looked at a feather dropping from the top of a house across the shadow which cut the fierce sun outside, and he saw the shimmering of an azure and scarlet and yellow spectrum of light before him as he had often done lying in this bed. He felt the monotony of his existence and the ceaseless discomfort which his body had endured through the burning sun. The only high spots had been those baths in the canal with Azad when they were at college, or the times when they had lifted their heads towards the clotted greenery of the city gardens, specially when they had worked together for their finals. Otherwise, one commonplace day had followed another, the oppressive daylight sucking the strength out of one’s bones and leaving one weak and tired and uninterested. It was perhaps the heat which made him so apathetic now... ‘But it is no use thinking of that,’ he said to himself, ‘it only makes me impatient.’ And he turned to Gama, though he knew that the lengthy conversation was straining him.

‘Have you heard how Azad is now?’ he asked. ‘And is he still in the asylum or has he been brought back to his father’s house?’

‘They say he was brought back from the asylum,’ answered Gama, ‘but he became violent again, raved profanities and obscenities and went on a hunger strike like Gandhi, demanding the release not only of all political prisoners but of all lunatics...’

‘You are joking,’ Nur said, ‘I suppose the Government brought influence to bear on his father... If only he hadn’t been such a fool, airing his opinions when even the boldest spirits spoke in guarded undertones, but he was always so impetuous...’ And he thought of the fiery, fanatical figure, at times like a sword that was never sheathed and destroyed everything in its way, and at others, loose and reckless, with a hearty laugh that made the world seem like a coloured bubble through its drumming thunders, and plunged one into a welter of confusion. Such a person, maddened by the life that surrounded him. Why didn’t he go on writing poetry? Why did he have to go into politics? But what self-respecting person in India could help being political; who could help being affected by the sordid side of this tragic existence? He himself had kept his mouth shut but what had he got? Why, he had known as he left college that death lurked for him at the bend of the road...

‘What are you thinking?’ Gama asked, turning uncomfortably to prepare for his departure.

‘Only these memories of our past,’ Nur said wearily.

‘But why do you feel like that this morning?’ Gama said. ‘You are as peevish as a stubborn child. Come, have a heart. You will be all right.’

‘My father wanted me to apply for admission to all the Government services,’ said Nur in an even, cynical voice, ‘to all the Government services, one after another, believing that since I had got a degree I had a free ticket for admission into the paradise of officialdom. And, in anticipation of my future position as a dignified member of the Government of India, he married me off. You should have seen the bustle and uproar in this house, the raucous laughter of the women of the gulley[3] as they sang filthy songs on the top of the house ...And the crowds of guests gorging on the sweets, which the Chaudhri made, as they had never gorged before... You should have seen their paunches expand with the free food — and the paunch of Maulvi Shahab Din knew no bounds. The noise and the din amid the sweating bodies left no room for one to stand or sit and it was sheer bedlam till the day when they led two sheep to be martyred before the divines and the witnesses... And I nearly died of shame to think what my college friends would feel. But of course, I had to go through the absurd ritual for fear that the Chaudhri would lose his temper in public...

That poor, silly girl, Iqbal, was as much a pawn in the game which her father was playing with mine as I was in the game which my father was playing with her’s; her father thought that I would get into the Imperial Service with my first class degree, and my father thought that the daughter of a respectable veterinary surgeon would bring a good dowry. And both the players were deceived in deceiving each other. I could not get into the Imperial Service and she only brought the prestige of her father’s position, and her own self, for the dowry. But no one realised this until after I returned from the interview with the board which was to select candidates for the Imperial Forest Service.

I never told you of this but, through the confusion of hope and fear I spent myself like a fool, arranging the details of a plan to hide my origin because that was the only obstacle to my selection since I had passed well from the University. It was very funny... I could laugh at it now... I borrowed a suit from Azad and a brown, trilby hat, as the Chaudhri wouldn’t believe that it was necessary to buy me a Sahib’s rigout such as could compete with the Ranken and Company suits of the other candidates; the Chaudhri didn’t see why a suit was necessary at all since I was an M.A. Pass... But, of course, he didn’t know that jobs are given by the Public Service Commission for smartness, general appearance, the possession of a good pedigree and according to the number of testimonials and recommendations from influential persons that a man may have, more than for anything else. You should have seen me doing a dress rehearsal before going to Simla...’

‘You must have looked like a Sahib, with your fair complexion,’ commented Gama with admiration.

‘Yes, I must confess,’ said Nur flushing with fatigue and excitement, though his voice was still tuned to a smooth cynicism, ‘for once I liked myself, whereas otherwise I had always been embarrassed by the number of lovers who made my life difficult at school and college. But the shame of knowing that I was the son of a confectioner, if I am to be honest, lessened the thrill of my own perfection. I never looked at my face in the glass afterwards without casting my eyes on my feet also immediately, like the peacock who weeps to see its ugly paws, and so I went... The journey to Simla — oh, I shall never forget that journey to Simla — I suppose it was the best thing I got out of it all. And the hotel, though since I knew that the Chaudhri had borrowed the hundred rupees for my expenses I couldn’t enjoy the Angrezi food they gave us at the Hotel Bristol. And then the interview. . . The fear almost gave me dysentery.’

He paused, laughed nervously and reddened, then paled with shame.

‘Go on,’ Gama said impatiently. ‘Tell me about that. Did you see the Lat Sahib?’

‘Long before I saw the Lat Sahib, there were those sons of the Lats who were appearing before the board. You can’t imagine the feeling I had when I entered the waiting room at Barnes Court, the office of the Governor of the Punjab: there were thirty other candidates, all splendidly dressed in expensive suits, all obviously the sons of the richest of fathers. And I had to make a terrible effort in my own mind not to betray my feelings during that long ordeal...’

He stopped short suddenly as if he felt suffocated with the lack of air in the low-ceilinged room and he moved his legs about as if he wanted to jump out of bed, and escape into the open...

‘Then what happened?’ asked Gama who had never been inside an Englishman’s house or talked to a European, except that he had been caned by Mercado, the Head Master of the Islamia School.

‘Oh, nothing very much,’ said Nur, his face twisting with a wry smile as if he were writhing with impatience inside and yet making a desperate effort to spit it out now that he had begun to vomit out his suffering. ‘The dramatic entry of me, in a complete funk, into the room where the commission sat, under the guidance of a peon in a goldbraided redcoat, who not only looked like a Rajah but behaved insolently like one; the seriousness of that moment, in which tables, curtains, papers, pens and an assortment of the Lat Sahib’s pipes swam in the void before my eyes with the glorious polished air of perfection surrounding them and, of course, as if it just had to happen at that auspicious moment, the foolish blunder on my part in kicking a chair over and saying “Good Noon,” when I should have said, “ Good Morning”...’

He blushed with embarrassment at telling Gama the story of his folly and exposing himself in the most sensitive, vulnerable parts of his character, and he lingered on the tremulous chords of that tense moment when his greeting was returned and when fear had taken possession of his body and set it trembling.

‘You know, that man Bailey was the son of a swine,’ he continued, after a little hesitation. ‘He was so alert in observation, one of those Englishmen who know us better than we know ourselves. My life went out of me as I saw his lean, wily face, lined on the cheeks as if he had been sucked up like an orange by that cow of a wife of his. I couldn’t understand the first question he asked me because the soft tone of his measured speech seemed to me to be issuing from the steady stare of his eyes rather than from his mouth. I don’t think his colleagues understood the burr-burr of his thin lips either, as they sat round him like statues; the buffalo-faced Raja Ram Singh, the parrot-nosed Abdul Hamid Khan, and that lover of his mother, the Parsi, Sir Fredoonji. I could have laughed had I not been terror-stricken by the Lat Sahib, the long-necked pelican. I have never known the eternities of hell in this life as in those moments...’

He stopped again and drowsed through a suffering in which the present was interweaving with the past. And, for a moment, he listened to his heart drumming like a tom-tom in a monotonous rhythm.

‘We ought to beat them with our shoes soaked in water, these illegally begotten, the limp lords as well as their sycophants!’ said Gama, whose hooliganism had become the desperate sincerity of political passion roused by the struggle in the dust, the straw, the dung, the urine of the underworld in which he lived.

‘Oh, what is the use?’ Nur said as he turned his face away, tired and worn and grey, as if he were a creature from another world, a pale traveller from some distant country, who had a story to tell which he thought wouldn’t be understood by any man of this land, and who was yet impelled by a curious instinct to unburden himself as if he would talk himself out of his frustration.

‘Abdul Hamid Khan is a fanatical Muslim Leaguer, isn’t he?’ Gama asked.

‘But I had known from the very beginning that I wouldn’t be accepted,’ Nur said in a hopeless, low voice, and stopped for a moment to consider how to convey his humiliation so as not to be unkind to himself and to expose his judges the more cruelly in order to revenge himself upon them. ‘When Raja Ram Singh asked me whether I had taken part in any “extramural” activity at college, I was so surprised at the buffalo-face mouthing a difficult word that I knew he had looked at the dictionary before coming there. And, frankly, I didn’t know the meaning of the word myself, though I tried to make a vague guess and answered I had played tennis. And Abdul Hamid Khan’s sympathy for his Mohammedan co-religionists refused to appear. Instead, the pig-eater laughed when Fredoonji asked me if my father was a confectioner, and I said: “Oh, no sir, he is the Chaudhri of the bazaar...” And so I walked away from the house of the limp lord! And as the poet has said: “I came out of your lane very insulted and humiliated.”

He had a stale taste at the root of his palate as he ended on that note and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth to take away the dryness that the profusion of speech had produced. And he became conscious of the incommunicability of his feelings to Gama or to anybody, through the impatience that possessed him.

But even as he relaxed, his bitterness returned. Only this time instead of bursting out, he simulated the air of stretching his limbs and twisted about on the bed as if to exercise the fatigue that possessed him.

‘You are very restless,’ said Gama. ‘Are your limbs tired? May I press your legs?’

‘No, I feel slightly cold,’ Nur said.

‘I must be going now,’ Gama suddenly said, listening to the air. ‘Someone is coming up the stairs.’

‘Nur, Nur, my son,’ a heavy hoarse voice came with the puffing and panting of hosts of other women, and after a long moment, the short, square form of his mother-in-law emerged, shrouded in her flowing white cotton veil, followed by the shrouded ghosts of his wife and her aunt.

‘Hai, hai,’ they cried as they advanced, ‘here is a man.’ And dropping the thick shrouds they had lifted to get a view of Nur, they rushed like fluttering, frightened hens towards a corner of the room.

Thereupon Gama turned and without looking this side or that, rushed away, down the stairs, lest the modesty of the women be outraged by the penetration of his glance.

‘Ohe Gamian!’ Nur shouted, jumping from his bed till his skeleton bent over his ribs, ‘Ohe...’ And then, realising that his friend was out of hearing he coughed with the strain of the effort as if every sinew and fibre of his skin were snapping with the black cough which tugged at his tissues, and tore the very protoplasm of his life. He hung his head down and bit his lips and resigned himself to the tides of the cough that lashed his inside, till the convulsive spasms subsided into gasps of hiccupping breaths and, bringing tears to his eyes, reddening his face a vivid red, threw up thick globules of blood and saliva like a string of tattered rags.

‘Oh! my mother, oh! my mother,’ he moaned through the acrid droolings, of his pain, and bending over the spittoon to throw off the last streaks of saliva in his mouth strained his neck to breathe...

‘Hai, hai! Hai, hai!’ the two elderly women shrieked rushing towards him like vultures to their prey and wailed: ‘What will happen to us, what will happen to our Iqbal?’ while his girl wife stood at the foot of the bed, unhooded and helpless, with tears in her eyes.

Nur lay back with his eyes closed.

‘Hai, hai!, Hai, hai!’ his mother-in-law and her sister cried the more loudly, and beating their breasts, howled and moaned till the old Grandma came slowly down the stairs and the women of the neighbouring houses rushed to the windows of their houses and began to shout, ‘Is he dead?  Is he dead?’

Nur was oppressed by the hysterical women, embarrassed and exasperated by the way they had lighted upon him when he was talking to Gama and broken the spell of his indignation against the world, which was forcing out of him the truths that he had felt but never expressed, which was making him recognise the necessity to tell life what he thought of it, now that he was to be deprived of it...

The women’s wails grew louder and shriller as his grandmother, his stepmother and the other women of the lane joined the chorus, the loudest of them adding to their shrieks a violent show of beating their breasts and smiting their foreheads in a rhythmic sequence attuned to the dirge of Hai, hai! Hai, hai! Hai, hai!

Nur hardened his jaws, stiffened his body, rose as if he were a brittle sword which wanted to hack their sprawling forms. But even as he lifted his head, he realised the futility of his rage against them as they were only practising a stupid convention that ordained the invocation of cries and shrieks and howls at the barest sign of death. He merely opened his eyes and waved his arm and said: ‘I am not dead, I am not dead,’ and collapsed in a heap.

‘Be quiet, mother! Be quiet, auntie! Be quiet, grandma!’ his wife was saying, as she struggled to stop them beating their breasts.

Nur looked at her. She seemed so helpless and shy that he felt sick to think he had ever hated her, she seemed so touching in her stupidity that he wished he could touch her now and make a contact which he had refused to establish between himself and her ever since they had been married, except in the moments of lust when she had docilely opened her legs to him.

‘Come mother, come auntie, come grandma, let him rest, come,’ she was whispering, as she dragged them away one by one. And she seemed to him tenderer than ever, someone who had hidden the light of her affection and her love in her own distress always, someone who had suffered and yet never shown it by word or deed. He suddenly recalled that he had cruelly and deliberately detached himself from her, because she was restrained by the convention of purdah, because she wasn’t a fashionable woman who could put on a sari and walk out with him so that he could proudly show her off to the world as his wife, and he was full of remorse. For, during the days of his suffering, the dull, hot days which followed his degradation at the hands of the selection committee of the Imperial Forest Service, when he had walked the dusty roads from one Government office to another, in midsummer heat, and was insulted by the peons who refused to let him see officials because he couldn’t pay them gratuities, she had followed him about tenderly, pathetically, fetching him cool drinks and fanning him, pressing his head, rubbing his feet, soothing him as he sought to forget the weariness of his struggle for a job in an afternoon’s sleep. And he had kicked her in the chagrin of his disappointments when, one day, during the period when he wrote a hundred applications and trudged a thousand weary miles to secure recommendations, during the days when he was weeping over the sneers of his relatives and the whispered mockery of the neighbours, she had yielded to him the perplexing knowledge of her pregnancy. And even then she had followed him about, like a devoted dog, worshipping him with her eyes, while he, in the panic of the fear of fatherhood that hung like an extra load on his already heavy-laden head, had frowned at her, refused to talk to her, and ignored her utterly, only charging at her now and then with the deliberate, violent, hard thrusts of a diabolical passion, as if he wanted to revenge himself against her... and leave her high and dry in the writhings of dissatisfaction without a word or a gesture of consolation... And when she had proudly presented him with the gift of a little red-faced girl child who frowned and cried with closed eyes, he had felt like murdering her and the child and had gone out reading among the tall valerians of the city garden, its towers and its lawns.

‘What is it, my son?’ his grandmother pouted in a short-breathed drawl, as she came trembling and shaking back to him with the eternal tears in her eyes. ‘What is it then? May I be your sacrifice!’

Disturbed in the flow of his thoughts he looked at her in a dazed, absent-minded stare. Then he looked straight across her to where his wife stood after sending the other women upstairs and smiled a weak, helpless smile at her, wishing she would come and put her arms round him. But the slight, pale, irregular face of the girl was impassive, as if she were still frightened of him.

‘Iqbal,’ he said to summon her to him.

The girl lifted her innocent, downcast, brown eyes, but just that moment the old woman began to stroke his head and murmur: ‘Go to sleep, my child, may I be your sacrifice! Those fainthearted women frightened me.’

And moving aside with bent back she said, ‘Come, Iqbal, you come and rest too, my daughter. Come, my child, why didn’t you bring the baby?’

‘She is coming with my other aunt, grandma,’ Iqbal said, and then she looked towards her husband, as if imploring him with her eyes to call her again.

Nur’s eyes were averted, however. Someone had suddenly come in between them, some ugly, horrible fate which had intervened to isolate them, as it had always done, till their eyes had never met in the nakedness of a common light, and now there was no building up of a private relationship between them, for now he was far removed from everyone.

If it had not been for the weight of responsibilities that had been piling up,’ he thought to himself as he saw her turn her back and follow grandma, if life had not buried him under the weight of his duties as a son, a husband and as a father, he might have loved her... But poverty... Oh! how it had hardened him to life, how it had made him insensitive to the colours, the shapes, the forms of things, to the thoughts, the feelings of people, till he had no contact with anyone or anything and went irritably through the world without any perception of even the lumps of human existence, to say nothing of the subtle nuances of experience... poverty had come between him and her, how cruel it had made him to her, how stubbornly aloof and hard, so that now when he wanted to smile at her, to touch her, he had turned his eyes away, frozen and rigid, too proud and too ashamed to look at her, to yield... And it was all his father’s doing...

‘The son of Sheikh Pir Baksh has become a deputy collector, why can’t you? The son of Sardar Kalyan Singh has become a sub-judge, why can’t you?’ Those words and the searching gleam of the Chaudhri’s blood-streaked eyes had spread a terror in his soul till he had felt that every breath he breathed was in jeopardy, that every morsel of food he ate in the house was being watched.

And, afraid of the penalties he might have to pay for disobedience, he had put his heart and soul into the work necessary for the I.C.S... But only he knew what he had gone through, waking up with aching eyelids in the dawn and getting down to work by the light of that kerosene lamp after washing his face in the water of amlas... sighing over every second page as he felt hopeless about his success in the competition. Those long summer months of work... He had felt like being in a prison of books... The date of the examination hanging like the sword of Damocles over his head... The misery of ten hours a day while all the world laughed, played and went about as usual... He used to cover his head with wet towels to keep himself from going mad with the heat... But he had known that this city would follow him, the streets of this city which had grown stale and horrible from the familiarity of being seen in the glare of the sun, day after day, for years, the streets of the city in which everyone knew him and whispered as he passed by, ‘there goes Nur, the son of the confectioner who is an M.A. Pass, but who sits idle, with one hand on the other, and kills flies because he can’t get a job.’ And he knew that the flower-seller lane in Dhab-Khatikan of this city would direct his footsteps within its narrow purlieus by the children who sat excreting in the drain and the women who sat spinning or weaving garlands in lightless hovels; he would grow grey and die in his father’s hateful house; fate had shattered his will to live, he really wanted to die and would never be able to escape; the foul breath he breathed here had poisoned him, so that he would take the bitter taste of its air about with him wherever he went till the poison would work its way slowly into his entire system and destroy him...

And, true to his prognostications, being a confectioner’s son, he had only secured five marks in the viva and failed to get into the I.C.S. in spite of the other high marks... And for months he had gone about living in a dead and lightless world with the winds of his father’s temper raging against the dark walls of his mind... And he had wished for release, longed for it, prayed for it, for each day he had awakened to recognise himself still breathing... till he had just ceased to care, gone beyond suffering to a listlessness and apathy like that of the first days of his illness, and as if there was no meaning in anything, that one just drifted along anyhow, hoping for little, believing less, and committed to one’s breath because one hadn’t the courage to take one’s life and end it all.

Then, as the last remaining desire in life, he had wished between periods of hopelessness and blank despair and endless, bottomless misery for the gift of a little job, howsoever insignificant and humiliating, even the job of a peon if it were not in this city, so that he could earn a little bread for himself, Iqbal and the child... . But even this last little wish was not to be fulfilled easily... Only days and unending days morning, noon and night and the rub of his father’s abuse and curses with every morsel of bread and every bite at a bone... And months... Oh where could one hide one’s face?... Where could one go?... For when it came to the point one couldn’t even go and become a boot-black in a different town as the news would spread, and there was still a lingering pride left in one’s body, pride and the fear of being laughed at by the world, of being beaten and insulted by the Chaudhri... One only had to eat a little food and this stupid pride came creeping back into one, the pride of one’s manhood and the pride of being an educated, intelligent man, a Babu, an MA Pass... The world was so snobbish, and one was so afraid of doing the wrong thing all the time. ‘...Ohe, look at that Nur, the son of the confectioner; he fancied himself as a Babu, and now he has come down to his real state, become a coolie.’ Any kind of manual labour was bad, was low and unworthy. It wasn’t respectable to exert one’s hands... the only izzat was in Government service... And it wasn’t only that the outside world believed this, the trouble was, if one was honest, that one had begun to believe in the snobbery oneself and was ashamed and embarrassed...

Then, at last, after the exertions of his father-in-law, after the abject crawling of his father with joined hands before that Bhai Bhachanga Singh, Inspector of Post Offices, after all the influence, brought to bear on Sheikh Pir Baksh, the Minister of Education, after all the recommendations, a clerkship in the Post Office at twenty rupees, and lucky to get it, as fifteen MA’s and a hundred and thirty-seven BA’s had applied for the same post, and but for the wire pulling, the favouritism for the Mohammedan and all the other influences, he would never have got it...

And then he lay still, listening to his own breath as if he were fascinated by his own naivete, saying to himself, ‘Strange, it’s my pain... the pain I can’t understand... of which I am going to die. Doesn’t hurt really... I feel no different from what I have felt for months... a little better, a little worse... I must be dying...’

The disappointment had done it, the routine of that office, working with dingy clerks, when the hours weighed like lead... selling postage stamps when he might have been an Imperial Service Officer...

Was he ungrateful to feel doomed though?

He looked into his heart with the inner eye and asked whether there was nothing in all the flux of his life that could have relieved his doom, no beauty, no tenderness, no faith, nothing but foiled desire...

There was no answer.

Only a slight tremor turned into perspiration, and the weakness of his body was sucked by the heat, and the heavy eyelids closed in stupor, against his will, conjuring queer images: Tarzan was lifting the woman, her golden hair streaming... Myrna Loy, perfect featured, and William Powell with a face like any He-man’s... Wonderful white houses in the English style... Charlie Chaplin running after the new woman he had seen on the corner of the restless street, all for love, a new love...

He felt his heart throbbing with a helpless pity for himself, that he had never fallen in love, that he had not gone to England as a probationer of the Imperial Forest Service or the LCS and come back to live a life in the English style, but lay completing the circuit of his life, fading into the unknown, into a future where there seemed to be a dearth even of past memories, where even the facts of his present state were slipping...

‘What had happened and what was happening?... Nothing... the Doctor will be coming soon...’

‘It was my perverse pride that denied Iqbal’s feelings,’ he said to himself, ‘and sent her away to her father’s house... Even the playful smile on the face of Rashida whom my sperm had made, did not move me...’

In his recoil, he frowned and wriggled and then, turning in upon himself, said, ‘Oh, it couldn’t be helped...’

He listened intently to the silence, controlling his breath for a moment... The blood was pumping into the veins and the arteries seemed swollen and hard... Perhaps they were affected by the heat... But there was no doubt... Life was ebbing in him. It was a matter of days...

That first haemorrhage had been a surprise to him... He had taken the shock calmly... But now it was no easy matter to sleep over it, for it might be a question of hours... He felt afraid.

But he mustn’t get excited, else the Doctor would complain. He must be calm, above all things, calm. Look how calm he had been for days... Why, the Doctor had complemented him on his ability to notice each symptom of the disease.

He recalled the changing phases of his body, while he felt his pulse... One day... it was a month ago, he had felt bad, very bad... But then he had felt well, and had even read Charles Garvice. It was curious how, when he was reading books, the festoons of clothes, the hurricane lamp hanging by the wall, and all the jumble of things which looked ugly in the ordinary light assumed a certain grandeur. The next day he had not been so well, and he felt apathetic to everyone and everything. His breathing had been heavy as it was now, and his fever was rising, and he had moaned exactly as he had done today. Perhaps he was trying grimly to hold on to himself, but what was the use, the cure was outside himself, and why couldn’t he get out of the prison of his own broodings... But there was nothing else to do...

It was no use looking to anything outside of himself for help... For he felt so exhausted, lying there. Why couldn’t he wrestle with every moment and delay the end for a few months, for a few years...? By prayer, for instance. That had given him whole days of good health... What a boon it was; he had liked people. ‘I wonder if the attacks of haemorrhage come because I don’t pray any more...’ But that was stupid! What was he thinking about? Neither God nor the Devil could help him...

A gleam of kindliness coloured his face for a moment, then changed to a frown, and he turned his tired body again, and shrank back like a snail into his own skin.

That haemorrhage, a fortnight ago, was the worst he had had. His disease had surely begun to overpower him then. He had been terrified... But, after all, it could not have done him much harm. It couldn’t have done, because he had felt life in his body... Why, the blood had rushed to his cheeks and that ghastly pallor of months had gone... But for the chill that he caught at dawn last Thursday... How he had trembled: always he had trembled when he had had fever, even as a child, a soft tremor went shivering through the nerves of his body. The cold had affected him badly, because he had had a terrible haemorrhage on Saturday... How helpless he had felt till the Doctor prescribed arsenic... But on Sunday his depression had lifted. He could rise again from the ashes... Yesterday he had felt that too, and today... He was tired perhaps, but he would get up, in spite of the haemorrhage, this morning. Would he though? Could he?... after months of sinking life? Could he? Hark, there was someone...

He listened.

There was the Doctor. They were Captain Pochanwala’s footsteps. He must ask him. He must get ready, not shuffle the clothes, lie still...

‘Well, Mr. Nur, how are you this morning?’ asked Captain Pochanwala superciliously, advancing into the room with an urbane manner which he seemed to have cultivated specially to suit the distinctive fawn-coloured polo topee which he alone of all the Indians in Amritsar wore with his well-cut suit. Being a Parsi, he perhaps thought himself superior to all the other Indians who had begun to wear English clothes.

Nur strained to say, ‘Good morning,’ but his father appeared behind the Doctor, and, somehow, he felt ashamed to be speaking English in the presence of the Chaudhri, as it would seem like showing off.

‘Flushed, very flushed, breathing bad,’ the Doctor said and fixing his gaze on Nur he asked, ‘How is the cough?’

‘Better,’ said Nur, and he saw his father going upstairs, presumably to fetch the money for the Doctor’s fees, since Captain Pochanwala didn’t believe in credit and had asked for his remuneration even when he had arrived too late to cure Nur’s mother.

‘Let us see the temperature!’ the Doctor said, screwing up his eyes and nose as if he really didn’t want to come into contact with his patient.

And while Nur was drawing his hand out of the sheet, Captain Pochanwala looked contemptuously round the room, and then put his hand on the boy’s forehead.

‘Very hot, very hot, very hot!’ he said, ‘What have you been doing to excite yourself this morning?’

‘Nothing, Doctor,’ said Nur.

Captain Pochanwala was applying the stethoscope to his patient’s heart, and didn’t wait for the boy to answer.

‘Hum...’ he said rather abstractedly and twisting his lower lips coldly and looking at the boy with knitted brows and eyes turned sideways, ‘that intractable lung... any haemorrhage this morning?’

‘No,’ said Nur, then correcting himself, ‘Yes.’

Captain Pochanwala looked quizzically about him and contemplated the purple glow on the boy’s face for a moment...

‘There is some medicine there, isn’t there?’ he asked and then turning to the table himself confirmed, ‘Yes.’

‘How is he, Doctor Sahib?’ asked the Chaudhri coming down the stairs, grim and heavy.

‘I am afraid Mr. Nur has been exciting himself,’ Captain Pochanwala replied, putting away his stethoscope. ‘He should remain absolutely quiet. That medicine in the bottle will do for some days...’ Then he took out his watch and moved towards the door, beckoning the Chaudhri.

Nur didn’t know whether the Doctor had made his gesture to tell his father confidentially that it was the end or whether to make sure of his fee... From the way in which he extended his hand, it seemed he was just a little embarrassed at the heartlessness of his demand for his fee; but then, as he took the five rupee note, he whispered something to the Chaudhri.

‘Will you come in again this evening, Sarkar?’ asked the Chaudhri as the Doctor was adjusting his hat so as not to knock it against the narrow door of the stairs.

But Captain Pochanwala affected not to have heard and screwing up his nose, opening his eyes wide, had explored the comparative darkness.

‘What did the Dagdar say?’ Nur heard his grandmother ask from where she came scrambling down the stairs again.

‘Nothing very much,’ the Chaudhri replied casually unheeding. Then he turned to Nur and asked sneeringly: ‘What have you been doing to yourself, ohe, Gentermana?’

‘How much more alive his patients are to the case histories of their ailments,’ said Nur, as if he were talking aloud to himself, ‘than Captain Pochanwala. He thrives on the snobbery of his position as an ex-IMS Officer. But he only had a temporary commission during the war, and doesn’t know any other medicines except quinine and tincture of iodine.’

‘What have you done,’ the Chaudhri burst out, red with rage, ‘that you should be critical of your elders? You wasted hundreds of rupees of my hard-earned money, you son of a bitch, and you couldn’t even get a job to feed yourself and wife and child? Why don’t you die of shame, you lover of your mother, and rid me of the responsibility you have imposed on me so long? When will you die, you dog? How long will you go on prolonging the agony of your poor old grandmother? You have disgraced me and given a bad name to your family! Go to hell and die and be done with it, you wretch...’

‘My son, my son, what are you saying?’ the old woman appealed coming towards the Chaudhri with lifted, supplicating hands.

‘Go to hell and be done with it, die and rid us all of this responsibility...’ the Chaudhri shouted raising his voice, ‘Die and give me peace,’ and he stood swaying with anger as he warded off his mother with a flourish of his hand.

Nur just lay bewildered on the bed, dazed by his father’s outburst, incapable of realising the full force of the Chaudhri’s anger, as if all his nervous energy were exhausted and he were completely unaffected by, indifferent to, things, except that his legs were shaking.

‘Why don’t you speak?’ the Chaudhri, rushing to the bed of his son, said, now tenderly.

‘Oh! forgive me, father, forgive me,’ Nur hissed, sinking farther and farther away from the reach of his father’s hand trembling and shaking and with the light of an abject terror in his eyes... ‘Oh, forgive me, forgive me ...’

‘Is this the fruit of all my labour for you?’ the Chaudhri said alternately glistening with rage and patting Nur’s forehead.

For the slightest moment, everything was still. Then the old woman began to soothe her son’s form with her wrinkled fingers, saying, ‘Calm, yourself, child, calm yourself, he is ill...’

‘What has he done for the money I spent on his education?’ the Chaudhri shouted, his face twisting with impatience. ‘What has he done, except spoil my izzat! Is this the reward I get for bringing him into the world, for looking after him, educating him! Why can’t God give me death and rid me of the affliction?’

As he stood there, however, his eyes fell on his son’s frightened bent head, and he ground his teeth with a revulsion against himself, and wished he could take the boy in his arms, but he felt the slightest gesture on his part would send the boy away from him and he had been too hardened since the day when Nur was a child to bend his body and touch his son to communicate the remorse he now felt. ‘Give him some food, mother,’ he with a heavy heart and extricating himself from his mother’s grasp rushed down the stairs, saying, ‘Give him some essence of chicken...’

‘Wait my son, wait child,’ said the old woman hobbling after him. ‘Son, you haven’t eaten anything yourself...’

But the Chaudhri had gone stamping down the stairs and was out of reach of her entreaties and prayers.

‘And now, now,’ the old woman wailed. ‘He hasn’t even eaten a crust of bread, and he went to work at dawn on an empty stomach... Hai... what shall I do?’ And she waited near the door of the stairs, torn between following him and coming to Nur. Then she returned towards Nur, who was slipping back into bed, pale and hushed, and stretching her arms said: ‘Don’t take any notice of what he says, my son; he is worried on account of you and overwrought, and he loses his temper... I am sure he is sorry at heart, and he loves you... And now he will be hungry. But never mind, I shall get you your soup and take his meal to the shop for him...’

She shambled and shuffled and hurried upstairs.

Nur lay still petrified and looking on through misty eyes at the broad naked heat of the sun. His mind seemed to be closed. Only, there was a dry taste at the base of his tongue, a parched feeling in his throat, mixed with a vague sense of betrayal. His face which had changed colour so often since the visit of the Doctor was set in a livid mould as if it were plastered with a mud mask. His brain wheeled dizzily, and he moved his head this side and that, as if he wanted to stir it into thought... But his eyes just stared hard into the air and he could not notice a thing in the crowded room...

Then, after a moment, he felt a weight rise from his belly to his chest, and stand there pressing down on his ribs. He breathed hard and turned on his side and, twisting his body, moaned as if to summon all the fragile cells of his body to come and look at the new wound that his father’s hard words had inflicted on him. But he felt an increasing weakness in his legs and thought he was fainting. His limbs seemed like loose streamers falling away from his leaden trunk. The drowsy shade of the room in which he lay seemed to exaggerate his contours, and he felt as if he were breaking. His will relaxed and weakened...

And yet the bitterness of his father’s cruelty lingered... This was the man... this was the man who was responsible for his very existence, this was the man who had loved him so when he was a little child in arms, with dark eyes and a fair complexion, when he was full of mischief and learning to toddle and speak... It seemed strange and unbearably tender; but his earliest memory, almost his first vivid recollection, was the Chaudhri laughing heartily as he flung him into the air playfully and kissed him at each fall, fairly smothering his face with kisses... After that, except now and then during the years, he had only worn a serious expression on his round, rugged face... But he had been proud even then of his father’s hefty, handsome form. Only afraid, so afraid, that he remembered only a very few occasions when he had lifted his eyes to face him... Although he must admit, he was also attracted by the magnetic presence of the man; in fact, the war between these two emotions in him had always led to awkward collisions, and he had faltered, stumbled, stammered, perspired whenever he had to say anything to the Chaudhri... His father had towered over him, simple and stubbornly upright... Was it because of his mother’s death that this difference had arisen between them? Anyhow, it was unfair... Was it because I, an only son, had been the cause of anxiety to him... I am a failure indeed... But why, oh why did he have to drag me into the dust by educating me? How could a parent expect to get a return for the money he had spent on his child? Why should he have expected anything? You produced me for your own pleasure... You produced me for your own pleasure, do you hear, and you didn’t consult me beforehand! Why didn’t you...? If you had to hate me... And tell me afterwards... Why did you? I didn’t want to be born...

He felt his soul rising in revolt and he rolled in a frenzy. His eyes saw the injustice of it all and welled with tears.

‘Oh God, why did he produce me if he had to be so hard to me? Oh, why did he have to educate me, why did he not let me sit at the shop and follow his own profession...? Oh why did he, why did he, why did he...? Why did he insist on my passing my MA if he had to blame me for it afterwards...? Oh why did he drag me...?’

No one seemed to hear his cries and in order not to waste his suffering on the empty air, he stifled his moans and with averted eyes still filled with tears, thought of the injustice more coolly.

‘Whose fault is it? He gave me all this education to flatter his own vanity and not because he meant me to learn anything. And was it my fault that I couldn’t get into any of the Services? Was it not because I was his son, the confectioner’s son, who couldn’t get any recommendations? For had I not always worked hard and always been top of my class? Of course, he couldn’t understand what books or anything meant. But had I not always passed in the first division? Did he not hate me because, not having flourished himself, he could not see his own son fail to ascend the pinnacles of glory so that he could call the faithful to come and witness the success of his investment... And he hit me...’

His tears ran down his cheeks and he was convulsed with sobs... ‘He has worked so hard in the grime and the dirt of the shop, the wretch has become surly and bad tempered serving his impatient customers,’ he thought. ‘But it was swinish the way he treated me, keeping a strict watch on everything I did. I must return home at seven. I must not consort with this man and that man. I must be respectful to his friends, his trusted friends, the pious practitioners of five prayers a day, who were always trying to kiss me and asking me to come and sit in their laps... And I dared not complain because they threatened to tell him that I didn’t go to say prayers at the mosque regularly... What right had he to fill me with fear... It was fear that had kept me from telling him openly about things... fear and his ignorance, for how could I have explained to him that Darwing said there wasn’t a God, and Huxley was an agnostic... What was Darwin to him and who was Huxley?...’

But he felt he was being naive, thinking like that... Only the blows rankled.

‘Oh! God, oh! My God... Oh! My mother, my mother, come and take me... I am burning, I am bursting, I am torn... Oh come, they have crushed me, they have ruined me, they have broken me, they have made me ill, they have destroyed me, your son, and there is none in this hovel, there is none who loves me at all... Oh, I was an orphan, my mother, I was an uncared for orphan when you died... Why, oh why did you have to bring me into the world if you had to leave me...? Oh why did he have to have me if he had to loathe the very sight of me...? Why did he have to do that, why...’ But he couldn’t go on. His cries were becoming louder and the reiterated hiccups of his sobs were choking him so that he would have to shriek to be heard even by his own ears. And he didn’t want the women upstairs to come down, because he would be too ashamed to face anyone. And yet he could not control the passion that he had let loose in himself, the anger, the resentment, the grief and the longing that lay choking him now...

He turned on his side and suddenly, his whole form was numbed, as if he had been struck in the heart.

For a moment he writhed in a paroxysm. The frenzied fire in his head drummed through his temples, the hot tears of remorse ran from his eyes, and his hard teeth ground a swooning sigh.

His throat suddenly brought up a profusion of saliva rich with blood and he lurched over to throw it into the spittoon.

He kept his head hanging over the streaks of dribbling blood and gaped weakly into the spittoon for a confirmation of his dread. The streaks of blood clotted the edge of the brass bowl. There was a coloured space before his eyes. He was sure now...

‘O mother,’ he cried and clutched the sheet tight. His brain was faint, the light of his eyes dimming slowly like an invisible anguish and his mind blended in a soundless void. He opened his mouth to call his grandma. But he felt the nerves of his body relaxing, as if the pain were being pressed out by the inexorable advance of death... ‘Nur, my child, Nur, wake up and drink this essence,’ his grandmother said, coming towards the bed... ‘Nur...’

His face looked strange.

She stood fixed to the ground. Then she struggled on heavy feet to the bed and shook him with trembling fingers, calling the while, ‘Nur, Nur, Nur my son, awake...’

But his face turned... and hung limply aside...

‘Hai, hai!’ she lifted her voice and cried. ‘Hai hai! Hai hai!’ And she struck the palms of her hands on her breasts, on her forehead, on her face and moaned and howled and tore her hair as she fell across his neck.

The women on the top storey came screaming down, beating their breasts, their thighs, their foreheads, their cheeks and their breasts again and cried, ‘Hai, hai! Hai hai! Hai hai!’

The women of the neighbourhood rushed and, entering the room, began to beat their bodies deliberately crying and wailing, ‘Hai hai! Hai hai!’

The body of death lingered on the sick bed.

[1]  Also spelt as salwar.

[2]  Also spelt as topi.

[3]  Also spelt as gali or gully.

Appearance and Reality

Dedicated to Goronway Rees

Sir Hasan Ali was surprised at the cordiality of the man’s greeting as he looked out from the ferry-boat which was carrying him ashore to Gibraltar from the steamer. A South Indian, or Ceylonese, by the look of him, Sir Hasan thought. But where had he met him before? Because the man was smiling and waving his arms with the familiarity of one who might have been his friend since the day when he wore a strip of cloth to hide his fore and aft. The warmhearted Punjabi in Sir Hasan, however, made him return the compliment with a broad sweep of his right arm, and with an effusive ‘Adab arz.’ The English ladies and gentlemen in the ferry-boat looked askance at him and Sir Hasan became somewhat selfconscious and sought to resume the dignified pose which he had begun to cultivate ever since he had been made a Knight Commander of the Star of India.

Nervously he rubbed his short French beard at the chin and then smoothed the new suit he had had made at Ranken & Co., Simla, for this, his first, trip to England. He had found it a great strain to keep up appearances on board the ship throughout the voyage. Because at the mature age of sixty he found it difficult to practise the gymnastics which ordinary European behaviour demanded, what with having to keep the crease of the trousers in which his awkward legs, used to the loose shalwar, could contain themselves with great difficulty, specially as the braces tugged at his bunch of piles, and the armour-like waist-coat and jacket, and the boots which strapped his feet used to the old style open Indian shoes of the nineteenth century. Still, he had accustomed himself to all these inconveniences and knew that, in spite of his doubts, he carried himself with the dignity and precision expected from India’s ambassador at large to the Western world. There was a great deal in a title and in properly made clothes. Sir Hasan was sure that even a small cloth merchant from Bazaar Sabunian in Amritsar could almost pass off as an Englishman if he had been honoured by the Angrezi Sarkar and gone in for a few fittings at Ranken’s. Whereas he himself had, at least, been used to shaking hands with the Deputy Commissioner Sahib and other England-returned men for a generation as head of one of the biggest carpet manufacturing firms of Amritsar, and as Vice-President of the local Municipal Committee. Only he was not sure whether the fez cap he wore was an advantage or a disadvantage: he had felt that he ought to keep his native head-dress in order to keep the prestige of his religion intact, but on the voyage he had inclined towards the use of a topee in the heat of Africa. But it was all a question of izzat, and propriety and his mission required that he should put up a good show...

Before Sir Hasan had finished his sartorial speculations, however, the ferry-boat splashed the blue-green water against the wharf and his compatriot greeted him with, ‘Salam alaikum’ as if he were his twin brother in Islam. To a devout Muslim like Sir Hasan, the ‘Wa alaykum as-Salam’ was as automatic as ‘How do you do?’ to an Englishman. But though he had meant no more than conventional politeness, he found himself committed to a cordial handshake with the stranger, in spite of the fact that the first close look at the man made him smell something black in the pulse. Other passengers were about and he could not be cool to the man now that he had shown a certain amount of warmth.

‘We have a common friend in His Highness the Aga Khan,’ the stranger said with the bluff of a broad smile on the full lips of his dark face, which was handsome in spite of the deep, degenerate circles round his eyes, the lean and hungry hollows of his cheeks. And then he added in a furtive whisper, ‘My name is Samuel Vijayaragavacharia.’

‘I am pleased to meet you — what did you say your name was?’ Sir Hasan said with a certain hauteur and contempt in his manner.

‘They call me Sammy here, Sir Hasan; so you call me Sam.’

‘Oh, so you know my name? ‘ Sir Hasan asked, surprised but correct.

‘Who doesn’t know of your fame, Sir Hasan?’ Sammy said. And then he lied, ‘The Aga Khan often mentioned you in his conversation with me as one of the older Muslim statesmen of Northern India.’

Sir Hasan was too puffed up by this flattery to question the man’s friendship with the Aga Khan or to be put off by the dirty collar which he wore, or his unkempt hair under the pork-pie felt hat, or the shabby suit, and they walked along together towards the gateway where the policeman was inspecting passports.

‘So you have been here a long time?’ he said, indifferent and worldly, after he had shown his papers and emerged on to the road where a number of taxis were lined up.

‘Oh yes, I know the Continent very well,’ said Sam obsequiously. ‘Too well, in fact, if you see what I mean!’ And he cocked his left eye as he pronounced the last sentence, and even before Sir Hasan could answer or acknowledge that significant gesture, he added, ‘I would like to show you La Linea, the Spanish part of the town. I could take you to places where none of these bahin chod Angrez log have been.’

‘So you speak Hindustani also, though by your name you come from the South!’ Sir Hasan said humorously, shocked at the sound of the vulgar abuse, but pliant.

‘We are all Asiatic brothers,’ Sammy said, ‘wherever we come from. These sale, harami think of all of us as black men... Actually, I come from Jafna...’

Sir Hasan surveyed Sam’s presence dispassionately for a moment. He knew that he was in the hands of a guide, a tout or a pimp, and he knew the other passengers around knew this. But he couldn’t back out now. For Sammy had hit him below the belt, as it were. Firstly, he had aroused that suspicion and hatred for the Government in him which, in spite of his long and loyal association with the Sarkar, was a major instinct in the Indian. And, secondly, he had touched those desires which even the devout Muslim in him had not been able to suppress through a lifetime of assiduity in the performance of physical (or spiritual?) jerks five times a day.

‘What will you show me?’ Sir Hasan asked with a lascivious smile.

‘All the houris promised to the faithful in heaven,’ said Sammy with a laugh emboldened by the softening of Sir Hasan’s manner. And he hailed a motor with a flamboyant lordly gesture.

‘Arey, arey, wait!’ Sir Hasan’s caution and respectability returned. ‘What is the fare to the town and what will you charge?’

‘Oh, Sir Hasan, come, you are my brother,’ said Sam, effusive and deliberately vague. ‘I don’t see many of my countrymen here in exile. I will take you to see the sights and if you are pleased you can pay me what you like.’

Sir Hasan was totally disarmed by this generous offer.

He even lost all the inhibitions which generally kept him from doing the wrong thing in the presence of the English passengers. He did not look before or after as he got into the taxi. Fortunately, he saw two first-class English passengers get into a similar car with a lady and he felt he had the necessary sanction for courage in the casual way they conducted themselves. But, as the car began to move and Sammy gave orders to the driver, in a language which seemed to him to be French though it was Spanish, his careful, timid soul which had never ventured so far, bubbled inside his stomach.

‘You know that the boat leaves at exactly nine o’clock this evening,’ he said. ‘So don’t let us go further than the main bazaar of the town.’

‘I know the time your boat leaves, Sir Hasan, but if you only want to see the bazaar I’ll have to ask the driver to change his direction,’ Sammy said sternly.

‘No, no, let us go where you like — only I must get back in time!’ said Sir Hasan flustered. For he felt the chance of seeing the houris, out of sight of all the eyes which had in the past prevented his enjoyment of this pleasure slipping away.

‘Then you are safe in my hands,’ said Sammy with a direct look in his eyes which became full of sinister meaning as it became fixed for a moment in the hollows of his eyes.

The shadows of evening were spreading slowly over the blue sea which took colour from the bluer sky. And as the taxi sped along the dusty road to La Linea, Sir Hasan surrendered to the twilight, and to Sammy, almost as if he had been hypnotised. For though he felt a certain trepidation in his small heart, the deeper urges in his spine seemed to incline him to the warmth of the Spanish peninsula with memories of the heroic Moors as they sped across it, tasting of its wines, raping its flesh, cutting its corn during the conquests. For a minute or two he had qualms about having missed performing the evening prayers, but then he rationalised his mood of wonder by contemplating the ineffable mystery behind everything created by the One God, of whom Muhammad was the Prophet, and by assuring himself that he was, today, earning the reward for all his prayers in the past — he was going to meet the houris!

As the taxi dropped them in a dark side-street in La Linea by a shop full of cigarette lighters, Sir Hasan looked questioningly at the tall, silent figure of his guide, and searched his soft, dark, shifty eyes. Sammy gave him his arm even as he rang the bell of the house and assured him, again that he was in safe hands...

As Sir Hasan came to from the sleepy stupor which seemed to have descended on him in the arms of a houri in heaven, he found himself very much on earth. He was lying outside the door of that house in the side-street where he fancied he had entered. A wave of nausea passed through his stomach as he felt for his wallet in the pocket of his trousers and found that it wasn’t there. He beat his head and burst out weeping. But his fez cap protected his head. Suddenly he thought of searching for the wallet in his jacket. He found that he only had his waistcoat on; the jacket of the Ranken & Co’s suit was missing. He pushed his eager, trembling hands into the waistcoat pockets, but they were empty.

He gave one piercing groan and with wide open mouth poised for shouting, raised himself up from the threshold and struck the doors with empty hands. The hard wooden door only thudded back with a hard answer.

In the layers of anguish beneath the bottomless misery in his soul he remembered Sam; and the assurance that the traitor had given him at this very spot. Without a doubt he was the pimp of the place because, when he had rung the bell, a little aperture had opened within the great door and a face had poked out.

Sir Hasan rang the bell and waited, but there was the same hard answer: the thudding wood echoing a dull thud.

He looked round. There was no one in the street. Only the glass of the cigarette lighter shop reflected back the radiance of the sky on the corner.

A motor car rushed past in the main street a hundred yards away. Sir Hasan called aloud ‘taxi’ and ran towards it, only to find himself in an empty street.

Suddenly the thought struck him: the ship. What time was it? His hands automatically reached for the gold chain adjusted to the Hunter watch in his waistcoat pocket. Neither the chain nor the watch was there.

Blind with rage and hot tears he ran towards a street which looked out to sea — but half way he realised that the harbour may not be visible from there, and that, anyhow, it was morning while the boat was supposed to have left the previous night.

His heart sank and he ran back to the main street in a panic almost as he had done when he had got lost in Mori Ganj as a child. But the heavy buttocks of his respectable body refused to go forward at such speed.

He wiped the sweat off his face and recited a few verses of the Koran, suitable for frightening off jinns in the dark. Then he paced along, his eyes bulging out to catch sight of a human being.

A man with an apron tied round his middle was throwing some bones to a dog by a shop where a few men were seated under an awning, apparently a cafe.

Sir Hasan walked towards the cafe. But, even as he advanced, the fear assailed him that he didn’t know the language of the place, or any European language except English, and might not be able to make himself understood. His fears were justified, for as he said aloud, ‘Ship! They take my wall! Coat! Watch chain!’ with copious gestures of his arms, the proprietor-waiter waved him to a chair in the most perfunctory manner and only asked: ‘Cafe au lait?’

Sir Hasan was desperate and turned to the two or three men who were eating rolls and drinking coffee. They turned their heads and merely whispered to each other: ‘Negro.’

When the proprietor brought a cup of coffee and put it on a table and said, ‘Something, something, Monsieur?’ to Sir Hasan, the Knight Commander of the Star of India walked away in disgust, followed by the curses and contemptuous jeers of the whole cafe.

He recalled he had seen a police guard at the gateway to La Linea as he travelled in the taxi last night with that wretch Sammy Ragavacharia. He began to walk back towards it. His feet dragged almost as if he had on the old native style shoes which he used to wear in the days before he became a public figure; his legs behaved as if they were loose in a tehmet; his body sweated as though he had set off canvassing in the market one early morning, in the manner of the days when he was his own firm’s traveller... What had happened, he asked himself? The air, the sky, the earth today were the same as yesterday, but he felt other than the assured traveller, the ambassador on his way to England. What had happened?

Everything had happened. ‘I have been betrayed,’ the answer came back from the surviving sense of dignity in his being. ‘Cheated and robbed and insulted,’ he protested. ‘My wallet gone and —’

But he didn’t dare to look at himself, he didn’t have the courage to ask himself what had happened. Only, he was eager to repair the damage. And he hurried to the frontier, feeling desolate and forsaken, utterly lost and exhausted.

The Spanish gendarme passed him on to the British sergeant, after giving Sir Hasan a contemptuous look, and the Tommy, who was lighting a cigarette, said: ‘ Now, mate, what is the trouble?’

Sir Hasan began to tell him his story with all the pent-up passion of futility.

‘Now, don’t get excited,’ said the Englishman. ‘I am not taken in by people like you. If you want to go and sell your bloody carpets in Gibraltar you’d better go and get a proper passport from the Spanish authorities and I’ll let you across the frontier...’

Sir Hasan protested vociferously that he was not a carpet seller, and lost his temper. The Punjabi passions in him welled up at the insult to his izzat and he stormed and raved at the sergeant like a lunatic.

‘Orders,’ was all the Sergeant would say, shrugging his shoulders. And when he couldn’t make his excuse heard above the loud and filthy abuse which Sir Hasan was casting on him, he suddenly thumped his rifle on its butt end and stood menacingly.

If he had had any chance of proving who he was to the stupid sentry, Sir Hasan had now altogether lost it by his violent abuse of the man. And, frightened, broken and in a rage that could call Allah to open up the earth and engulf him in the fires of hell, he turned back.

But on a word from the British sentry, the Spanish gendarme caught Sir Hasan by the nape of his neck and shouted at him: ‘Passport.’

As Sir Hasan wrung his hands in vain, the gendarme took him towards a dungeon and threw him into a black hell worse even than any cellar in the basement of his own home in Mori Ganj, Amritsar, where he used to consign his erring servants now and then.

On the afternoon of that day an inquiry came through from Headquarters in Gibraltar, which incidentally revealed the identity of Sir Hasan Ali to the Sergeant of the guard at the frontier of La Linea. And, needless to say, the Englishman secured the release of the great man from the Spanish police after some difficulties and apologised profusely to the dignitary himself.

Was he mad? Sir Hasan asked himself as the car swung across the rock to the house of the Governor of Gibraltar. Or had he really been changed by the shock of this incident into the undignified person he had once been in his early life... But then he became aware of the difficulties he would have in conducting himself with dignity at the house of the Governor without his jacket and in trousers which had been creased by the ill usage he had suffered the previous night. His small, humble soul shrank at the prospect of having to keep up appearances again...

Boots

Dedicated to Denys Val Baker

Looking through the haze of early sunshine, stabbed by the rays that probed every corner of her dark soul, scorched by the fire of heaven, the pinpoints of moisture trailing on the tip of her snub nose, she sat tying the last knot on the bundle of her personal belongings with hands that quivered like birds who sense the hunter’s approach.

There was as yet no sound in the gulley outside as she applied her ears to listen and she hurried, hoping to make a clean getaway before the creditors arrived. But the lower knot of the sheet in which she had bound her clothes was too thick to allow a similar knot on top. And in the emptiness of the courtyard beyond her, she could hear a low rumbling — was it the drumming of the elements? She could see the undulations of fluorescent screens of many tinted clouds cavorting like demons of destruction — could it be the jinns dancing round her husband’s spirit? She could feel caverns, deep chasms, between her hands — may be the jaws of Death opening up to receive her...?

Alone.

A whole aeon of sorrow stretched between her and the nebulous distances where he had travelled, earth and sea and snow and mud, all a grey nothingness, only swinging to the lilt of the tune:

‘Where have you gone, O my exile!’

Her eyes fell on the boots which she had carefully put on one side. They were too big to be packed into the bundle and too sacred to be left behind — those boots of the lord and master which she had put by the mandala where her brass idols stood, those boots which more than the gods had connected her to Jai Singh and which had thus become the incarnation of the Supreme God in her queer universe.

‘What a slender thread holds us together!’

It is a song or a pair of boots that makes the curve of remembrance on the taut emptiness of the lonely heart. And the wise concede wood and stones to all those who cannot see afar.

The whole of Gobindi’s life hung by the shoe laces of those artillery boots which Jai Singh had left behind in a fit of absent-mindedness on his embarkation leave. And she assembled them together and laid them on the top of the bundle so that they dangled on each side. Then she got up to see how the land lay and what chance there was of her getting away.

Like a shy gazelle she darted across the courtyard and stood behind the tattered length of jute cloth which curtained her off from the world. The thunderous drumming, which was her thumping heart, spread its wings on the air, and she gasped for breath. She recalled that that was what she had always felt like when she had come, a newly-wed bride, to his house and when evading her mother-in-law’s eyes, she used to go and wait at the door to hear if her husband was approaching. For, though she could not outrage the convention which said that a woman must never show affection, in secret she had harboured a wantonness in her bosom that was always bursting to embrace Jai Singh. He had been equally shy before his mother’s glare, but he used to steal back in the afternoons when the old woman was having her siesta and smiling, silent but light-hearted, he would take her in his arms and lay her down in the verandah... When the old woman had died he was already away fighting in the war, and they had never been able to give themselves to each other in the fullness of passion. Secret, like the scent of roses which he had brought her from Amritsar, was his love for her, but it lashed her body like a forest fire... Secret, like the failing breath of her body, was her love for him, but it had wrapped his soul so that he overstayed every leave. Secret, secret were the scars he had left on her soul in parting...

‘Where have you gone, O my exile!’

The tune haunted her until she felt faint.

But she lifted the jute cloth aside ever so gently and peered into the alley way. ‘No one... but...’ She retraced her head with a jerk. The old weaver woman, Phuphi, sat like a warden of the marches on the threshold of her house up the lane, drinking a saucerful of tea. The concentration in the dilated dark eyes of Phuphi had always frightened Gobindi, for she knew that the old woman was a confidante of her hard, narrow mother-in-law and it always seemed as if the latter had breathed her soul’s grim secrets into the ears of the weaver woman before her death. Phuphi had always talked of ‘rescuing her’ from the sinful glances of the menfolk. And the vigilant little shrivelled neck of the old woman, craning into the lane above the saucer of tea, was eloquent.

Gobindi stepped back into the courtyard, her head inclined to a side in order to listen.

A cock crowed in the yard of the old woman’s home. And she could hear Phuphi cursing.

The sudden realisation came to her that her plan to escape to her mother’s village was shattered. She scampered back to the verandah nevertheless, hoping against hope and lifted her bundle. But just then there was the sound of footsteps walking up the lane towards her house and she knew she was done for.

The boots rolled off the bundle and fell with a thud through her crumbling hands.

As she bent to pick them up, Seth Milap Chand was already at the door rattling the door latch and calling.

‘The wife of Jai Singh! Little one! May we come in?’

Gobindi sat down in a huddle and demurely pulling her head cloth over her eyes, answered: ‘Han Sethji, aao, come in.’

‘We wanted to avoid undue noise and talk and gossip by getting all this business over before many people are about,’ began Seth Milap Chand to cover his embarrassment. His thick-set form, was covered with sweat and his eyes were averted over his huge nose, surveying the property at the same time. ‘I have brought the gentleman who will buy the whole house, Dr Sain Das...’

Gobindi did not answer, but sat getting hotter and hotter on her bundle.

‘Come forward, Dr. Sahib,’ Milap Chand said.

Gobindi peered through the aperture of her head cloth and saw a black giant with glasses on his small eyes, a veritable elephant in an English suit, advancing with his arms on his hips. The old woman Phuphi came trailing, bent-back, behind them and some noisy children crowded in at the door.

‘If the back wall is pulled down, Dr. Sahib, the house faces the bazaar... I suggest you have a door put in there and let the male patients come in that way and keep the back door in the gulley for the purdah patients... It will do fine for your purposes, especially as the house next door will soon...’ He coughed and then nodding, continued: ‘By and by you can extend the practice...’

‘Hun!’ the elephant of a Doctor nodded. ‘Not much of a place, it will have to be rebuilt entirely later.’

‘But it is alright for the while, isn’t it?’ said Seth Milap Chand to clinch the bargain.

‘Hun, well it will have to do,’ the Doctor said.

‘So we will have a hospital here!’ said Phuphi. ‘Oh how my back aches. Perhaps Dr. Sahib can give me a poultice or something.’

‘Never you mind, old woman,’ said Milap Chand to shake her off.

‘What about the bedstead and the pots and pans?’ asked the Doctor. ‘They are with the house, I hope!’

‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that, but we can discuss that later. I would like to go and have a bath at the well in the fields.’

‘To wash off your sins, I suppose,’ said the old woman. ‘Not ashamed to possess the property acquired through Gobindi’s prostitution!’

‘Phuphi mai!’ protested Gobindi between her tears.

‘Don’t bark, you two!’ shouted Milap Chand. ‘I have spared you all the humiliation of an auction. I specially brought over Dr. Sahib at great inconvenience to him early in the morning. And you —’

‘Leave them alone,’ said Dr. Sain Das, who did not want a row between the money lender and the old woman.

‘Achha, then, Dr. Sahib, let us go...’

At that instant his eyes fell on the bundle of goods and the boots which stood by Gobindi. So he lunged forward,shouting:

‘Thief! the daughter of a bitch! What were you stealing from here! Open that bundle. And those boots — my son Gulzari Lal wants those!’

The words stabbed Gobindi’s soul and she fluttered under the headcloth like a wounded bird, uttering hiccupping cries and sobbing even as she fell on her bundle.

‘Open it, bitch!’

‘Don’t be hard on her,’ old Phuphi rallied to the girl’s aid. ‘She had meant to give those boots to my son, as a last gift from Jai Singh. After all, the boys were friends.’

‘Open the bundle and let us see what you are taking away,’ said Dr. Sain Das authoritatively. ‘Old woman, ask her to open it.’

‘Come, my daughter, let these evil faces see what is in the bundle and I’ll see that they don’t deprive you of your personal things — those boots especially which you meant to give to my son, anyhow.’

A shock of horror went through Gobindi’s soul as the old woman came towards her. She left the bundle but clutched the boots.

‘Open that bundle!’ Milap Chand ordered.

Old Phuphi began to undo the knots on the bundle while the money lender and the Doctor came forward to see what was in it.

‘And give me those boots for Gulzari,’ said the money lender, pushing Gobindi away from where she clutched the memory of Jai Singh.

The whole of Gobindi’s life seemed to lie in the remembrances of that hold she had on the boots, and she felt her spirit rising and falling as the hope of saving the relic rose and fell.

‘There is nothing very much except her knick-knacks in the bundle,’ said Dr. Sain Das, gingerly exploring the clothes. ‘Those boots are the only worthwhile thing. I could do with them if I have to trudge through the countryside.’

‘Gulzari —’ began Milap Chand.

‘Eaters of your masters, they are already given away as a gift to my son,’ said the old woman, trying to wrest the pair from Gobindi.

Gobindi struggled with all the grim strength of her young body for a while, her headcloth falling away and revealing a face convulsed with suppressed sobs. But old Phuphi scratched with her claws and Seth Milap Chand thrust her aside with both hands while the Doctor kicked her as though she were a dog.

‘You have the temerity to deny me the huckster’s profit on the deal,’ said the money lender, wresting the boots out of Gobindi’s hands after all.

The girl suddenly reeled where she sat and fell headlong on the earth weeping bitterly and screaming: ‘I’ll go mad! I’ll go mad!’

The children fled in terror.

Professor Cheeta

Dedicated to Fredoon Kabraji

Professor Cheeta heaved himself up from his seat on the top of the 77 bus immediately after it had left the Russell Hotel and, in the absence of the conductor upstairs, pressed the red knob of the bell with all his might.

The driver looked round with a scowl on his face, the passengers all stared hard and the conductor, coming to the top of the stairs, mumbled some of the spiciest words in the unacknowledged but most telling and forceful vocabulary of proletarian speech.

The bus hesitated under the clock of Sir Isaac Pitman’s Typewriting School, but did not stop until it had gone well past Peter’s Bar by the Burlington Hotel, almost opposite Bloomsbury Place.

That is exactly where Professor Cheeta had meant it to stop.

‘Come on now, Oldie, your bus fare finished at Russell Square y’ know!’ the conductor shouted.

‘Perhaps he does not understand,’ a passenger said.

‘Oh yes, he does! He comes this way every afternoon!’ the conductor said.

‘Thank you, thank you!’ Professor Cheeta said sheepishly as he struggled down from the bus, breathing heavily. ‘Thank you...’

‘Come on then — I thank you!’ the conductor said ironically, ‘Come on...’

Seemingly undaunted, he stepped down from the deck of the bus hurriedly but carefully, deploring the fact that there was so little respect for old age in the world nowadays and he began to walk down the pavement with mincing steps, followed by the humorous invective of the conductor.

Professor Cheeta was on his way to the British Museum Reading Room to research on the morphology of certain nouns and verbs in the Sanskrit, English and German languages, with a view to establish the cultural affinities of the Indo-Germanic peoples in particular, and the world in general, so as to promote world brotherhood, peace, tolerance and goodwill among men. He had started this particular enquiry about twenty-five years ago on the rebound against the fanatical nationalism of his earlier days and the terrorism with which he had toyed. But, as his research was nowhere near completion and as world tension grew, he was thinking of doing something more immediate, to write a short piece, a poem, to contribute his share to the solution of the difficulties of our troubled times. But almost every day he came into conflict with someone whose look or word implied ‘black man’ and his earlier terroristic impulses re-asserted themselves. He could not concentrate enough to put anything down and felt as though life were crumbling away around him. Now and then he walked the whole distance from his home in King’s Cross Road in order to keep his thoughts together. But he was too old at sixty-four and couldn’t keep it up. The life of poetry and reflection seemed to him more and more irreconcilable with the world of buses and trams.

Still, he rolled along at amazing speed on the short, squat legs which carried his top-heavy, stocky little frame, loaded with clothes. For summer or winter, he wore two shirts, a thick waist-coat made of eiderdown, a rough suit, a large, frayed overcoat, a coloured muffler round his neck, another tied as a turban on his round head, which fell almost over his ears and covered his round coffee-coloured face.

He could not resist looking at the shop windows of Harding’s bookshop in Great Russell Street, mumbling to himself names of the books displayed. Then, suddenly with a jerk, he tore himself away as if he were in a special hurry to get to the Reading Room and did not want to linger. For, ordinarily, he did not regard the Reading Room as a library, but more as a social club where he met all his old friends and cronies among the international fraternity of scholars, cranks, exiles and refugees who had also been researching here for years, monuments of industry and patience who emerged from their lonely attics and converged here towards the late afternoon.

‘You are late today, Professor?’ the tall, top-hatted beadle said by way of a greeting.

‘Hellow, Mr. Jenks!’ the Professor returned the greeting. ‘Ow are you? And the wife?’

Jenks’ perennial inquiries about the wife had always embarrassed him, for from the first Peggy had patronised him by saying that she was marrying him, a coloured man, against the wishes of her family; and he had never got on with her. ‘Rather seedy! Rather seedy you know, Mr. Jenks, my wife is rather seedy,’ he said hypocritically and then sought to change the subject. ‘The weather has not been too good... The Sun! Oh, the Sun of my country!’

‘Too hot for me!’ Jenks said, ‘When I was in your country up in Chitral I had malaria. Yes, too hot for me, your country!’

‘And it is getting hotter — what with Gandhi!’ interjected the dour policeman who stood by the gate.

But the Professor was not really listening. The mention of the Sun had excited a train of thought in his mind and he mumbled academically to himself: ‘The Sun has many names, Brahma, Vishnu, Krishna, Surya, Apollo, Ra, Isis, Phoebus, Thor...’

‘And mumbo-jumbo,’ said the porter with a laugh.

The Professor did not take any notice of Jenks, but began suddenly, spontaneously like a child to weave a rhapsodic chant about the Sun, as children do when they are fascinated by a word.

‘I am the son of the Sun

the true son of the Sun,

descended from the tribe of the worshippers of Surya,

baked in the fire of the Lord...’

‘Breeds a lot of maggots, the Sun!’ said Jenks.

But the Professor did not heed him and walked away with a wave of the hand, singing snatches of little verses and soliloquising in his rhapsodic manner.

‘I am the circle above the zone of the Equator

who stirred the seas

and shook the mountains,

who hurled the earth

into the mounting storm of light...’

‘He’s off his head!’ Jenks said to the policeman. ‘Poet and don’ know it!’ the policeman answered.

Professor Cheeta walked along, talking to himself and chanting the words of certain half-forgotten poems, absentminded and unconcerned with everyone else, he was yet aware that he was different from most men in the juggernaut of commerce which was rushing on outside. An exile from his homeland ever since he had come out of jail for suspected terrorism, he had never taken any roots in this country for all the thirty years that he had spent here. People stared at him, turned back to look at his queer gnome-like, dark, heavy figure, swathed in a thick overcoat, with the blue turban on his head and pince-nez on his nose. The children whispered to each other about whether he was an African or a Red Indian and cheeked him by asking him the time.

But though he seemed a fool to others, he was a dreamer imbued with the precariousness of life. For throughout his life there had come to him certain impulses and visions, vague and fleeting at first, but which had lingered in him with a subtle sense of beauty, nobility and grandeur, like a melody that moved him strongly at odd moments and then evaporated.

And he knew certain kindred souls whose life had been disturbed in the same way but who had later accepted some kind of compensatory faith. There was Miss Richardson, for instance, a lady of seventy, an ardent Christian prohibitionist, who worshipped the memory of Pussyfoot Johnson, read Dr. Mathew’s rendering of the Bible in the Reading Room, and fed pigeons in the compound.

‘Come and see my little ones,’ she said in a squeaky voice as the Professor strolled up today.

Professor Cheeta made a noise with his lips in the cooing language of pigeons and then broke out into human speech:

‘Come, my sons, come, you flutter like my heart.’

‘They are not afraid,’ said Miss Richardson with a laugh which knit her shrivelled, lined face with a queer, innocent beauty, the aura of the devoted, of those who believe.

‘Hellow, Miss Richardson,’ said Professor Cheeta almost flirtatiously.

‘The pets — they are so hungry!’ said the old woman blushing a little.

‘They are happy as the air,’ said Professor Cheeta conventionally. But in his heart there was a tense emptiness, as though he felt the need for wings, but realised that he hadn’t even a face, or a tongue to speak with, as though he could not even move or look at anyone. And there came a far-away look in his eyes, a kind of fixed stare at the nothingness about him.

‘Why so sad, Professor?’ Miss Richardson asked as she threw more crumbs onto the palm of her hand.

Professor Cheeta sighed an almost inaudible sigh and swallowing a choking breath, said in a doleful voice: ‘I was born in India, you know, Miss Richardson, in the country of dreams, the fountain of fables, the source of much knowledge and wisdom and tears...’

‘How many Christians are there in India, altogether?’ asked Miss Richardson, ‘I have always wanted to ask you that, Professor?’

‘As a young man,’ went on Professor Cheeta, without heeding her question, and almost as if he were talking to himself, ‘I felt I had a dream. Brighter than all dreams, a glorious vision of myself — I wanted to write a poem in which I could infuse the spirit of fire which would embody light, which would, if you see what I mean, be radiant, glowing and bright, which would put some meaning into things.’

‘I am quite sure if you believe in Jesus...,’ began Miss Richardson.

But Professor Cheeta did not let her finish her sentence, which he knew was the beginning of a quite mechanical speech to convert him that she always delivered in season and out of season! He was too restless and felt as if even his instinct for words was betraying him, as though he were losing his grasp on life altogether. ‘Time went on,’ he said, ‘and the vision still persisted, flashing and sparkling in my brain, flowing like the music of rushing waters, shimmering like the sunshine and bathing me in the aroma of roses, if you see what I mean, a fire consumed me —’

‘And then?’ Miss Richardson said, now interested.

‘Oh lady,’ replied Professor Cheeta, moving his head about dolefully till the pigeons took fright and fluttered. ‘I was let down, betrayed, put into jail. And since then I have been too preoccupied with mundane struggles. Too pulled about, torn by the strain of it all to believe ever in poetry.’

‘Didn’t Krishna say, “Live in action”?’ asked Miss Richardson.

‘He was speaking in another time,’ said Professor Cheeta. ‘Nowadays, what with atom bombs and the rest, I feel —’ And he waved his short arm in a gesture of despair.

‘To work then on your dream!’ exhorted Miss Richardson, so that the pigeons fluttered with the echo of her voice... ‘You have no time to lose.’

Professor Cheeta was affected by the peremptory note in her voice and looked at her for a moment. Then he withdrew his gaze inwards as if he felt the will to have vision anew and was trying to hold fast to a glimpse of it. Greeting Miss Richardson with a bow he fairly ran towards the Reading Room, taking two steps at a time, hurrying through the swing doors and the hall amid the babble of sightseers’ voices. He did not even halt to return the ‘Good afternoon’ of the porter at the doors of the Reading Room, but scrambled towards the North Library, panting for breath. His thoughts seemed to go askew as though the dome had pressed them out and his eyes moved furtively outwards and inwards, as if to keep the vision in control.

‘Is this seat taken, Mr. Southern?’ he asked an old man with the beard of Havelock Ellis and the eyes of Bertrand Russell.

‘Sh, sh!’ shushed Mr. Southern who, though a friend of Professor Cheeta’s, was compiling the history of Egypt in thirty volumes and had no time to answer irrelevant questions.

Professor Cheeta’s face fell a little and he drifted away, groping for a seat and assuring himself in his mind that if only he could get hold of a seat and a pen he could cause the ink to run into gold and hold the glimpse of the beauty and the tragedy he had lived, captive forever... Therefore, he did not acknowledge Mr. Davis who was writing a treatise to blow the cancer research racket skyhigh, or Father Talbot who was writing up the Spanish Inquisition. But he noticed Professor Palmer, the orientalist, and his heart congealed, for Palmer had written a most vicious introduction to a translation of the Gita and was now doing a commentary to damn the Vedas. Professor Cheeta’s eyes quivered with fear and he changed his direction. The Reading Room was full at this time. One of the friendly old assistants, Evans, seeing the Professor in distress, came up to him and said: ‘You are late today, aren’t you? There is only ten minutes to closing time!’

‘Yes,’ Professor Cheeta said apologetically, ‘can you get me a seat, Mr. Evans? I have something important to write.’

‘Wait then,’ Evans said, ‘I shall look around at the other end.’

‘Thank you,’ Professor Cheeta said and moved towards the corners of hope. Looking up at the clock he felt as if the years were rolling by with every tick of the minute-hand. And the urge of the poem in his heart beat louder and louder as he saw the pens of the readers running faster and faster before closing time. Afraid of losing the rhythm of his song, as well as to test its ring on the tympanum of his ears, he paced up and down impatiently, and losing sight of Evans, stood talking to himself as if he were in a delirium. ‘I am no mere bookworm. . . like that Mr. Southern there. Buried beneath dusty volumes. I am no mere chronicler of the dead; I have something in me. My love for my country. I am stirred like the waves of the sea, Mr. Palmer, ghost of dead ideas that you are! I am possessed by the Sun.’

‘Please don’t talk so loudly,’ a reader said.

But Professor Cheeta was absorbed in himself and went on burr-burring,

‘I am the Son of the Sun... I...’

‘Please don’t disturb me,’ the reader said.

‘Young man!’ the Professor said, surprised at the student’s lack of consideration, ‘I want to sit down.’

‘Oh alright, go away from here!’ the young reader stammered impatiently.

Now the other readers were disturbed too and there came suppressed whispers of concern, brief injunctions, suppressed threats, silent angry looks, more potent than any words.

‘What is all this noise?’ a minor official said coming up to SS2.

‘Oh my head aches,’ Professor Cheeta was saying to himself.

‘Throw him out!... Sh... Chuck him out!’ the readers said, bursting from beneath a hitherto suppressed hysteria which seemed to have been waiting to explode in the silence.

‘I shall fetch the Superintendent,’ said the official.

Possessed by tremors of hate and frustration, Professor Cheeta turned towards the exit. His whole frame quivered with the fear that all the Englishmen in the Museum were following him and that they were going to lynch him. Above these delusions the smoke of chagrin covered his thoughts, his head hung down and there was a light in his eyes which was too furtive to stare ahead. As he raced along, the turbulent music of anguish in his body blinded him completely and he fell headlong across the steps by a bookshelf with a giant thud.

‘Oh, the poor old man!’ someone said.

‘Give him a hand!’ another said.

‘Now, now, what have you done, Professor!’ Evans said, rushing up after him.

The Assistant Keeper of Printed Books came down from his perch at this uproar, a tall, towering, bald-headed man. He seowled at the people who had gathered round the old man, whispered something to himself and went away. He knew that Cheeta, like several other people, regarded the library as a social club and disliked him for making himself a nuisance.

‘And I found you a seat too!’ Evans was saying consolingly to the Professor as he lifted him... ‘And you go and fall down like that! Come!’

At that instant the closing bell of the Reading Room rang.

‘There you are, you couldn’t have written much today, anyhow,’ said Evans, seeing him to the door. ‘Now steady as you go...’

‘Thank you, Mr. Evans, thank you for your trouble,’ Professor Cheeta said as he hobbled along.

Then he felt for his turban which had come undone. He did not stop to retie it, however, and went along, clutching his old portfolio securely in his left hand and mumbling: ‘Oh my head! Oh my head!’

‘Hello Professor! Hello!’ someone called to him by the cloak-room.

But he did not want to meet anyone now and hurried out.

‘He seems very restless today!’ the porter said to the policeman, as he saw him rushing away without the familiar, long drawn-out conferences with Professor Carlo, the Professor of Languages, and Mr. Matthews, who came to the Reading Room to pick up newspapers from the waste paper baskets and the various Indian students.

The next day he received an official, brief, curt letter from the Keeper of Books informing him that his Reading Room ticket was cancelled. After he had lain in bed the whole morning, recovering from this shock, he tried to get up and proceed to the Museum as usual. But as he was dressing, he fell with a thud on the floor and was laid out for months and confined to bed with an undiagnosible malaise.

When he recovered slightly, he begged his wife to wheel him to the compound of the Reading Room. But the doctor disallowed any such exercise.

After that he was bedridden and kept losing weight as if something inside him was gnawing at him and corroding his strength.

Miss Richardson came to see him twice or thrice and tried to give him faith. But he seemed inconsolable. Having lingered, for some months, with failing powers of physique, he passed away one afternoon at almost the time he used to go to the Reading Room, mumbling to himself the while:

‘I am the son of the Sun,

I am the Sun,

The Sun...’

The Lady and the Pedlar

Dedicated to Julian Maclaren Ross

Even as Topsy caught the handle of the door of that compartment she regretted it, for she had seen the strange hulk of Shiv Singh’s turban over the bulk of his form in the corner. But she had been in such a hurry. And she felt foolish to be frightened. So she braved it and entered, her attache case in front of her.

Shiv Singh who sat huddled in his overcoat raised his eyes towards her for a moment. Then, conscious from past experience that his stare usually frightened the English ladies and generally drove them away to another compartment, he assumed a casual air and lowering his bearded face into the folds of his colourful muffler, luxuriated in the warmth of his own breath.

Topsy smoothed her coat under her and sat down in the corner seat by the door, her attache case by her. She looked straight before her and tried to calm herself, as she felt her cheeks burning with the blood that had rushed up to her face through hurrying up the platform and the confusion of seeing a foreigner in the compartment which she had entered. There were the tiniest beads of perspiration on the tip of her well-shaped nose and the smooth skin of her almost masculine face. She breathed deeply for a moment, looked vigilantly at the stranger from the corner of her eyes and then opened her bag to get a cigarette.

As she lit the fag and exhaled a mouthful of smoke in an effort to calm her nerves, Shiv Singh turned and stared at her. His gaze was half full of wonder at her beauty, which was like that of a wax image in a hair-dresser’s shop and at the same time possessed the strange armour-like hardness of steel and half disapproving because of the instinctive taboo of the Sikh in him against tobacco fumes.

She felt her heart thudding with danger as she sensed that he was looking at her. She would have got up and cleared out to another compartment but there was a whistle and the train began to move. Then, ashamed of her panic, she tried to settle down and shake off the queer glistening fibre of dread that shimmered before her eyes, to cool the thick diaphanous stream of blood that turned to sweat under her armpits, to jam the echoes of memories that struck her spine between the shoulder blades and formed a vague, spheroidal ball of fire in her belly...

Now that the railgari had started there was no danger of her going away out of sheer fright and Shiv Singh felt his pulse beat rise at the warmth of her presence. It always made him happy to be with a pretty girl, specially if she took him for granted and trusted him, and, although in the soft layers under his crustacean brown skin he knew that this one was self-conscious and had no pity for him but only fear, he thought that in a little while she would get used to his strangeness.

In fact he felt he must do something to put her at her ease, for the English never took the initiative in these things — certainly travelling here was not like journeying in Indian trains where everyone told his life-story even before the moving thing had begun to move. So he thought of some way of breaking the ice. For a moment he felt the subtle radiance of dread overwhelm his brain and he could imagine her pulling the chord if he accosted her. Then, beneath the heavy crest of his forehead, the warm sun of his good sense shone forth, infusing into him an assurance which was the reflex of his innocence and lit his Punjabi heart with warmth. During these many years, after the chill of his first arrival, he had gone through the streets and lanes of this country, the towns as well as the most outlying villages and, though aware of the handicap of his black body, in the tang of the sun on his face and the smell of his bushy beard, he had built up a wall of bluff in his strong sinews to protect his child’s heart which he could, however, remove at will to release the warmth of his humanity as soon as he came into contact with people. And he had learnt to turn the tap on at the right time through long practice as a pedlar, for you had to make a beginning if you wanted to sell your wares. But how was he to begin now?

He stared at the girl knowing that the gentle liquid in his eyes would communicate his real intent. But Topsy was staring through the hard points of her grey-green eye balls, straight in front of her, her face cast in a rigid mould, even as it was flushed a vivid pink against the ivory of her neck. She looked like the effigy of death itself. And Shiv Singh was flustered.

Glancing at her attache case and fancying it did not give her enough space to sit on comfortably, he said: ‘Miss, I put your box on the luggage rack — there?’

There was the rustling of tussore silk in the curve of his voice where the words were being cut with sharp, high pitched scissors in his throat.

‘No, thank you,’ she said turning with a deliberate kindness towards him. Instantly she felt her congealed blood melting into a more copious sweat, though her startled nerves relaxed into ellipses below ellipses of memory and undulated towards the planets behind her breasts and in her belly.

And, for a while, both the passengers settled down, each to each, separate yet inured to the decency of being and letting be.

But it is not long before the process of becoming will come breaking in upon the moments of being.

Glancing with the eye of the professional hawker at her form, the pedlar caught sight of the edge of her pink crepe de chine petticoat, erring beyond the tweed skirt. Glossy and soft it was by the ruddy knees of the lady — even as the Benares silk of the shalwar his wife had worn when she emerged out of the palanquin into the barn of his home in Nurpur after his marriage: only it transgressed across the bare inviting legs of this girl like a big rose petal falling from a ripe flower. In the spring-time of bygone days, the orchards of the landlord by the black river had smelt of wild herbs and juicy fruit, and he would be bursting with desire, warm like a swoon and dizzy with the confusion and disorder of life reaching out to unattainable bliss. ...But now he was getting old and the stirring of desire in his bones was chilled by the distance from women and the coldness of these northern climes in which he sojourned to make a living. And yet in the dim-lit corners of his soul he felt the expansion of a warm glow to see the erring robe... He wished he hadn’t sold out his entire stock of underwear, for then he could have presented the girl a piece of lingerie just out of the gladness of his heart... He stole another look at the suggestive garment and then sat disturbed, tempestuous.

Retreating from the three dimensional picture of hills and plains in the frame above the seats, retracing the pupils of her eyes inwards from the cigarette smoke which filled the atmosphere now, she could see the colours of the spectrum as she had seen them when she closed her eyes on the terrace of her mother’s home in Johannesburg. Nothing else was clear and certain, only the multi-coloured stars of heat, spreading like flowers in a kaleidoscope before her as she followed the negro gardener who watered the hanging plants. And then, suddenly, across the long corridors, there was the echo of a rich voice. That was her mother calling, a fragrant voice but also full of coldness as she knew that she, Topsy, had been following Charlie about, and was reprimanding her with don’ts. ...Was it the fiery heat of Africa that made her, even now, break out in deadly sweats? She had been brought away to school in England so long ago that she did not remember much about the big house in Johannesburg where she had been born and bred. And yet in the vegetable-animal kingdom of her nerves she came across the most extraordinary sensations, which her sudden blushes and flushes proclaimed to the world. ...She had been very fond of Charlie, and her mother was kind to the servants in spite of what she said. Why then did she always get hot and cold whenever she met a coloured man? And why did she feel a faint nausea in her belly every time she came face to face with a man? Why the wild confusion?

The train was running now as if it were racing towards the end of the world and outside the ups and downs of Cheshire hills made a bewitchingly impermanent pattern, like the past dissolving into the thin cold air of winter.

The two passengers waited, after their thoughts had wandered to and fro, to assess each other again, and yet as they surveyed the shadows of each other’s presence they were struck blind by the impenetrability of the barriers which the cluster of memories and desires had put between them.

Someone brushed past the window along the corridor and the fear that the intruder might come into the compartment forced the disturbing clusters in each of them to offer a common response of uneasy taciturnity towards the stranger. But the danger passed and they were lost in their own fancies.

Before long, however, the desire to make contact with the girl began to overpower Shiv Singh, for he was going to alight at the next station and felt he should have liked to prove to her that he was no murderer. Why shouldn’t he be able to speak to her? He did not mean any harm. So why not? ...And the fact that he could not do as he wished became a challenge to him, to his sense of chivalry and manhood. ‘Can I dare? Can I?’ The question arose from underneath the callow, abject soul that had never been able to overthrow the many fears that the white skin had instilled into him, except when he was openly defiant... And he sought to deceive himself by intoning a Hindustani verse, lamenting the inevitability of separation from the beloved. And, a little later, he was carried beyond the torments of the poetic lover to the cynicism of the frustrated Majnu and tried to remember another conceit in which he had heard expressed the faithlessness of woman, the hollowness of her heart, the changes and shifts of her manner, the faked smiles, the easy tears and all the other blandishments.

The girl was much more at ease now, though she still pursed her lips tight and averted her empty steel glare to the window beyond which the landscape was changing. She could not help reacting to the pressure of his will which kept caressing her face through surreptitious glances, and yet she was determined to resist the intrusion of his pathetic, dog-like eyes with the bones of her high cheeks and her strong chin. Never, never to yield, to keep the distance between herself and them — that was the feeling which held her together. (‘Give them an inch and they would take a yard my dear!’) And, anyhow, it was too late to surrender after her first hesitation at the door, after her persistent refusal to face him, and after he had stripped her naked with his exploring eyes (‘they see right through you, my dear!’).

The train passed through a dark tunnel and Topsy’s heart nearly sank into the pit of her stomach. But Shiv Singh had not moved and the shadow was brief. And then, they passed by a graveyard and the backs of some houses and over a bridge and the pedlar stirred and reached out for his suitcase.

The atmosphere in the compartment eased with his movement. And Topsy even stole a glance at the contemptible creature out of sheer curiosity, as though she was wondering what kind of an ape he was.

Shiv Singh got up and, assembling his belongings, stood looking about him.

Now that she had surveyed his tall athletic form the girl was fascinated by him and stared at him hard and yet constantly...

And the miracle happened which she had tried to avoid: their eyes met for the briefest instant.

Because his eyes had met hers when she was completely unawares and there had been no hatred in her glance but only a faint look of wonder, Shiv Singh was emboldened to establish the connection he had longed for, even though it was only for a moment, before he alighted from the train.

Impulsively he dug his hand into the pocket of his coat and took out an egg.

‘Miss, take this,’ he said offering it to her on his palm.

‘Very rare nowadays.’

The fascination of wonder had in that one instant been overtaken by the compulsion of a faint greed and fainter gratitude.

‘Oh, thank you,’ she said and smiling, dipped her eyes coyly before him.

Shiv Singh had now turned his back, so overcome was he by his sense of conquest and so anxious that not the slightest trace of contempt in her eyes should spoil his happiness. And the generous, puffed-up Punjabi in him bore him down the corridor and out to the platform of the station where the train had come to a standstill after the last jerk.

Topsy carefully packed the egg in a paper bag and put it in her attache case. She marvelled at her own indiscretion in taking a gift from a stranger, a black man, but an egg was an egg these days.

When she got home she boiled the egg, thinking it would be nice to have it for supper. As she took it out of the saucepan, because she saw the shell splitting, she found that it was already a hard-boiled egg, which had now become doubly hard-boiled!

•••

Glossary

Acha/Achha

Expression for ‘well! all right’ used in the Indian sub-continent.

Adab arz

Urdu word for salutation or greeting.

Allah-ho-Akbar

God is great.

Allah-Mian

Another respectful name for Allah.

Amla

Hindi for Indian Gooseberry.

Angrezi

English language, and/or anything associated with England.

Babuji

A respectful title or form of address for a man, especially an educated one.

Bachu

A friendly expression for the person being addressed.

Badshah

King.

Bahin chod Angrez  log

Sister fucker. In the story it is used as an obscenity to denounce the British.

Bazaar

A market place.

Bhut/Bhoot

Literally, demon, ghost or an evil spirit.

Churel

Witch or a hag.

Dagdar

Distortion of English word ‘Doctor’.

Dur, Dur

To shoo away.

Fakir

A Muslim religious ascetic who lives on alms.

Gentermana

North Indian rural distortion of the word ‘Gentleman’.

Gulley/Gali/Gully

An alley.

Hai-hai

Alas! Alas!

Han/Haan

Yes.

Harami

Bastard.

Hun

A grunt indicating assent.

Izzat

Honour, reputation.

Jinns

Evil spirit capable of appearing in human and animal forms and possess humans.

Kikar

A small tree found mainly in dry regions of the Indian sub-continent also called Babool.

Lalla/Lala

A respectful designation especially for a trader or businessman.

Lat Sahib

Hindi/Urdu distortion of the English word ‘Lord’.

Mullah

A Muslim learned in Islamic theology and sacred law.

Munshi

A North Indian expression for a clerk usually the one who writes books of accounts.

Ohe

Hey you.

Parathas

A flat, thick piece of unleavened bread fried on a griddle.

Phuphi mai

Paternal aunt (father’s sister).

Pice

The smallest unit of Indian currency till the mid-twentieth century. Pice was a quarter of an anna in value.

Pir/Peer

A Muslim saint or a holy man.

Purdah

The practice among women in certain Muslim societies of dressing in all enveloping clothes, in order to stay out of sight of men or strangers.

Railgari

Train

Raj

Rule

Rajah

King

Sahib

A polite form of address for an educated, cultured man.

Salam alaikum

Arabic language greeting in Muslim cultures, meaning ‘Peace be upon you.’

Sale/Saale

Literally, wife’s brother. Also an abuse implying that the speaker has slept with the sister of one addressed.

Sari/Saree

A garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by women from the Indian sub-continent.

Sarkar

Literally, the government. It also refers to a person in a position of authority, especially one who owns land worked by tenant farmers.

Shalwar/Salwar

A pair of light, loose pleated trousers tapering to a close fit around the ankles, worn by men/women mostly in North India and Pakistan.

Suras

A chapter or section of the Koran.

Tehmet/Tehmad

An unstitched length of cloth usually worn knotted at the waist by men in the Indian sub-continent.

Tonga-wallah

‘Wallah’ translated literally means ‘man’ and the prefix tonga (horse carriage) indicates occupation. Tonga-wallah would roughly translate as tonga-man or tonga-driver.

Topee/Topi

A hat or a cap.

Vilayat

England

Wa alaykum

as-Salam

Response to Salam alaikum (peace be upon you) meaning ‘And on you be peace!’

Wuzu

The act of cleaning oneself before namaaz.

Table of Contents

The Author

Copyright

Lament on the Death of a Master of Arts

Appearance and Reality

Boots

Professor Cheeta

The Lady and the Pedlar

Glossary