Malgudi Days (27 page)

It was a sore trial for me each day. I could not stand her. Her voice got on my nerves while she harangued, reprimanded or bawled at the servant girl. I shut and bolted the door of my room. I wanted peace of mind to go through the book in hand,
Life of Ramakrishna
, passages from Max Müller, Plato's
Republic
—it was a privilege to be able to be a participant in their thoughts. I felt thrilled to be battling with their statements and wresting a meaning out of them. Whatever they might have meant, they all seemed to hold forth the glory of the soul, which made me survey myself top to toe and say, ‘Sambu, who are you? You are not the creature with a prickly stubble on the chin, scar on the kneecap, with toenail splitting and turning blue . . . you are actually made of finer stuff.' I imagined myself able to steer my way through the traffic of constellations in the firmament, in the interstellar spaces, and along the Milky Way; it enabled me to overlook the drab walls around me and the uninspiring spectacles outside the window opening on Kabir Street. Into this, shattering my vision, would come hard knocks on my door. Mother would be standing there crying, ‘Why do you have to close this door? Who is there in this house to disturb you or anyone? Not like those days . . . Whom are you trying to shut out?' I could only look on passively. I was aware that she was ready for a battle, but I had not based my life on a war-footing yet. She looked terrifying with her grey unkempt hair standing like a halo around her head, her eyes spitting fire. I felt nervous, the slightest wrong move could spark off a conflagration.

I don't know what came over her six months after her husband's death. At the first shock of bereavement she remained subdued. For months and months she spoke little, spent much of her time in the
puja
room, meditating and chanting holy verse in an undertone. She went about the business of running the house without any fuss, never noticing anything too closely. She left me very much alone, though hinting from time to time that I should study and pass my B.A. In those days, some of the flotsam and jetsam who had been thriving indefinitely on my father's hospitality were still occupying various portions of my house. As long as they were all there, Mother kept herself in the background and behaved like a gentle person. Probably she had a code as to how she should behave in the presence of hangers-on. When I got the last of them out—that was the mad engineer, who had sought shelter from his brothers scheming to poison him and who finally had to be bundled off with the help of neighbours and the driver of the ambulance van—she began to breathe freely and probably felt that the stage had been cleared for her benefit. Following it, her first hostile act was to shut my father's room and put a lock on the door. I was aghast when I realized that access to the books was cut off. As she spent most of her time in the middle block of the house, I had to be running after her, begging for the key if I wished to see a book. At first, she would not yield. ‘Read your school books first and pass your examination,' she said. ‘Time enough for you to read those big books, after you get your degree. Anyway, you won't understand them. Do you know what your father used to say? He said that he could not make them out himself! What do you say to that?'

‘I don't doubt it. Did he at any time try? He always sat with his back to them.' She grew angry at this remark. ‘Don't laugh at your elders, who have nurtured you,' she would say and move off dramatically to end the conversation. I had to follow her, begging, ‘The key, please, Mother . . .' I was young enough in those days not to feel discouraged. Finally she would say, ‘Don't mess up the books. You are so persistent—if you could have shown half this persistence in your studies!' I hated her at such moments. Why should she attach importance to examinations and degrees? Traditional and habitual manner of thought. Her sister's sons at Madras were all graduates, and she felt humiliated in family circles when they compared my performance. Before I finally gave up studies, whenever the Matriculation results were announced she would scream, ‘You have failed again! You fool! You are a disgrace . . .'

I would shout back, ‘What can I do? You think marks are to be bought in the market?'

After some more exchanges of the same kind, she would break down and have a quiet cry in a corner, abandoning for the day her normal activities, not even lighting the lamp in the
puja
room in the evening. A deadly gloom would descend on the house, everything still and silent, no life stirring even slightly. We would become petrified figures in that vast house. I would feel upset and oppressed in this atmosphere and leave without a word, to seek some bright spots such as the town library, the marketplace, the college sports ground, and, more than any other place, the Boardless Hotel, to pass the time in agreeable company.

 

Instead of the dark house to which I usually sneaked back, today when I returned from the Boardless I found the light in the hall burning. I was puzzled. I went up a few steps in the direction of my room and stopped. I heard voices in the hall and a lot of conversation. My mother's voice was the loudest, sounded as spirited as in her younger days. She was saying, ‘He is not a bad boy, but likes to sound so. If we talk to him seriously, he'll certainly obey me.' The other one was gruff-voiced and saying, ‘You should not have let him go his way at all; after all, young persons do not know what is good for them, it is for the elders to give them the necessary guidance.' I was hesitating, wondering how to reach the door to my room, unlock it without being noticed. If they heard the click of the key, they were bound to turn their attention on me. My door was at the end of the veranda, and I could not possibly go past the window without being seen. I felt hunted. I could not go back to the Boardless. I quietly sat down on the
pyol
of the house, leaning against the pillar supporting the tiled roof, stretched my legs and resigned myself to staying there all night, since from the tenor of the dialogue going on there was no indication it would ever cease. The gruff voice was saying, ‘What keeps him out so late?' My mother was saying, ‘Oh, this and that. He spends a lot of time at the library, reads so much!' I appreciated my mother for saying this. I never suspected that she had such a good opinion of me. What secret admiration she must be having—never showing any sign of it outside. It was a revelation to me. I almost felt like popping up and shouting, ‘Oh, Mother, how nice of you to think so well of me! Why could you not say so to me?' But I held myself back.

He asked, ‘What does he plan to do?'

‘Oh!' she said, ‘he has some big plans, which he won't talk about now. He is very deep and sensitive. His ambition is to be a man of learning. He spends much time with learned persons . . .'

‘My daughter, you know, is also very learned. She reads books all the time . . .'

‘Sambu has read through practically all the volumes that his father left for him in that room. Sometimes I just have to snatch the books from him and lock them away so that he may bathe and eat! I don't think even an M.A. has read so much!'

‘I really do not worry what he will do in life, though holding some position or an office is the distinguishing mark of a man.' He recited a Sanskrit line in support of this. ‘Let him not strain in any manner except to be a good husband. My daughter's share of the property . . .' Here he lowered his voice and they continued to talk in whispers.

At dawn my mother caught me asleep on the
pyol
when she came out to sweep the front steps and wash the threshold as others before her had been doing for one thousand years. She was aghast at seeing me stretched out there. At some part of the night I must have fallen asleep. I think they were passing on to some sort of reminiscences far into the night, and they were both convulsed with laughter at the memory of some ancient absurdity. I had never heard my mother laughing so much. She seemed to have preserved a hidden personality especially for the edification of her old relatives or associates, while she presented to me a grim, serious, director-general aspect. It was foolish and thoughtless of me to have lain there and get caught so easily. Luckily her guest had gone to the back yard for a bath and had not seen me. Otherwise he'd have suspected that I had come home drunk, and been abandoned by undesirable companions at our door. Ah, how I wish he had seen me in this condition, which would have been a corrective to all the bragging my mother had been indulging in about me. She hurriedly woke me up. ‘Sleeping in the street! What'll people think! Why didn't you go into your room? Did you return so late? What were you doing all the time?' There was panic in her tone, packed with suspicion that I must have been drinking and debauching—the talk of the town was the opening of a nightclub called Kismet somewhere in the New Extension, where the youth of the city were being lured. Someone must have gossiped about it within her hearing. I was only half-awake when she shook me and whispered, ‘Get into your room first—'

‘Why?' I asked, sitting up.

‘I do not want you to be seen here . . .'

‘I found you talking to someone and so I . . .' I had no rational conclusion to my sentence.

She gripped my arm and pulled me up, probably convinced that I needed assistance. I made a dash for my door, shut myself in and immediately resumed my sleep, a part of my mind wondering whether I should not have said, ‘I was at Kismet . . .' I got up later than usual. There was no trace of the visitor of the night, which made me wonder if I had been having nightmares. ‘He left early to catch the bus,' explained Mother when I was ready for coffee. I accepted her explanation in silence, refraining from asking further questions. I felt a premonition that some difficult time was ahead. We met at the middle courtyard as usual, where I accepted my coffee after a wash at the well. Normally we would exchange no words at this point; she would present a tumbler of coffee when I was seen at the kitchen door. There our contact would stop on most days, unless she had some special grievance to express, such as a demand for house-tax or failure on the part of the grocer or the milk-supplier. I'd generally listen passively, silently finish the coffee and pass on, bolt myself in, dress and make my exit by the veranda as unobtrusively as possible. But today, after coffee, she remarked, ‘The servant girl hasn't come yet. Of late she is getting notions about herself.' I repressed my remarks, as my sympathies were all on the side of that cheerful little girl, who had to bear a lot of harsh treatment from her mistress. After this information Mother said, ‘Don't disappear, stay in . . .' and she allowed herself a mild smile; she seemed unusually affable; this combined with all the good things she had been saying last night bewildered me. Some transformation seemed to be taking place in her; it didn't suit her at all to wear a smile; it looked artificial and waxwork-like and toothy. I wished I could fathom her mind; the grimness and frown and growl were more appropriate for her face. I said, ‘I have some work to do and must go early.'

‘What work?' she asked with a mischievous twinkle in her eyes. I felt scared. There were a dozen excuses I could give; should I tell her about Varma's treasure-hunt (on Mondays he brought a sheaf of planchette messages purporting to give directions for a buried treasure in the mountains and sought my interpretation of them), or the little note I had promised a college student on Jaina philosophy, or apt quotations for a municipal councillor's speech for some occasion. I was afraid my mother would pooh-pooh them, and so I just said, ‘I have many things to do—you wouldn't understand.' Normally she would burst out, ‘Understand! How do you know? Have you tried? Your father never kept anything from me.' But today she just said, ‘Very well, I don't want to bother you to tell me,' with a mock-sadness in her voice. It was clear that she was continuing the goodwill she had exhibited last night before the stranger. I felt uneasy. She was playacting, for what purpose I could not guess.

Presently she followed me into my room and said, ‘You may go after listening to me. Your business can wait for a while.' She sat down on my mat and invited me to sit beside her to listen attentively. I felt nervous. This was not her sitting hour; she'd be all over the place, sweeping, washing, cleaning and driving the girl about. But today what could be the important item of business, suspending all else?

It was not long in coming. ‘Do you know who has come?' I knew I was being pushed to the wall. Sitting so close to her made me uneasy. I felt embarrassed, especially when I noticed a strand of white beard on her chin. Was she aware of its existence? Ridiculous if she was going about, behaving as if it weren't there. ‘Grey-beard loon . . .' A phrase emerged now out of the miasma of assorted reading of hypothecated property. I recollected her boasts before the visitor about my studious habits. After waiting for me to say something (luckily I was brooding over Shakespeare's line—or was it Coleridge's?—otherwise I would have promptly said, ‘Some dark, hook-nosed fellow with a tuft—I couldn't care less who,' every word of which would have irritated her), she explained, ‘The richest man in our village: a hundred acres of paddy, coconut garden—from the coconut garden alone his income would be a
lakh
of rupees, and from cattle . . . They are distantly related to us . . .' She went into genealogical details explaining the family alliances of several generations and dropping scores of names. She was thorough. I was amazed at the amount of information stored in her mind; she knew also where every character lived, scattered though they were between the Himalayas in the North and the tip of Cape Comorin in the South. I was fascinated by the way she was piling up facts in order to establish the identity of the man with the tuft. I felt like the Wedding-Guest in ‘The Ancient Mariner'. I could not break away. Here was another line floating up from the literary scrap acquired from my hypothecated property: ‘Hold off!' the Wedding-Guest wailed, ‘unhand me,' but the Ancient Mariner gripped his wrist and said with a far-away look, ‘With my crossbow I shot the Albatross.' While my head buzzed with these irrelevant odds and ends, my mother was concluding a sentence: ‘The girl has studied up to B.A. and is to be married in June—he is keen that it should be gone through without any delay. She is his last issue and he is anxious to settle her future . . . and the settlement he has proposed is very liberal . . .' I remained silent. I could now understand the drift of her conversation. She mentioned, ‘The horoscopes match very well. He came here only after the astrologers had approved.'