Malgudi Days (33 page)

The man replied breezily, ‘You don't have to worry, you will be taken care of. Let us have coffee.' He got off and hailed someone inside a hut. Some appetizing eatable on a banana leaf and coffee in a little brass cup were brought out and served. Ranga felt revived, having had nothing to eat since his morning
ragi.
He inquired, ‘Why all this, sir?'

The man said benignly, ‘Go on, you must be hungry, enjoy.'

Ranga had never known such kindness from anyone. This man was conducting himself like a benign god. Ranga expected that after the repast they would resume their journey. But the benign god suddenly got up and said, ‘Come with me.' He took him aside and said in a whisper, ‘Do not worry about anything. We will take care of you. Do you want to earn thirty rupees?'

‘Thirty rupees!' Ranga cried, ‘What should I do for it? I have not brought my machine.'

‘You know me well enough now, trust me, do as I say. Don't question and you will get thirty rupees if you obey our instruction; we will give you any quantity of food, and I'll take you to the town . . . only you must stay here tonight. You can sleep here comfortably. I'll take you to the town tomorrow morning. Don't talk to others, or tell them anything. They will be jealous and spoil your chance of getting thirty rupees . . . You will also get a transistor radio. Do you like to have one?'

‘Oh, I don't know how to operate it. I'm not educated.'

‘It is simple, you just push a key and you will hear music.'

He then took Ranga to a secluded part of the camp, spoke to him at length (though much of what he said was obscure) and went away. Ranga stretched himself on the ground under a tree, feeling comfortable, contented and well-fed. The prospect of getting thirty rupees was pleasant enough, though he felt slightly suspicious and confused. But he had to trust that man in the blue shirt. He seemed godlike. Thirty rupees! Wages for ten days' hard work. He could give the money to his daughter to keep or spend as she liked, without any interference from her mother. He could also give her the radio. She was educated and would know how to operate it. He wondered how to get the money through to her without her mother's knowledge. Perhaps send it to her school—the writer of petitions and addresses at the post office in the city would write down the money-order for him and charge only twenty-five paise for the labour. He was a good friend, who also wrote a postcard for him free of charge whenever he had to order a new grinding wheel from Bangalore. Ranga became wary when he saw people passing; he shut his eyes and fell into a drowse.

The blue bush-shirt woke him up and took him along to another part of the camp, where inside a large tent a man was seated at a desk. ‘He is our chief,' he whispered. ‘Don't speak until he speaks to you. Answer when he questions. Be respectful. He is our officer.' After saying this, he edged away and was not to be seen again.

Ranga felt overawed in the presence of the officer. That man had a sheet of paper in front of him and demanded, ‘Your name?' He wrote it down. ‘Your age?'

Ranga took time to comprehend, and when he did he began to ramble in his usual manner, ‘Must be fifty or seventy, because I . . .' He mentioned inevitably how a thin line of moustache began to appear when he first sharpened a knife as a professional. The officer cut him short. ‘I don't want all that! Shall I say you are fifty-five?' ‘By all means, sir. You are learned and you know best.'

Then the officer asked, ‘Are you married?'

Ranga attempted to explain his domestic complications: the temper of his present wife, who was actually his second one; how he had to marry this woman under pressure from his relatives. He explained, ‘My uncle and other elders used to say, “Who will be there to bring you a sip of gruel or hot water when you are on your death bed?” It's all God's wish, sir. How can one know what He wills?' The officer was annoyed but tried to cover it up by going on to the next question: ‘How many children?'

‘My first wife would have borne ten if God had given her long life, but she fell ill and the lady doctor said . . .' He went into details of her sickness and death. He then went on to some more personal tragedies and suddenly asked, ‘Why do you want to know about all this sorrowful business, sir?' The officer waved away his query with a frown. Ranga recollected that he had been advised not to be talkative, not to ask, but only to answer questions. Probably all this formality was a prelude to their parting with cash and a radio. The officer repeated, ‘How many children?'

‘Six died before they were a year old. Do you want their names? So long ago, I don't remember, but I can try if you want. Before the seventh I vowed to the Goddess on the hill to shave my head and roll bare-bodied around the temple corridor, and the seventh survived by the Goddess's grace and is the only one left, but my wife does not understand how precious this daughter is, does not like her to study but wants her to become a drudge like herself. But the girl is wonderful. She goes to a school every day and wants to be a lady doctor. She is a match for her mother.'

The officer noted down against the number of children ‘Seven' and then said commandingly, ‘You must have no more children. Is that understood?' Ranga looked abashed and grinned. The officer began a lecture on population, food production and so forth, and how the government had decreed that no one should have more than two children. He then thrust forward the sheet of paper and ordered, ‘Sign here.' Ranga was nonplussed. ‘Oh! if I had learnt to read and write . . . !'

The officer said curtly, ‘Hold up your left thumb' and smeared it on an inking pad and pressed it on the sheet of paper. After these exertions, Ranga continued to stand there, hoping that the stage had arrived to collect his reward and depart. He could cross the field, go up to the highway and pay for a bus ride, he would have money for it. But the officer merely handed him a slip of paper and cried, ‘Next.' An orderly entered, pushing before him a middle-aged peasant, while another orderly propelled Ranga out of the presence of the officer to another part of the camp, snatched the slip of paper from his hand and went away, ignoring the several questions that Ranga had put to him. Presently Ranga found himself seized by the arm and led into a room where a doctor and his assistants were waiting at a table. On the table Ranga noticed a white tray with shining knives neatly arrayed. His professional eye noted how perfectly the instruments had been honed. The doctor asked, ‘How many more?' Someone answered, ‘Only four, sir.' Ranga felt scared when they said, ‘Come here and lie down,' indicating a raised bed. They gently pushed him onto it. One man held his head down and two others held his feet. At some stage they had taken off his clothes and wrapped him in a white sheet. He felt ashamed to be stripped thus, but bore it as perhaps an inevitable stage in his progress towards affluence. The blue bush-shirt had advised him to be submissive. As he was lying on his back with the hospital staff standing guard over him, his understanding improved and his earlier suspicions began to crystallize. He recollected his butcher friend reading from a newspaper how the government was opening camps all over the country where men and women were gathered and operated upon so that they could have no children. So this was it! He was seized with panic at the prospect of being sliced up. ‘Don't shake, be calm,' someone whispered softly, and he felt better, hoping that they would let him off at the last minute after looking him over thoroughly. The blue-shirt had assured him that they would never hurt or harm an old man like him. While these thoughts were flitting across his mind, he noticed a hand reaching for him with a swab of cotton. When the wrap around him was parted and fingers probed his genitals, he lost his head and screamed, ‘Hands off! Leave me alone!' He shook himself free when they tried to hold him down, butted with his head the man nearest to him, rolled over, toppling the white tray with its knives. Drawing the hospital wrap around, he stormed out, driven by a desperate energy. He ran across the fields screaming, ‘No, I won't be cut up . . .' which echoed far and wide, issuing from vocal cords cultivated over a lifetime to overwhelm other noises in a city street with the cry, ‘Knives sharpened!'

Nothing seemed to belong to him. He sat on a strip of no-man's-land between the outer wall of the temple and the street. The branch of a margosa tree peeping over the wall provided shade and shook down on his head tiny whitish-yellow flowers all day. ‘Only the gods in heaven can enjoy the good fortune of a rain of flowers,' thought the hippie, observing him from the temple steps, where he had stationed himself since the previous evening. No need to explain who the hippie was, the whole basis of hippieness being the shedding of identity and all geographical associations. He might be from Berkeley or Outer Mongolia or anywhere. If you developed an intractable hirsute-ness, you acquired a successful mask; if you lived in the open, roasted by the sun all day, you attained a universal shade transcending classification or racial stamps and affording you unquestioned movement across all frontiers. In addition, if you draped yourself in a knee-length cotton dhoti and vest, and sat down with ease in the dust anywhere, your clothes acquired a spontaneous ochre tint worthy of a
sanyasi.
When you have acquired this degree of universality, it is not relevant to question who or what you are. You have to be taken as you are—a breathing entity, that's all. That was how the wayside cobbler viewed the hippie when he stepped up before him to get the straps of his sandals fixed.

He glanced up and reflected, ‘With those matted locks falling on his nape, looks like God Shiva, only the cobra coiling around his neck missing.' In order to be on the safe side of one who looked so holy, he made a deep obeisance. He thought, ‘This man is tramping down from the Himalayas, the abode of Shiva, as his tough leather sandals, thick with patches, indicate.' The cobbler pulled them off the other's feet and scrutinized them. He spread out a sheet of paper, a portion of a poster torn off the wall behind him, and said, ‘Please step on this, the ground is rather muddy.' He had a plentiful supply of posters. The wall behind him was a prominent one, being at a crossing of Ramnagar and Kalidess, leading off to the highway on the east. Continuous traffic passed this corner and poster-stickers raced to cover this space with their notices. They came at night, applied thick glue to a portion of the wall and stuck on posters announcing a new movie, a lecture at the park or a candidate for an election, with his portrait included. Rival claimants to the space on the wall, arriving late at night, pasted their messages over the earlier ones. Whatever the message, it was impartially disposed of by a donkey that stood by and from time to time went over, peeled off the notice with its teeth and chewed it, possibly relishing the tang of glue. The cobbler, arriving for work in the morning, tore off a couple of posters before settling down for the day, finding various uses for them. He used the paper for wrapping food when he got something from the corner food shop under the thatched roof; he spread it like a red carpet for his patrons while they waited to get a shoe repaired and he also slept on it when he felt the sun too hot. The hippie, having watched him, felt an admiration. ‘He asks for nothing, but everything is available to him.' The hippie wished he could be composed and self-contained like the cobbler.

The previous day he had sat with the mendicants holding out their hands for alms on the temple steps. Some of them able-bodied like himself, some maimed, blind or half-witted, but all of them, though looking hungry, had a nonchalant air which he envied. At the evening time, worshippers passing the portals of the temple flung coins into the alms bowls, and it was a matter of luck in whose bowl a particular coin fell. There was a general understanding among the mendicants to leave one another alone to face their respective luck, but to pick a coin up for the blind man if it fell off his bowl. The hippie, having perfected the art of merging with his surroundings, was unnoticed among them. The priest, being in a good mood on this particular evening, had distributed to the mendicants rice sweetened with
jaggery
, remnants of offerings to the gods. It was quite filling, and after a drink of water from the street tap, the hippie had slept at the portal of the temple.

At dawn, he saw the cobbler arrive with a gunnysack over his shoulder and settle down under the branch of the margosa; he was struck by the composition of the green margosa bathed in sunlight looming over the grey temple wall. The hippie enjoyed the sense of peace pervading this spot. No one seemed to mind anything—the dust, the noise and the perils of chaotic traffic as cycles and pedestrians bumped and weaved their way through Moroccans, lorries and scooters, which madly careered along, churning up dust, wheels crunching and horns honking and screaming as if antediluvian monsters were in pursuit of one another. Occasionally a passer-by gurgled and spat out into the air or urinated onto a wall without anyone's noticing or protesting. The hippie was struck by the total acceptance here of life as it came.

With his head bowed, the cobbler went on slicing off leather with an awl or stabbed his bodkin through and drew up a waxed thread, while stitches appeared at the joints as if by a miracle, pale strands flashing into view like miniature lightning. The cobbler had a tiny tin bowl of water in which he soaked any unruly piece of leather to soften it, and then hit it savagely with a cast-iron pestle to make it limp. When at rest, he sat back, watching the passing feet in the street, taking in at a glance the condition of every strap, thong and buckle on the footwear parading before his eyes. His fingers seemed to itch when they did not ply his tools, which he constantly honed on the kerbstone. Observing his self-absorption while his hands were busy, the hippie concluded that, apart from the income, the man derived a mystic joy in the very process of handling leather and attacking it with sharpened end. For him, even food seemed to be a secondary business. Beyond beckoning a young urchin at the corner food shop to fetch him a cup of tea or a bun, he never bothered about food. Sometimes, when he had no business for a long stretch, he sat back, looking at the tree-top ahead, his mind and attention switched off. He was quite content to accept that situation, too—there was neither longing nor regret in that face. He seldom solicited work vociferously or rejected it when it came. He never haggled when footwear was thrust up to him, but examined it, spread out the poster under the man's feet, attended to the loose strap or the worn-out heel and waited for his wages. He had to be patient; they always took time to open the purse and search for a coin. If the customer was too niggardly, the cobbler just looked up without closing his fingers on the coin, which sometimes induced the other to add a minute tip, or made him just turn and walk off without a word.