Greatest Short Stories (11 page)

I would have stayed and talked about the possibilities of the new wonder to Saudagar if my friends had not been calling incessantly, but that afternoon I was too preoccupied by my ardour to put my heart into playing Kabadi, and I couldn’t sleep in the night for the sheer excitement of sharing the glory of having inspired the old cobbler. In the morning I ran along to school bound up in the curves of a rich stillness, the radiant exultation of a child whose fantastic dreams have, for the first time, achieved the guise of visible truths. And all day I was full of mischief the tingling shadow of an ingrown largeness in my being played havoc with every mundane fact, the vastness of the creator laughed at people, and the depths of a realised truth mocked at impossibilities.

Off I went to Saudagar ’s shop immediately after I returned from school and, true as the very colour of my dream, even truer because harder, the sewing-machine was before me, with the old cobbler seated on the stool adjusted to it, sewing a piece of leather, with beads of perspiration on his forehead, as his two pupils, and a number of other people of low and high castes crowded into the hovel to see the wizardry.

‘Come, son,’ Saudagar said, lifting his eyes and breathing a mouthful of stale breath. ‘This is the upper part of the boots I am going to sew for you, since you must have the first-fruits of my acquisition.

I smiled awkwardly and then felt a sudden urge to touch the wonderful new thing which was exactly like the sewing-machine of which I had brought Saudagar the picture, except that it had no casket to enclose the upper part, but an anvil into which the needle darted like a shaft, probing the leather in between with the cotton in its eye. But I curbed my childish desire as, just then, Saudagar brushed aside the crowd which was clamouring to touch it, and I only asked: ‘When will my shoes be ready, Uncle?’

‘You shall have them by and by,’ Saudagar said. ‘I will sew them at any odd times I get, because all the rest of my time must be devoted to turning out enough work to pay off the debt I owe on the machine to Lalla Sain Das, who is coming back tomorrow.’

My visits to the cobbler ’s shop became more frequent since I could always excuse myself to my parents by saying that I was going to the outcast’s quarter to see how the boots that Saudagar had promised to make me were getting on. And as my old Indian shoes made of crude hide were wearing out and my parents would have had to buy me a new pair if Saudagar had not offered me the gift, I was allowed to go and waste as much time as I liked.

Saudagar had added a pattern of stitches to the shoes he intended for me during the first few days, but then he had hung them up as a sample on the door of his hut, and was mainly busy turning out Indian shoes by the dozen to defray the sum of one thousand rupees, which Sain Das had declared to be the cost of the machine plus freightage and taxes. Every time I went the old man would pick up the sample and contemplate it with an air of absorption and say: ‘Well, son, I believe I shall begin to sew the lining to them next week, and then I must send Majitha to get some leather for the soles and heels. Or would you like rubber soles instead?’

‘No, I want leather soles and rubber heels, Uncle,’ I said, swinging from the first disappointment of seeing the shoes no further advanced to a sudden excitement.

‘You, can’t have both, son,’ Saudagar would say kindly. ‘I want to set the fashion,’ I replied.

‘But, son, let me make you an ordinary pair first,’ said the old man,’ ‘And then later —’

‘When will they be ready?’ I would ask impatiently. ‘Tomorrow, by the grace of God, tomorrow I shall do something to them…’

But tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow came and went, and as my old Indian shoes were completely worn out and discarded, I trudged barefoot to and from school, and cursed both my parents for not buying me a new pair of Angrezi shoes and Saudagar for not completing the pair he had promised me.

I couldn’t realise that my parents were poor and could not afford to buy me a pair of English boots, and I was too obstinate to accept a cheap pair of Indian shoes. But Saudagar’s work was pledged to Lalla Sain Das for the money the cobbler had borrowed to buy the machine, and I was disgusted.

‘Let me buy a good pair of shoes like your old one’s my mother said.

‘No, I replied stubbornly. ‘I want English shoes and you needn’t bother because Saudagar is making them for me.’

“Never trust a washerman’s promise, nor a goldsmith’s nor a cobbler’s,” she quoted the proverb.

But mine was the faith that would have moved mountains but for the fact that an act of God intervened. Saudagar, the old cobbler, fell ill and was unable to work for days, and when he got up from his illness he had to clear arrears of debt and work so hard on his ordinary job that he had no time left even to think of the shoes he had so lovingly cut and on which he had sewn the first stitches. And considering that he had not been able to pay up even the arrears of interest on the cost of the machine, there was little prospect of his ever completing the job for me.

I looked at the old man bending over the machine and working patiently as the sweat poured from his face on to his neck and then on to the earth, and I felt constrained not to trouble him with my demands. And the mixture of resentment and pity I felt for the old man became transformed into feeling of hate for the machine, for, as it stood hard, hard and unbending, it seemed to have become a barrier between Saudagar and me and the thing which had emphasized his self-interest so that he never seemed to put a stitch on anyone’s shoes without insisting on being paid for it. And as he sat tied to the chariot wheels of doom, he also began to be more and more reticent, as if he were turning in upon himself to drink his own blood in the silent places of his heart, and the illumination of his natural manner disappeared behind a pale, shadowy face that was always dirty and grimy with a layer of scum on the sweat covered beard. And still the sample shoes of English design meant for me stood unfinished, while he and his assistants worked furiously to produce enough to pay off the debt on the machine.

I shook the roots of hope from their foundation in my heart and rarely visited Saudagar ’s shop, thinking he would call me one day when the remorse of his unfulfilled promise had prompted him to finish making my boots.

But that day never came, for worn out by the fatigue of producing many more shoes than he had ever sewn to pay off his debt, drained of his life-blood by the sweat that was always pouring off his body, he fell stone dead one evening as he recited the devotional verse:

‘The days of your life are ending

And you have not made your accounts with God.’

In the amorphous desert of my familiar thoughts I felt the pain of silent guilt, as I knew that I had to some extent been the cause of his death. If only I had known then that it was not enough for Saudagar and his pupils to love the machine and work it, but to own it, I could have defied the verdict of the village which said that Saudagar was killed by the devil disguised in the image of the sewing-machine.

^*
From
The Barber s Trade Union and Other Stories
.

Part III

THE SOCIAL
SCENE

12

The Power of Darkness
^*

In the autumn of last year, I visited Mangal, the site for the new dam that has harnessed the course of one of the oldest waters of the land of five rivers. The sun, seemed, in the afternoons, to set fire to the surface of the new canals and made the earth look like beaten gold. And the pylons seemed to speak to the sky. And, seeing the wonder of it all, the ejaculation came spontaneously from my lips, in the homely Punjabi tongue; ‘In the jungle has arisen this Mangal!’ My speech fell on the ears of an electrician of the nearby powerhouse. And, as he opened his mouth and uttered his dictum, in the northern refugee accent, ‘Green shoots will soon stand with their roots moistened by this nectar ’, I surmised from the lilt in his voice that he was somewhat by way of being a poet. A little later, I heard him hum a tune from our famous epic, Hir and Ranjha. And, compelled by nostalgia, I asked him to sing again. Instead, he began to tell me the story of Mangal. That tale is told here in the words of Bali the Bard, (for that was his name, I discovered), almost he told it to me. And it seems, that the lyrical manner of his telling almost achieves the dramatic tension necessary to a modem story, mastering the laws of space and time.

‘Of all the gods and goddesses of our country, Shakti is the most supreme. To be sure, everything is Shakti, soul and body, earth and sky and the waters that flow from their union…’

‘But how were the villages of Kamli to know this truth? For when the gloom of madness falls upon the soul, so that it turns to rend and destroy its nearest and dearest, when the light of dread it be a man, woman or child, then who can find in the maleficent presence of fear, his chiefest good?

‘And, as the power of darkness blurs the outline of things around us, seeming to free us from the rule of daylight, but really consigning us to hell, when we ourselves beckon the god of the netherworld Yama, and his doots, we have to close our eyes in order to explore our inner selves, and rescue, from the silences, the strength to face a future which we cannot understand…

‘Our profoundest truth today, brother, consists in this: That we have a capacity for great works. And if I, Bali, know anything about anything, since I know much about electricity, then these big works are organised schemes, in which the sparks are lit in order to free men from their fetters, to enable them to surpass themselves, and to give all that they have and what they acquire to their children.

‘But how can one show this spirit of light to the dark-minded and the dead in heart?’

“If it exists, they said, “show it to us! How can your electricity vie with Kamli, the mother, after whom our village is named? This giant monster of cement and steel, which you are helping to build in your dam, is an insult offered to our ancient goddess! For ages she has directed the courses of the sun, the moon and the stars. And every part of our land is imbued with the spirit of Kamli. And we have had good harvests, plentiful ones, until you refugees came and began to devour our stocks, snatching bread from the mouths of our children! And now those, who are in authority, declare that our village of Kamli is to be submerged in the artificial lake they are constructing. And they want us to move away, before the water fills this construction of the iron age and the canals begin to flow…! To be sure they have given us some compensation and some fallow land, near Chandigarh, where hey have built barrack-like structures on the sites where the goddess Chandi manifested herself for the first time when she walked down form the high peaks of the Daula Dar to the plains! Ruffians and Scoundrels! Drunk with power! Respecting neither religion nor the gods. And to think that the Prime Minister of this faithless country is himself a Brahmin. Look, folks darkness has come!”

‘And though the work proceeded on the huge dam, and the time seemed to come nearer, when the waters of the artificial lake, Mangal Sagar, were to submerge the little hamlet of Kamli, the villagers, who talked like this, would not move.’

‘And thus a drama was enacted before our eyes, of which you may see the happy ending, but of which you do not know the various parts. Even I can detach myself today and talk of that grim struggle in an even voice, but those were solemn moments, brother, those moments when, for days, we were on the brink of death and destruction, and from which we emerged only because some transcended themselves…Only a few know that God does not fix the prices of grain, and that droughts can be avoided by making rain; but the worshippers of Kamli did not believe this and talked of fate and invoked the curses of the Goddess… In those moments of mortal agony, when the lips of these men only framed abuse and oaths and imprecations, I groaned many a time, the cry we utter in our deepest need,” oh mother!”…

“Tell me, then, brother Bali, the story of this struggle,” I interrupted.

The bard closed his eyes for a moment as though he was encompassing all the solemn moments of death, all the moment of each act of the drama of the village of Kamli before it was submerged in Lake Mangal Sagar. And then he opened his eyes which were slightly cocked, as though, like Alexander the Great he drew the wisdom of heaven with the left eye, which was tilted upwards, and from the earth with the right eye, which was tilted downwards. And he spoke: ‘Like a child you are in your curiosity, brother. But if it will fill you with compassion for the human lot, I shall tell you this, my mythical story, and you can draw your own conclusions.

‘Once upon a time, and it seems a long time ago, there stood at the bottom of the ravine there, now filled with the life-giving waters of Mangal Sagar, the selfsame village of Kamli, of which I have spoken.

‘And though it was peopled by seventy souls, all told, there were five men of this village, villains, if you would like to call them such, but men whose words counted for much with the ignorant, and who were able to persuade many to defy the light, for months, on behalf of the power of darkness.

‘The chief of this group, who was moreover a landlord, owning some bighas of land, and headman of the village, was called Viroo. An old man of nearly eighty years, he sat upon the land, and upon his own life, like a leech upon a sick body, drinking away the blood without getting any fatter to the naked eye. He had a profligate son, called Prakash, a boy who stole jewellery from his mother’s box and sold it in Ambala, but who was nevertheless much loved by his father and utterly spoilt by his mother, being plied with endless long tumblers of whey and copious portions of butter on his spinach and large loaves of maize bread. This Prakash beat up his own young sister, Yashoda, for stopping by the well a little longer than usual to listen to me reciting Hir in the distance, and he distinguished himself, during the events of those days, when his village was pitched in a battle against us, by rascally behaviour that has no parallel in the annals of the Punjab.

‘The next in command of the forces of destruction was a goldsmith named Ram Jawaya, a dignitary with a tuft knot that protruded, always, beyond the confines of this small, greasy, black cap, the lashes of this eyes having been blown out by the smoke and fire from the hearth where he melted the jewellery pawned by the villagers, but whose greedy vision was still unaffected, so that he could see everything, evil in all that was good, whose mendacity had remained unabated in the fifty-five odd years of his existence on earth, during which his right hand never allowed his left hand to know how much land he was absorbing with his penman’s jugglery, in the Jong account book where all the mortgages were recorded. His son, Dharam Dev, was not such a rouge as Prakash, the son of the landlord Viroo, but weak-chinned and pale-faced, this boy was a glib little talker, who constantly twirled his thin moustache in the belief that it was a thick one, though I am sure, he did this to give himself courage.

‘And then there was the double-dealing, clever young man called Tarachand, who had gone to town and become a B.A. pass, though he had put in for the law and failed to become a vakil, in spite of the fact that he had sold his mother’s land. Some said that he had turned sour because he could not get a job in the offices of the Sarkar, and that may have been the reason for his virulence. But to me he seemed the kind of man who could have sold his mother for his own good and set fire to the whole village if it had suited him, even as he surely lit the flames of the controversy which nearly ruined the fortunes of all the poor peasants. You know that our country is full of partial prophets, petty quacks posing as perfect Doctors, speakers of half truths promising total cures and before them we feel helpless…

‘There were also two middle-peasants, brothers, named Jarnel Singh and Karnel Singh, who had served as Sepoys under the British Raj and retired with the rank of Havildar and Lance Naik respectively. They had failed to gain any wisdom from their wanderings across the earth and never forgot the two squares of land given to them by the Angrezi Sarkar in Lyallpur District, which they had to leave after the partition, even as many of us left everything we ourselves had, north of the Wagha Canal.

‘A young boy named Bharat Ram, the son of the widow Siddhi, who had learnt to be a mechanic in a motor garage in Patiala town, stood aide from all these and seemed to me, in his long silences, to be the superior of this nefarious gang of obstructionists, for he talked sense when he did dare to open his mouth before them and nearly swayed the villagers on the side of truth. And he it was who came with us, beating the drum, even as I went among the folk singing the songs, and shouting the words, which were to rescue the villagers from the mouth of the disaster that nearly befell them.

“Actually, how did the trouble arise and what happened?” I asked him impetuously in my eagerness to know how the crises had developed.

‘Not so fast, brother, said Bali, the bard. As the poet Kabir has spoken: “What cooks slowly matures into a sweeter dish.” And I shall tell you all if you be patient. You must understand, first, that part of the world today wants plenty for us black men and part of the world is opposed to this idea. While most men hesitate because they think two thoughts at the same time. And in the learned ones like you, many forces make for adverse ends….’

“Go, on, brother, go on,” I said.

‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘These people of Kamli did not know, at first, what was going on. They were the creatures of habit, whose chief god was Dastur. What was good enough for their forefathers was, they thought, good enough for them. And they did not know where they were going or what they really wanted. And though they followed their customs blindly, they suffered in secret. And then they were amazed that they were caught up in the web of suffering.

‘And, yet, all the time they were fighting feuds with each other.

‘Thus, landlord Viroo felt, that the whole of the village had been poisoned by the goldsmith Ram Jawaya, And goldsmith Ram Jawaya felt, that the cause of the downfall of the whole of the countryside was Babu Tarachand, B.A., who talked so much, mixing the words of Punjabi speech with Angrezi, and putting on kot-patloon to impress all and sundry, and ready to throw all the wise elders on the rubbish heap. The middle peasants, Jamel Singh and Karnel Singh, worked hard on the land and hardly had any time to think, but when they did manage to scratch their heads, they felt that the moment had come when both landlord Viroo and goldsmith Ram Jawaya should give up the headship of the village which these elders had enjoyed in rotation, and allow one of the younger ones among them to become the Chaudhri. And, all of these ‘wise’ ones, distrusted their sons, because the boys were seen in the company of mechanic Bharat Ram, the son of the widow Siddhi, who gave lifts to all his companions on his phutt-phutti.

‘And thus the elders stood open-mouthed for the first few months, even as they stared at the glow of the giant lights, which shone during the nights to enable the labourers to keep vigil on the construction of the Mangal Dam. And they muttered curses against the Kali-Yug, during which the laws of nature were being upset by the wiping out of the distinction between day and night. And as they heard the
phutt-pphutti
of mechanic Bharat Ram making frequent trips to the site of the dam, three miles away, with one or two of the boys of the village holding on to him from the seat at the back, they were more furious with this mechanic than even with the builders of the dam. And when they realised that most of the villagers got better wages doing labour on the construction than they themselves had ever paid these men for work on their estates, they were filled with murderous rages…

‘So they appointed the loquacious Babu Tarachand, B.A., top go and see the Tehsildar of the big village of Mangal and apprise him of the objections of the elders of Kamli against the upset caused by the demoniac construction… And Tarachand, they did not know, is a two-faced man, and his body is a mixture of many selfish attitudes. And with his own confusion, he can sow more confusion in each soul.

‘Babu Tarachand, B. A., went proudly enough to meet the Tehsildar and came back thumping his chest at the victory he had secured.

The Sarkar is going to give us money by way of compensation for moving our houses in this village to a settlement near Chandigarh when Kamli is submerged in the artificial lake of Mangal Sagar that will fill the space between the two hills on our side, And I had secured the promise of the best lands in the basin, at the foot of the Himalayas, for us all…

“Compensation!” exclaimed Viroo

“For leaving our houses?” protested Ram Jawaya.

“A settlement near Chandigarh?” inquired Jamel Singh. “You mean to say that you, son of an owl, have agreed on our behalf, that we will move out of our village…”;

“Hallowed by the incarnation of the goddess herself!” asseted old Viroo.

“If the land near Chandigarh it’s anything like as good as the plots we had in Lyalljmr district,” ventured Karnel Singh, “But what would this literate fool Tarachand know about the qualities of the soil!”

“Look, folks darkness has come,” put in Ram Jawaya, “He has sold us all, as he would willingly sell his mother, for some advantage which the Tehsildar has promised him.”