UNTOUCHABLE Read online

  As he recalled these things, he seemed to feel ashamed. He had felt that shame also on the occasion when those things first happened. In a frantic effort to escape from himself, to escape from the secret, buried desire he had for the girl, he casually took a turning off the track which led to the washermen’s houses, and wandered aimlessly into a lane which ended in the washermen’s ghats by the waterside.

  Shioh ! Shioh ! Shi ! A few washermen were shouting as they tore the garments of their customers and broke their buttons on slabs of stone by the edges of the brook. Their dark legs were immersed in the water up to the knees and their bodies from the rumps upwards were swathed in the thick folds of loin-cloths up to the waists, where their shirts were tucked in. They doubled over the stones with supple movements and struck the garments with a loud swinging sweep which was graceful in itself even if it did not do any good to the cloth. Bakha had often stood watching this operation. In his childhood, of course, he had been fascinated by it, so that he wished to become a washerman. It was Ram Charan, true son of his mother, Gulabo, if he wasn’t his father’s son, but of the rich man, his mother’s lover, who had knocked the bottom out of that ambition by telling Bakha that though he (Ram Charan) touched him and played with him, he was a Hindu, while Bakha was a mere sweeper. Bakha was too young then to understand the distinction implied in the washer-boy’s arrogant claim, or else he would have slapped Ram Charan’s face. But now he knew that there were degrees of castes among the low-caste, and that he was of the lowest.

  He looked hard among the few washermen who beat clothes upon the slabs of stone. He anxiously explored among the stray washermen’s donkeys which grazed on the side of the brook, wildly thinking that Ram Charan might be there. He looked across the yards of space on which the washed, wet clothes lay drying in the hot afternoon sun. But he was looking in vain. For how could Ram Charan have absented himself from so auspicious an occasion as his sister’s marriage and be working here ! ‘ Only, did Ram Charan not absent himself at the time of his father’s death and go fishing with us ? ’ Bakha thought. ‘ He might be here to-day.’ Then he thought : ‘ Perhaps his father wasn’t his father, but he is his sister’s brother. I will have to go to his place after all.’

  He began to walk back. He felt shy. He didn’t know how he could approach the house where festivities were going on. ‘ All the members of the washermen’s brotherhood will be there, dressed in their best clothes, singing strange southern music. How shall I be able to stand there and look ? ’ He felt ashamed to picture the scene. He was highly strung to-day. A strange leprosy seemed to have struck his tissues, his vertebrae seemed to be eaten up from within. ‘ How shall I be able to call Ram Charan when I get there ? ’ he said.

  Between the intervals of wiping the sweat off his brow, his ordinary self came back. The nervousness descended into the crowded world of his entrails, leaving the surface of his mind clean like a slate. He got to the kerb of the outcastes’ street and stopped still, suddenly, within ten yards of Ram Charan’s house. He had the pleasantest surprise. Chota stood, leaning by a wooden pillar, staring with wonder at the crowd of men and women gathered in the one-roomed mud-house and outside on the veranda.

  Bakha advanced gingerly towards the wooden pillar and came and stood by Chota. His friend turned with surprise at him and cordially pressed him by the hand. Then they both fell to staring at the dazed, happy crowd before them. Bakha noticed how white the starched linen, which the washermen wore, seemed against their black skins. At first, however, he could not concentrate his gaze on the individuals. He felt afraid to lift his eyes beyond the veranda to the cavernous room scarcely illuminated by the glowing sun outside. A wave of warmth descended down the back of his head. Through the haze he could see a man from within looking at him. He felt quivers of self-consciousness pass through him. The thought of Ram Charan’s sister came into collision with the sight of her. His heart sank within him. He was sweating. Luckily for him, the double beat of a drum tore the air and lifted all the confusion in Bakha’s soul on the flapping, hovering wings of the song that accompanied it. It was a queer refrain, sudden as thunder, as it ranged over three notes of the minor scale, sung in unison by the whole assembly. In the very beginning it was a shrill wail, which went through the tympanum of the ear to the head, and seemed to make the listener mad with its ever-sharpening frenzy, as lightning which pokes its sharp spears of power through the heart and leaves it athrob. Before they proceeded very far, the song had mounted above the drum and established the reign of an exhilarating rhythm. Bakha floated on the strain as he might have done on a swing. Then as the melody arose steeply to its full height of enthusiasm in the swaying, rolling, rocking, yelling frames of the washermen and washerwomen, Bakha again felt cold and impassive with self-consciousness. He touched Chota’s arm nervously, hiding his movement in the blaze of riotous excess to which the washermen had carried their song. Chota greeted him with a broad grin as cordial as the contagious spirit of happiness in the atmosphere could make it.

  ‘ I shall call Ram Charan,’ said Chota, and quite unafraid and unashamed to face the crowd of singing washermen he called Ram Charan, who sat dressed in a rather contradictory style of Eastern and Western habiliments—a large khaki topee on his small head, a muslin shirt, clean and white, but torn near the collar, and a pair of shorts on his thin, bare black legs.

  At first Ram Charan was too absorbed, eating the ludus (sugar-plums) which his mother was distributing with the tankards of native wine, for Chota’s message to pass from the washerman near him to whom he had entrusted it, through the forest of heads, to Ram Charan. Then luckily for his friends, as Ram Charan stood up to sprinkle the red colour over the white clothes of the crowd through a crude spray made out of a tin can, the ceremonial little mischief-maker was lifted amid the happy cries and shouts of hilarious laughter of the white-clad men, now spotted profusely with scarlet, and thrown out.

  ‘ Come,’ he greeted Chota and Bakha, blinking his lashless eyes, and ran ahead.

  ‘ Give, o bey brother-in-law, give us some of the sweets,’ said Chota.

  Ram Charan had not forgotten to fill the pockets of his shorts, and his large silk handkerchief, stolen from the laundry bag of some rich merchant, with sugar-plums.

  ‘ Keep quiet for a while,’ said Ram Charan, suddenly turning back to see if his mother was aware of the direction he was going to take.

  She was.

  ‘ Oh, you illegally begotten !’ came her voice shrilly, audible above all the other noises. ‘ Are you running away to play with that dirty sweeper and leather-worker on the very day of your sister’s marriage ? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you little dog !’

  ‘ Shut up, you bitch !’ replied Ram Charan, as was his wont, for he had been hardened into an impudent, obstinate young rascal by the persistency of his mother’s abuse. And with Chota at his heels and Bakha following clumsily behind, he led the way towards the heath which sloped gently towards the north of the outcastes’ colony.

  ‘ Give us some of those sugar-plums, brother-in-law !’ insisted Chota, greedy and gay. ‘ I have waited for an hour for you outside your noisy house.’

  ‘ You shall have some as soon as we get to the hill,’ assured Ram Charan. ‘ I have brought them for you and Bakha, not for anyone else. Now let us run, for my mother might come after me.’ And he carried himself with the assurance of one who has suddenly come into power. Chota at least, if not Bakha, paid him the homage which he expected as his due because he had a dozen sugar-plume in his possession.

  ‘ Come, O elephant,’ he rebuked Bakha for his coldness, ‘ show your teeth and lift your legs. You shall have some sweets soon.’

  Bakha dismissed the impudence of his joke with a grunt and followed quietly. He was feeling quite detached from the human world, swathed in a sort of unadulterated melancholy.

  The hand of nature was stretching itself out towards him, for the tall grass on the slopes of Bulashah Hills was in sight, and he had opened his hea
rt to it, lifted by the cool breeze that wafted him away from the crowds, the ugliness and the noise of the outcastes’ street. He looked across at the swaying loveliness before him and the little hillocks over which it spread under a sunny sky, so tran-scendingly blue and beautiful that he felt like standing dumb and motionless before it. He listened to the incoherent whistling of the shrubs. They were the voices he knew so well. He was glad that his friends were ahead of him and that the thrum was not broken, for the curve of his soul seemed to bend over the heights, straining to woo nature in solitude and silence. It seemed to him he would be unhappy if he heard even one human voice. His inside seemed to know that it wouldn’t be soothed if there were the slightest obstruction between him and the outer world. It didn’t even occur to him to ask why he had come here. He was just swamped by the merest fringe of the magnificent fields that spread before him. He had been startled into an awareness of the mystery of vegetable moods.

  As he rambled along, however, he felt he wanted an adventure in friendship to humanise the solitary excursion of the stoic in him. But he didn’t want to call Ram Charan, or Chota, to come and share his joy with him. He fell back to a memory of the adventures he had had here in his childhood. He remembered the time in his early days when he used to come to the heath with all the other boys, to fight battles for the imaginary fort they had built by fixing a flag on the top of the hill. The bamboo bows with which they flung arrows at each other came before him and the imitation toy pistols with their sparks. How enthusiastic all the boys used to feel about him then ! They had made him their Jernel (general). He recalled with pride the pitched battle they had fought against the boys of the 28th Sikhs and won. They were helter-skelter battles, not quite like the organised manoeuvres of the regiments, fought with guns. ‘ But then,’ he said to himself, ‘ they were the games played in childhood. I wouldn’t play those games now. I can hardly spare time to play hockey, with my father shouting at me all the time.’ He felt a bit lonely thinking such thoughts. He switched his mind on to the landscape in that vague groping manner in which his mind always felt its way across things. On the slopes, carpeted with grass, there flourished a wilderness of flowers, of which the shades changed at various intervals. There were the yellow buttercups, which had seemed to Bakha always like the mustard-seed flower of his village near Sialkot ; then there were the long-stalked, single-headed daisies, alternating with grades of purple and white anemones—to Bakha all flowers, mere flowers, for he didn’t know their names. A pool of water in long grass and ferns looked like a large basin round which the silver birches bent down and, smitten by the wind, seemed to be drinking. Here every passer-by quenched his thirst from the water that sprang from a natural spring.

  Descending down to it, with his nostrils full of fresh air, and his heart as light as the spirits of the sparrows which chirped, Bakha seemed nevertheless unaroused and unresponsive as a child turning aside from every wayside flower, for though he had the receptivity of the man who is willing to lend his senses to experience, he had an unenlightened will. Necessity had forced him to the contemplation of the charms of nature, merely superficially. Heredity had furrowed no deep grooves in his soul where flowers could grow or grass abound. The cumulative influence of careful selection had imprisoned his free will in the shackles of slavery to the dreary routine of one occupational environment. He could not reach out from the narrow and limited personality he had inherited to his larger yearning. It was a discord between person and circumstance by which a lion like him lay enmeshed in a net while many a common criminal wore a rajah’s crown. His wealth of unconscious experience, however, was extraordinary. It was a kind of crude sense of the world, in the round, such as the peasant has who can do the job while the laboratory agriculturalist is scratching his head, or like the Arab seaman who sails the seas in a small boat and casually determines his direction by the position of the sun, or like the beggar singer who recites an epic from door to door. But it wanted the force and vivacity of thought to transmute his vague sense into the superior instinct of the really civilised man.

  As he sauntered along a spark of some intuition suddenly set him ablaze. He was fired with a desire to burst out from the shadow of silence and obscurity in which he lay enshrouded.

  He rushed down to the slope, towards the trees that stood by the pool below him. The soft breeze came whispering up to him and made his blood tingle with its soft, fresh coolness. The sun on the curve of the sky before him was being reflected from the sheen of the rippling water with a restlessness like the pain in Bakha’s soul. He descended through the meadows, rank with herbage, before he had breathed more than a breath. He lay down on the bank of the pool and immediately lent himself to the stillness about him, making not the slightest stir, even though the position in which he leaned back exposed his eyes uncomfortably to the sun. In a moment or two his frame seemed to have sunk into insignificance, drowned as it were in a pit of silence, while the things on the sunny bank began to take life, each little stem of plant becoming a big leaf, distinct and important. The whole valley seemed to him aglow with life.

  But the rich and exuberant spaces about him seemed to have sucked all his energy away. He lay as if dead. His empty belly had provoked the subtle urgings of sleep into play. He was dozing.

  He had hardly dozed off before Chota came and began to tickle his nose with a straw. With one wild sneeze the sweeper-lad got up and sat with his trunk upright in the face of his friends’ double-barrelled laughter. Bakha was no killjoy to be annoyed by so ordinary a practical joke and willingly let himself be made a fool of. But the incidents of the morning had cast a shadow over him and there was something forced in his smile as against the spontaneous heartiness of his companions. Chota noticed this. He saw that there was something tense about it, something accusing, as if Bakha really disapproved of the joke which had been played on him.

  ‘ What is the matter with you, brother-in-law ? ’ he asked.

  ‘ Nothing,’ replied Bakha. ‘ You were running. I came slowly.’

  ‘ You didn’t look for us ? ’

  ‘ I was tired. I wanted to sleep. I couldn’t sleep very well last night.’

  ‘ Because you will be a gentreman and won’t put a quilt over you as your father says,’ joked Chota. He learnt from Rakha all that happened to Bakha at home, all the abuse that their father inflicted upon him, and he used to tease him about it.

  ‘ Shut up,’ retorted Bakha playfully, ‘ you are more of a gentreman than I am, and look at this brother-in-law to-day ; he is wearing a sahib’s topee and shorts.’

  Although they all aspired to copy English customs, they were not altogether unconscious of the falseness of their instinct, and could see the edge of their elders’ sarcastic reproach : ‘ Look at this gentreman ! ’ and repeated it amongst each other.

  ‘ What about those sugar-plums ? ’ Bakha continued, referring to Ram Charan. He wasn’t particularly keen to have them although he would have liked to eat one.

  ‘ Here is your portion,’ said Ram Charan, unfolding the handkerchief which he carried.

  There were three sugar-plums in it, all slightly broken.

  ‘ Throw me one,’ said Bakha.

  ‘ Take it,’ said Ram Charan.

  But Bakha hesitated and didn’t hold his hands out.

  ‘ Take it, why don’t you take it ? ’ Ram Charan grumbled.

  ‘ No, give it to me, throw it,’ Bakha said.

  Both Ram Charan and Chota were surprised. Never before had they seen Bakha behave like that. Ram Charan was admitted to be of the higher caste among them, because he was a washerman. Chota, the leather-worker’s son, came next in the hierarchy, and Bakha was of the third and lowest category. But among the trio they had banished all thought of distinction, except when the snobbery of caste feeling supplied the basis for putting on airs for a joke. They had eaten together, if not things in the preparation of which water had been used, at least dry things, this being in imitation of the line drawn by the Hindus betw
een themselves and the Mohammedans and Christians. Sweets they had often shared together, and they had handled soda-water bottles anyhow, at all those formal hockey matches they played once a year, with the boys’ teams of the various regiments in the Bulashah Brigade.

  ‘ What has happened to you ? ’ queried Chota in a voice full of deep concern, and then he added caressingly : ‘ Come, friend, tell us.’

  ‘ Nothing, it’s nothing,’ said Bakha.

  ‘ Come, come, we are your friends,’ implored Chota.

  Bakha told them how when he left them that morning he was walking through the town, a man happened to brush past him, and how he began to abuse him, and summoned a large crowd ; and how before he could get away, he had slapped him.

  ‘ Why didn’t you strike back ? ’ Chota asked, enraged.

  ‘ That wasn’t the only thing,’ continued Bakha. And he narrated how the priest tried to molest his sister and then came shouting at them both : ‘ Polluted, polluted.’

  ‘ You wait till the illegally begotten comes to our street side. We will skin the fellow,’ shouted Chota indignantly.

  ‘ There was another insult waiting for me further up,’ Bakha added, and he narrated the story of how the woman in the silversmith’s alley had flung the bread down at him from the top of her house.

  ‘ Comrade, we’re sorry,’ assured Chota. ‘ Come, be brave, forget all this. What can we do ? We are outcastes.’ He patted Bakha comfortingly. ‘ Come,’ he consoled again, ‘ forget all about it. We will go and play hockey. Let that brother-in-law of a priest come down our street, and we will teach him the lesson of his life.’