UNTOUCHABLE Read online

  Bakha was profoundly moved. He was affected by the rhythm of the song. His blood had coursed along the balanced melodic line to the final note of strength with such sheer vigour that his hands joined unconsciously, and his head hung in the worship of the unknown god.

  But a cry disturbed him : ‘ Polluted, polluted, polluted.’ A shout rang through the air. He was completely unnerved. His eyes were covered with darkness. He couldn’t see anything. His tongue and throat were parched. He wanted to utter a cry, a cry of fear, but his voice failed him. He opened his mouth wide to speak. It was no use. Beads of sweat covered his forehead. He tried to raise himself from the awkward attitude of prostration, but his limbs had no strength left in them. For a second he was as if dead.

  Then as suddenly as he had been overpowered he asserted himself. He lifted his head and looked round. The scales fell from his eyes. He could see the little man with a drooping moustache whom he knew to be a priest of the temple, racing up the courtyard, trembling, stumbling, tottering, falling, with his arms lifted in the air, and in his mouth the hushed cry ‘ polluted, polluted, polluted.’

  ‘ I have been seen, undone,’ the sentence quickly flashed across Bakha’s mind. But he espied the figure of a woman behind the shouting priest. He stood amazed, though still afraid, still feeling that he was doomed. He was unaware, however, of the form the doom would take.

  But he soon knew. A thumping crowd of worshippers rushed out of the temple, and stood arrayed as in the grand finale of an opera show. The lanky little priest stood with upraised hands, a few steps below him. His sister, Sohini (for that was the woman he had seen behind the priest), lingered modestly in the courtyard.

  ‘ Polluted, polluted, polluted !’ shouted the Brahmin below. The crowd above him took the cue and shouted after him, waving their hands, some in fear, others in anger, but all in a terrible orgy of excitement. One of the crowd struck out an individual note.

  ‘ Get off the steps, you scavenger ! Off with you ! You have defiled our whole service ! You have defiled our temple ! Now we will have to pay for the purificatory ceremony. Get down, get away, you dog !’

  Bakha ran down the steps, past the priest below him, to his sister. He had two impulses, that of fear for himself, for the crime he knew he had committed, another of fear for his sister, for the crime she might have committed, since she stood there speechless.

  ‘ You people have only been polluted from a distance,’ Bakha heard the little priest shriek. ‘ I have been defiled by contact.’

  ‘ The distance, the distance !’ the worshippers from the top of the steps were shouting. ‘ A temple can be polluted according to the Holy Books by a low-caste man coming within sixty-nine yards of it, and here he was actually on the steps, at the door. We are ruined. We will need to have a sacrificial fire in order to purify ourselves and our shrine.’

  ‘ But I… I… ’ shouted the lanky priest histrionically, and never finished his sentence.

  The crowd on the temple steps believed that he had suffered most terribly, and sympathised, for it had seen the sweeper-boy rush past him. They didn’t ask about the way he had been polluted. They didn’t know the story that Sohini told Bakha at the door of the courtyard with sobs and tears.

  ‘ That man, that man,’ she said, ‘ that man made suggestions to me, when I was cleaning the lavatory of his house there. And when I screamed, he came out shouting that he had been defiled.’

  Bakha rushed back to the middle of the courtyard, dragging his sister behind him, and he searched for the figure of the priest in the crowd. The man was no longer to be seen, and even the surging crowd seemed to show its heels as it saw the giant stride of the sweeper advance frighteningly towards the temple. Bakha stopped still in his determined advance when he saw the crowd fly back. His fist was clenched. His eyes flared wild and red, and his teeth ground between them the challenge : ‘ I could show you what that Brahmin dog has done !’

  He felt he could kill them all. He looked ruthless, a deadly pale and livid with anger and rage. A similar incident he had heard about, rose to his mind in a flash. A young rustic had teased a friend’s sister as she was coming home through the fields after collecting fuel. Her brother had gone straight to the fields with an axe in his hand and murdered the fellow. ‘ Such an insult !’ he thought. ‘ That he should attack a young and innocent girl. And then the hypocrisy of it ! This man, a Brahmin, he lies and accuses me of polluting him, after—father of fathers, I hope he didn’t violate my sister.’ A suspicion stole into his mind that he might have. He was stung to the quick, and turning to Sohini asked her loudly :

  ‘ Tell me, tell me, that he didn’t do anything to you !’

  Sohini was weeping. She shook her head in negation. She couldn’t speak.

  Bakha was reassured a bit. ‘ But no, the attempt !’ he thought ; ‘ the man must have made indecent suggestions to her. I wonder what he did. Father of fathers ! I could kill that man. I could kill that man !’ He was being tormented with the anxiety to know what had really happened, and yet he hesitated to question his sister again lest she should begin to cry. But his doubts and misgivings about her were too much for him.

  ‘ Tell me, Sohini,’ he said, turning fiercely to his sister, ‘ how far did he go ? ’

  She sobbed and didn’t reply.

  ‘ Tell me ! Tell me ! I will kill him if… ’ he shouted.

  ‘ He-e-e just teased me,’ she at last yielded. ‘ And then when I was bending down to work, he came and held me by my breasts.’

  ‘ The son of a pig !’ Bakha exclaimed. ‘ I will go and kill him !’ And he rushed blindly towards the courtyard.

  ‘ No, no. Come back. Let’s go away,’ called Sohini after him, arresting his progress by dragging hard at a lapel of his overcoat.

  He stood staring at the temple for a moment. There was not a soul to be seen out of doors. All was still. He felt the cells of his body lapse back chilled. His eyes caught sight of the magnificent sculptures over the doors extending right up to the pinnacle. They seemed vast and fearful and oppressive. He was cowed back. The sense of fear came creeping into him. He felt as if the gods were staring at him. They looked so real although they were not like anything he had ever seen on earth. They seemed hard, their eyes fixed as they ogled out of their niches, with ten arms and five heads. He bent his head low. His eyes were dimmed. His clenched fists relaxed and fell loosely by his side. He felt weak and he wanted support. It was with difficulty that he steadied his gait and retraced his steps, with Sohini, to the outer gate.

  The sight of her walking along with him, however, sent a wave of anguish into his soul. So frail she looked and so beautiful. Bakha was conscious of the charm of his sister. Her slim, pale-brown figure, soft and warm and glowing, shot through with a lustre that set off her ornaments, the rings in her ears, the bangles on her arms, to a ravishing effect, was so silent and subtly modest and full of a strange tenderness and light. He could not think of her being brutalised by anyone, even by a husband married to her according to the rites of religion. He looked at her and somehow a picture of her future life seemed to come before him. She had a husband—a man who had her, possessed her. He loathed the ghost of her would-be husband that he conjured up. He could see the stranger holding her full breasts and she responding with a modest acquiescence. He hated the thought of that man touching her. He felt he would be losing something. He dared not think what he would be losing. He dared not think that he himself——‘ I am her brother,’ he said to himself, to rectify his thoughts which seemed to be going wrong. But there seemed no difference to his naked mind between his own feeling for her and what might be a husband’s love. He dismissed the whole picture. Facing his mind was the figure of the little priest. That made his blood boil. He felt a wild desire to retaliate, retaliation meaning to him just doing anything to the man, from belabouring him with blows to killing him if need be. For though the serfdom of thousands of years had humbled him, the tropical emotions that welled up in him under an op
en sky had lessened his respect for life. He came of peasant stock, his ancestors having come down in the social scale by their change of profession. The blood of his peasant ancestors, free to live their own life even though they may have been slaves, raced in him now. ‘ I could have given him a bit of my mind,’ he exclaimed to himself.

  A superb specimen of humanity he seemed whenever he made the high resolve to say something, to go and do something, his fine form rising like a tiger at bay. And yet there was a futility written on his face. He could not overstep the barriers which the conventions of his superiors had built up to protect their weakness against him. He could not invade the magic circle which protects a priest from attack by anybody, especially by a low-caste man. So in the highest moment of his strength, the slave in him asserted itself, and he lapsed back, wild with torture, biting his lips, ruminating his grievances.

  A busy street lay before the brother and sister when they emerged from the temple. Bakha looked out to it vaguely. He could not concentrate on the riot of variety that was displayed in it. He had no patience to see anything or to hear anything, and he didn’t want to speak. ‘ Why didn’t I go and kill that hypocrite !’ he cried out silently. ‘ I could have sacrificed myself for Sohini. Everyone will know about her. My poor sister ! How can she show her face to the world after this ? But why didn’t she let me go and kill that man ? Why was she born a girl in our house, to bring disgrace upon us ? So beautiful ! So beautiful and so accursed ! I wish she had been the ugliest woman in the world ! Then no one would have teased her !’ But he couldn’t bear the thought of her being ugly. His pride in her beauty seemed to be hurt. And he just wished : ‘ Oh, God, why was she born, why was she born.’ Then, however, he saw her bending and wiping her eyes with her apron. With a sudden burst of tenderness and humility he gripped her arm close and dragged her along, writhing with the conflicts in his soul, trembling with despair.

  A few steps and he felt more easy. His breath came and went more evenly. His big, raw-boned body, strung into a lithe, active frame by his overpowering passion, became rather heavy. His instinctive fear of the people in the street, all so quick to notice the vagaries of individuals, rude and ill-mannered if they saw something ridiculous or sublime, made him recollect himself. He contemplated his experience now in the spirit of resignation which he had inherited through the long centuries down through his countless outcaste ancestors, fixed, yet flowing like a wave, confirmed at the beginning of each generation by the discipline of the caste ideal.

  ‘ Do you go home, Sohini,’ he said to his sister, who walked behind him, ashamed and crestfallen, with the stain upon her honour she thought it was to have been the object of a scene. ‘ Yes, do you go home,’ he said, ‘ and I’ll go and get the food. Take this basket and broom with you.’

  She moved her head in assent without looking up at him. Then she took the basket and broom from his hand and drawing her apron to cover her face, she walked away towards the city gates.

  A glance in the direction of his sister, and Bakha walked slowly away from the house of God. ‘ Posh, posh, sweeper coming,’ he suddenly remembered his warning call, as he just avoided touching a barefooted shopkeeper who was running like a holy bull from shop to shop. When he had thus unconsciously passed through the congested ironmonger’s bazaar, past a humanity whose panting rush in its varied, rather hybrid clothes, neither English nor Indian, he took for granted, he found himself standing outside an alley which spread like a yawn between a fruit shop and an old perfumer’s. Beneath the emptiness in his inside lay suppressed a confusion arising from the overpowering contradictions of his feelings. But outwardly he was calm and unperturbed. He stood still for a moment, to exercise his sense of direction, as he had been walking almost in a coma. ‘ To the houses in this alley for food,’ he said to himself and turned into the lane.

  A stray dog, thin, flea-bitten and diseased, was relieving itself. Another which was all bones, was licking at some decayed food on a refuse-heap that lay blocking the drain. Right across the passage further up lay a cow. Bakha observed the dirt and filth that lay about, casually. But the animals seemed to infuriate him. He approached the dogs, and jumping sharply surprised them into making off with a squeak and a squeal. The bovine insensibility of the cow that lay stretched before him was, however, hard to break through. Lest he should be accused of disturbing the holy mother by the rich owners at whose doors she lay stretched, he held it by the horns to protect his legs against its well-known ferocity, and picked his way across. More heaps of rubbish littered all over the small, old brick pavement meant to him only more reminders of his sister’s careless performance of her duties that morning. He excused her, however, by thinking of her suffering. Nobody who had been insulted as she had, could be expected to do her work properly. He didn’t want to confess that his defence of her was unreasonable, in that she was supposed to have been here before she went to clean the house in the temple. A huge din of coppersmiths hammering and rehammering copper in their irregular little dark shops engulfed him and he walked more comfortably for a while, for the noise was pleasant, even cheering from a distance, and helped to drown his conscience with regard to his sister’s negligence. Deeper in the square, however, the ‘ thak, thak, thak ’ that issued from the collection of shops became unbearable. He would have rushed into the little sub-alley where he had to go and call for food but that the ablutions of a devout Hindu on the platform of the street well in the middle of the lane offered the prospect of Bakha getting well sprinkled with the holy water that rained off from the well-oiled body, naked save for a loin-cloth. Bakha waited until his holiness had emptied a canful of water on his head and slung the empty vessel back into the well. Then he sauntered into the dark, damp gulley, where two fat men could hardly pass each other. He felt calmer because it was cool here and the noise of the copper-beaters was fainter. But the test of his nerves was yet to come. For being an outcaste he could not insult the sanctity of the houses by climbing the stairs to the top floors where the kitchens were, but had to shout and announce his arrival from below.

  ‘ Bread for the sweeper, mother. Bread for the sweeper,’ he called, standing at the door of the first house. His voice died down to the echo of ‘ thak, thak, thak,’ which stole into the alley.

  ‘ The sweeper has come for bread, mother ! The sweeper has come for the bread,’ he shouted a little louder.

  But it was of no avail.

  He penetrated further into the alley, and standing near a point where the doors of four houses were near each other, he shouted his call : ‘ Bread for the sweeper, mother ; bread for the sweeper.’

  Yet no one seemed to hear him on the tops of the houses. He wished it had been the afternoon, because he knew that at that time the housewives were always downstairs sitting in the halls of their houses, or on the drains in the gulley, gossiping or plying the spinning-wheel. But the vision of a number of them squatting in the gulley and wailing with each other’s aprons over their heads, or beating their breasts in mourning for the dead, came before his eyes and he felt shy.

  ‘ Bread for the sweeper, mother,’ he shouted again.

  There was no response. His legs were aching. There was a lethargy in his bones, a curious numbness. His mind refused to work. Feeling defeated, he sat down on the wooden platform of a house in the lane. He was tired and disgusted, more tired than disgusted, for he had almost forgotten the cause of his disgust, his experiences of the morning. A sort of sleepiness seemed to steal into his bones. He struggled hard against it by keeping his eyes open. Then he lightly leaned against the hard wood of the huge hall door as a concession to his fatigued limbs. He knew that his place was on the damp brick pavement on the side of the drain which carried water from the filth-pipes of all the houses. But for a while he simply didn’t care. Bringing his legs together he crouched into a corner and gave himself up to the soft urgings of the darkness that seemed to envelop him. Before long he had succumbed to sleep.

  Unfortunately for his tired body
, it was an uneasy half sleep that he enjoyed, the hindrances in the labyrinthine depths of his unconscious weaving strange, weird fantasies and dreams. He saw himself driven in a bullock-cart through the thronging streets of a most marvellous city, encountering a wedding procession of gaily-dressed, laughing people, preceded by a litter, covered with ochre-coloured draperies, carried by four men, who were themselves preceded by a Sikh band, dressed in the uniform of the English Army, carrying clarinets, bugles, flutes, super-saxophones and drums, walking in loose formation, and playing not the harmonies which he had heard in the cantonment, but tuneless wails, weird and disturbing. Then he was on the platform of a railway station. Before him stood a train of forty closed iron freight wagons with an engine at each end. Somewhere in a long row he could espy open trucks, two laden with boulders of stone and bulks of timber. He saw himself getting onto the top of one of these loads and sitting there, a bundle by his side, an umbrella with a carved silver handle in his hand, a solar topee on his head and the tube of his father’s hookah in his mouth. Suddenly he could see the closed iron freight wagons move. Almost simultaneously he could hear squeaks, creaks, execrations, lamentations and general excitement, as if someone had been murdered on a near but invisible siding. Full of fear and pity he imagined himself bending over the end of the wagon. He discovered that they were only some blue-uniformed railway coolies pushing a coach into a shed. He was next transplanted to a small village with very narrow streets, muddy and heavily cambered with rills of water running on either side. He could see cows wandering about and two big carts, heavy laden, get stuck in the slush as they came from opposite directions. A number of sparrows alighted on the heaps of grain in the open shops and helped themselves to food. A carrion crow soared down to the bruised neck of a bullock and began to peck at it. Then he watched a little girl who stood outside a sweet-shop. The child advanced smiling, holding aloft the food she had bought. The crow swooped down and snatched at her hand and threw her food onto the heap of litter lying near the gutter. She began to cry. A silversmith, handsome, immense, who had sat before a charcoal fire fashioning ornaments, looked up, smiled understandingly, and with his tongs placed a burning ember on her uplifted hand. The child toddled off happily through a narrow entry, pleased that she was carrying the nucleus of warmth for her mother’s hearth…. Then Bakha saw himself in the compound of a school where boys in yellow turbans were reading aloud as their master sat, cane in hand, exercising a vigilant scrutiny over his wards. The monitor of the class passed successively to each of his fellows on the benches a verse which they declaimed after him. Behind a network of streets in the wonder city ran a stream by which stood a palace, whose domed inner roof was supported by stone trusses and whose wealth of stone carving compelled attention. Bakha looked at it with wonder and admiration and gasped. He entered and saw how it had been hewed out of a rock. Its roof was painted in red and gold and black and green. By colonnades of immense and richly ornamented columns forming a nave and an aisle at the far end, stood men crowding round an emaciated man. Out of the dome some soldiers emerged and chattering, talking, smiling, happy, they carried him to a vast plain, a burning-ground, where the embers of the incinerations of the previous evening still smouldered, sending delicate spirals of smoke from the mounds of human bodies. A number of holy men stood beside the dead bodies, pouring the ashes of the dead into their hair, drinking hemp and dancing in an orgy of destruction. A gora sahib was looking on from a corner. He smiled at the scene. Bakha saw one of the holy men, an ascetic whose years were said to exceed ten thousand and who sat naked and with shaven head in silent contemplation, perform a magic trick by which the sahib was turned into a little black dog. Bakha thought of offering him a gift but the holy man’s followers told him he shouldn’t. Bakha stood wondering how the man lived. Then a swarm of monkeys jumped down from a tree and——