Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (28 page)

It is impossible to describe more clearly than this Margayya’s activity under the tree. He advanced a little loan (for interest) so that the little loan might wedge out another loan from the Cooperative Bank; which in its turn was passed on to someone in need for a higher interest. Margayya kept himself as the centre of all the complex transaction, and made all the parties concerned pay him for his services, the bank opposite him being involved in it willy-nilly. It was as strenuous a job as any other in the town and he felt that he deserved the difficult income he ground out of a couple of hundred rupees in his box, sitting there morning till evening. When the evening sun hit him on the nape of the neck
he pulled down the lid of his box and locked it up, and his gathering understood that the financial wizard was closing his office for the day.

Margayya deposited the box under a bench in the front room of his house. His little son immediately came running out from the kitchen with a shout:
‘Appa!
–’ and gripped his hand, asking: ‘What have you brought today?’ Margayya hoisted him up on his shoulder: ‘Well, tomorrow, I will buy you a new engine, a small engine.’ The child was pleased to hear it. He asked, ‘How small will the engine be? Will it be so tiny?’ He indicated with his thumb and first finger a minute size. ‘All right,’ said Margayya and put him down. This was almost a daily ritual. The boy revelled in visions of miniature articles – a tiny engine, tiny cows, tiny table, tiny everything, of the maximum size of a mustard seed. Margayya put him down and briskly removed his upper-cloth and shirt, picked up a towel that was hanging from a nail on the wall, and moved to the backyard. Beyond a small clump of banana trees, which waved their huge fan-like leaves in the darkness, there was a single well of crumbling masonry, with a pulley over its cross-bar. Margayya paused for a moment to admire the starry sky. Down below at his feet the earth was damp and marshy. All the drain-water of two houses flowed into the banana beds. It was a common backyard for his house and the one next door, which was his brother’s. It was really a single house, but a partition wall divided it into two from the street to the backyard.

No. 14 D, Vinayak Street had been a famous land-mark, for it was the earliest house to be built in that area. Margayya’s father was considered a hero for settling there in a lonely place where there was supposed to be no security for life or property. Moreover it was built on the fringe of a cremation ground, and often the glow of a burning pyre lit up its walls. After the death of the old man the brothers fell out, their wives fell out, and their children fell out. They could not tolerate the idea of even breathing the same air or being enclosed by the same walls. They got involved in litigation and partitioned everything that their father had left. Everything that could be cut in two with an axe or scissors or a knife was divided between them, and the
other things were catalogued, numbered and then shared out. But one thing that could neither be numbered nor cut up was the backyard of the house with its single well. They could do nothing about it. It fell to Margayya’s share, and he would willingly have seen his brother’s family perish without water by closing it to them, but public opinion prevented the exercise of his right. People insisted that the well should remain common property, and so the dividing wall came up to it, and stopped there, the well acting as a blockade between the two brothers, but accessible from either side.

Now Margayya looked about for the small brass pot. He could not see it anywhere.

‘Hey, little man!’ he called out, ‘where is the well-pot?’ He liked to call his son out constantly. When he came home, he could not bear to be kept away from him even for a moment. He felt uneasy and irritated when the child did not answer his call. He saw the youngster stooping over the lamp, trying to thrust a piece of paper into the chimney. He watched him from the doorway. He suppressed the inclination to call him away and warn him. The child thrust a piece of paper into the lamp, and when it burned brightly he recoiled at the sudden spurt of fire. But when it blackened and burnt out he drew near the lamp again, gingerly putting his finger near the metal plate on the top. Before Margayya could stop him, he had touched it. He let out a shriek. Margayya was beside him in a moment. His shriek brought in Margayya’s wife, who had gone to a neighbouring shop. She came rushing into the house with cries of ‘What is it? What is it? What has happened?’ Margayya felt embarrassed, like a man caught shirking a duty. He told his wife curtly, ‘Why do you shout so much, as if a great calamity had befallen this household – so that your sister-in-law in the neighbourhood may think how active we are, I suppose!’

‘Sister-in-law – how proud you are of your relatives!’ Her further remarks could not be continued because of the howling set up by the child, whose burnt finger still remained unattended. At this the mother snatched him up from her husband’s arms, and hugged him close to her, hurting him more, whereupon he shouted in a new key. Margayya tried to tear him out of his
wife’s arms, crying: ‘Quick, get that ointment. Where is it? You can keep nothing in its place.’

‘You need not shout!’ the wife answered, running about and rummaging in the cupboard. She grumbled: ‘You can’t look after him even for a second without letting him hurt himself

‘You need not get hysterical about it, gentle lady, I had gone for a moment to the well.’

‘Everyone gets tap-water in this town. We alone –’ she began, attacking on a new front.

‘All right, all right,’ he said, curbing her, and turning his attention to the finger. ‘You must never, never go near fire again, do you understand?’

‘Will you buy me a little elephant tomorrow?’ the child asked, his cheeks still wet with tears. By now they had discovered a little wooden crucible containing some black ointment in the cupboard, hidden behind a small basket containing loose cotton (which Margayya’s wife twisted into wicks for the lamp in God’s niche). She applied the ointment to the injured finger, and set the child roaring in a higher key. This time he said, ‘I want a big peppermint.’

At night when the lights were put out and the sounds of Vinayak Street had quietened, Margayya said to his wife, lying on the other side of their sleeping child: ‘Do you know – poor boy! I could have prevented Balu from hurting himself. I just stood there and watched. I wanted to see what he would do alone by himself His wife made a noise of deprecation: ‘It is as I suspected. You were at the bottom of the whole trouble. I don’t know… I don’t know… that boy is terribly mischievous … and you are … you are …’ She could not find the right word for it. Her instinct was full of foreboding, and she left the sentence unfinished. After a long pause she added: ‘It’s impossible to manage him during the afternoons. He constantly runs out of the house into the street. I don’t have a moment’s peace or rest.’

‘Don’t get cantankerous about such a small child,’ said Margayya, who disliked all these adverse remarks about his son. It seemed to him such a pity that that small bundle of man curled beside him like a tiny pillow should be so talked about. His wife
retorted: ‘Yes, I wish you could stay at home and look after him instead of coming in the evening and dandling him for a moment after he has exhausted all his tricks.’

‘Yes, gladly, provided you agree to go out and arrange loans for all those village idiots.’

The child levied an exacting penalty on his parents the next day for the little patch of burn on his finger. He held his finger upright and would not let anyone come near him. He refused to be put into a new shirt, refused food, refused to walk, and insisted on being carried about by his mother or father. Margayya examined the hurt finger and said: ‘It looks all right, there seems to be nothing wrong there.’

‘Don’t say so,’ screamed the boy in his own childish slang. ‘I’m hurt. I want a peppermint.’ Margayya was engaged all the morning in nursing his finger and plying him with peppermints. His wife remarked: ‘He’ll be ill with peppermints before you are done with him.’

‘Why don’t you look after him, then?’ he asked.

‘I won’t go to mother,’ screamed the boy. ‘I will be with you.’

Margayya had some oddjobs to do while at home in the mornings. He went to the nearby Urban Stores and bought sugar or butter, he cut up the firewood into smaller sizes if his wife complained about it, or he opened his tin box and refreshed his memory by poring over the pages of his red-bound account-book. But today the boy would not let him do anything except fuss over him.

The child kept Margayya at home for over an hour beyond his usual time. He could leave for the Co-operative Bank only at midday, stealing out when, oblivious of his surroundings, the little fellow’s attention was engaged in splashing about a bucket of water in the backyard. When the water was exhausted he looked all round and let out such an angry shout for his father that the people on the other side of the wall remarked to each other: ‘This is the worst of begetting sons late in life! They pet them and spoil them and make them little monsters.’ The lady on the other side of the wall could well say this because she was the mother often.

* * *

Margayya looked up as a shadow fell on his notebook. He saw a uniformed servant standing before him. It was Ami Doss, the head peon of the Co-operative Bank, an old Christian who had grown up with the institution. He had wrinkles round his eyes, and a white moustache and mild eyes. Margayya looked up at him and wondered what to do – whether to treat him as a hostile visitor or as a friend. Instinctively he recoiled from anyone coming out of that building, where he knew he was being viewed as a public enemy. He hesitated for a moment, then looked up silently at the figure before him. ‘Sit down, won’t you, Arul Doss?’ Arul Doss shot a glance over his shoulder at the office.

‘He will not like it if he sees me dallying here. He, I mean the Secretary, asks you to come –’ said Arul.

‘Me!’ Margayya could hardly believe his ears. ‘The Secretary! What have I to do with your Secretary?’

‘I don’t know at all, but he said, “Go and tell Margayya to come here for a moment.”’

On hearing this, Margayya became indignant. ‘Go and tell them I am not their paid – paid –’ He was about to say ‘servant’, but he remembered in time, even in his mental stress, that the man standing before him was literally both paid and a servant, and thought it would be injudicious to say so now. So he left off the sentence abruptly and asked: ‘Do they pay me to appear before them when they want me?’

‘I don’t know,’ said this very loyal Co-operative man. ‘He told me to tell you. The Secretary is no ordinary person, you know,’ he added. ‘He receives a salary of over five hundred rupees a month, an amount which you and I will probably not see even after a hundred years of service.’ Now Margayya’s blood was stirred. Many angry memories welled up in him of all the indignities that he had suffered at the hands of his brother, who cut him off with half a house, while he himself passed for a man of means, a respectable citizen. Margayya felt that the world treated him with contempt because he had no money. People thought they could order him about. He said to Arul Doss: ‘Arul Doss, I don’t know about you; you can speak for yourself. But you need not speak for me. You may not see a hundred rupees
even after a hundred years of service, but I think I shall do so very soon – and who knows, if your Secretary seeks any improvement of his position, he can come to me.’

Arul Doss took a few moments to understand, then swayed with laughter. Tears rolled down his cheeks. ‘Well, I have been a servant in this department for twenty-nine years, but I’ve never heard a crazier proposal. All right, all right.’ He was convulsed with laughter as he turned to go. Margayya looked at his back helplessly. He cast his eyes down and surveyed himself: perhaps he cut a ridiculous figure, with his
dhoti
going brown for lack of laundering and with his shirt collar frayed, and those awful silver spectacles. ‘I hate these spectacles. I wish I could do without them.’ But age, age – who could help long-sight? ‘If I wore gold spectacles, perhaps they would take me seriously and not order me about. Who is this Secretary to call me through the peon? I won’t be ridiculed. I’m at least as good as they.’ He called out: ‘Look here, Arul Doss.’ With a beaming face, Arul Doss turned round. ‘Tell your Secretary that if he is a Secretary, I’m really the proprietor of a bank, and that he can come here and meet me if he has any business –’

‘Shall I repeat those very words?’ Arul Doss asked, ready to burst out laughing again.

‘Absolutely,’ Margayya said. ‘And another thing, if you find yourself thrown out of there, you can come to me for a job. I like you, you seem to be a hard-working, loyal fellow.’ Further parleys were cut off because a couple of villagers came round for consultation, and started forming a semi-circle in front of Margayya. Though Arul Doss still lingered for a further joke, Margayya turned away abruptly, remarking: ‘All right, you may go now.’

‘Please,’ said a peasant, ‘be careful, sir. That Arul Doss is a bad fellow.’

‘I’m also a bad fellow,’ snapped Margayya.

‘It’s not that. They say that the Secretary just does what this fellow says. If we go in to get just one single form, he charges us two annas each time. Is that also a Government rule?’ asked the peasant.

‘Go away, you fools,’ Margayya said. ‘You are people who have no self-respect. As long as you are shareholders, you are masters of that bank. They are your paid servants.’

‘Ah, is that so?’ asked the peasant. And the group looked up at each other with amazement. Another man, who had a long blanket wrapped round his shoulder, a big cloth turban crowning his head, and wore shorts and was barefoot, said: ‘We may be masters as you say, but who is going to obey us? If we go in, we have to do as they say. Otherwise, they won’t give us money.’

‘Whose money are they giving away?’ asked Margayya. ‘It is your own.’

‘Margayya, we don’t want all that. Why should we talk of other people?’

‘True, true,’ said one or two others approvingly.

Encouraged by this, the peasant said: ‘We should not talk about others unnecessarily.’ He lowered his voice and said: ‘If they hear it they may –’