Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (40 page)

‘I was thinking of… of…’ He considered for a moment, and added, ‘My lessons,’ knowing it would please his father. But it did not seem to have that effect.

‘When you prostrate, you must not prostrate so fast.’

‘How long can I lie on the floor prostrate?’ the boy asked sullenly. ‘I can’t be lying there all the time.’

‘If you grumble so much about your duties to the Goddess, you will never become a learned man, that is all,’ Margayya warned him.

‘I don’t care,’ said the boy, very angry at the thought of an exacting Goddess.

‘You will be called a useless donkey by the whole world, remember,’ Margayya said, his temper rising. ‘Learn to talk with more reverence about the gods … Do you know where I was, how I started, how I earned the favour of the Goddess by prayer and petition? Do you know why I succeeded? It was because my mind was concentrated on the Goddess. The Goddess is the only one who can –’

The boy cut him short with, ‘I know it is a different Goddess you worshipped. It is that Goddess Lakshmi. I know all that from mother.’

Margayya felt upset by this taunt. He called his wife and asked, ‘Why have you been talking nonsense to this boy? He is saying all sorts of things.’

‘What has he been saying?’ asked the wife, wiping her wet hands on the end of her
sari
.

Margayya was at a loss to explain. There was really no basis for his charge. He merely said, ‘That boy contradicts me.’ He turned furiously on his son and said, ‘It is all the same Goddess. There is no difference between Lakshmi and Saraswathi, do you understand?’

The boy was not to be cowed. He simply said, ‘They are different, I know.’ He said it with an air of finality. Margayya asked, ‘How do you know? Who told you?’

‘My master.’

‘Who? Murti? I will speak to that fool. If he is putting obstinate ideas into your head, he is not fit to be your teacher.’
Then he added, ‘Tell me as soon as he comes tomorrow or this evening.’

‘But you won’t be at home when he comes,’ said the boy.

‘Let him wait for me. Tell him he must see me,’ said Margayya.

‘All right,’ said the boy.

Margayya then ordered him out, with, ‘You can go and do your sums now. Don’t waste the precious hours of the morning.’ Balu ran off with great relief to his study and read a page out of his geography at the top of his voice so that all other sounds in the house were drowned.

He went to school trembling with the joyous anticipation of carrying a piece of unpleasant news to his teacher. The moment he sighted him he cried, ‘Sir, sir, my father has asked you to wait for him this evening.’

The teacher’s face turned pale. ‘Why? Why?’ he stammered nervously. There were some boys watching them, and he said, ‘Go away, boys, attend to your work, why do you stand and gape,’ as sternly as he could. He then took Balu aside and said: ‘Tell me boy, why does your father want me to see him?’ ‘I don’t know, sir,’ Balu replied, enjoying the occasion completely. ‘I don’t know, sir.’ He shook his head, but his eyes were lively with mischief and suppressed information. The teacher tried to frighten him: ‘Should you not ask him why he wants to when somebody says he wants to meet somebody else? Must you be taught all these elementary things?’

‘Oh, my father cannot be asked all that. He will be very angry if he is questioned like that. Why should I be beaten by him, sir? Do you want me to be beaten by him, sir?’

The teacher took him privately under the tamarind tree and begged: ‘See here, what exactly happened today, won’t you tell me, won’t you tell your teacher?’

He sounded melodramatic, and Balu started bargaining, ‘I couldn’t do any sums this morning.’ The teacher assured him that he would condone the lapse. And then Balu went on to the next bargaining point by which the teacher himself should do the sums and not bother Balu except to the extent of showing him what marks he had obtained for them. When it was granted, Balu demanded: ‘You promised me
bharfi;
I must have it this afternoon, sir.’

‘You will surely get a packet from me this afternoon,’ said the teacher affably. After all this, Balu told him the reason why his father wanted to meet him. The teacher cried: ‘I say, whatever made you speak thus? Have I ever mentioned to you anything about Lakshmi or anything of the kind?’

‘My father asked who told me all that, and so I had to say it was you,’ said Balu, with obscure logic.

The teacher waited for Margayya’s arrival in the evening after finishing the lessons with Balu. Balu went in to demand his dinner. It was past eight when Margayya came home. As the pitpat of his sandals was heard outside the teacher felt acutely uneasy and stood up. Margayya carefully put away his sandals at the corridor and came in. He saw the teacher and asked, ‘What is the matter, teaching so late?’ The teacher went forward officiously, rubbed his hands and said, ‘Oh, I finished the lessons long ago, and Balu has even gone to sleep. I only waited to see you, sir,’ he added.

‘Oh, now, impossible,’ said Margayya. He proceeded to put away his upper-cloth and take off his shirt. ‘I come home after a hard day’s work and now you try to catch me for some idiotic school business, I suppose. Do you think I have no other business? Go, go, nothing doing now.’

‘All right, sir,’ the teacher said turning to go, greatly relieved.

‘Is there anything else?’ Margayya shouted as the other was going. The teacher thought for a moment and said: ‘Nothing special, sir,’ in a most humble tone, which satisfied Margayya. His self-importance was properly fed; and so he said, as a sort of favour to the teacher, ‘I hope Balu is all right?’

‘Oh, yes, sir; he is quite up to the mark although he needs constant watching …’

‘Well, as a teacher that is what you are expected to do, remember. And any time you see him getting out of hand, don’t wait for me. Thrash him. Thrash him well.’ As a sort of general philosophy, he added, ‘No boy who has not been thrashed has come to any good. I am going to be extremely busy hereafter and won’t have much time for anything. Don’t take your eye off the boy.’

‘Yes, sir, I will always do my best; as a teacher my interest is to see him rise in the world as a man of –’

Margayya turned and went away to the backyard without waiting for him to finish the sentence. His wife picked up a vessel of water and gave it to him. As he poured it over himself and she could be sure he was feeling cooler, she said, ‘Why do you constantly say “Thrash” “Thrash” whenever you speak of the child? It is not good.’

Margayya replied, ‘Oh, you believe it! It is just a formality with teachers, that is all. It keeps them in trim. After all, the fellow takes ten rupees a month and he must keep himself alert; but he dare not even touch our little darling. I would strike off that miserable teacher’s head.’

It was all very bewildering to his wife. She asked, ‘If you don’t want him to do it why do you tell him to thrash him?’

‘That is the way things have to be done in the world, my dear. If you see a policeman ask him to catch the thief, if you see a monkey ask him to go up a tree, and if you see a teacher ask him to thrash his pupil … These are the things they do and it pleases them, they are appropriate. If you want to please me tell me to put up the interest, and I at once feel I am being spoken to by a friend and well-wisher!’

There was probably no other person in the whole country who had meditated so much on the question of interest. Margayya’s mind was full of it. Night and day he sat and brooded over it. The more he thought of it the more it seemed to him the greatest wonder of creation. It combined in it the mystery of birth and multiplication. Otherwise how could you account for the fact that a hundred rupees in a savings bank became one hundred and twenty in course of time? It was something like the ripening of corn. Every rupee, Margayya felt, contained in it seed of another rupee and that seed in it another seed and so on and on to infinity. It was something like the firmament, endless stars and within each star an endless firmament and within each one further endless … It bordered on mystic perception. It gave him the feeling of being part of an infinite existence. But Margayya was racked with the feeling that these sublime thoughts were
coming to him in a totally wrong setting. He disliked the atmosphere of the Gordon Printery. He detested his office and the furniture. Sitting in a chair, dangling one’s legs under a table, seemed an extremely irksome process; it was as if you remained half suspended in mid-air. He liked to keep his knees folded and tucked – that alone gave him a feeling of being on solid ground. And then his table and all its equipment seemed to him a most senseless luxury. They were not necessary for the welfare and progress of a business man; they were mere show stuff. And all that calling-bell nonsense. The best way to call was to shout ‘Boy,’ and keep shouting till the boy’s ear-drums split and he came running. All this tinkling calling-bell stuff was a waste of time. You were not a shepherd playing on a flute calling back your flock! Margayya was so much tickled by this comparison that he laughed aloud one day while he sat in his office, and was supposed to be counting the orders for
Domestic Harmony
. The boy came running in at the sound of this laughter, and Margayya flung the call-bell at him and said: ‘Don’t let me see this on my table. I don’t want all this tomfoolery.’ This was the starting-point.

The business always seemed to him an alien one. The only interesting thing about it seemed to be the money that was coming in. ‘But money is not everything,’ he told himself one day. It was a very strange statement to come from a person like Margayya. But if he had been asked to explain or expand it further he would have said: ‘Money is very good no doubt, but the whole thing seems to be in a wrong setting.’ Money was not in its right place here, amidst all the roar of printing machinery, ugly streaming proof sheets, and the childish debits and credits that arose from book sales with booksellers and book buyers, who carried on endless correspondence over trivialities about six and a quarter and twelve and a half per cent and a few annas of postage and so forth. It was all very well if you spoke of those percentages with a value of a hundred rupees at least; but here you were dealing with two rupees per copy and involved yourself in all these hair-splitting percentages. It did not seem to Margayya an adult business; there was really no stuff in it; there was not sufficient adventure in it; there was nothing in it. ‘Book
business is no business at all,’ he told his wife one evening when he decided to part company with Lai. ‘It is a business fit for youngsters of Balu’s age.’ The lady had no comment to offer since all business seemed to her equally complex and bewildering. She had to listen with patience as he expanded his theme: ‘It is a rusty business, sitting there all the time and looking at those silly figures … Well, to let you into a secret, there is not much of that either; the figures are falling off; sales are not as good as they used to be.’ And then it hurt his dignity to be called the publisher of
Domestic Harmony
. He would prefer people to forget it if possible. When the profits dwindled he began to view the book in a peculiarly realistic light. ‘Awful stuff,’ he told his wife. ‘Most vulgar and poisonous. It will do a lot of damage to young minds.’

‘And also to old minds, I think. How can people write brazenly of all those matters?’ she asked.

Margayya said, ‘Did you ever notice how I have managed not to bring a single copy into this house? I don’t want our Balu even to know that there is such a book.’ His wife expressed deep appreciation of this precaution. Margayya felt further impelled to add, ‘I don’t want people to say that Balu enjoys all the money earned through
Domestic Harmony
. I would do anything to avoid it.’ He felt very heroic when he said that. He seemed to swell with his goodness, nobility and importance, and the clean plans he was able to make for his son.

It was quite a fortnight before he spoke of it to Lai. Lai was thinking that Margayya was attending to his work as usual. Their quarterly statement system worked quite smoothly. There was no chance of any mistake or misunderstanding. Lai himself was a man who believed that in the long run honesty paid in any business. Margayya had complete charge of the sales, and the division of the spoils went on smoothly without a hitch. At tiffin time, Margayya called up his boy and told him: ‘Go and ask Lai if he will come here for tiffin today. Tell him that there is something I have brought from home.’ Lai came up. Margayya ceremoniously welcomed him and pointed to the chair opposite. ‘My wife has sent something special today for my afternoon tiffin, and I thought you might like to taste it.’

‘I have to go home for lunch,’ said Lai. ‘I have told them that I would be there.’

‘I will send word to them. Boy!’ Margayya cried. He took complete charge of the other. ‘Call the master’s servant, and send him up to inform the lady at the house that
Sab
is not coming there for his meal. And then run up and bring …’ He gave an elaborate list of tiffins to be purchased at the canteen next door. ‘Ask him to make the best coffee.’

‘I don’t want coffee, mister. Let it be tea. I have taken coffee only for your sake once or twice. I don’t want coffee.’

‘All right, make it tea then; and coffee for me. Hurry up! Why are you still standing and blinking? Hurry up, young fellow.’ There, consuming their repast, Margayya made his proposal. ‘Lai, you have done a lot for me. I want to do a good turn to you.’

At the mention of this Lai sat up interested. ‘Good turn,’ he thought. That sounded suspicious. No one like Margayya would do a good turn except as a sort of investment. Lai wanted to know what the proposal was going to mean. He knew that it must be something connected with
Domestic Harmony
, but he felt he should have all his faculties alert. He said very casually, ‘Well, mister, we must all be helpful to each other, isn’t that so? Otherwise, what is life worth? What is existence worth? If we are always thinking of our profits, we shall not be able to do any good in this world. I am glad you think so much of my little service to you. But pray don’t think too much of it. I have done the little I could, although financially it has really meant a loss. If I should put into my books all the time and energy, to say nothing of the materials, that have been put into our job, it would really turn out to be a loss. If I had engaged myself in something else … But my mind will not run on these lines: I always like to think at the end of the day that I have done something without thought of profit, and only then do I feel able to go to sleep.’