Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (5 page)

said the text before him. On reading it, all his domestic worries and all these questions of prestige seemed ridiculously petty. ‘My children,
my
family,
my
responsibility – must guard
my
prestige and do
my
duties to
my
family – Who am I? This is a far more serious problem than any I have known before. It is a big problem and I have to face it. Till I know who I am, how can
I know what I should do? However, some sort of answer should be ready before my brother questions me again –’

The solution appeared to him in a flash. He knew what he ought to do with himself. Within twenty-four hours he sat in the train for Malgudi, after sending away his wife and son to her parents’ house in the village.

The old man came out of his prayer and said: ‘Would it be any use asking who you are?’

‘I’m from Talapur and I am starting a paper here –’

‘What for?’ asked the man suspiciously.

‘Just to make money,’ Srinivas replied with a deliberate cynicism which was lost on the old man. He looked pleased and relieved. ‘How much will it bring you?’

‘Say about two thousand a month,’ Srinivas said and muttered under his breath: ‘Is this the only thing you understand?’

‘Eh, what?’

‘Come along, show me a house –’

They started out. The old man elaborately locked up his cell, and took him through a sub-lane to the back of Anderson Lane. As he came before a house he cried to someone who was driving a nail in the wall: ‘You! You! … Do you want to ruin my wall? I will give you notice to quit if you damage my house –’

Srinivas received a very confused impression of the whole house. It had a wet central courtyard with a water-pipe, and a lot of people were standing around it – four children, waiting to wash their hands, three women to draw water, and three men, who had eaten their food, were waiting also to wash their hands. In addition to these there was a little boy with a miserable puppy tied to a string, waiting to bathe his pet. On seeing the old man, one woman turned on him and asked: ‘Ah, here you are! Can’t you do something about this dog? Should it be washed in the same pipe as the one we use for our drinking water?’ The young boy tugged his dog nearer the tap. Somebody tried to drag it away, and the boy said: ‘Bite them –’ At which the dog set up a bark and wriggled at the end of its tether, and people grew restless and shouted at each other. The old man tried to pass on, without paying attention to what they
were saying. One of the men dashed up, held him by the elbow and demanded: ‘Are you going to give us another water-tap or are you not?’

‘No – you can quit the house –’

‘It is not how you should talk to a tenant,’ said the other, falling back.

The old man explained to Srinivas: ‘I tell you, people have no gratitude. In these days of housing difficulties I give them a house – only to be shouted at in this manner –’

‘It must be heart-breaking,’ agreed Srinivas. The old man looked pleased and stopped before a doorway in a dark passage and said: ‘This is going to be your portion. It is an independent house by itself He turned the key, flung the door open; darkness seemed to flow out of the room. ‘It only requires a little airing … Nobody to help me in any of these things. I have to go round and do everything myself …’ He hurried forward and threw open a couple of window shutters.

‘Come in, come in,’ the old man invited Srinivas, who was still hesitating in the passage. Srinivas stepped in. The walls were of mud, lime-covered, with an uneven and globular surface; bamboo splinters showed in some places – the skeleton on which the mud had been laid. The lime had turned brown and black with time. The old man ran his hand proudly over the wall and said: ‘Old style, but strong as iron. Even dynamite couldn’t break it –’

‘That’s obvious,’ Srinivas replied. ‘They must have built it in the days of Mohenjodaro – the same building skill –’

‘What is that?’

‘Oh, very rare specimens of building thousands of years ago. They have spent lakhs of rupees to bring them to light …’

‘Walls like these?’

‘Exactly.’ The old man looked gratified. ‘How wise of them! It is only the Europeans who can understand the value of some of these things. We have many things to learn from our ancients. Can our modern cement stand comparison with this?’ He waited for an answer, and Srinivas replied: ‘Cement walls crumble like rice-flour when dynamite is applied.’

‘You see, that is why I look after my houses so carefully. I don’t allow any nail to be driven into a wall – The moment I see a
tenant driving a nail into the wall … I lose myself in anger. I hope you have no pictures –’

‘Oh, no. I have no faith in pictures.’

‘Quite right,’ said the old man, finding another point of agreement. ‘I don’t understand the common craze for covering walls with pictures.’

‘Most of them representation of Gods by Ravi Varma.’

‘His pictures of Gods are wonderful. He must have seen them in visions, that gifted man –’ remarked the old man.

‘And yet some people who know about pictures say that they aren’t very good or high-class –’

‘Oh, they say it, do they?’ the old man exclaimed. ‘Then why do people waste their money on the pictures and disfigure their walls? I have not seen a single house in our country without a picture of Krishna, Lakshmi and Saraswathi on it –’

‘Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, must patronize every home, Saraswathi, the goddess of intelligence and learning, must also be there. Well, don’t you talk so lightly of these; you would get no rent or not have the wit to collect it, if it were not for the two goddesses. So be careful –’

‘That is a very clever interpretation,’ the old man said, and added a Sanskrit epigram to support the same idea.

Srinivas found that his house consisted of a small hall, with two little rooms to serve for kitchen and store….

‘This is my best flat. I have refused it to a score of people. Such a clamour for it! Quite spacious, isn’t it?’ the old man asked, looking about. ‘How big is your family?’

‘We are three.’

‘Oh, you will be very comfortable, I’m sure. There was once a person who lived here with his eleven children.’

He pointed out of the window. ‘You have a very fine view from here. See the plant outside?’ A half-withered citrus plant drooped in a yard-wide strip of garden outside. ‘You must see it when it is in bloom,’ he added, seeing that the plant didn’t make much of an impression on his prospective tenant. ‘You have a glorious view of the temple tower,’ he said, pointing far off, where the grey spire of Iswara temple rose above the huddling tenements, with its gold crest shining in the sun.

‘But – but,’ Srinivas fumbled. ‘What about water – a single tap?’

‘Oh, it is quite easy. Only a little adjustment. If you get up a little earlier than the rest. – All a matter of adjustment. Those others are savages –’

On the very first day that he moved in with his trunk and roll of bedding a fellow tenant dropped in for a chat. He was a clerk in a bank, maintaining a family consisting of his father, mother and numerous little brothers and sisters, on a monthly income of about forty rupees. He paid a rent of two rupees for one room in which his entire family was cooped up. The children spent most of their time on the pyol of a house at the end of the street. Now, ever since Srinivas had come this man looked happy, as though Srinivas had settled there solely to provide him with a much-needed sitting-room. He spent most of his time sitting on Srinivas’s mat and watching him. He had been the very first tenant to befriend Srinivas. He said: ‘Do you know why the old devil agreed to give this to you for fifteen rupees?’

‘No.’

‘Because nobody would come here. It’s been unoccupied for two years now. A tenant who was here hanged himself in that room, a lonely bachelor. Nobody knows much about him. But one morning we found him swinging from the roof –’

Srinivas felt disquieted by this information. ‘Why did he do that?’

‘Some trouble or other, I suppose; a moody fellow, rather lonely. Every day the only question he used to ask was whether there were any letters for him. He died, the police took away his body, and we heard nothing further about it. One or two tenants who came after him cleared out rather abruptly, saying that his ghost was still here.’ Srinivas remained thoughtful. The other asked: ‘Why, are you afraid?’

‘Not afraid. I shall probably see it depart. And even if it stays on, I won’t mind. I don’t see much difference between a ghost and a living person. All of us are skin-covered ghosts, for that matter.’ Since his boyhood he had listened to dozens of ghost stories that their cook at home used to tell them. The cook dared
Srinivas, once, to go and sleep under the tamarind tree in the school compound. He went there one evening, stayed till eight with a slightly palpitating heart, softly calling out to the ghost an appeal not to bother him in any way. ‘I think I shall be able to manage this ghost quite well,’ he said.

‘I think good people become good ghosts and bad fellows – I dread to contemplate what kind of ghost he will turn out to be when our general manager dies.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Edward Shilling – a huge fellow, made of beef and whisky. He keeps a bottle even in his office room. I am his personal clerk. God! What terror it strikes in me when the buzzer sounds. I fear some day he is going to strike me dead. He explodes “Damn”, “Damn” every few minutes. If there is the slightest mistake in taking dictation, he bangs the table, my heart flutters like a –’ He went on talking thus, and Srinivas learnt to leave him alone and go through his business uninterrupted. At first he sat listening sympathetically; but later found that this was unpractical. Though the man had numerous dependants, he had less to say about them than about his beefy master. His master seemed to possess his soul completely, so that the young man was incapable of thinking of anything else, night or day. He seemed to have grown emaciated and dazed through this spiritual oppression. Srinivas had learnt all that was to be learnt about him within the first two or three days of his talk with him. So, though he felt much sympathy for him, he felt it unnecessary to interrupt his normal occupation for the sake of hearing a variation of a single theme.

He was setting up a new home and he had numerous things to do. He took the landlord’s advice and got up at five o’clock and bathed at the tap before the other tenants were up. He went out for a cup of coffee after that, while the town was still asleep. He discovered that in Market Road a hotel opened at that hour – a very tiny restaurant off the market fountain. It meant half a mile’s walk. He returned directly to his room after coffee. He prayed for a moment before a small image of Nataraja which his grandmother had given him when he was a boy. This was one of the
possessions he had valued most for years. It seemed to be a refuge from the oppression of time. It was of sandalwood, which had deepened a darker shade with years, just four inches high. The carving represented Nataraja with one foot raised and one foot pressing down a demon, his four arms outstretched, with his hair flying, the eyes rapt in contemplation, an exquisitely poised figure. His grandmother had given it to him on his eighth birthday. She had got it from her father, who discovered it in a packet of saffron they had brought from the shop on a certain day. It had never left Srinivas since that birthday. It was on his own table at home, or in the hostel, wherever he might be. It had become a part of him, this little image. He often sat before it, contemplated its proportions, and addressed it thus: ‘Oh, God, you are trampling a demon under your foot, and you show us a rhythm, though you appear to be still. I grasp the symbol but vaguely. You hold a flare in your hand. May a ray of that light illumine my mind!’ He silently addressed it thus. It had been his first duty for decades now. He never started his day without spending a few minutes before this image.

After this he took out his papers. He was about to usher his
Banner
into the world, and he had an immense amount of preparatory work to do. He had a thin exercise book and a copying pencil. He covered the pages of the exercise book with minute jottings connected with the journal. The problems connected with its birth seemed to be innumerable. He did not want to overlook even the slightest problem. He put down each problem with a number, and on an interleaf against it put down a possible solution. For instance, problem No. 20 in his notebook was: ‘Should the page be made up as three column with 8-point type or double column with 10-point? The latter will provide easier reading for the eye, but the former would be more true to its purpose, in that it will give more reading matter. Must consult the printer about it.’ He made the entry: ‘Problem 20: The answer has been unexpectedly simplified. The printer says he favours neither two columns nor three columns; in fact, he has no arrangement whatever for printing in columns. Nor has he anything but 12-point in English – a type that looks like the headings in a Government of India gazette. He insists upon
saying that it is the best type in the whole country: no other press in the world has it. I fear that with this type and without the columns my paper is going to look like an auctioneer’s list. But that can’t be helped at this stage.’ On the day his printer delivered the first dummy copy, which had to go up before a magistrate, his heart sank. It was nowhere near what he had imagined. He had hoped that it would look like an auctioneer’s list, but now he found that it looked like a handbill of a wrestling tournament. One came across this kind of thing at week-ends, the thin transparent paper with the portraits of two muscular men on it, the print soaking through. It had always seemed to him the worst specimen of printing; but then the promoters of wrestling bouts could not be fastidious. But
The Banner?
He said timidly to his printer: ‘Don’t you think we ought to –’

The printer said with a smile: ‘No,’ even before he completed his sentence. ‘This is very good, you cannot get this finish in the whole of South India.’ He spoke so very persuasively that Srinivas himself began to feel that his own view might not be quite correct. The printer was a vociferous, effusive man. When he took a sheet from the press he handled it with such delicacy, carrying it on his palms, as if it were a new-born infant, saying: ‘See the finish?’ in such a tone that his customers were half hypnotized into agreeing with him. He never let anyone look through the curtain behind him. ‘I don’t like my staff to watch me talking to my customers,’ he often explained. He spoke of his staff with great pride and firmness, although Srinivas never got a precise idea of how many it included, nor what exactly lay beyond that printed curtain, on which was represented a purple lion attacking a spotted deer. Srinivas could only vaguely conjecture how many might be working there. All that he could hear was the sound of the treadle. Of even this he could not always be certain. Some days the printer appeared in khaki shorts, with grease spots on his hands, and explained: ‘The best dress for my type of work. I’m going on the machine today. You see, I solve the labour problem by not being a slave to my workmen. When it comes to a pinch, I can do every bit of work myself, including gumming and pasting –’