Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (52 page)

The girls said: ‘We belong to … the theatre –’

‘The theatre! Why don’t you say what you really are! If you are seen again anywhere –’

The rest they could not hear, because Dr Pal wriggled himself free, and suddenly dashed into the car, started it, and was off. He looked back and remarked: ‘You miserable miser, who cannot share your goods with your own son – all right –’

The red rear light of the car receded and vanished around a bend. Margayya hesitated on the road for a moment to decide whether he should follow his son into the house. But he saw his son bolt the veranda door, and put out the light. ‘Good! Good! It is a good sign. He is a good son that trembles and runs away from his father,’ he said to himself, and turned homeward.

Later in life Margayya often speculated what would have become of him if he had started back home after speaking to his
daughter-in-law a little earlier and missed Dr Pal’s Austin that night, or if he had remained in the shadows and had allowed Pal to go off after dropping Balu, whom he might probably have tackled with more circumspection and diplomacy: he might even have shared his property with him as he demanded: that would have saved him at least the rest of it – and prevented the doctor from doing what he did.

Dr Pal went straight to a police station and recorded an immediate complaint of assault. The two actresses and Balu were his witnesses. Next morning he went round with plaster on his face to his various customers and business men. His first visit was to the blanket merchant. He took Balu along with him in the car. The blanket merchant was the first to ask: ‘What has happened to your face, Doctor?’

The doctor looked sad and said: ‘I am an academic man, and I should not have associated with business men –’

‘Can’t you tell me what happened?’ the blanket merchant persisted.

The doctor just shook his head and said: ‘No, I can’t – better leave things alone. It was my mistake to have associated with all sorts of folks, and I ought to blame only myself… I’m paying for it.’

‘Don’t say so, sir. We have the greatest respect for you –’

‘Business people have money, and they can help me to set up my Psychological Clinic – that was my chief interest: that would have been of the greatest benefit to them: nowadays psychological wear and tear has the highest incidence among business men: theirs is a life of the utmost strain. I thought I might be of some help to the business community more than to anyone else – and what is the result?’

‘No, sir, you must not speak like that. We have the greatest regard for you. But business life is becoming difficult with so many controls and permit forms to be filled up for all sorts of things. You have no idea how many obstacles a business man has to face before he can get through anything in the Government –’

After this the doctor drew his attention again to the plaster over his cheeks. The merchant asked: ‘You have not yet told me where you got it?’

Dr Pal lowered his voice to a whisper and said: ‘You will not believe me! Margayya assaulted me last night near his son’s house.’

‘What! Why?’

‘How can I say? He is somewhat queer these days. His son went up to him with some request and was slapped in the face. Later, I had to see him. Things are probably not going smoothly there.’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed the merchant.

He was the first to meet Margayya at his house that morning. ‘I want to take back my deposit. There is a marriage proposal likely to shape out – ‘He grinned awkwardly, nervously, and held out the receipt issued by Margayya.

‘My accountant has all the figures,’ began Margayya. The blanket merchant cringed: ‘It’s urgent. I’ve to find immediate cash.’

‘You have already drawn interest on it?’

‘Yes … yes … But I want the principal.’

‘Oh, yes, certainly,’ said Margayya, and went into the small room and came out with a bundle of currency.

‘You are a clever rogue! You have earned so much interest and are now getting your capital! Very clever, very clever,’ Margayya said light-heartedly, which pleased the blanket merchant tremendously as he counted the cash and went out. This was the starting-point. Margayya could not leave for his office. One after another they came with their receipts. Margayya returned their cash without a murmur. The street became congested with people converging on his house; people hung about his steps and windows. He bolted the front door and dealt with them through the window.

Margayya’s wife looked panic-stricken: ‘What has happened? Why so many people?’

‘They are wanting their money back, that’s all.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Well, give it back, that’s all.’

‘You have not eaten this whole day.’

‘I have no taste for food.’ He felt very weak and still could not stomach the thought of food. His eyes smarted with scrutinizing so many receipts. His wrist pained him with the counting of
notes. He wished he could get his accountant by his side. He saw him through the window, struggling to approach the house in the midst of the crowd. But he could not come nearer. Some persons recognized the accountant, and turned upon him. Margayya saw them manhandling the old man.

‘I knew nothing about it. I swear. I still know nothing about it,’ he was crying.

‘My life’s savings gone! I am a beggar today!’ one of them shouted into the ears of the old man.

They were pulling him here and there. His spectacles were broken and his turban torn. A policeman came into the crowd and took away the old man.

By about four o’clock all the cash in the house was gone. All the mail sacks lay about empty and slack; yet peeping through the window, Margayya saw seas and seas of human heads stretching to the horizon, human faces at their most terrifying. The babble of the crowd was deafening. Luckily for him the front door of the house was at least a century old and made of thick timber, and could stand the battering by a hundred hands. People jammed the passage and windows and shouted menacingly. There seemed to be only one theme for all the cries: ‘My money! My money gone! All my savings gone –’

Margayya could sit up no longer. He just flung himself down on the floor beside the window. No air could come in. There were terrifying faces all around and the babble of voices; and over it all came the cry of an ice-cream pedlar: ‘Ice cream! Ice cream for thirst!’ as his bell tinkled.

Margayya’s wife was scared by the siege and at the condition of her husband. She bent over him and asked: ‘What shall I do? Oh, what shall I do?’

‘Call my brother,’ said Margayya.

She ran to the backyard. Very soon Margayya’s elder brother climbed the lavatory wall and the parapet of the well, jumped into the backyard and was in a minute by his side.

‘Brother, what is this? What has come over you?’

‘I’m tired … Please send for the police … Hurry up, otherwise they will mob this house: they will kill us, they will set it on fire, they will –’

‘Do you still owe all of them money?’

‘To all of them and many more unseen; more will come tomorrow. More and more of them … Get me the police to save us now and bring a lawyer. I am filing insolvency at once.’

‘Insolvency! Think of your family reputation!’

‘No other way out, none whatever.’

The brother, ever a man for a crisis, stood thinking. The hubbub outside was increasing every moment.

‘The flood is outside,’ Margayya said. ‘It will wipe us out. Please, please run – ‘He felt too weak with his effort and lay still with his eyes closed.

His brother ran to his sister-in-law standing at the door sobbing. ‘Quick, give him something –’

‘There is no milk in the house. The milkman could not come in. There is nothing in the house. We have been shut up here since the morning.’

‘Oh, is that so?’ He rushed away, and returned soon carrying a vessel full of coffee, and something to eat. He seemed to be enjoying the situation. He said excitedly: ‘Now, try and give him something. I tried to see if there was a regular meal next door – but it was not available: your sister-in-law will send you food presently. She has just started cooking.’ He bustled round spreading his utensils about. ‘Give him something at once. I will go and get the police to guard us. I will also get a lawyer. I will do everything to exempt this house at least from the schedule. This is inalienable property. They cannot attach this.’ His talk was full of technicalities. He rushed off to the backyard and then on to his task.

The tide rolled back in about three or four months. Days of attending courts, lawyers, inventories and so on and so forth. Margayya felt that he had lost all right to personal life.

He relaxed completely. He lay on a mat with his eyes closed, his wife in the kitchen. A
jutka
stopped outside, and in marched his son followed by his wife, carrying the infant on her arm. The
jutka-man
brought in a couple of trunks and beds and placed them in the hall. Margayya clutched the baby to his bosom. His daughter-in-law went into the kitchen. Balu stood about uncertainly.
Margayya did not speak to him for a long time. The boy stood in the passage undecided what he should do, his shirt unbuttoned at the throat. A feeling of pity overcame Margayya. The boy had lost some of the look of confidence that he wore before – the radiance that shone on his face when there was money in the background. Money was like a gem which radiated subdued light all round. The boy looked just dull and puzzled. Margayya kept looking at him so long that he felt he had to explain: so he just said: ‘I have come away – they have attached the house.’

‘With the furniture and all the other things?’ Margayya asked. ‘I was expecting it –’

‘It was difficult to come out even with our clothes and Brinda’s jewellery. They demanded a list.’

‘I was expecting it. Come here, Baku’

Balu approached him and sat beside him. Margayya put his arm round him: ‘You see that box there. I have managed to get it out again.’ He pointed to a corner where his old knobby trunk was kept. ‘Its contents are intact as I left them years ago – a pen and an ink-bottle. You asked for my property. There it is, take it: have an early meal tomorrow and go to the banyan tree in front of the Co-operative Bank. I hope the tree is still there. Go there, that is all I can say: and anything may happen thereafter. Well, what do you say? I am showing you a way. Will you follow it?’

The boy stood ruminating. He was looking crushed: ‘How can I go and sit there? What will people think?’

‘Very well then, if you are not going, I am going on with it, as soon as I am able to leave this bed,’ said Margayya. ‘Now get the youngster here. I will play with him. Life has been too dull without him in this house.’

His mother, who died delivering him, and his father, who was killed in Mesopotamia, might have been figures in a legend as far as Sriram was concerned. He had, however, concrete evidence of his mother in a framed photograph which for years hung too high on the wall for him to see; when he grew tall enough to study the dim picture, he didn’t feel pleased with her appearance; he wished she looked like that portrait of a European queen with apple cheeks and wavy coiffure hanging in the little shop opposite his house, where he often went to buy peppermints with the daily money given him by his granny. Of his father, at least, there were recurring reminders. On the first of every month the postman brought a brown, oblong envelope, addressed to his granny. Invariably Granny wept when it came to her hand, and his childish mind wondered what it could contain to sting the tears out of her eyes. Only years later he understood that his granny had been receiving a military pension meant for him. When the envelope came she invariably remarked: ‘I don’t have to spend your pension in order to maintain you. God has left us enough to live on.’ Then she took it to the fourth house in their row, which was known as the ‘Fund Office’ (what the name meant, he never understood) and came back to say: ‘There is nothing so fleeting as untethered cash. You can do what you like with it when you are old enough.’

That portrait in the opposite shop fascinated his adolescent mind. The shopman was known as Kanni, a parched, cantankerous, formidable man, who sat on his haunches all day briskly handing out goods to his customers. Until eleven at night, when he closed the shop, his hollow voice could be heard haranguing someone, or arguing, or cowing his credit-demanding clientele: ‘What do you think I am! How dare you come again without cash? You
think you can do me in? You are mistaken. I can swallow ten of you at the same time, remember.’ The only softening influence in this shop of cigars,
beedis
, explosive aerated drinks, and hard words was the portrait of the lady with apple cheeks, curls falling down the brim of her coronet, and large, dark eyes. ‘Those eyes look at me,’ Sriram often thought. For the pleasure of returning the look, he went again and again, to buy something or other at the shop.

‘Whose is that picture?’ he asked once, pausing between sips of a coloured drink.

‘How should I know?’ Kanni said. ‘It’s probably some queen, probably Queen Victoria,’ although he might with equal justification have claimed her to be Maria Theresa or Ann Boleyn.

‘What did you pay for it?’

‘Why do you want to know all that?’ said Kanni, mildly irritated. If it had been anyone else, he would have shouted, ‘If you have finished your business, be gone. Don’t stand there and ask a dozen questions.’

But Sriram occupied a unique position. He was a good customer, paid down a lot of cash every day, and deserved respect for his bank balance. He asked, ‘Where did you get the picture?’

Kanni was in a jovial mood and answered, ‘You know that man, the Revenue Inspector in Pillaiah Street. He owed me a lot of money. I had waited long enough, so one day I walked in and brought away this picture hanging in his room. Something at least for my dues.’

‘If there is any chance,’ said Sriram with timid hesitation, ‘of your giving it away, tell me its price.’

‘Oh, oh!’ said Kanni, laughing. He was in a fine mood. ‘I know you can buy up the queen herself, master
zamindar
. But I won’t part with it. It has brought me luck. Ever since I hung the picture there, my business has multiplied tenfold.’

One evening his grandmother asked: ‘Do you know what star it will be tomorrow?’

‘No. How should I?’ he asked, comfortably reclining on the
cold cement window-sill, and watching the street. He had sat there, morning to night, ever since he could remember. When he was a year old his grandmother put him down there and showed him the traffic passing outside; bullock-carts, horse-carriages, and the first few motor-cars of the age, honking away and rattling down the road. He would not be fed unless he was allowed to watch what went on in the street. She held a spoonful of rice and curd to his lips and exclaimed: ‘Oh, see that great motor-car. Shall our little Ram travel in it?’ And when he blinked at the mention of his name and opened his mouth, she thrust in the rice. This window became such a habit with him that when he grew up he sought no other diversion except to sit there, sometimes with a book, and watch the street. His grandmother often reproached him for it. She asked: ‘Why don’t you go and mix with others of your age?’

‘I am quite happy where I am,’ he answered briefly.

‘If you left that seat, you would have many things to see and learn,’ said the old lady sharply. ‘Do you know at your age your father could read the almanac upside down, and could say at a moment’s notice what star was reigning over which particular day?’

‘He was probably a very wise man,’ ventured Sriram.

‘He
was
very wise. Don’t say “probably”,’ corrected his grandmother. ‘And your grandfather, you know how clever he was! They say that the grandfather’s reincarnation is in his grandson. You have the same shaped nose as he had and the same eyebrows. His fingers were also long just like yours. But there it stops. I very much wish you had not inherited any of it, but only his brain.’

‘I wish you had kept a portrait of him for me to see, Granny,’ Sriram said. ‘Then I could have worshipped it and become just as clever as he.’

The old lady was pleased with this, and said: ‘I’ll teach you how you could improve yourself Dragging him by the hand to the little circle of light under the hall lamp, she took the brown paper-covered almanac from under a tile of their sloping roof. Then she sat down on the floor, clamoured for her glasses till they were fetched, and forced Sriram to open the almanac and go
through it to a particular page. It was full of minute, bewildering symbols in intricate columns. She pushed his face close to the page.

‘What is it you are trying to do?’ he pleaded pathetically.

She put her finger on a letter and asked: ‘What is this?’

‘Sa
…’ he read.

‘It means
Sadhaya
. That’s your star.’ She drew her finger along the line and pointed at the morrow’s date. ‘Tomorrow is this date, which means it’s your birth star. It’s going to be your twentieth birthday, although you behave as if you are half that. I am going to celebrate it. Would you like to invite any of your friends?’

‘No, never,’ said Sriram positively.

So all alone next day he celebrated his twentieth birthday. His guest as well as hostess was his grandmother. No one outside could have guessed what an important occasion was being celebrated in that house in Kabir Street numbered ‘14’. The house was over two hundred years old and looked it. It was the last house in the street, or ‘the first house’ as his great grandfather used to say at the time he built it. From here one saw the backs of market buildings and heard night and day the babble of the big crowd moving on the market road. Next door to Sriram’s house was a small printing press which groaned away all day and next to it another two-hundred-year-old house in which six noisy families lived, and beyond that was the Fund Office, where Granny kept her grandson’s money. A crooked street ran in front of these houses; their closeness to the market and to a Higher Elementary Town School, the Local Fund Dispensary, and above all to the half-dozen benches around the market fountain, was said to give these houses in Kabir Street a unique value.

The houses were all alike – a large single roof sloping down to the slender rosewood pillars with carvings and brass decorations on them, and a pyol, an open brick platform under the windows, on which the household slept in summer. The walls were two feet thick, the doors were made of century-old teak planks with bronze knobs, and the tiles were of burnt mud which
had weathered the storms and rains of centuries. All these houses were alike; you could see end to end the slender pillars and tiles sloping down as if all of them belonged to a single house. Many changes had occurred since they were built two centuries ago. Many of them had changed hands, the original owners having been lost in the toils of litigation; some were rented out to tradesmen, such as the Sun Press, the Butter Factory, or the Fund Office, while their owners retired to villages or built themselves modern villas in Lawley Extension. But there were still one or two houses which maintained a continuity, a link with the past. Number 14 was such a one. There the family lineage began centuries ago and continued still, though reduced to just two members – Sriram and his grandmother.

Granny had somewhere secured a yard-long sugar cane for the celebration, although it was not the season. She said: ‘No birthday is truly celebrated unless and until a sugar cane is seen in the house. It’s auspicious.’ She strung mango leaves across the doorway, and decorated the threshold with coloured rice-powder. A neighbour passing down the road stopped to ask: ‘What’s the celebration? Shall we blow out the oven fires in our houses and come for the feast in yours?’

‘Yes, by all means. Most welcome,’ said the old lady courteously, and added, as if to neutralize the invitation, ‘You are always welcome.’ She felt sorry at not being able to call in the neighbours, but that recluse grandson of hers had forbidden her to invite anyone. Left to herself she would have engaged pipes and drums and processions, for this particular birthday was a thing she had been planning all along, this twentieth birthday when she would hand over the savings passbook to her grandson and relinquish the trust.

It was an adventure accompanying Granny to the Fund Office, four doors off. She seemed to shrink under an open sky – she who dominated the landscape under the roof of Number 14 lost her stature completely in the open. Sriram couldn’t help remarking, ‘You look like a baby, Granny.’ Granny half-closed her eyes
in the glare and whispered, ‘Hush! Don’t talk aloud, others may hear.’

‘Hear what?’

‘Whatever it may be. What happens behind one’s door must be known only to the folk concerned. Others had better shut up.’

As if confirming her worst suspicion, Kanni cried breezily from his shop: ‘Oho, grandmother and her pet on an outing! A fine sight! The young gentleman is shooting up, madam!’

Sriram felt proud of this compliment; he was seized with a feeling of towering height, and he pursed his lips in a determined manner. He gripped in his right hand the brown calico-bound passbook presented to him with a somewhat dramatic gesture by his grandmother a moment ago.

‘Oh, the young
subedhar
is going to the right school with the right book,’ Kanni remarked. ‘He must live to be as great as his father and grandfather put together.’

Granny muttered, quickening her steps, ‘Don’t stand and talk to that man; he will plague us with his remarks; that’s why I never wanted your grandfather to sell that site opposite, but he was an obstinate man, such an obstinate man! He was also fond of this Kanni, who was then a young fellow.’

‘Did Grandfather also buy plantains?’

‘Not only plantains,’ she muttered, with a shudder, recollecting his habit of buying cheroots in Kanni’s shop. She had thought it degrading for any person to be seen smoking a cheroot. ‘Like a baby sucking a candy stick!’ she was wont to remark, disturbing the even tenor of their married life. She had always blamed Kanni for encouraging her husband to smoke and never got over a slight grudge on that account.

Before reaching the Fund Office they had interruptions from other neighbours who peeped out of their doorways and demanded to be told what extraordinary thing made the old lady go out in the company of her grandson. They could understand her going out all alone on the first of the month in the direction of the Fund Office – that was understandable. But what made the lady go out in the company of the young fellow, who was – an unusual sight – holding on to a bank book?

‘What!’ cried a lady who was a privileged friend of Granny’s, ‘does it mean that this urchin is going to have an independent account?’

‘He is no longer an urchin,’ cried the old woman. ‘He’s old enough to take charge of his own affairs. How long should I look after him! I’m not immortal. Each responsibility should be shaken off as and when occasion arises to push off each responsibility.’ This was a somewhat involved sentiment expressed in a round-about manner, but her friend seemed to understand it at once, and cried, coming down the steps of her house, ‘How wisely you speak! The girls of these days should learn from you how to conduct themselves,’ which pleased Granny so much that she stopped to whisper in her ear: ‘I was only a trustee of his money. From today he will take care of his own.’

‘Wisely done, wisely done,’ the other cried and asked, ‘How much in all?’

‘That you will never know,’ said Granny and walked off. Sriram, who had gone ahead, asked: ‘How is it, Granny, you stop and talk to everyone! What were you telling her?’

‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘You follow the same rule and you will be a happier man. Your grandfather ruined himself by talking. Anything that happened to him, good or bad, was bound to be known to everyone in the town within ten minutes; otherwise his soul felt restless.’

‘Why should anything be concealed from anyone?’ asked the boy.

‘Because it’s better so, that’s all,’ said the old lady.

All these interruptions on the way delayed her arrival at the bank. The clock struck four as she showed her face at the counter.

‘Must you be on the last second, madam?’ the manager asked. ‘Is there any reason why you could not come a little earlier?’

‘No, none,’ she said, ‘except that I’m not a young creature who can frisk along.’ The manager, used to her ways, got down from his high seat, opened a side door, and without a word, let her in.

Sriram was being initiated into the mysteries of banking. The bank manager opened the last page of his passbook and said:
‘What figure do you see here?’ Sriram wondered for a moment if he was testing him in arithmetic, a terrible memory of his early schooldays. He became wary and ventured to say: ‘Thirty-eight thousand, five hundred rupees, seven annas, and six pies.’