Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (76 page)

He gave a summary of his gaol existence and a resume of all that had happened to him since she saw him last. The
tonga
ran smoothly. The extreme sympathy with which she listened to his story pleased him greatly. It gave it a touch of importance. As he spoke, he was impressed with his own doings. He was on the point of asking himself: ‘Am I the one who has done all this or is it someone else?’ He was filled with a sense of extreme heroism. ‘I never thought I could put up with all this sort of trouble. I was very keen that the man in the street – ‘he began, and puffed with his own importance. The listener, Bharati, gave his whole life a new meaning and a new dimension. When they arrived at a colony of huts somewhere in New Delhi, he was completely satisfied with all the things he had done in his life.

‘This is my present headquarters,’ Bharati explained. She had taken him to her own hut. ‘Yes, this is my home.’ There was a spinning wheel in one corner, and her clothes hung on a rope tied across the doorway.

‘After all, she is going to be my wife, that’s why she doesn’t mind my staying with her,’ he reflected.

She said, ‘You will have your “room” ready in about an hour, till then you may rest here. There is another block, where you may wash yourself. Make yourself comfortable.’ As she was speaking a group of children came running in crying,
‘Moi, Moi
– ‘and they said something that Sriram could not make out. They came and surrounded Bharati and dragged her by her hand. She stopped and said something to them in their own language. They left her and went away.

‘Who are they?’ asked Sriram with a touch of jealousy.

‘Children, that’s all we know about them,’ she said.

‘Where do they belong?’

‘Here at the moment,’ she said, and added, ‘They are refugee children, we don’t know anything more about them. I will be
back in about an hour. Make yourself comfortable.’ And she went out.

She was gone a long while. By the time she returned he had explored his surroundings. He had discovered the bathroom and the tap, and washed and tidied himself. He went back to her hut and spent a long time combing back his hair and studying himself in the mirror in order to decide whether he was worthy of Bharati. Bharati’s kindness had restored his confidence in himself. He had never hoped that she would treat him with such warmth and kindness. The years that had separated them did not seem to make the slightest difference. It was as if they had separated only an hour ago: all the moments of loneliness and hankering and boredom that had made life a hell for him within the last few years were gone as if they had not existed.

He saw one of her
saris
hanging up, a white one with yellow spots. It was of course made of
khadi
, hand-spun; the rope sank under its weight. He pulled it down to take it in his hands and gauge its weight, reflecting, ‘She ought to wear finery, poor girl. I will give her everything.’ He took it in his hand and weighed it; ‘It seems to weigh twenty pounds.’ He stretched it and held it before his eyes. ‘It’s like a metal sheet. She must feel stuffy under it. I can’t see any light through it.’ He rolled it up and pressed it to his breast. It had a faint aroma of sandalwood which pleased him. ‘It has the fragrance of her own body,’ he reflected, closing his eyes. As he sat there the door opened and Bharati stood before him.

‘What are you doing with my
sari
?’ she asked in surprise. ‘One would think that you were trying to wear it,’ she said with a laugh. Sriram reddened, and put it hastily away.

‘It does not try to ward me off,’ he said, ‘when I take it to my heart.’

‘Hush!’ she cried. ‘Don’t try to be silly. We are all very serious people here, remember. I see you have tidied yourself up. If you have any clothes for washing, give them to me.’

Sriram handed her a small roll that he had brought back from his bathroom. ‘They are terribly soiled,’ he murmured apologetically.

She snatched the bundle from his hands and went out. He reflected, ‘She is almost my wife, she is doing what a wife would
do, good girl! God bless her. If I tie a
thali
around her neck somehow, when she is asleep, things will be all right.’

She returned in a moment saying, ‘Your clothes will come to you in the evening. Here in this camp everyone is expected to wash his or her own clothes and not employ others to do the job, but you are new and I have got a
dhobi
to wash for you as an exception. Are you hungry?’

‘Extremely,’ he said. ‘I am longing for something to eat.’

‘I don’t know what you mean by something,’ she said. ‘You can’t expect all our South Indian stuff. It is months and months since I tasted anything like that. You will have to learn to eat
chappati
, and vegetable and curd and fruit, and not ask for rice or
sambar.’
She led him to a shack where some people were eating and children were sitting with plates before them. There were two platters laid for her and Sriram, side by side. ‘This is how husbands and wives sit together,’ Sriram reflected as he sat beside her and tried to work his way through wheat
chappatis
. He longed for the taste of the pungent South Indian food and its sauces and vegetables, but he suppressed the thought. Gaol life had trained him to eat anything offered him. ‘I am really still in a gaol,’ he reflected.

She was extremely busy all through the day. She seemed to have numerous things to do. She was always attending on children, changing one’s dress, combing another’s hair, engaging another group in dance or play, and continuously talking to them; besides this she had a great deal to say to a lot of miscellaneous men and women who came in search of her. Hers was a full-time occupation. She gave the children a wash, fed them, put them to sleep on mats in various sheds, drew their blankets over them, said something to each one of them, and finally came back to her own room, sat down on her cot, and stretched her arms. Sriram followed her about for hours but could not get in a word of his own. He tried to smile at the children, thinking that that might please Bharati, but she hardly noticed his presence when she was with them. It infuriated him. After a time, he turned on his heels, and went back to his hut. It was furnished with a rope cot and a mat and had no door. There was a common bath at the end of the alley which he shared with a number of others. He had
felt indignant when he was transferred here. It seemed to dash his hopes to the ground. ‘Did she put me in here in order to get rid of me?’ he reflected. ‘Was it because I picked up her spotted
sari?
If I had not done so, she would probably have let me sleep in the same room. I have probably destroyed her trust.’ He reflected ruefully. ‘Trust! Who wants her trust! I only want her.’

He had switched on the light and was sitting on his bed. The entrance darkened. The low roof of the hut made it stuffy, although it kept the place warm in winter. She came in bearing his clothes which he had given her for washing. Sitting in his hut, Sriram had been seized again with the feeling that he was still cooped up in a cell. ‘My gaol seems to be on my back, all the time,’ he reflected. The fatigue of the journey had begun to affect him, the intense cold air, and the gloomy and novel surroundings depressed him and made him feel unhappy – a gloom and unhappiness without any cause. The brief spurt of happiness he had experienced seemed chimerical.

Bharati put his clothes on his bed and said, ‘Are you comfortable?’

‘Yes and no. I feel happy when you are with me, and miserable when you go away.’ She looked at him, startled. He continued, ‘Won’t you sit down here?’ and he made a space for her. She sat down. He moved close to her, and laid his arm on her shoulder.

She said, ‘Not yet,’ and gently pushed away his arm. ‘What a strange man!’ she cried. ‘You have not changed at all.’

He sat away from her and asked, ‘Am I still an untouchable?’

She said, ‘Bapuji alone can decide.’

‘Have you spoken to him about it?’

‘Yes, more than once, but he has not given an answer yet.’ She sat with bowed head when she said it, her voice was low. She looked subdued.

There was an uneasy silence for a while, then he asked, ‘Why? Doesn’t he want us to marry?’

‘It may not be that,’ she said. ‘But he really did not have the time to give it a thought, there were other things to do.’

It was a relief for him to know that Bapuji was not against the notion of their marrying, but it was not enough. He held his breath and listened without speaking. He had a fear that his
slightest word might spoil everything. This was an occasion for speech in the most delicate of whispers. Anything more harsh might destroy the whole fabric. He wanted to be on his guard. He wanted to do nothing that might scare her and take her away from him, nothing that might make fruitless all the thousands of miles he had come. So he refrained from speaking. He wanted to shout at her and demand if it was only for this that she had wanted him to come all that way, he wanted to tell her that he regretted ever having set eyes on her. He wanted to threaten her that he would seize her by force and carry her back to South India.

‘More than anything else,’ she said, ‘the thing that pains Mahatmaji now is the suffering of women. So many of them have been ruined, so many of them have lost their honour, their home, their children, and the number of women who are missing cannot be counted. They have been abducted, carried away by ruffians, ravished or killed, or perhaps have even destroyed themselves.’ She appeared to be on the point of breaking down at the thought.

Sriram felt he must say something in sympathy. ‘Why do these things happen?’ And he felt ashamed of the utter inanity of his question. She didn’t notice his question, but just went on speaking.

‘On the 15th of August when the whole country was jubilant, and gathered here to take part in the Independence Day festivities, do you know where Bapu was? In Calcutta where fresh riots had started. Bapu said his place was where people were suffering and not where they were celebrating. He said that if a country cannot give security to women and children, it’s not worth living in. He said it would be worth dying if that would make his philosophy better understood. He walked through villages barefoot on his mission. We followed him. Each day we walked five miles through floods and fields, silently. He walked with bowed head, all through those swamps of East Bengal. We stopped for a day or two in each village, and he spoke to those who had lost their homes, property, wives, and children. He spoke kindly to those who had perpetrated crimes – he wept for them, and they swore never to do such things again.
I have seen with my own eyes aggressive rowdy-looking men taking a vow of non-violence and a vow to protect the opposite faction – don’t ask what community they were: what one community did in one part of the country brought suffering on the same community in another part of the country. I have seen what has happened both at Noakhali and Bihar, and then at Delhi. How can one choose? Human beings have done impossible things to other human beings. It’s no use discussing whether this community committed greater horrors or the other one. Bapuji forbade us to refer to anyone in terms of religion as Muslims, Hindu, or Sikh, but just as human beings. He said one day that he sometimes pitied those who committed acts of violence – he advised some women in a village that they should sooner take their lives with their own hands than surrender their honour …’

‘You must have gone to many places,’ said Sriram, not having anything else to say.

‘Yes, for about a year I have been with Mahatmaji. He was at first unwilling to take me to all those places but I bothered him again and again after I was released from gaol. I don’t know how many villages I have seen. We followed the Master through burning villages. Of course, anything might have happened to us anywhere. There were a few places where they showed their anger even against Mahatmaji. They held up placards threatening Bapu’s life unless he turned back and left them. But in such places he stayed longer than in other places. And ultimately he held his ground.’

‘Were you at any time in danger?’

‘Of what? Of being assaulted? Yes, sometimes, but Mahatmaji had advised women as a last resort to take their lives with their own hands rather than surrender their honour. There was no sense of fear where Mahatmaji was. But … if any unexpected thing happened, I was always prepared to end my life.’

‘No, no,’ said Sriram horrified.

‘It seemed quite a natural thing to do in those places, where one saw burning homes, children orphaned, men killed, and women carried away. I felt we were in some other country. My special charges were children wherever I saw them.
I gathered them and brought them here. All those children you saw here, we don’t know anything about them. They escaped death, somehow, that’s where providence has shown its presence. They are all gathered from various villages in Bengal and Bihar. We had more, but some were reclaimed in Calcutta itself. But the ones we have now with us, we don’t know anything about them. If their parents are alive, they will know they are here and come for them: otherwise we will bring them up. We have collected toys and clothes for them. Don’t ask whether they are Muslim children or Hindu children or who they are. It is no use asking that; we don’t know. We have given them only the names of flowers and birds. Bapuji said once that even a number would be better than a name, if a name meant branding a man as of this religion or that. You see one child was called Malkus, that’s a melody: a girl is known as Gulab, that is a rose. These children must grow up only as human beings.’

Sriram shivered a little, and Bharati said, ‘I’ll give you some warm clothes and blankets out of what we have collected for refugees. For this purpose, we’ll count you as a refugee, no harm in that.’ She laughed slightly. He was frightened of her. She seemed too magnificent to be his wife. ‘You now understand why I could not talk to Mahatmaji about our own affairs. It would have been sacrilegious. Even so, I mentioned you to him one day in a village in Bengal. He was about to say something, when someone dashed in crying that he had been stabbed, and then another time in Calcutta I was telling him about you, and he asked when you were coming out of gaol; it was late at night. I had waited for our opportunity when there would be no one about, and suddenly some big men, ministers of the place and others, arrived for urgent consultations. I never got a chance again.’