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  ‘Pani!’ he said to the shopkeeper, joining his hands, first in greeting, then unfolding them as a cup.

  The pan-biri wallah eyed him suspiciously, then relaxed in the face of the sun’s merciless stare, and began to pour water into the stranger’s cupped hands from a brass jug.

  Bapu drank and belched his fill. Then he caressed his face with his moist hands and touched his eyes with the water on his fingertips. The cool touch of liquid seemed to revive him.

  And, as though from some instinct for seeking reassurance, he looked into the mottled mirror that hung down from the pan-biri shop. He had not looked at himself in such a glass for years. He saw that his face was shrivelled up, lined with the wrinkles which had been sharpened by hard work in his youth, and many small lines criss-crossed the corners of his eyes, his forehead, his jowl and neck. And a greyish pallor covered the visage, more than the abject anxiety to please the contractor, rather like the colour of death which he had apprehended as he had walked along the road. The shock of the old fact disturbed him and he turned away from the mirror.

  ‘About seventy years!’ Ram Singh said. So he turned towards the mirror again.

  ‘Oh ja, ja, ahead’, said the pan-biri wallah. ‘Don’t break my glass by showing it your ugly old face!’

  Old Bapu ambled along ahead, hoping to buy four annas worth of corn to sustain himself in the illusion of youth.

  * From The Power of Darkness and Other Stories.

  11

  The Cobbler and the Machine*

  Apart from the innocence of old age and youth, Saudagar, the cobbler of my village, and I shared in common a passion for the machine.

  Saudagar, of course, was interested in only one machine, the small sewing-machine which the village tailor wielded very ostentatiously on the footboard of his cavernous shop before the gaping rustics, who had often travelled fifty miles from their homes in the hills to see it — a grimy, black hand-machine in a casket, decorated with a tracery of leaves in yellow paint, that nibbled at the yards of cloth like a slimy rat, at terrific speed. But I liked all kinds of machines which I saw in the town where I went to school every morning: the great big railway-engine, whose phuff-phuff I had learned to imitate when we played at trains at the recess hour: the phonograph from which I hoped to hear my own voice one day; the motor-car in which my father was given a lift by Lalla Sain Das when there was an election; the push-bike on which our second master came to school from his bungalow; the intricate mass of wheels and pistons which lay hiccuping in the power house at the junction of the two canals; and the roaring monsters of iron and steel that converted the cotton and wool of our village into cloth at the Dhariwal mills. And even of sewing-machines I had seen at least two varieties other than the one that Saudagar knew, and yet a third-a pedal-machine, adjusted to a chair with a leather belt across it, to which I used to see Baha-ud-din, the tailor in the main bazaar in the town, glued all day, and a similar upright contraption on which one of the employees in the Bhalla shoe shop sat sewing boots.

  ‘Uncle Saudagar,’ I said to the cobbler one day as I sat idly at the door of his dark straw hut while he stared across the street at Bhagirath, the tailor, revolving the handle of his sewing-machine with amazing alacrity. ‘Do you know, you waste so much of your time sewing pieces of leather to the soles of people’s shoes and then they complain that you don’t sew them well and that the water gets into them? Why, you could have a machine like Bhagirath’s, even superior, with a seat attached to it like the chairs the Sahibs sit on. I have seen a man in the Bhalla shoe shop sewing boots on one.’

  ‘Is there a machine like that, son?’ said Saudagar incredulously, and yet vaguely convinced, as he had been for months since the tailor brought his casket machine, that there must be a contrivance for sewing leather as there was one for sewing cloth.

  ‘Yes, uncle,’ I said enthusiastically, for to me all machines were still toys and play things, rather than ‘chariots — which men could ride.’ ‘There are wonderful machines in the town if only you will go and see, but you never stir out of this hovel. Didn’t you go to see the great exhibition at Lahore? My father tells me there was a great big boot there all sewn by machine in which people could play hide-and-seek.’ I had seen the wonders of science in the school laboratory and the marvels in the streets of the town and wished rather too eagerly that they could come to my village, so convinced was I of the superiority of modernity over the old ways of the countryside.

  ‘Well, son,’ said the old man kindly, ‘I have heard that there is a machine which can do the work of my hand, but I have never seen it. Ever since I saw the ready-made saddles, reins and collars in the stables of Thakur Mahan Chand, I knew they were made by a defter hand than that of man. And when the son of the landlord sent me the black leather boots which he bought in town to mend, I knew that they couldn’t have been sewn by any human being. And truly, I have been looking at Bhagirath’s sewing-machine and wondering if there is a similar contraption for sewing shoes. But I am old and I have not been to town these ten years. So I have not seen what this machine looks like. One day I must make a trip to see it. But of course, I am too poor ever to be able to buy it. And perhaps God would curse my fingers and those of my pupils, and make them incapable of sewing at all, if I began to use this machine.’

  ‘But, Uncle Saudagar,’ I said, I tell you, you will like this machine if you see it. And you will look like a Sahib sitting on the chair which is adjusted to it. You will only need a basket-hat to complete your life and you will begin to eat and drink on a raised platform automatically. I wish my mother would let me convert that broken pitcher we have into a chair and I could use the manger of the cows for a table always.’

  ‘I am an outcast, son,’ Saudagar said. ‘How can I presume to eat like the Sahibs or be like them? And won’t people laugh at me if they see me seated in a chair, sewing shoes?’

  ‘But these people are fools, Uncle,’ I said. ‘They regard the Sahibs as outcasts, too, even though the Sahibs are clean. And these rustics have no idea of modern times. They are old fogies with jungly habits. They are oxen. They have no idea of the new life.’

  ‘Yes, son, perhaps you are right,’ said the old cobbler. ‘God has created iron in the mountains. I suppose He meant us to make machines with it.’

  ‘I have got a beautiful bolt I found in the playground, Uncle,’ I said. ‘I will show it to you, if you like.’

  ‘I would like to see it, son,’ said Saudagar indulgently. ‘Now run along and go home. Your father might come this way and abuse you for wasting your time sitting in an outcast’s shop. Run along and play with your fellows.’

  ‘I will also bring you a picture of the sewing-machine, if you like, Uncle’, I said, making an overture of friendship so as to win more easily the privilege of fidgeting round the cobbler ’s shop, for ordinarily he discouraged children from flocking round the door of his hovel and robbing his dim eyes of the little natural light that trickled through the aperture of the door.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right, son. You must show me a picture if you can, though I don’t know what use it is to show a man the likeness of a bunch of grapes when he will never be able to eat the fruit.’

  But the spark that had failed to kindle a devouring flame in the heart of old Saudagar lit my flesh with the warmth of a new delight, for the echo of the old cobbler of my village handling a new machine reverberated in my brain like the voice of a wish that had become father to the thought. I ran towards home as if I were possessed by more than a love of the new toy that would be Saudagar’s machine. I had a feeling that there might come to be in my village the atmosphere of a splendid, gorgeous wonder-house, in which great big iron frames, with a thousand screws and knobs assembled through the ingenuity of a man like my science master, created the power to achieve miracles.

  I persuaded my class-fellows when we were coming home from school the next day to climb a high wall near the Railway Station and pull off a poster which showed an English
woman, with a bun on the top of her head, wielding a Singer sewing-machine embossed on a steel plate in the shape of the letter S. And I brought it to Saudagar.

  ‘This, Uncle,’ I said, ‘Is the kind of machine which I told you, you should have. Only this is for sewing cloth. But, the one for sewing leather which the man in the Bhalla shoe shop plies is like it in appearance, except that it has a thicker needle.’

  The old cobbler looked at the picture in wide-eyed wonder. I could see from the loving way in which he passed his hand over the surface of the steel that his imagination had caught fire from the picture of the sewing-machine, bigger than Bhagirath’s which seemed to make him firmly believe in the existence of a similar machine for sewing leather though he hadn’t seen it.

  And so charmed was he by the novelty of the instrument of which I had shown him the picture, that he asked us to bring the steel plate which we had stolen into his shop and leave it there for a decoration. And he gave us a piece each as compensation for our trouble.

  It seemed to me that he had not kept the advertisement for the Singer sewing-machine merely for decorative purposes but because he wanted to see the likeness of the object which he had set his heart on buying one day. And my feeling was confirmed by the fact that whenever I went to his hovel now he would always say something about the shape of the needle in the picture not being quite clear, and of his inability to understand how one could get into the habit of pressing the pedal with the feet while one was sewing something on top.

  ‘And the stool seems too small,’ he said. ‘It may be all right for the “lendis” to sit on, but how will such a crude old bottom as mine balance on it?’

  ‘Don’t you care,’ I said, with an emphasis that gained weight from the earnestness and zeal I felt at the prospect of seeing the cobbler of my village achieve the dexterity of the man in the Bhalla shoe shop. ‘A little practice and you will learn to wield it better than anyone else, and as for your old posterior, why, I have seen the heavy-bottomed Mem Sahib, who is the wife of the City Engineer, balanced on a stool like that in the verandah of her bungalow, as if she were seated on a comfortable horse.”

  A look of wonder lit his dim eyes and, glancing at me with the tenderness of humility, he traced the curves of the steel plate on the picture of the machine printed in black-and-white against the green. And then he would close his eyes and, smiling, shake his head as if he were surcharged with the ecstasy of a knowledge in the hollows of his brain where phantasmagoric visions of himself at work on the new machine swirled in a mad delirium, the edges of enchanting top-boots, splendid, well-polished shoes, and strong-soled country shoes creating and destroying each other in an irrelevant disorder.

  ‘But anyhow, the trouble is, son, where am I to get the money to buy the machine?’ the old man would then say with a sigh, and continue: ‘I don’t know how I shall get it, and where it is to be got even if I had the money, which I shall never have.’

  The grim sagacity of his practical argument defeated my intelligence, for I had no idea how many rupees the machine cost and where Saudagar was to get the money, but, of course, the address of the Singer Sewing Machine Company, England, was printed at the bottom of the picture, and I speculated that if that company manufactured sewing-machines for cloth, surely they made those for sewing leather, and I said: it is made in Vilayat, and can be had from there, or perhaps through a commission agent in Lahore or Bombay, if not in our district.’

  ‘Vilayat is very far away ’, Saudagar. said, ‘And I shall never cross the seven seas even when I go to Heaven, because I have-not done enough good deeds to earn the privilege of being able to travel in my next life. As for Lahore and Bombay, if anyone is going there from our parts we will make inquiries.

  But for days and weeks and months no one from our parts was going to Lahore Delhi, or Bombay, and I hugged the desperate enthusiasm for Saudagar ’s sewing-machine in my heart till the cool waters of a placid existence had washed off the bright edges of my dreams. I went to see the cobbler as usual in the afternoons, but the topic of the machine was seldom mentioned, and instead the old man bent over the shoes he was mending, brushed his beard, and, with a mischievous light in his eyes, told me a story about some ogre or wild animal, or the witchery of an old maiden who died without ever being married.

  One day, however, when I was waiting at the usual hour for my friends to emerge from their homes to play in a maidan near Saudagar’s house, he called me and, ‘with a weird chuckle that rose above the curve of his usual silence of a madman, he said: ‘Come here, son, and guess what has happened.’

  ‘What is it, then?’ I asked, at first completely taken aback but then warming to the happy glare in his eyes with a sensation that the cause of Saudagar’s sudden happiness was somehow connected with our project about the machine.

  ‘You know, son, that Lalla Sain Das, the notary and cotton dealer, has gone to vilayat on business. Well, he asked me to make him some gold-worked shoes to give as present to his clients beyond the seas. When he came to collect them he asked me politely whether he could do something for me while he was away. And I asked him to fetch a machine for sewing leather. He was very kind and said he would bring the machine most willingly. And what is more, that since he knew I was a poor man who couldn’t pay him for the thing at once, he would buy the machine at his own expense and let me use it and pay for it by and by exactly as if it were a loan with a small interest attached to it. Now I have had this letter from the rail office and the Munshi read it and he says that it is the voucher for the sewing-machine which Lalla Sain Das has sent from Vilayat and which is lying in the railway godown. So, please God, I shall have the machine after all. I am going to distribute sugar-plums among the brotherhood to celebrate the auspicious occasion when the machine comes, and I will make you a pair of Angrezi boots, since it was really you who told me about it.

  I clapped my hands with joy, breathed some breaths quickly, and stimulated my being with shouts of ‘Marvellous! Marvellous!’ And, either because I easily whipped myself into a kind of elemental buoyancy, or because it was the natural colour of my temperament, I danced in my mind to the cadence of a rhythm I could feel in the working of the machine, in its contours, in its dainty, intricate contrivances, its highly ingenious purpose, in the miracle it was to me, an architecture embodying mysteries which not only represented the exact formula of science and mathematics, but was the magnificent toy, the plaything. And, of course, Saudagar ’s offer of a pair of Angrezi boots, such as I had been persuading my father to buy for me for years, made me hysterically happy, for I felt that I could rise in the estimation of all my fellows by possessing footwear which was worn only by the Sahib and the rich folk.

  ‘When will you actually get the machine Uncle?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘I shall go and get it tomorrow, son,’ he said. ‘It is after eleven years that I am going to town.’

  ‘If you are in town, go and get the advice of the cobbler in the Bhalla shoe shop, as to how to work it.’

  ‘That is a good idea,’ Saudagar said. ‘Yes, I will do that. And since you have been so good to me, child, I shall take your measurements now and start sewing your shoes first on the machine.’

  I would have stayed and talked about the possibilities of the new wonder to Saudagar if my friends had not been calling incessantly, but that afternoon I was too preoccupied by my ardour to put my heart into playing Kabadi, and I couldn’t sleep in the night for the sheer excitement of sharing the glory of having inspired the old cobbler. In the morning I ran along to school bound up in the curves of a rich stillness, the radiant exultation of a child whose fantastic dreams have, for the first time, achieved the guise of visible truths. And all day I was full of mischief the tingling shadow of an ingrown largeness in my being played havoc with every mundane fact, the vastness of the creator laughed at people, and the depths of a realised truth mocked at impossibilities.

  Off I went to Saudagar ’s shop immediately after I returned from school and, true
as the very colour of my dream, even truer because harder, the sewing-machine was before me, with the old cobbler seated on the stool adjusted to it, sewing a piece of leather, with beads of perspiration on his forehead, as his two pupils, and a number of other people of low and high castes crowded into the hovel to see the wizardry.

  ‘Come, son,’ Saudagar said, lifting his eyes and breathing a mouthful of stale breath. ‘This is the upper part of the boots I am going to sew for you, since you must have the first-fruits of my acquisition.

  I smiled awkwardly and then felt a sudden urge to touch the wonderful new thing which was exactly like the sewing-machine of which I had brought Saudagar the picture, except that it had no casket to enclose the upper part, but an anvil into which the needle darted like a shaft, probing the leather in between with the cotton in its eye. But I curbed my childish desire as, just then, Saudagar brushed aside the crowd which was clamouring to touch it, and I only asked: ‘When will my shoes be ready, Uncle?’

  ‘You shall have them by and by,’ Saudagar said. ‘I will sew them at any odd times I get, because all the rest of my time must be devoted to turning out enough work to pay off the debt I owe on the machine to Lalla Sain Das, who is coming back tomorrow.’

  My visits to the cobbler ’s shop became more frequent since I could always excuse myself to my parents by saying that I was going to the outcast’s quarter to see how the boots that Saudagar had promised to make me were getting on. And as my old Indian shoes made of crude hide were wearing out and my parents would have had to buy me a new pair if Saudagar had not offered me the gift, I was allowed to go and waste as much time as I liked.

  Saudagar had added a pattern of stitches to the shoes he intended for me during the first few days, but then he had hung them up as a sample on the door of his hut, and was mainly busy turning out Indian shoes by the dozen to defray the sum of one thousand rupees, which Sain Das had declared to be the cost of the machine plus freightage and taxes. Every time I went the old man would pick up the sample and contemplate it with an air of absorption and say: ‘Well, son, I believe I shall begin to sew the lining to them next week, and then I must send Majitha to get some leather for the soles and heels. Or would you like rubber soles instead?’