Greatest Short Stories Page 15

  While all this was going on, I noticed that a gentlemen, a business man by the look of him, clad in a white muslin dhoti, a delicate ‘Lucknow’ tunic, and an embroidered cap on his head had come up towards our first class compartment and stood looking at the white reservation card to see if his name was on it. He recognised his name on the card, and turning beckoned to the coolie, who was following with his luggage, a big steel trunk and hold-all and several small baskets and a brass jug. Weighed down by the two enormous articles on his head, the coolie could not see the Seth. So the businessman shouted:

  ‘Are, come here! Can’t you see? Blind one!… Here!’

  The coolie did not hear because he was still far away. So the Seth shouted again, lifting his hands as though in a panic:

  ‘Are, here, hurry, the train might go!’

  ‘Aya huzoor, aya…!’ the coolie said as he quickened his pace.

  But before these reassuring words could have reached the Seth, he was unnerved completely, not by any default of the coolie, but by the adroit skill of a monkey, who leapt down from the top of our compartment, snatched away the fine embroidered cap of the businessman, and got up to the neem tree.

  ‘Are! Are! Father of fathers! What have you done, monkey, brother-in-law!’; the businessman shouted in utter confusion. And his face, which has been round and smug, was covered with perspiration.

  By this time the coolie had arrived with his luggage and was waiting for orders. But the Seth had run up towards the tree over the pump and stood threatening the monkey with his fisticuffs and loud abuse. The more he abused the monkey, however, the remoter the monkey became. For, apparently, it was the same skilful Simian who had played the prank on the bather. And what added to the perplexity of the businessman was the completely unsympathetic attitude of the onlookers, who laughed out aloud or smiled as the Seth became more vociferous in his challenges, threats and imprecations.

  ‘Look people,’ he said stretching his hands to the crowd with a piteous and hopeless expression on his bespectacled face. He thought that the loss of his head-dress, which is the symbol of dignity in India, would be deplored by everyone and a sentiment of solidarity arise.

  But the people just turned their faces away or looked stonefaced, as they often do for fear of being dragged into giving evidence before the police.

  And the coolie made it worse by calling out,

  ‘Sethji, where? Where shall I put the luggage?’

  I told the coolie to put the luggage in the compartment, as I knew the Sethji had found a seat here. And I began to help him with the luggage.

  As I turned from the compartment, I saw that a fruit hawker had come forward pushing his little cart and was telling the Seth that he would rescue his cap.

  Sethji seemed to be only slightly relieved by the voluntary offer of the fruit vendor.

  But the vendor went ahead, nevertheless, dangling a couple of bananas before the monkey with this right hand, and stretching out his left hand for the cap.

  The monkey seemed to hesitate, not because he was not tempted, but because there were too many people laughing and talking and offering advice and he probably dreaded some punishment if he came down.

  ‘Ao, ao, come down,’ the vendor coaxed the monkey, lifting the bananas higher up, even as he walked up towards the bough on which the animal was sitting.

  The monkey responded by climbing down cautiously to a branch which was almost contiguous to the stretched right arm of the fruit vendor.

  The whole platform became silent, as the people, who had been laughing and making odd remarks, waited, with bated breath, for the impossible to happen.

  —But the impossible did happen.

  The vendor cooed in a soft voice and gestured to the accompaniment of Ao, ao, and the monkey, after looking this side and that accepted the bargain, taking over the bananas with his right hand while he released the wonderful embroidered cap, slightly crumpled with his left hand.

  ‘Sabhash! What to say. May I be a sacrifice for you!’ the different members of the crowd commented.

  And the Sethji, to whom the cap belonged and whom the monkey had deprived of his dignity so suddenly rudely stretched out his hands towards the fruit vendor to receive the cap. His eyes were withdrawn as he had obviously felt very embarrassed at being made, by a cruel fate, the victim of what now seemed like the perverted sense of humour of the monkey; and he was eager to get into the compartment after the restoration, of his head gear.

  The fruit-wallah came and humbly offered the Seth his cap, adding:

  ‘ Those budmashes are hungry. So they disturb the passengers. He really wanted the bananas…”

  ‘Acha’, said the Seth surlily and turned to go into the compartment.

  ‘Sethji, please give me the two annas for the bananas which I had to offer to the monkey…’

  ‘Are wahl What impudence! Two annas if you please! For what?… Sethji shouted each word, with the mingled bitterness of his humiliation at the hands of the monkey and disgust in the face of a grimy fruit vendor

  ‘But Sethji?’ protested the vendor.

  ‘Han, han, Seth Sahib,’ I added. ‘Please give him two annas.’

  ‘Han, han,’ agreed one of the bureaucrats.

  ‘Acha, here is your money, coolie. Four annas for you! And an anna for you, fruit-wallah!’ Sethji conceded.

  ‘But huzoor!’ the coolie wailed. ‘Two big pieces of luggage and—’

  ‘Go, go! Sala! Crook!’ Sethji thundered, turning to the coolie. And he nearly came down from the eminent position he occupied in the doorway, to kick the coolie away.

  The coolie went away but the fruit vendor persisted, saying:

  ‘Sethji, be just, I saved your cap, the mark of your izzat, for you and—’

  The businessman threw an anna towards him on the platform and went into the compartment.

  The guard’s whistle blew and everyone boarded the train.

  The fruit vendor looked in from the window from outside to explore the compartment, so that he could make further please to the Seth. And, finding him settled down, by the Sikhs, he entreated with joined hands:

  ‘Sethji, do not rob the poor! I tried to—’

  ‘Ja, ja! Take rest! do your work!’ the Sethji spat fire, while the frown on his face twisted his visage into an ugly, unhappy scowl.

  ‘Give, him one anna more, Sethji.’ I said with a straight face.

  ‘You don’t know, Sahib, you don’t know these budmashes! They are in league. with the monkeys! Bananas are two a pice! Fancy asking for an anna for one rotten banana! ‘

  This seemed to me outrageous and I was dumb with the shock of the astute businessman’s calculations.

  Meanwhile, the train had begun to move, and the fruit vendor first ran along with it, then got on to the footstep and clung to the window, appealing, threatening and pleading in turn. But Sethji had turned his head astray and was looking out of the window at the goods train on the other side.

  At length the train passed the whole length of the platform and the frustrated fruit vendor dropped off after hurling the spiciest abuse on the merchant.

  I looked at the bureaucrats, and the bureaucrats looked at me, while the Sikhs stared at the Seth, but the Seth kept his face averted from us and kept steadily looking out of the window.

  When the train was well out of Faizabad station, he did sit back with his face, now towards the sanctum of the compartment, and began to see if his luggage was alright. Then he turned round to all of us and began to justify himself: “If he did not want to help me to get my cap back, he should not have offered the monkey the bananas! I did not ask him to help!…”

  I could not bear this self-righteousness and, under cover of big words, tried to pontificate: ‘Han, han, all men are equipped with free will. They can go to hell or they can go to heaven… The rich Sahukars always go to heaven!…’

  I impetuously tried to shame him by staring at him when I caught his eyes for a brief moment. But he was partly sheepish an
d partly knew me to be hostile. So he avoided looking in my direction.

  The anger in my soul mounted even as the Seth seemed to cool down and assume an air of casual indifference. I felt that all the other passengers felt with the poor vendor and that the whole amusing occasion had ended in a sour and bitter sense of grievance against the businessman, who seemed tolerably well of from his clean clothes, but who had been so hard to the generous-hearted fruit vendor.

  I took the only revenge I could take on this mean creature by drawing a caricature of him in the position in which I had seen him as he stood under the neem tree, supplicating to the monkey who had taken his cap away and I passed it on to the other passengers. The bureaucrats smiled, while the Sikhs began to laugh out aloud and were all for shaming the Seth by showing the cartoon to him. But I restrained them. I think he knew from the ease which arose after the cartoon had been passed round, that our relaxed smiles were the index of his discomfiture…

  * From The Power of Darkness and Other Stories.

  Part IV

  THE COMIC

  VEIN

  16

  A Pair of Mustachios *

  There are various kinds of mustachios worn in my country to make the boundaries between the various classes of people. Outsiders may think it stupid to lay down, or rather to raise, lines of demarcation of this kind, but we are notorious in the whole world for sticking to our queer old conventions, prides and prejudices, even as the Chinese or the Americans, or, for that matter, the English… And, at any rate, some people may think it easier and more convenient to wear permanent boundary-lines like mustachios, which only need a smear of grease to keep them bright and shiny, rather than to wear frock coats, striped trousers and top hats, which constantly need to be laundered and dry-cleaned, and the maintenance of which is already leading to the bankruptcy of the European ruling classes. With them clothes make the man, but to us mustachios make the man. So we prefer the various styles of mustachios to make the differences between the classes…

  And very unique and poetical symbols they are too. For instance, there is the famous lion mustache, the fearsome upstanding symbol of that great order of resplendent Rajas, Maharajas, Nabobs and English army generals who are so well known for their devotion to the King Emperor. Then there is the tiger mustache, the uncanny, several pointed mustache worn by the unbending, unchanging survivals from the ranks of the feudal gentry who have nothing left but the pride in their greatness and a few mementos of past glory, scrolls of honour, granted by the former Emperors, a few gold trinkets, heirlooms, and bits of land. Next there is the goat mustache — a rather unsure brand, worn by the nouveau riche, the new commercial bourgeoisie and the shopkeeper class somehow don’t belong — an indifferent, thin little line of a mustache, worn so that its tips can be turned up or down as the occasion demands a show of power to some coolie or humility to a prosperous client. There is the Charlie Chaplin mustache worn by the lower middle class, by clerks and professional men, a kind of half-and-half affair, deliberately designed as a compromise between the traditional full mustache and’ the cleanshaven Curzon cut of the Sahibs and the Barristers, because the Babus are not sure whether the Sahibs like them to keep mustachios at all. There is the sheep mustache of the coolies and the lower orders, the mouse mustache of the peasants, and so on.

  In fact, there are endless styles of mustachios, all appropriate to the wearers and indicative of the various orders, as rigorously adhered to as if they had all been patented by the Government of India or sanctioned by special appointment with His Majesty the King or Her Majesty the Queen. And any poaching on the style of one class by members of another is interpreted by certain authorities as being indicative of the increasing jealousy with which each class is guarding its rights and privileges in regard to the mark of the mustachio.

  Of course, the analysis of the expert is rather too abstract, and not all the murders can be traced to this cause, but certainly it is true that the preferences of the people in regard to their mustachios are causing a lot of trouble in our parts.

  For instance, there was a rumpus in my own village the other day about a pair of mustachios.

  It so happened that Seth Ramanand, the grocer and money-lender, who had been doing well out of the recent fall in the price of wheat by buying up whole crops cheap from the hard-pressed peasants and then selling grain at higher prices, took it into his head to twist the goat mustache, integral to his order and position in society, at the tips, so that it looked nearly like a tiger mustache.

  Nobody seemed to mind very much, because most of the mouse-mustached peasants in our village are beholden of the banya, either because they owe him interest on a loan, or an instalment on a mortgage of jewellery or land. Besides, the Seth had been careful enough to twist his mustache so that it seemed nearly though not quite like a tiger mustache.

  But there lives in the vicinity of our village, in an old, dilapidated Moghul style house, a Mussulman named Khan Azam Khan, who claims descent from an ancient Afghan family whose heads were noblemen and councillors in the Court of the Great Moghuls. Khan Azam Khan, a tall, middle-aged man is a handsome and dignified person, and he wears a tiger mustache and remains adorned with the faded remanants of a gold-brocaded waistcoat, though he hasn’t even a patch of land left.

  Some people, notably the landlord of our village and the moneylender, maliciously say that he is an impostor, and that all his talk about his blue blood is merely the bluff of a rascal. Others, like the priest of the temple, concede that his ancestors were certainly attached to the Court of the Great Moghuls, but as sweepers. The landlord, the money-lender and the priest are manifestly jealous of anyone’s long ancestry, however, because they have all risen form nothing, and it is obvious from the stately ruins around Khan Azam Khan what grace was once his and his fore-fathers. Only Khan Azam Khan’s pride is greatly in excess of his present possessions, and he is inordinately jealous of his old privileges and rather foolish and headstrong in safeguarding every sacred brick of his tottering house against vandalism.

  Khan Azam Khan happened to go to the moneylender’s shop to pawn his wife’s gold nose-ring one morning and he noticed the upturning tendency of the hair on Ramanand’s upper lip which made the banya’s goat mustache look almost like his own tiger mustache.

  ‘Since when have the lentil-eating shopkeepers become noblemen?’ he asked surlily, even before he had shown the nose-ring to the banya.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Khan,’ Ramanand answered.

  ‘You know what I mean, seed of a donkey!’ said the Khan.

  ‘Look at the way you have turned the tips of your mustache upwards. It almost looks like my tiger mustache. Turn the tips down to the style proper to the goat that you are! Fancy the airs of the banyas nowadays!’

  ‘Oh, Khan, don’t get so excited,’ said the money lender, who was nothing if he was not amenable, having built up his business on the maxim that the customer is always right.

  ‘I tell you, turn the tip of your mustache down if you value your life!’ raged Khan Azam Khan.

  ‘If that is all the trouble, here you are,’ said Ramanand, brushing one end of his mustache with his oily hand so that it dropped like a dead fly. ‘Come, show me the trinkets. How much do you want for them?’

  Now that Khan Azam Khan’s pride was appeased, he was like soft wax in the merchant’s sure hand. His need, and the need of his family for food, was great, and he humbly accepted the value which the banya put on his wife’s nose-ring.

  But as he was departing, after negotiating his business, he noticed that though one end of the banya’s mustache had come down at his behest, the other end was still up.

  ‘A, strange trick you have played on me, you swine,’ the Khan said.

  ‘I have paid you the best value for your trinket, Khan, that any money-lender will pay in these parts,’ the banya said, especially, in these days when the Sarkars of the whole world are threatening to go off the gold standard.’

  ‘It ha
s nothing to do with the trinket,’ said Azam Khan,

  ‘But one end of your mustache is still up like my tiger mustache though you have brought down the other ‘O your proper goat’s style. Bring that other end down also, so that there is no apeing by your mustache of mine.’

  ‘Now, Khan,’ said the banya, ‘I humbled myself because you are doing business with me. You can’t expect me to become a mere worm just because you have pawned a trinket with me. If you were pledging some more expensive jewellery. I might consider obliging you a little more. Anyhow, my humble milk-skimmer doesn’t look a bit like your valiant tiger mustache.’

  ‘Bring that tip down!’ Khan Azam Khan roared, for the more he had looked at the banya’s mustache the more the still upturned tip seemed to him like an effort at an initiation of his own.

  ‘Now, be sensible, Khan,’ the money-lender said waving his hand with an imperturbable calm.

  ‘I tell you, turn that tip down or I shall wring your neck,’ said the Khan.

  ‘All right, the next time you come to do business with me I shall bring that tip down,’ answered the money-lender cunningly.

  ‘ That is far, said Chaudri Chottu Ram, the landlord of the village, who was sitting under the tree opposite.

  ‘ To be sure! To be sure!’ some peasants chimed in sheepishly.