‘Sir, please …’ he began.
‘Come tomorrow, we will see. Now leave me, I have many important things to talk over with old Kanda.’
He had lost sight of Kanda years ago. Margayya had been very fond of this man, who always said that he preferred fluid cash to stagnant land and that it was more profitable to grow money out of land than corn. Kanda had now come to ask Margayya’s advice on how best to get money out of some new lands which had unexpectedly come to him through the death of a relative. These lands were in the regions of Mempi, whose slopes were covered with teak and other forests, and at whose feet stretched acres and acres of maize fields, with stalks standing over a man’s height. Margayya was carried away by visions of this paradise of blue mountains, forest, and green fields. It was wealth at the very source and not second-hand after it had travelled up to town. The more he listened to Kanda’s petition the more he felt that here was raw wealth inviting him to take a hand and help himself. Though it had grown nearly dark he sat and listened to Kanda as he narrated to him his financial ups and downs.
‘I am glad you have come back to me, Kanda. I will pull you out of your difficulties,’ he said as he rose to go.
Kanda explained, ‘I cannot get any more loans from the Cooperative Bank; they have expelled me for default, although they auctioned the pledges …’
‘The crooks,’ Margayya muttered. ‘They are crooks, I tell you. I do not know why the government tolerates this institution…. They should put in gaol all the secretaries of co-operative societies.’ The picture of the secretary and Arul came back to him with all the old force. Margayya warned him, ‘Don’t go near them again; they will see you ruined before they have done with you. I will look after you,’ he added protectively, starting to lock up his door. He had sent away his accountant, and with a duplicate key he locked the door of his office. He generously indicated to Kanda the veranda. ‘Sleep here, Kanda, no one will object. I will see you tomorrow morning and then we will go and inspect your property at Mempi. What time is your bus?’
‘The first bus leaves the Market Square at six o’clock.’
‘The next?’
‘It is at eight-thirty … Four buses pass Mempi village every day,’ he said with a touch of pride.
‘So that you may come oftener into town and borrow, I suppose!’
‘There is also a railway station, about five or six stones off,’ Kanda said. ‘From here you can get the evening train and be down there at about twelve o’clock.’
‘And get eaten by tigers, I suppose,’ Margayya added, ‘before reaching home.’
Kanda laughed at this piece of ignorance. ‘Tigers are in the hills and generally do not come down.’
‘Even then I prefer to come with you by the morning bus,’ Margayya said. ‘We will go by the second bus tomorrow. You can have your food in that hotel there.’
Margayya walked home. At his house he found a commotion. His wife’s voice could be heard wailing, and a large crowd had gathered at his front door. He quickened his pace on seeing it.
‘What is the matter?’ he asked someone nearby. He hoped the people were not rushing in, in order to loot the house. He had kept a few important documents in the front room and a lot of cash. ‘Must remove it elsewhere,’ he thought as he pushed his way through the crowd on the front steps. ‘Get out of the way,’ he thundered. ‘What are you all doing here?’ Someone in the crowd said, ‘Your lady is weeping –’
‘I see that. Why?’
They hesitated to speak. He gripped one nearby by his shirt collar and demanded, ‘What has happened? Can’t you speak?’ He shook him vigorously till he protested, ‘Why do you trouble me, Margayya? I won’t speak.’ Margayya let him go and went in. He saw his wife rolling on the floor and wailing, in a voice he had never heard before. He never knew that she had such a high-pitched voice. There were a number of women sitting round her and holding her.
Margayya rushed towards them crying, ‘What has happened to her? Meenakshi, what is the matter with you?’ She sat up on hearing his voice. Her hair was untied. Her eyes were swollen. She wailed, ‘Balu … Balu …’ Her voice trailed off and she broke down again. She fell on the floor and rolled in anguish. Margayya felt helpless. He saw his brother and his wife also in the crowd. He knew something must be seriously the matter if these two were there, and their many children sucking their thumbs. His brother’s wife was sitting beside Margayya’s wife and trying to comfort her. Margayya rushed up and pleaded: ‘Won’t someone tell me what has happened?’ His brother pushed his way through the crowd and handed him a card. Margayya’s eyes were blurred with the mist of perspiration. His excitement had sent his heart racing. He rubbed his eyes and gazed on the card. He couldn’t read it. He groaned, and fumbled for his glasses … He could not pull them out of his pocket easily. He gave the card to the one nearest him and cried: ‘Can’t someone read it? Is it an illiterate gathering? What are you all watching for?’ And then some person obliged him by reading out: ‘Your son … B … Balu … is no more –’
‘What! What! … Who says so?’ Margayya cried, losing all control over himself. More perspiration streamed down his eyelids and he wept aloud: ‘My son! … my son! Am I dreaming?’ The assembly watched him in grim silence.
His wife was sobbing. She suddenly shot towards Margayya and cried: ‘It’s all your doing. You ruined him.’
Margayya was taken aback. There was a confused mixture of emotions now. He did not know what to say. One side of his mind went on piecing together his son’s picture as he had last seen him.
‘Did I treat him too harshly over the examination results? Or have I been too thoughtless over that cursed school record – ?’ He felt angry at the thought of examinations: they were a curse on the youth of the nation, the very greatest menace that the British had brought with them to India … If he could see his son now he would tell him, ‘Forget all about schools and books: you just do as you like, just be seen about the house – that’s sufficient for us.’ In this din, his wife’s accusation reached him but faintly. He retorted: ‘What are you saying, you poor creature! What are you trying to say?’
‘You and your schools!’ she arraigned him. ‘But for your obsession and tyranny –’
‘You keep quiet,’ he said angrily. He turned round to someone and enquired: ‘Do you know how it happened?’
Several voices chorused: ‘He fell off a fourth floor of a building in Madras,’ ‘He must have been run over in that city,’ ‘Probably caught cholera,’ ‘We don’t know –’
‘Who was with him?’ asked Margayya. He conducted a ruthless cross-examination.
‘How can we know – the card is signed by a friend.’
‘Friend! Friend!’ Margayya cried. ‘What sort of friend is it? Friend, useless blackguard.’ He did not know what he was saying. Nor could he check the rush of his words. He babbled as if under the influence of a drug. He saw the whole house reeling in front of his eyes – the surroundings darkened and he sat down unable to bear the strain. He sat on the floor, with his head between his hands, quietly sobbing. His brother sidled up, put his arm round him, and said: ‘You must bear it, brother; you must bear it.’
‘What else can I do?’ Margayya asked like a child. He still had on his coat and turban. Through all his grief a ridiculous question (addressed to his brother) kept coming to his mind: ‘Are we friends now – no longer enemies? What about our feud?’ A part of his mind kept wondering how they could live as friends, but the numerous problems connected with this seemed insoluble. ‘We had got used to this kind of life. Now I suppose we shall have to visit each other and enquire and so on …’ All that seemed to be impossible to do. He wished to tell him then and there: ‘Don’t let this become an excuse to change our present relationship.’
Margayya did his best to suppress all these thoughts, but they kept bothering him till he could say nothing, till he was afraid to open his lips lest he should blurt them out. His brother whispered among other things: ‘W
e will send you the night meal from our house.’
‘No, we don’t want any food tonight,’ Margayya said. ‘Please send all those people away.’ He was indignant. Because Balu was dead, why should this crowd imagine that the house was theirs? ‘Shut and bolt the door,’ he thundered.
His brother left him, went up to the strangers about the house and appealed to them to leave. He said, with his palms pressed together in deference: ‘Please leave us. This is the time when the family has to be together.’
‘No,’ Margayya thundered with deadly irony in his tone. ‘How can they leave? How can they afford to ignore all this fun and go? If an entrance be charged – ‘he began, then stopped, for in his condition he realized that he ought not to complete his sentence, which ran: ‘We might earn lakhs – ‘He did not think it was a good statement to make. So he merely said: ‘Oh, friends and neighbours, the greatest service you could do us is to leave us alone.’ The neighbours grumbled a little and started moving out. On the fringe of the crowd someone was muttering: ‘When are they bringing the body?’
Margayya never knew till now that he had so many well-wishers in the city. The next day they proposed to bundle him off to Madras. He seemed to have no choice in the matter. All sorts of persons, including his brother, sat around and said: ‘It’s best that you go to Madras – at least once, and verify things for yourself
‘What for?’ asked Margayya. The others seemed to be horrified at this question, and looked at him as if to say: ‘Fancy anyone asking such a silly question!’
‘I can’t go, I won’t go, it is not necessary,’ Margayya said offensively.
His wife had been transformed. She looked like a stranger, with her face swollen and disfigured with weeping. She glared at him and said: ‘Have you no heart?’
‘Yes, undoubtedly,’ Margayya said in a mollifying manner. He felt that she had lost her wits completely and required to be handled with tact.
‘If you have ordinary human feelings then go and do something … at least … at least –’
‘Yes, I understand … But it’s all over.’
His brother said: ‘Is this the time to argue about it all? You must go and do something.’
His sister-in-law added her own voice: ‘It’s your duty to go and find out more about it. Perhaps, there is still some chance of –’
‘But,’ wailed Margayya, ‘where am I to go? Madras is a big world – where on earth am I to go there?’ He despairingly turned the postcard between his fingers: ‘There is no address here, nothing is said of where they have written from, nor who has written it.’
‘Never mind,’ they all said with one voice. Margayya felt now, more than ever, most unhappy to have been the father of Balu. The duties of a father seemed to be unshakable. He made yet another attempt to make others see reason: ‘Look here, if I go to Madras, where am I to go as soon as I get down at the railway station?’
‘Is this the time to go into all that?’ they asked, looking on him as if he were a curious specimen. This encounter left him no time to brood over his own sorrow. There seemed to be so many demands upon him, following the catastrophe, that it was as much as he could do to keep himself parrying all the blows; it left him no time to think of anything else. When there was a pause and his eyes fell upon a little object, the lacquer-painted wooden elephant that Balu had played with as a child, it sent a sharp stab down his heart; it made him wince, he choked at the throat, and the tears came down in a rush, involuntarily – but he was spared more of that experience by the people around him. He almost regretted that his brother and his family were now back in the fold: they seemed to think up a new proposition for him every minute … and his wife, who seemed to be already crazed, apparently fell in with every one of their proposals. One moment they kept saying that he must at once make arrangements to get through the ten-day obsequies for the peace of the departed soul and start right away the performance of those rites; the next, they immediately said that he must go to Madras and try and do what he could.
‘You want me to buy a train ticket this moment, and in the same breath ask me to send for the purohit –’
At the mention of the word purohit, his wife clapped her hands over her ears and wailed afresh: ‘I never hoped in my worst dreams to hear that word applied to my darling –’
‘How can you be so callous as to utter that word so bluntly?’ asked his sister-in-law, and another lady scowled at him.
He felt irritated, but practised gentle ways with a deliberate effort, fearing lest anything that he might say should once again bring a rupture between the families and continue it for another decade. He contented himself by saying under his breath: ‘I don’t seem to know what to say now – all the wrong things seem to come uppermost.’ They did not encourage him to go on with even that reflection, but said, ‘Do something; don’t sit there and chat. This is no time for it.’
His brother added: ‘If you are afraid to go to Madras alone, I will go with you. I know one or two people there.’
‘Here is this man,’ Margayya at once reflected, ‘wangling a free journey to Madras.’ And the prospect of his brother’s constant company for so many days appalled him. Lest the women-folk and others should follow up the idea, he hastily said: ‘Don’t worry, I will go myself. I don’t want anyone to think that I am reluctant to go.’
He suddenly saw it as a beautiful opportunity to escape. His grief was unbearable no doubt, but the atmosphere and the people about him made it worse. He saw himself being entangled with these folk for the rest of his life: that seemed to suit his wife, but he liked to be more independent. His house seemed to have lost all privacy. For the rest of their existence these people perhaps intended to sit around and wail over Balu. At the echo of the word ‘Balu’ in his mind he let a loud cry escape his lips and he beat his brow. It occurred almost involuntarily, and at once brought his brother and a cousin to his side: ‘No, no, not that way. If you break down and lose all control, what is to happen to the others? You must be in a position to give them strength and –’
‘How? How can I?’ sobbed Margayya, moved by their sympathy. ‘I prayed for him, and promised the Gods his weight in silver rupees if he should be born.’
‘Did you fulfill that promise?’ some asked, going off at a tangent. ‘For that is a sacred pledge, you know.’
Margayya’s wife answered: ‘Yes, it was done within an hour of his birth.’
‘Yes, these vows must be fulfilled within the shortest time possible. Otherwise the baby will acquire weight. How much did the child weigh?’
‘About three hundred rupees weight at birth. We tramped to Tirupathi,’ said Margayya, recollecting his pilgrimage with his young wife so many years ago.
She had worn a saffron-dyed sari, had carried the infant on her arms and walked behind him, as he went to ten houses and begged for alms. His pride would not let him beg, but it was once again his elder brother who bothered him by explaining: ‘The God at Tirupathi does not like anyone to visit him as a holiday-maker, just for fun. He wants you to go there as a humble supplicant, in the attitude of a beggar.’ He had put into it all the weight of scholarship that he had acquired. ‘That’s the symbol, that’s why you are obliged to visit at least ten houses with a begging bowl, stand and cry at the door for alms, and then go on the pilgrimage, on foot, if possible. The God does not notice a person who goes to him in a holiday mood.’
And Margayya had clutched a brightly polished pot and, followed by his saffron-clad wife, had gone from door to door: ‘Give me alms – ‘People had come out of their houses and dropped a handful of rice into his copper pot.
He suddenly recollected now how amused he had felt when he saw his face in that burnished pot – its convex surface distorted his nose and cheeks; it was so grotesque that he could not help grinning at his reflection, which made it so much more funny that it became impossible for him to maintain the gravity needed for the occasion. He remembered that one or two people had felt scandalized by the way he grinne
d when they came out to give him alms. His wife had pulled him up, but he held the shining pot to her face and she too burst into a laugh. He remembered how at that time he wished he could also amuse the infant. He remembered how he carried the alms and the sovereigns equal to the weight of the child to the Tirupathi Hills and deposited them all in the treasure box in the shrine … He felt he had done a good job, and it had been an enchanting pilgrimage. He sighed and groaned at the memory of his son. Through it all he remembered how he had not been a day too soon in weighing the youngster in gold as he showed a tendency to grow heavier each day.
‘That vow was fulfilled all right. Nothing wrong there,’ he said suddenly.
He sat in a third-class compartment in the train to Madras. He had become extremely unhappy when leaving home. He told his brother, ‘Keep an eye on this house, will you?’ He had told his wife, ‘Don’t ruin yourself with crying. I will go to Madras and do what I can.’ It had sounded most futile – what could he do at Madras? Where could he go at Madras? It was all a very confused business. He felt unhappy that he was not even in a position to utter a promise. He bundled up a couple of shirts and dhotis into a small jute bag which had no clamp. It was to serve as a pillow for him at night. He had not travelled for years now, and he found it exciting. He wondered how he could leave his office. What was to happen to the business? Suppose somebody did something and killed his business? He wished he didn’t have to leave at short notice. He wished he had had a little more time to arrange his affairs and then leave. But death gives no notice. They were bundling him about: and finally they thrust him and his bag into a jutka and sent him down to meet the six o’clock train to Madras coming from Trichy.
He asked at the ticket-window: ‘Will you please give me a ticket?’