Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (57 page)

‘That’s a very clever boy,’ Mahatmaji said. ‘I’m very happy to see you. But you must not spit those pips all over the place, in fact you must never spit at all. It’s very unclean to do so, and may cause others a lot of trouble. When you eat an orange, others must not notice it at all. The place must be absolutely tidy even if you have polished off six at a time.’

He laughed happily at his own quip, and then taught the boy what to do with the pips, how to hide the skin, and what to do with all the superfluous bits packed within an orange. The boy laughed with joy. All the men around watched the proceedings with respectful attention. And then Gandhi asked:

‘Where do you live?’

The boy threw up his arm to indicate a far distance: ‘There at the end of the river …’

‘Will you let me come to your house?’

The boy hesitated and said, ‘Not now – because, because it’s so far away.’

‘Don’t bother about that. I’ve a motor-car here given to me, you see, by this very rich man. I can be there in a moment. I’ll take you along in the motor-car too if you will show me your house.’

‘It is not a house like this,’ said the boy, ‘but made of bamboo or something.’

‘Is that so!’ said the Mahatma. ‘Then I’ll like it all the more. I’ll be very happy there.’

He had a brief session with a delegation which had come to see him by appointment; when it left, he dictated some notes, wrote something, and then, picking up his staff, said to the Chairman, ‘Let us go to this young man’s house. I’m sure you will also like it.’

‘Now?’ asked the Chairman in great consternation. He mumbled, ‘Shall we not go there tomorrow?’

‘No, I’ve offered to take this child home. I must not disappoint him. I’d like to see his father too, if he can be met anywhere on the way.’

Mahatmaji gave his forefinger to the young boy to clutch and allowed himself to be led down the veranda steps. The Chairman asked dolefully, ‘Won’t you come in and have a look round my humble home?’

‘I know how it will be. It must be very grand. But would you not rather spare an old man like me the bother of walking through those vast spaces? I’m a tired old man. You are very hospitable. Anyway, come along with us to this little man’s home. If I feel like it, you will let me stay there.’

The Chairman mumbled, ‘I hoped – ‘But Gandhiji swept him aside with a smile:

‘You will come along with me too. Let me invite you to come and stay with me in a hut.’

Unable to say anything more, the Chairman merely replied, ‘All right, sir, I obey.’

The warmth of Mahatma’s invitation made him forget his problems as a Chairman and his own responsibilities. Otherwise he would not have become oblivious of the fact that the sweepers’ colony was anything but a show-piece. Not till the Collector later sought him out and arraigned him for his lapse did it occur to him what a blunder he had committed.

The Collector said, ‘Have you so little sense, Chairman, that you could not have delayed Mr Gandhi’s visit at least by two hours, time to give the people a chance to sweep and clean up that awful place? You know as well as I do, what it is like!’ All of which the Chairman took in without a word.

He was gloating over the words spoken to him by Mahatmaji. Not till his wife later attacked him did he remember his omission in another direction. She said in a tone full of wrath, ‘There I was waiting, dressed as you wanted, with the boy, and you simply went away without even calling us!’

‘Why couldn’t you have come out?’ he asked idiotically.

‘How could I, when you had said I must wait for your call?’ She sobbed, ‘With the great man at our house, I’d not the good fortune even to appear before him. And the child – what a disappointment for him!’

When they got over their initial surprise, the authorities did everything to transform the place. All the stench mysteriously
vanished; all the garbage and offal that lay about, and flesh and hide put out to sundry on the roofs, disappeared. All that night municipal and other employees kept working, with the aid of petrol lamps: light there was such a rarity that the children kept dancing all night around the lamps. Gandhiji noticed the hectic activity, but out of a sense of charity refrained from commenting on it. Only when it was all over did he say, ‘Now one can believe that the true cleansers of the city live here.’ The men of the colony tied round their heads their whitest turbans and the women wore their best
saris
, dragged their children to the river and scrubbed them till they yelled, and decorated their coiffures with yellow chrysanthemum flowers. The men left off fighting, did their best to keep away from the drink shops, and even the few confirmed topers had their drinks on the sly, and suppressed their impulse to beat their wives or break their household pots. The whole place looked bright with lamps and green mango leaves tied across lamp-posts and tree branches.

Gandhi occupied a hut which had a low entrance. He didn’t like to oust anyone from his hut, but chose one facing the river sand, after making certain that it had been vacant, the occupant of the hut having gone elsewhere. The Chairman brought in a low divan and covered the floor with a coarse rush mat for Gandhi’s visitors to sit on. Sriram lowered himself unobtrusively on the mat. Gandhi sat on his divan, and dictated to one of his secretaries. They wrote voluminously. Mahatmaji performed a number of things simultaneously. He spoke to visitors. He dictated. He wrote. He prayed. He had his sparse dinner of nuts and milk, and presently he even laid himself down on the divan and went off to sleep. It was then that someone turned off the lamp, and people walked out of the hut.

Sriram now felt that he could not continue to sit there. Although no one bothered to ask him what he was doing, he could not stay any more. When he saw the girl was preparing to leave the hut, he thought he had better get up and go; otherwise someone might say something unpleasant to him.

The girl lifted Gandhi’s spinning wheel, put it away noiselessly, and tip-toed out of the room. She passed without noticing him at first, but the fixed stare with which he followed her
movements seemed to affect her. She went past him, but suddenly stopped and whispered: ‘You will have to go now,’ and Sriram sprang up and found himself outside the hut in one bound.

She said rather grimly: ‘Don’t you know that when Bapuji sleeps, we have to leave him?’

He felt like asking, ‘Who is Bapuji?’ but using his judgement for a second, he understood it must refer to the Mahatma, and not wanting to risk being chased out by the resolute girl said, ‘Of course, I knew it. I was only waiting for you to come out.’

‘Who are you? I don’t think I have seen you before.’

This was the question he had been waiting to be asked all along, but now when it came he found himself tongue-tied. He felt so confused and muddled that she took pity on him and said, ‘What is your name?’

He answered, ‘Sriram.’

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said irrelevantly. ‘I saw you when you came with a money-box in the market, the other day …’

‘Oh, I see,’ she said out of politeness. ‘But I might not remember you since quite a lot of people put money into my box that day. Anyway, I asked you what you are doing here now?’

‘Perhaps I’m one of the volunteers,’ Sriram said.

‘Why “perhaps”?’ she asked.

‘Because I’m not yet one,’ he replied.

‘Anybody cannot be a volunteer,’ she said. ‘Don’t you know that?’ she asked.

‘Don’t I know that? I think I know that and more.’

‘What more?’ she asked.

‘That I am not an anybody,’ he replied and was amazed at his own foolhardiness in talking to the girl in that fashion; she could put him out of the camp in a moment.

‘You are a somebody, I suppose?’ the girl asked laughing.

‘Well, you will help me to become somebody, I hope,’ he said, feeling surprised at his own powers of rash and reckless speech.

She seemed a match for him, for presently she asked, with a little irritation, ‘Are we going to stand here and talk the whole night?’

‘Yes, unless you show me where we can go.’

‘I know where I ought to go,’ she said. ‘You see that hut there,’ she pointed to a small hut four doors off Gandhi’s, ‘that’s where all the women of this camp are quartered.’

‘How many of them are there?’ Sriram asked just to keep up the conversation.

She answered sharply, ‘More than you see before you now,’ and added, ‘Why are you interested?’

Sriram felt a little piqued. ‘You seem to be a very ill-tempered and sharp-tongued girl. You can’t answer a single question without a challenge.’

‘Hush! You will wake up Bapuji standing and talking here,’ she said.

‘Well, if he is going to be awakened by anyone’s talk, it will be yours, because no one else is doing the talking,’ he replied.

‘I have a right to ask you what you are doing here and report to our
Chalak
if I don’t like you,’ she said with a sudden tone of authority.

‘Why should you not like me?’ he asked.

‘No one except close associates and people with appointments is allowed to enter Bapuji’s presence.’

‘I will tell them I am your friend and that you took me in,’ he replied.

‘Would you utter a falsehood?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’

‘None except absolute truth-speakers are allowed to come into Mahatma’s camp. People who come here must take an oath of absolute truth before going into Mahatma’s presence.’

‘I will take the vow when I become a member of the camp. Till then I will pass off something that looks like truth,’ he said.

‘When Mahatma hears about this he will be very pained and he will talk to you about it.’

Sriram was now genuinely scared and asked pathetically, ‘What have I done that you should threaten and menace me?’

This softened her, and for the first time he noticed a little tenderness had crept into her tone.

‘Do you mind moving off and waiting there? We should not be talking like this near Mahatmaji’s hut. I will go to my hut and then join you there.’

She turned and disappeared; she had the lightning-like motion of a dancer, again the sort of pirouetting movement that she had adopted while carrying off other people’s coins in a jingling box. She passed down the lane. He moved off slowly. He was tired of standing. He sat on a boulder at the edge of the river, kicking up the sand with his toes, and ruminating on his good fortune. He had never hoped for anything like it. It might have been a dream. This time yesterday he could not have thought he would talk on these terms to the money-box girl. He realized he had not yet asked her her name. He remembered that he had felt hungry and thirsty long ago. ‘I wish they would give us all something to eat in Mahatmaji’s camp.’ He remembered that Mahatma ate only groundnuts and dates. He looked about hoping there would be vendors of these things. The Taluk Office gong sounded nine. He counted it deliberately, and wondered what his granny would make of his absence now. ‘She will fret and report to the police, I suppose!’ he reflected cynically. He wished he had asked his teacher to go and tell Granny not to expect him home till Gandhiji left the town. On second thoughts it struck him that it was just as well that he had not spoken to the teacher, who would probably have gone and spread the rumour that his interest in Gandhi was only a show and that he was really going after a girl. What was her name? Amazing how he had not yet asked her it, and the moment she came back he said, ‘What is your name?’

‘Bharati,’ she answered. ‘Why?’

‘Just to know, that’s all. Have I told you my name is Sriram?’

‘Yes, you have told me that more than once,’ she said. ‘I have heard again and again that you are Sriram.’

‘You are too sharp-tongued,’ he replied. ‘It is a wonder they tolerate you here, where peace and kindness must be practised.’

‘I am practising kindness, otherwise I should not be speaking to you at all. If I didn’t want to be kind to you I wouldn’t have gone in and taken my
Chalak’s
permission and come right away here. We must have permission to talk to people at this hour.
There is such a thing as discipline in every camp. Don’t imagine that because it is Mahatmaji’s camp it is without any discipline. He would be the first to tell you about it if you raised the question with him.’

‘You have the same style of talk as my grandmother. She is as sharp-tongued as you are,’ Sriram said pathetically.

She ignored the comparison and asked, ‘What about your mother?’

‘I have never seen her, my grandmother has always been father and mother to me. Why don’t you meet her? You will like her, both of you speak so much alike!’

‘Yes, yes,’ said the girl soothingly, ‘some day I will come and meet her as soon as this is all over. You see how busy I am now.’

She became tender when she found that she was talking to someone without a mother, and Sriram noticing this felt it was worthwhile being motherless and grandmother-tended. She sat on the same step, with her legs dangling in the river, leaving a gap of a couple of feet between them. The river rumbled into the dark starlit night, the leaves of the huge tree over the ancient steps rustled and sighed. Far off bullock-carts and pedestrians were fording the river at Nallappa’s Grove. Distant voices came through the night. Mahatmaji’s camp was asleep. It was so quiet that Sriram felt like taking the girl in his arms, but he resisted the idea. He feared that if he touched her she might push him into the river. The girl was a termagant, she would surely develop into the same type as his grandmother with that sharp tongue of hers. Her proximity pricked his blood and set it coursing.

‘There is no one about. What can she do?’ he reflected. ‘Let her try and push me into the river, and she will know with whom she is dealing,’ and the next moment he blamed himself for his own crude thoughts. ‘It is not safe with the Mahatma there. He may already have read my thoughts and be coming here.’ He was a Mahatma because awake or asleep he was fully aware of what was going on all round him. God alone could say what the Mahatma would do to someone who did not possess absolute purity of thought where girls were concerned. It meant hardship, no doubt, but if one was to live in this camp one had to follow the orders that emanated from the great soul. He struggled
against evil thoughts and said, ‘Bharati!’ She looked startled at being called so familiarly and he himself felt startled by the music of her name.