Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (75 page)

‘Ah, a pertinent question, who could photograph the photographer? Guess how it was done. Do you imagine I attached a camera to my back to follow me and take the pictures?’

‘Possibly, possibly,’ said Sriram, losing interest in the whole question. He didn’t want to look at any more pictures or hear
about them. The sight of the Independence Day Celebrations irritated him. He almost said, ‘If only I had known that people would reduce it all to this. I didn’t go about inscribing “Quit” and overturning trains just to provide a photographer with material for his album.’ He decided that he wouldn’t look at any more pictures.

The photographer said, ‘I have three more albums. They present another phase of our struggle.’ He attempted to reach them down from a shelf.

Sriram held his hand, saying, ‘No, not now. I have a headache. I won’t look at any more pictures.’ He was terrified at the prospect of having to look through more crowds, flags, and assemblies.

The photographer said: ‘Good photographs are a sure remedy for headache. That’s what an American scientist has recently found out.’

Sriram said defensively, ‘I will examine them again tomorrow.’

‘Very well. You know what my greatest regret is?’ He paused to give him time to guess, and added, ‘That I haven’t a cine camera. If only I had had one I’d have shown you all the scenes you have missed as if you were seeing them before your eyes. That’s the stuff. If I had charged as much as other photographers, I’d have had the biggest movie camera there is. But oh, this troublesome conscience with which some of us are burdened!’

Sriram felt disappointed with the man: he had looked so imposing as an underground worker: so precise and clear-headed and purposeful. Now he seemed woolly-headed and vague. The atmosphere of peace did not suit his nature. Sriram wondered for a moment why he had ever carried out his orders at all. He was disappointed that the other showed so little interest in his own gaol existence. Sriram asked, ‘Did the police get you?’

‘Me! Oh, no! How could they? They didn’t know my whereabouts. It was possible for me to evade them completely. I lived in that temple after you left; didn’t you see it in the first picture? Didn’t you notice how I labelled it?’ He again tried to reach out for the album.

Sriram said hastily, ‘Yes, yes, quite right. It was very apt,’ although he could not clearly recollect what it was.

‘Moreover,’ concluded the photographer, ‘there was no occasion for the police to get me. My grandmother did not start dying at a wrong moment. If it hadn’t been for your grandmother, you would not have gone to gaol at all.’

Sriram said nothing in reply. This was a subject which he did not wish to brood over. He had a hope they might have something to talk about in common, some diversion from the photographs. He asked point blank, ‘Where is Bharati? Did she come out of gaol?’

‘Oh, yes, I was wondering why you hadn’t asked anything about her. I thought perhaps you had forgotten her!’

‘No, never! Not even for a moment!’ cried Sriram passionately. ‘Have you seen her?’

‘Of course,’ said the photographer in a tone which made Sriram anxious and jealous. While he had been having social intercourse with homicides, she seemed to have come out of prison, been received and garlanded by the photographer and his friends, and probably they had all had a good time. She must have wondered why he was not there! He hoped that the others had had at least the goodness to remind her that he was still in gaol.

‘Did you receive her at the prison?’ he asked suddenly.

‘We should have, but it was impossible to meet her. She was in one of the earliest batches to be released and she immediately took the train that very evening for Noakhali.’

‘Noakhali; what is her business there? Where is it?’ His geography was poor.

The photographer ignored the geographical question and said, ‘Are you aware of what has been going on in East Bengal? Hindus versus Muslims. They are killing each other. Are you not aware of anything?’

‘No. How could I be?’ said Sriram. ‘I was not kept in a municipal reading-room or the public library. I’m not aware of anything or of what you are talking about.’

‘Whole villages have been burnt in inter-communal fights. Thousands of people have been killed, bereaved, dispossessed, demented, crushed.’

‘Who is doing what and why?’

‘Don’t ask all that. I am a man without any communal notions and I don’t like to talk about it. Somebody is killing somebody else. That is all I care to know. Life is at a standstill and Mahatmaji is there on a mission of peace. He is walking through villages, telling people not to run away, to be brave, to do this and that. He is actually making the lion and the lamb eat off the same plate. And Bharati seems to have had a call.’

Sriram was seized with cold fear. This was a new turn of events for which he had not bargained at all. Noakhali, Calcutta, Bengal, what was the meaning of it? What did she mean by going so far away from him? Did she do it by design? Did she try to make good her escape before he could come out of prison?

‘What did she mean by going away?’

The photographer simply laughed at the question.

‘Couldn’t she have come and seen me in prison? She must have known I was in prison?’

‘How?’ asked the photographer.

‘By enquiring, that is all, it is simple,’ said Sriram with feeling. He said, ‘Probably she has no thought of me. Perhaps she has forgotten me completely!’

Jagadish became serious on seeing his gloom. ‘Don’t let all that disturb you so much. Did you think of her often?’

Sriram began to say something in reply, but could not find the words, spluttered, remained silent and began to sob. The photographer patted his back and said, ‘What has happened now that you feel so bad about it?’ Sriram had nothing much to say in reply. He merely kept on sobbing. The photographer said, ‘You are a fool! What have you done to keep in touch with her?’

‘What do you mean? What could I do, chained and caged?’

‘Now, I mean. What are you going to do about it now? Now you are not chained or caged. What are you going to do about it?’

‘She is so far away, thousands of miles from me,’ Sriram wailed. The thought of Noakhali was very disturbing.

‘But there is such a thing as a postal service. You don’t have to employ a special runner to carry your mails. Why don’t you write to her?’

‘Will you see the letter addressed and despatched properly?’

‘I promise. Give it to me. I will send it off.’

This brought a ray of hope to Sriram. He suddenly asked, ‘What shall I write to her?’

‘H’m, that is a thing I can’t tell you. Each man has his own style in these matters.’

It was clear that his mind was in a complete fog. To think or plan clearly was beyond him. Prison life showed its damage only now.

The photographer took pity on him. He said, ‘Please rest a while. Close your eyes and relax.’ He went to a small table and took out a pen and a sheet of paper, and started writing. The traffic on the road outside had ceased.

‘Don’t you wish to close your shop?’ Sriram asked.

‘Don’t let that bother you. I can look after myself. I’m not much good at writing this sort of stuff. Anyway, I will try. Meanwhile, shut your eyes and switch off your thoughts, if you can.’

He sat and faithfully wrote a long letter which began:

‘M
Y
D
ARLING
, – Who keeps slipping away like this! I might as well be in gaol. But in gaol or out of it – there is only one thought in my mind, that’s you. I have been thinking of you night and day, and not all the gaol regulations could prevent me from thinking of you. And today I came out of the prison and my good friend Jagadish (he is a very fine man, let me say) told me about you. The prison bars kept me away from you so long, and now all the miles between here and there, but that is of no consequence. This distance is no distance for me. May I come and join you, because I will gasp and die like a stranded fish unless I see you and talk to you? Give me your answer in the quickest time possible.’

Jagadish got so lost in writing the letter that he forgot how long he was taking, and Sriram began dozing in his seat and snoring gently. Jagadish looked at him and hesitated for a moment. He put the letter under a paperweight and wrote a covering note: ‘If approved, this letter may be signed and sent first thing in the morning, though preferably it should be copied in your own hand.’ He got up and shut the front door of the
shop. He switched off the light, and went into his living apartments, softly closing the door behind him.

Ten days of anxious, desperate waiting, and then Sriram received a letter:

‘Happy to hear from you. Come to Delhi. Birla House at New Delhi, if you can. Our programme is unsettled. We are going to Bihar with Bapu, where there is trouble. There is much to tell you. We shall be in Delhi on 14th January. After that come any time you like. We shall be happy to meet you.

B
HARATI
.’

The Grand Trunk Express in the end arrived at New Delhi station. Sriram struggled to reach a window in order to have the first glimpse of Bharati. The men near the window would not let him near it. It was no use speaking to them: they seemed to live in a different world. He spoke Tamil and English, and they understood Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu or whatever it might be. He could now realize the significance of Bharati’s insistence that he should learn Hindi. Just to please her he had looked through readers and primers, but that took him nowhere. He had been isolated for the last thirty-six hours. He had sat brooding, gaol life had trained him to keep his own company. His greatest trial had been when two men appeared suddenly from somewhere when the train was in motion, and scrutinized all the people in the compartment; when they came to him, they stopped in front of him and asked him a question. He could catch only the words ‘Mister’ and ‘Hindu’ with a lot of other things thrown in. They were rowdy-looking men. He said something in his broken Hindi, and Tamil and English, which seemed to make no impression on them. They came menacingly close to him, peering at his face; Sriram was getting ready to fight in self-defence. He sprang up and demanded in the language that came uppermost, ‘What do you mean, all of you staring at me like this?’ As he rose, one of the two pulled his ear-lobe for a close scrutiny, saw the puncture in it made in childhood, and let go, muttering, ‘Hindu’. They lost interest and moved off. After they were gone, a great tension relaxed in the compartment. Someone started explaining,
and after a good deal of effort in a variety of languages, Sriram understood that the intruders were men looking for Muslims in the compartment: if Muslims were found they would be thrown out of the moving train: an echo of the fighting going on in other parts of the country. Sriram lapsed into silence for the rest of the journey.

It was a most uncomfortable journey: he was crushed, could not find the space even to stretch his length or swing his arm: people came crowding in and sat on him. Sometimes he could not even extricate his legs. When he felt sleepy, he leaned his head back on the window or on the shoulder of a total stranger. When he felt hungry, he called to someone selling tea outside, and drank it. He could not get coffee. The people here seemed strange men who could swallow the very sweet
jilebi
and wash it down with bitter tea the very first thing in the day: this only confirmed his feeling that he was in a strange, fantastic world. He yearned for coffee, his favourite, like a true South Indian, but coffee could not be had here. He had to content himself by dreaming of it as he used to do in gaol. In fact this seemed only an extension of prison life: this life in a crowded, congested compartment, with a lot of strangers. He felt more uncomfortable here than he had felt in the prison. There at least he could say something or hear something from others’ lips, but here the human voice conveyed nothing but jabber. The compartment was full of people who smoked
beedis
and filled the air with it, spat on the floor without a second thought, and the closet was nearly always inaccessible. He managed by jumping out of the train when the train halted and rushing back to the train when it whistled.

At ten-thirty or eleven on some day or other the train came to New Delhi.
‘Nav Dheheli
,’ people in the compartment cried and bustled about. He tried to run to the window or door to catch a glimpse of Bharati. She had written promising to meet him at the station. He felt ashamed of his appearance: he combed back his hair with his fingers: it was dishevelled and standing on end. He knew he was grimy, grisly, and unsightly. He wished he could tidy himself up before Bharati set eyes on him after all these years. He caught a glimpse of her through a number of heads and
shoulders jammed at the window, and, in his anxiety he pushed and bumped into people rudely, and the train moved past before coming to a halt. He saw her standing, gazing earnestly at the window. For a brief second he caught a glimpse of her figure, and his heart sank. He wished he could improve his appearance before facing her. He wished he could skulk away with the crowd and see her later. He had great misgivings as to what she might think of him if she saw him in his present state. But even in that desperate state, he knew, by his experience in the train itself, that he could never ask his way again and go in search of her. She might be lost to him for ever.

When he got down from the train, carrying a roll of bedding and a trunk, Bharati’s searching eye picked him out in the crowd. She waved her arms and came running to him. She gripped his hands and said, ‘Oh, how good to see you again!’ and in that tone of spontaneous affection Sriram lost himself, forgot his own appearance and griminess, and acquired self-confidence. He looked her up and down, and cried, ‘You look like a North Indian, yourself. You look like a Punjabi. I hope you understand our language.’

She took charge of him immediately. She picked up his bedding and said, ‘You carry your trunk.’ He snatched the bedding from her hand, and took the load on his own shoulder. She said, ‘Don’t be silly. You haven’t four arms, remember.’ And she snatched back the bed from his hands. Sriram lost his bewilderment. The proximity of Bharati gave him a sense of homeliness. It was as if he were back in Malgudi with her. He didn’t notice the strange surroundings, the strange avenues, and buildings, the too broad roads, the exotic men and women, and the strange shops they were passing. He had not time to notice anything. His attention was concentrated on Bharati. She looked darker, and more tired, but her tresses were as black as ever. She looked tired, as if she had undernourished herself. He could not get over the novelty of meeting her again. He was always on the point of disbelieving what he saw and felt. Perhaps, he was going through a fantastic dream. Perhaps he was dead. Or dreaming from his confinement. For the first time these many months and years he had a free and happy mind, a mind without friction and
sorrow of any kind. No hankering for a future or regret for a past. This was the first time in his life that he was completely at peace with himself, satisfied profoundly with existence itself. The very fact that one was breathing, feeling, and seeing, seemed sufficient matter for satisfaction now. She kept looking at him, and asked, ‘When did they release you?’