Hats and Doctors: Stories Read online

Whether Lallan cared about Hariya or not, she had loved Ramdulare very much. Out of love for him she had even more or less forgotten her anger towards Hariya. She had stopped worrying about whether or not Hariya gave her any money for the household. Night and day she was involved with her Ramdulare. She was deeply depressed by the death of her child. She half-wasted away from crying. Her eyes grew sunken and her body sagged.

  The hot season that year was intense. There had been several deaths in the city the month before because of the heat. Malhotra too had a heatstroke one day and for several days burned with fever. By the time the fever abated he felt extremely weak. Even though it was the hot season, his calves started aching. The weakness bothered him even more. His spirit was quite broken. One day he asked his wife if she would just press his feet a little, so his wife told Lallan to do it; and thus, Lallan started pressing his feet again. This time, Malhotra felt that some of the iron in Lallan’s hands had softened. When he told her to press his calves harder, she said, ‘Sir, I’m too old now. I can’t do that any more.’

  And she laughed a feeble sort of laugh.

  ‘Tell me, how is your Sweeper these days?’ Malhotra asked with a smile, to change the direction of the conversation, ‘He doesn’t beat you and steal from you any more?’

  ‘Now he doesn’t even come home at all!’ There was so much sorrow in Lallan’s voice, it touched Malhotra’s heart.

  ‘Where does he stay?’ He asked.

  ‘He goes over there, to Bai ke Bagh.’

  ‘Who’s in Bai ke Bagh?’

  ‘There’s a Mr Collis. He teaches in the Christian College. His sweeper is such a whore, sir, he’s under her spell. As soon as he finishes work, he goes over there. He gives her all his wages, he eats and drinks there.’

  Malhotra sensed a thin flash of jealousy in Lallan’s eyes and voice.

  ‘So, is she a beautiful woman?’ He asked.

  ‘How should I know, sir, I’ve never gone over there. As far as I’ve heard she’s ten or twelve years older than me. She’s a whore, sir, she’s snared him. The Sweeper has been living over there for the past year.’

  Malhotra also got a faint sense of longing from her voice. She kept quietly pressing his feet and Malhotra thought about that other woman.

  He did know Professor Noel Collis, because he too was a history professor. They weren’t friends; they were acquaintances. One evening he went to Professor Collis’s house with his friend Sen. While they were drinking tea, he lavished praise on Collis’s bungalow and his garden. After tea, Professor Collis took him into his garden. ‘Flowers just don’t flourish in the summer the way they do in January and February,’ Professor Collis said, ‘but I’ve planted so many kinds of petunias that flowers of different colours are in bloom all day long. And then, perhaps, nowhere else in the city would you find such a large jasmine as I have here at my home.’

  To encourage him, Malhotra praised the tiny little plants that looked like bamboo, which were planted on both sides of the crescent-shaped path along the edge of the lawn, and asked their name.

  ‘Those are called “puchiya”, or peacock’s feathers,’ Professor Collis explained enthusiastically. ‘Take a look at this, all the plants look the same. None is the slightest bit taller or shorter than the others.’

  And he began to explain how he had sorted out these identical-looking ones from five hundred other plants and then planted them in rows.

  He kept going on about his jasmine, pearl jasmine, champa, sunflowers, blue verbena and who knows what other kinds of plants. Malhotra didn’t hear a thing. He just kept nodding and murmuring in response. When Professor Collis took them behind the bungalow towards the servant’s quarters to show them more of the grounds, Malhotra’s interest was suddenly piqued. He praised to the skies that habit the English had of making room for their servants in their bungalows and always putting the kitchen far away from the house, and then he enumerated the many good qualities of that system.

  Professor Collis told him he had four servants: the cook, the bearer, the gardener and the sweeper, and that they all lived in the bungalow.

  Malhotra was walking in front of the servants’ quarters when he suddenly stopped in front of one of the rooms. The door was open, and Hariya was sitting inside with a small earthenware cup in front of him, next to a fat, coarse woman. As soon as he saw Malhotra he pushed the earthenware cup under the cot.

  ‘Why, Hariya!’ Malhotra cried out, pretending to be astonished. ‘What are you doing here?’ And he darted inside.

  The parentheses turned to brackets on Hariya’s shrivelled-up face and he quickly got up and greeted him.

  Malhotra did not reply to his greeting. His gaze moved from Hariya to the coarse, fat, dirty, raggedy sweeper woman beside him. Lallan had said she was ten years older than her, but she seemed to him to be about the age of his own mother.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he suddenly asked Hariya.

  Hariya looked at the floor, trying to figure out how to answer Malhotra’s real question. Then he said, ‘She’s my relative.’

  ‘Come here a minute!’ Malhotra went outside. He told Collis and Sen that this was his sweeper and he had to tell him something important.

  He took Hariya a little distance away and scolded him for leaving such a good wife and going after this witch. He would not let Lallan go, but he would not give her happiness, either, it seemed. Malhotra threatened that if he ever saw him there again, he would have him sent to jail on some charge. ‘You know, the chief captain of police is my friend. At the police station they’ll see to it that all your carousing is leashed in and stopped forever. For one thing, you’ll go to jail, and for another, you’ll have to wash your hands of your job.’

  Hariya listened quietly, his gaze fixed on the ground.

  ‘What do you say?’ he asked, thundering. ‘If you don’t agree, would you rather I told Professor Collis that this witch has opened up a brothel here?’

  ‘I’m just a sweeper, sir, and Lallan talks like a rich lady,’ Hariya complained.

  ‘Oh, come now, she probably tells you to keep clean. If she bothers you, tell me. I’ll reason with her!’ Malhotra patted him on the back and turned away.

  And two days later, Lallan told him as she pressed his feet that Hariya had come home, and she asked Malhotra for five rupees so she could have a kurta-pajama sewn for him.

  ‘You’ve got your man under control,’ he told her, giving her a five-rupee note. ‘I told you before, too, that if he doesn’t stay clean, you should clean him up yourself. If he doesn’t wash his clothes, you should wash them. It’s better if he eats and drinks in front of you than if he eats and drinks outside the house.’

  After Lallan had pressed his feet and gone away, he heard her asking his wife for half a bar of the ‘English’ soap that was in the bathroom.

  All these events flashed before Malhotra’s eyes when he reached the water pipe. Then Hariya saw him. There was nothing but suds all over his body, and on his face there was a kingly smile, in which he sensed neither the old helplessness nor hostility. Hariya greeted him from where he was sitting.

  Malhotra did not reply to his greeting. He glanced briefly at Lallan, her head bent down in great concentration as she scrubbed Hariya’s back and ribs with soap; and there had been a day when she had said, ‘I won’t scrub him with soap, I’d rather have him run out of town.’

  Malhotra smiled in spite of himself.

  The Aubergine Plant

  Mahiram has uprooted the aubergine plant, and yet, as I cross the vegetable field, walking on its narrow boundary to my house, that dry plant and the yellow, shrivelled aubergine that dangles from it still swim before my eyes.

  It was some time since the brief winter day had come to a close. I had taken a long, after-dinner walk, sporting an overcoat and a scarf, and under that, a warm achkan and kurta, a thick khadi shirt and undershirt. Flashlight in hand, I was absorbed in the clicking of my steel-heeled Flex boots, my ears hidden in the collar of my overcoat
to protect them from the sharp, cold, dry wind of the month of December. When I entered the verandah of my house, I was astonished to see an old man seated there on a dirty charpoy, coughing. He was decrepit, filthy as the dark night and wrapped in a black quilt.

  ‘What is it, my friend? What’s the matter?’ I asked, pulling my overcoat tighter around me.

  ‘Nothing, sir,’ he said, ‘I’m Mahiram’s man.’

  ‘You’re Mahiram’s man, fine, but why are you out here, on this open verandah?’

  ‘I have enough clothing to protect me, sir.’

  Silently, I opened the door to my room. I had left the large line-fourteen Ditmar table lamp burning, and although both the transom windows were open, the room had grown warm. The moment I entered, a smell assailed me which was warm, yet sharp, redolent with kerosene. My friends have often advised me not to leave the lamp burning like that. ‘What’s the point in leaving behind the pollution of the city to live in the fresh air,’ they ask, ‘if you don’t leave your bad city habits behind?’ And they inform me that keeping a lamp burning in a closed room is extremely harmful, according to doctors: dirty air enters the breathing path, it affects the lungs, and the lungs are weakened. I often feel that way myself, but what can I do about it? In the end I’m forced to leave the lamp burning in the closed room every day. Whenever I sit with the door open and a sharp gust of wind comes in, and my hands become motionless, and my pen refuses to move, I get up and close the door. Just the way a cigarette smoker grows fond of the cigarette’s dizzyingly bitter, pungent smell, I have, after a fashion, grown fond of the smell of kerosene in my room.

  I hung my hat on the hook, took my scarf and wrapped it around my head and ears, and sat down to work.

  But my attention was still focused on the verandah.

  I had seen that old man before. I had seen him just that morning. He was pruning the aubergines, and when I was returning from the dining hall, I had even asked him why he was doing that. He had explained to me that aubergines bear fruit twice. If they are pruned once, they get even larger and plumper. I glanced at the dry, flowerless plants. A yellow aubergine, shrivelled and desiccated, hung from one of them. My gaze shifted from the aubergine to the old man. It was difficult to tell how old he really was, but he looked extremely aged. Though he had a thick cotton shawl to shield him from the cold, his yellow, stick-thin hands, his legs, skinny as bamboo stalks, his dry, pinched face and the sockets of his eyes were all completely exposed. Then a strange thought entered my head—even when an aubergine plant dries, it produces fruit again after it is pruned; the drumstick tree also grows after pruning. There are certain kinds of trees and plants that grow even more after pruning. Why didn’t the Unseen Creator make man the same way? But on the other hand, someone once said that the vine of mankind is also immortal: men and women, children and old people are its fruit and flowers, leaves and branches. Death is its pruning shears. When people rot or dry up, those shears cut them away and, in their place, leaves, flowers, fruit grow ever outwards, always fresh, full of green, shouting with the excitement of life, laughing, dancing, singing.

  But why was this old man outside in the biting cold? Did he have no home of his own? And starting slightly, I looked out and asked him, ‘But who are you?’

  ‘Sir, I’m Mahiram’s man!’

  ‘Yes, you are Mahiram’s man, but just how are you related to him?’

  The old man was about to say something when he had a coughing fit. After coughing ceaselessly for a few moments, he brought his breathing under control with some difficulty and told me that he wasn’t related to Mahiram in any way. He was from his village. His family was very large. He had five small children, a wife and two daughters of marriageable age, and he had come here with Mahiram to earn a living.

  As I sat and worked, I found it hard to concentrate when I thought of the tenderness of his voice. Not only was I wearing a great deal of clothing, I was sitting in a warm room with a blanket pulled over my trousers, whereas that poor man was lying outside in the cold. All he had for bedding was a thin blanket, ragged and filthy, and an ancient black quilt.

  ‘Why don’t you lie here, inside—it’s so cold outside,’ I suggested to him tenderly. ‘The verandah is open on two sides. Why are you sitting out there?’

  But just then the sound of heavy shoes stamping on the cement floor reached my ears, and the next moment, Mahiram—that six-foot-three employee of the contractor Gopal Das—appeared, standing at the door. He was wearing a huge turban, a thick black blanket, a dhoti down to his knees and, on his feet, shoes weighing two or two-and-a-half pounds each. Once he had chased a man all the way to the press for stealing nothing but six radishes and, when he’d caught the thief in the field, Mahiram had given him such a beating he had never turned his face in that direction again.

  ‘I told him to sleep here myself, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who the bastard is who robs the fields at night. It’s been going on for two or three days. Yesterday, ten heads of cauliflower were missing. In the whole field you wouldn’t find such nice cauliflowers, and the day before yesterday, someone picked some ripe tomatoes. You know, we also have to supply the kitchen, and then, sir, there’s the two hundred-rupees rent. All that has to be made from the produce.’

  ‘But who steals the vegetables?’ I asked. ‘I’ve never heard of any stealing here. My house is completely isolated, there’s no other house nearby; but I’m gone for hours at a time, and I leave the door open. It’s probably some outsider.’

  ‘No, sir. An outsider wouldn’t come in this cold just to take ten heads of cauliflower.’

  ‘But that other time there were the radishes too …’

  ‘That was something different, sir; he was just a passer-by. While he was going by, he dug them up and took them. But this is someone from here. I’m going to catch the bastard and teach him so he’ll never lay his hand on anything again for the rest of his life.’ And he smiled, his thick lips spread wide and his pockmarked face stretched tight.

  ‘But, why don’t you let this man sleep inside? It’s very cold.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Mahiram replied. ‘The cold only affects rich people like you. We don’t feel the cold. I’m having him sleep here like this only as a blind. I’ll be on guard, sitting behind those jasmines. As soon as he thinks the old man has gone to sleep, he’ll come and then I’ll swoop down on him.’

  And he laughed.

  ‘But he has no clothing to …’

  ‘He has enough clothing, sir.’ And he went away.

  The old man had another coughing fit.

  I again became engrossed in what I was doing. But I soon found I just couldn’t work. A picture of the employer of these two men sketched itself before me. Contractor Gopal Das—whose cheeks, because of his wealth, prosperity, offspring and lack of worries, were as pink as a rose even now, at the age of fifty—was probably warm from the glowing brazier, lying under a thick quilt, gossiping happily in his room, or amusing himself with playing cards or chess.

  Musing thus, my eyelids began to droop—I had eaten too much, I had weighed myself down with clothing, and my room was warm. I got up. I took some important papers along with pen and ink to my bedroom. I thought I’d get up a little early the next morning. Then, when I was going back to lock the office, I asked the old man if he wanted me to leave the office door unlocked. But when he said, ‘No, sir, no, I have enough clothing,’ I locked the door and went into my warm, cosy, little bedroom. The bed was already made and all I did was put another blanket over the quilt, change my clothes and lie down. The bed was cold as ice. I drew in my feet and then, after a while, I slowly stretched them out again. My mind started to wander through a number of different thoughts—disordered, disconnected and uncontrolled—but my eyes had grown heavy from the warmth of the quilt and, slowly, they closed.

  As I slept, different faces came into my mind: sometimes Mahiram’s, sometimes the old man’s, and sometimes that of their employer, the contractor.

  I
dreamt that Mahiram had caught the thief and taken him to the nearby village, Vairoke, beating him all the way. Gathering all the villagers around him, he announced that whoever stole our vegetables would meet with the same punishment. So saying, he beat the thief some more. The thief looked towards him with pathetic eyes and I was astonished that it was none other than the contractor—the same polished head, the same blooming cheeks, the same flat nose.

  I opened my eyes. I saw that the quilt had slipped off my legs. My chest felt a little heavy from eating too much and my throat felt dry.

  I drank some water from the pitcher at the head of the bed, pulled the quilt back up and, tucking it under my legs on each side, I lay down again. Outside, the wind was lashing at the walls, and the trees were shrieking fervently, contending with all their might against its intensity. From far away came the thundering of the clouds and the crack of lightning. But my body grew warm again and then relaxed. I fell asleep.

  This time I dreamt that it was raining heavily. A strong wind was blowing. Hailstones were falling, as big as half a pound each. All the vegetables were destroyed. Their beds were full of water. Only that yellow, shrivelled aubergine was left standing. Then, right before me, the aubergine started to grow larger and I saw that its face had become just like the old man’s—his arms were stuck to his chest and wrapped around his knees, he was shrunken, naked, hanging from that very same plant by his braid. The hailstones hit him on the head, but all the same he hung there, swinging …

  Then I saw that the plant had become a big, tall tree, perhaps a rose apple or a mango. A crowd of people was standing under it making a lot of noise—the old man was dead … The old man is dead … The old man hanged himself and now he is dead …

  And then only voices saying, ‘He’s dead … he’s dead,’ reached my ears.

  I woke up and heard someone knocking loudly on my door. I put on the warm socks I had placed next to the head of my bed, and a warm hat and, wrapping the blanket tightly around me, I got up and opened the door.