Malgudi Days by R. K. Narayan
‘Aiyo!’ wailed the shopman.
‘I have to have special protection . . . I can’t go in . . . no candle, no light. We’ll have to manage in the dark. If I hadn’t been quick enough, you would not have seen me again.’
‘Aiyo! What’s to happen to my shop and property?’
‘We’ll see, we’ll see, we will do something,’ assured the other heroically; he himself looking eerie in the beam of light that fell on him from the street. The shopman was afraid to look at him, with his grisly face and rolling eyes, whose corners were touched with white sacred ash. He felt he had been caught between two devils—difficult to decide which one was going to prove more terrible, the one in the shop or the one outside. The exorcist sat upright in front of the closed door as if to emphasize, ‘I’m not afraid to sit here,’ and commanded, ‘Get me a copper pot, a copper tumbler and a copper spoon. It’s important.’
‘Why copper?’
‘Don’t ask questions . . . All right, I’ll tell you: because copper is a good conductor. Have you noticed electric wires of copper overhead?’
‘What is it going to conduct now?’
‘Don’t ask questions. All right, I’ll tell you. I want a medium which will lead my mantras to that horrible thing inside.’
Without further questioning, the shopman produced an aluminium pot from somewhere. ‘I don’t have copper, but only aluminium . . .’
‘In our country let him be the poorest man, but he’ll own a copper pot . . . But here you are calling yourself a sowcar, you keep nothing; no candle, no light, no copper . . .’ said the exorcist.
‘In my village home we have all the copper and silver . . .’
‘How does it help you now? It’s not your village house that is now being haunted, though I won’t guarantee this may not pass on there . . . Anyway, let me try.’ He raised the aluminium pot and hit the ground; immediately from inside came the sound of the jug hitting something again and again, ‘Don’t break the vessel, ’ cried the shopman. Ignoring his appeal the exorcist hit the ground again and again with the pot. ‘That’s a good sign. Now the spirits will speak. We have our own code.’ He tapped the aluminium pot with his knuckles in a sort of Morse code. He said to the landlord, ‘Don’t breathe hard or speak loudly. I’m getting a message: I’m asked to say it’s the spirit of someone who is seeking redress. Did you wrong anyone in your life?’
‘Oh, no, no,’ said the shopman in panic. ‘No, I’ve always been charitable . . .’
The exorcist cut him short. ‘Don’t tell me anything, but talk to yourself and to that spirit inside. Did you at any time handle . . . wait a minute, I’m getting the message . . .’ He held the pot’s mouth to his ear. ‘Did you at any time handle someone else’s wife or money?’
The shopman looked horrified, ‘Oh, no, never.’
‘Then what is it I hear about your holding a trust for a widow . . . ?’
He brooded while the cat inside was hitting the ventilator, trying to get out. The man was in a panic now. ‘What trust? May I perish if I have done anything of that kind. God has given me enough to live on . . .’
‘I’ve told you not to talk unnecessarily. Did you ever molest any helpless woman or keep her at your mercy? If you have done a wrong in your childhood, you could expiate . . .’
‘How?’
‘That I’ll explain, but first confess . . .’
‘Why?’
‘A true repentance on your part will emasculate the evil spirit.’ The jug was hitting again, and the shopman became very nervous and said, ‘Please stop that somehow, I can’t bear it.’ The exorcist lit a piece of camphor, his stock-in-trade, and circled the flame in all directions. ‘To propitiate the benign spirits around so that they may come to our aid . . .’ The shopman was equally scared of the benign spirits. He wished, at that pale starlit hour, that there were no spirits whatever, good or bad. Sitting on the pyol, and hearing the faint shrieking of a night bird flying across the sky and fading, he felt he had parted from the solid world of men and material and had drifted on to a world of unseen demons.
The exorcist now said, ‘Your conscience should be clear like the Manasaro Lake. So repeat after me whatever I say. If there is any cheating, your skull will burst. The spirit will not hesitate to dash your brains out.’
‘Alas, alas, what shall I do?’
‘Repeat after me these words: I have lived a good and honest life.’ The shopman had no difficulty in repeating it, in a sort of low murmur in order that it might not be overheard by his tenants. The exorcist said, ‘I have never cheated anyone.’
‘. . . cheated anyone,’ repeated the shopman.
‘Never appropriated anyone’s property . . .’
The shopman began to repeat, but suddenly stopped short to ask, ‘Which property do you mean?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the exorcist, applying the pot to his ear. ‘I hear of some irregularity.’
‘Oh, it’s not my mistake . . .’ the shopman wailed. ‘It was not my mistake. The property came into my hands, that’s all . . .’
‘Whom did it belong to?’
‘Honappa, my friend and neighbour, I was close to his family. We cultivated adjoining fields. He wrote a will and was never seen again in the village.’
‘In your favour?’
‘I didn’t ask for it; but he liked me . . .’
‘Was the body found?’
‘How should I know?’
‘What about the widow?’
‘I protected her as long as she lived.’
‘Under the same roof?’
‘Not here, in the village . . .’
‘You were intimate?’
The shopman remained silent. ‘Well, she had to be protected . . .’
‘How did she die?’
‘I won’t speak a word more—I’ve said everything possible; if you don’t get that devil after all this, you’ll share the other’s fate . . .’ He suddenly sprang on the exorcist, seized him by the throat and commanded, ‘Get that spirit out after getting so much out of me, otherwise . . .’ He dragged the exorcist and pushed him into the dark chamber of the shop. Thus suddenly overwhelmed, he went in howling with fright, his cry drowning the metallic clamour. As he fumbled in the dark with the shopman mounting guard at the door, the jug hit him between his legs and he let out a desperate cry, ‘Ah! Alas! I’m finished,’ and the cat, sensing the exit, dashed out with its metal hood on, jumped down onto the street and trotted away. The exorcist and the shopman watched in silence, staring after it. The shopman said, ‘After all, it’s a cat.’
‘Yes, it may appear to be a cat. How do you know what is inside the cat?’
The shopman brooded and looked concerned. ‘Will it visit us again?’
‘Can’t say,’ said the exorcist. ‘Call me again if there is trouble, ’ and made for his cubicle, saying, ‘Don’t worry about my dakshina now. I can take it in the morning.’
THE EDGE
When pressed to state his age, Ranga would generally reply, ‘Fifty, sixty or eighty.’ You might change your tactics and inquire, ‘How long have you been at this job?’
‘Which job?’
‘Carrying that grinding wheel around and sharpening knives.’
‘Not only knives, but also scythes, clippers and every kind of peeler and cutter in your kitchen, also bread knives, even butcher’s hatchets in those days when I carried the big grindstone; in those days I could even sharpen a maharaja’s sword’ (a favourite fantasy of his was that if armies employed swords he could become a millionaire). You might interrupt his loquaciousness and repeat your question: ‘How long have you been a sharpener of knives and other things?’ ‘Ever since a line of moustache began to appear here,’ he would say, drawing a finger over his lip. You would not get any further by studying his chin now overlaid with patchy tufts of discoloured hair. Apparently he never looked at a calendar, watch, almanac or even a mirror. In such a blissful state, clad in a dhoti, khaki shirt and turban, his was a famili
He stuck his arm through the frame of a portable grinding apparatus; an uncomplicated contraption operated by an old cycle wheel connected to a foot-pedal. At the Market Road he dodged the traffic and paused in front of tailor’s and barber’s shops, offering his services. But those were an erratic and unreliable lot, encouraging him by word but always suggesting another time for business. If they were not busy cutting hair or clothes (tailors, particularly, never seemed to have a free moment, always stitching away on overdue orders), they locked up and sneaked away, and Ranga had to be watchful and adopt all kinds of strategies in order to catch them. Getting people to see the importance of keeping their edges sharp was indeed a tiresome mission. People’s reluctance and lethargy had, initially, to be overcome. At first sight everyone dismissed him with, ‘Go away, we have nothing to grind,’ but if he persisted and dallied, some member of the family was bound to produce a rusty knife, and others would follow, vying with one another, presently, to ferret out long-forgotten junk and clamour for immediate attention. But it generally involved much canvassing, coaxing and even aggressiveness on Ranga’s part; occasionally he would warn, ‘If you do not sharpen your articles now, you may not have another chance, since I am going away on a pilgrimage.’
‘Makes no difference, we will call in the other fellow,’ someone would say, referring to a competitor, a miserable fellow who operated a hand grinder, collected his cash and disappeared, never giving a second look to his handiwork. He was a fellow without a social standing, and no one knew his name, no spark ever came out of his wheel, while Ranga created a regular pyrotechnic display and passing children stood transfixed by the spectacle. ‘All right,’ Ranga would retort, ‘I do not grudge the poor fellow his luck, but he will impart to your knife the sharpness of an egg; after that I won’t be able to do anything for you. You must not think that anyone and everyone could handle steel. Most of these fellows don’t know the difference between a knife blade and a hammerhead.’
Ranga’s customers loved his banter and appreciated his work, which he always guaranteed for sixty days. ‘If it gets dull before then, you may call me son of a . . . Oh, forgive my letting slip such words . . .’ If he were to be assailed for defective execution, he could always turn round and retort that so much depended upon the quality of metal, and the action of sun and rain, and above all the care in handling, but he never argued with his customers; he just resharpened the knives free of cost on his next round. Customers always liked to feel that they had won a point, and Ranga would say to himself, ‘After all, it costs nothing, only a few more turns of the wheel and a couple of sparks off the stone to please the eye.’ On such occasions he invariably asked for compensation in kind: a little rice and buttermilk or some snack—anything that could be found in the pantry (especially if they had children in the house)—not exactly to fill one’s belly but just to mitigate the hunger of the moment and keep one on the move. Hunger was, after all, a passing phase which you got over if you ignored it. He saw no need to be preoccupied with food. The utmost that he was prepared to spend on food was perhaps one rupee a day. For a rupee he could get a heap of rice in an aluminium bowl, with unexpected delicacies thrown in, such as bits of cabbage or potato, pieces of chicken, meat, lime-pickle, or even sweet rasagulla if he was lucky. A man of his acquaintance had some arrangement with the nearby restaurants to collect remnants and leftovers in a bucket; he came over at about ten in the night, installed himself on a culvert and imperiously ladled out his hotchpotch—two liberal scoops for a rupee. Unless one looked sharp, one would miss it, for he was mobbed when the evening show ended at Pearl Cinema across the street. Ranga, however, was always ahead of others in the line. He swallowed his share, washed it down at the street tap and retired to his corner at Krishna Hall, an abandoned building (with no tangible owner) which had been tied up in civil litigations for over three generations, with no end in sight. Ranga discovered this hospitable retreat through sheer luck on the very first day he had arrived from his village in search of shelter. He occupied a cosy corner of the hall through the goodwill of the old man, its caretaker from time immemorial, who allotted living space to those whom he favoured.
Ranga physically dwelt in the town no doubt, but his thoughts were always centred round his home in the village where his daughter was growing up under the care of his rather difficult wife. He managed to send home some money every month for their maintenance, particularly to meet the expenses of his daughter’s schooling. He was proud that his daughter went to a school, the very first member of his family to take a step in that direction. His wife, however, did not favour the idea, being convinced that a girl was meant to make herself useful at home, marry and bear children. But Ranga rejected this philosophy outright, especially after the village schoolmaster, who gathered and taught the children on the pyol of his house, had told him once, ‘Your child is very intelligent. You must see that she studies well, and send her later to the Mission School at Paamban’ (a nearby town reached by bus).
Originally Ranga had set up his grinding wheel as an adjunct to the village blacksmith under the big tamarind tree, where congregated at all hours of the day peasants from the surrounding country, bringing in their tools and implements for mending. One or the other in the crowd would get an idea to hone his scythe, shears or weeding blade when he noticed Ranga and his grinding wheel. But the blacksmith was avaricious, claimed twenty paise in every rupee Ranga earned, kept watch on the number of customers Ranga got each day, invariably quarrelled when the time came to settle accounts and frequently also demanded a drink at the tavern across the road; which meant that Ranga would have to drink, too, and face his wife’s tantrums when he went home. She would shout, rave and refuse to serve him food. Ranga could never understand why she should behave so wildly—after all, a swill of toddy did no one any harm; on the contrary, it mitigated the weariness of the body at the end of a day’s labour, but how could one educate a wife and improve her understanding? Once, on an inspiration, he took home a bottle for her and coaxed her to taste the drink, but she retched at the smell of it and knocked the bottle out of his hand, spilling its precious contents on the mud floor. Normally he would have accepted her action without any visible protest, but that day, having had company and drunk more than normal, he felt spirited enough to strike her, whereupon she brought out the broom from its corner and lashed him with it. She then pushed him out and shut the door on him. Even in that inebriate state he felt relieved that their child, fast asleep on her mat, was not watching. He picked himself up at dawn from the lawn and sat ruminating. His wife came over and asked, ‘Have you come to your senses?’ standing over him menacingly.
After this crisis Ranga decided to avoid the blacksmith and try his luck as a peripatetic sharpener. Carrying his grinding gear, he left home early morning after swallowing a ball of ragi with a bite of raw onion and chillies. After he gave up his association with the blacksmith, he noticed an improvement in his wife’s temper. She got up at dawn and set the ragi on the boil over their mud oven and stirred the gruel tirelessly till it hardened and could be rolled into a ball, and had it ready by the time Ranga had had his wash at the well. He started on his rounds, avoiding the blacksmith under the tamarind tree, criss-crossed the dozen streets of his village, pausing at every door to announce, ‘Knives and cutters sharpened.’ When he returned home at night and emptied his day’s collection on his wife’s lap, she would cry greedily, ‘Only two rupees! Did you not visit the weekly market at . . . ?’
‘Yes, I did, but there were ten others before me!’
His income proved inadequate, although eked out with the wages earned by his wife for performing odd jobs at the Big House of the village. Now she began to wear a perpetual look of anxiety. He sounded her once if he should not cultivate the blacksmith’s company again, since those who had anything to do with ir
‘Then I suppose people scamper away and hide their knives on hearing your voice!’ And they both laughed at the grim joke.
The daughter was now old enough to be sent to the Mission School at Paamban. Ranga had to find the money for her books, uniform, school fee and, above all, the daily busfare. His wife insisted that the girl’s schooling be stopped, since she was old enough to work; the rich landlords needed hands at their farms, and it was time to train the girl to make herself useful all round. Ranga rejected her philosophy outright. However meek and obedient he might have proved in other matters, over the question of his daughter’s education he stood firm. He was convinced that she should have a different life from theirs. What a rebel he was turning out to be, his wife thought, and remained speechless with amazement. To assuage her fears he asked, ‘You only want more money, don’t you?’