THE GRACE OF SHIVA
ONCE again, the train chuffed through the familiar hills. Gian sat smoking, his thoughts straying over the happenings of the past few weeks.
He was dressed in a pair of khaki slacks and a white shirt, the shirt buttoned up at the neck to hide his Andaman chain. He had had many opportunities to have the chain cut off, but had decided against it. In the first few days of his return, a bit of human flotsam in a flood of humanity, it seemed the only thing that gave him an identity. Now, the chain round his neck had be come an important factor in his plans, something of an asset, really.
He was aware of a sense of finality. He was a man coming to the end of his tether. Unless he could get a job within the next few days, he would have to starve; starve, or give himself up. As he had planned it, his getting a job would depend on the Andaman chain. And if that did not succeed, the chain and the disk would make it easy for him to give himself up, establish proof of his identity without too much fuss. It was now the middle of April. Five weeks had passed since he had landed at Madras, a man without a name, grateful for the immensity of the city, its poverty, its heat, and above all, for its overcrowding. No one took much notice of a half-naked man sleeping on the pavements, sheltered by the arches of the great shops. There were hundreds, thousands of other half-naked men sleeping on pavements; women too, hugging little brown children to their bodies, grubbing for food." The weeks in Madras had been harrowing; the return to the world of the free, a constant strain. He could not have endured those weeks if it had not been for the big Ramoshi's gold.
Even to think of that time brought on a gush of bitter anger; a picture of a man driven to desperation by hunger, haunted by fear, his bare feet blistering in the hot streets himself. And then the picture of that same man, tramping through the goldsmiths' bazaar, turning surreptitiously to look into the shops, at the fat, sweating men sitting on clean white mattresses, the gleaming, delicate-looking balances in glass cases, the mirrored shelves of gold and silver ornaments, and the blackboards near the entrances marked with the day's rates: Gold-83-12-3, Sovereign-58-2-0. Sovereign fifty-eight, he kept telling himself as he walked, sovereign fifty-eight. His stomach rumbled with hunger. He had ten of them. Five hundred and eighty rupees, he kept counting, five hundred and eighty-one and four annas.
And how many times had he passed that particular shop, trying to pluck up courage to go in. The big Ramoshi would not have hesitated, he kept reminding himself. He had carefully tried to think out what the Ramoshi would have done in his place.
The shop was a little apart from the other jewellers' shops, separated from them by a tea-house and a betel-nut stall. It looked mean and dingy, its wares shoddy. He noticed the crowds were getting thinner and that the shops had already begun to put up their shutters, one by one. He must act quickly, unless he wanted to spend another night without food. And again his nerve had failed. He had decided to make another round, to walk up to the end of the road by the silk mart, and then come back. If the shop was still open, he would risk it.
It was open.
The fat man with the gold-work cap had risen to his feet, but when he saw Gian, he squatted down again. "What is it?" he asked frowning. This is not the first of the month! I saw you passing the last time."
For a moment, Gian did not know what he was talking about. He stood nervously, clutching a sovereign in his hand, ready to make a dash if there was any danger of being challenged. Some- thing in his attitude must have warned the shopkeeper that he was not whoever he had mistaken him for. His frown turned into a smile. 'Oh, you have come on business,' he said. "For a moment, I thought you were from the police... come for his hapta. Do come in.' He squatted down on his white mattress.
That had been a lucky break. In his faded Andaman blouse and shorts, he must have looked like a plain-clothes policeman. Boldly, he walked up the remaining steps and held out the coin. "I want to sell a sovereign,' he explained.
The man gave him a hard stare and took the coin from his hand. He turned it expertly in his fingers, almost without looking. I'll give you thirty rupees,' he offered.
Gian shook his head. He had lived with criminals long enough to know that a goldsmith who had to pay his monthly bribe to the police was always open to a shady transaction. 'No, thank you," he said, and sat down on the bench. 'It says fifty-eight rupees on the board."
Take it or leave it. The other shops will not be so... so accommodating. They will send for the police.'
With studied deliberateness, Gian pulled out his coconut knife and placed it beside him on the bench. "Send for the police, then. I will tell them you offered thirty rupees for a sovereign." The man made as if to return the coin and then turned it over in his fingers again. 'All right, fifty, then. A man must live."
"Fifty if you will buy ten sovereigns."
The fat man looked at Gian's face and then at the knife. He nodded. Gian took out the other nine sovereigns and gave them to him. He thumbed them expertly and kept them on one side, in a neat pile. From under his mattress, he took out a bundle of hundred-rupee notes and began to count them. I want the money in tens,' Gian told him.
'They always do, the man muttered. Without even looking at him, he put away the hundred-rupee notes and pulled out another bundle from under the mattress, this time of ten-rupee notes. He counted out fifty notes and gave them to Gian. Any time you have any business, you know where to come,' he said, with an ingratiating smile.
'Of course, Gian had said. 'I will remember.' He pocketed the notes, tucked the knife away into his belt, and walked out.
After that, he began to eat regular meals. He bought himself clothes, a razor and a small tin trunk. The trunk gave him a sense of respectability; he was now a man with possessions. But even after that, he hesitated a long time before moving from the pave- ment to the cheapest hotel in Madras. This necessitated his taking on a false name: Maruti Rao.
He chose the name after a great deal of thought; a name that would not sound outlandish in South India. There must be hundreds of Raos in Madras itself, he had told himself, thousands. For a few days, all went well, and then, just as he was beginning to feel secure, he nearly gave himself away.
They were all waiting for the second sitting in the dining room, and Gian was looking over the dog-eared and grease- stained sheet from the morning's Hindu that lay on the table. The room-boy had come for his keys.
"The room-boy wants your keys, Mr. Maruti Rao,' the manager had called from his desk.
He had gone on reading, and then he heard the voice again: "Can the room-boy have your keys, Mr. Maruti Rao, so that he can tidy up? Gian had looked around him to see who the manager was speaking to. The others in the room were all looking at him, the dark south Indian faces with bemused smiles on them. 'Mr. Maruti Rao, your keys,' the manager said again. "Yes, of course,' Gian said. He took the key from his pocket and walked over to the manager's desk. "Thank you,' said the manager with exaggerated politeness. "Thank you. Mr. Maruti Rao.'
Sleep had been difficult that night. The incident had pin- pointed his problem. He was a man without a name. Madras, an unfamiliar city for anyone from the north, was not the proper place to begin a new life. His accent and appearance were conspicuous. His money was running out. For several days past, he had been looking for a job. There were numerous openings in Madras just then, with new ordnance factories going up. But they never took on anyone, even as a coolie, unless he could produce a verification of his character from the police.
Towards the morning, he had been able to formulate a plan. It was by no means perfect and much depended on a number of imponderables. But there was a very good chance of succeeding. He was going to try and get a job, preferably in a big city. And if he could not get a job before his money ran out, he was going to give himself up. Suddenly it was all as simple as that. He felt free and light. He could easily have gone to sleep now, but it was too late to think of sleeping. The trams had already begun to clang in the streets below.
He packed his tin trunk and went to the office to pay the bill. The manager had asked him with a casualness he thought was studiedly elaborate:
I hope you are leaving a forwarding address, Mr. Rao, in case there are any letters."
There will be no letters,' Gian told him. He went to the Central station and bought himself a third class ticket to Duriabad. After paying for the ticket he had exactly one hundred and seventy-one rupees left.
He would never have gone to Konshet if it had not happend to be on his way to Duriabad. Even as it was, when the train stopped at Pachwad junction, he was seized with a sudden fear which made him hang back in his carriage until the guard blew the whistle for the train to start. Then, just as the train had begun to move, he jumped out.
He watched the train crawl away, wishing he had remained in it. It was at Duriabad that his plan was to be put into operation; stopping at Konshet was merely a détour which had no place in his plans. Why had he jumped out, when he had no desire to visit his own village? Was it because he was secretly afraid of what Duriabad held in store and wanted to put off arriving there?
He remembered the last time he had got out at this station, almost exactly three years before. What had then been occupying his mind were such topics as how he would have to give up cigarettes for the holidays, Debi-dayal's sister and those other men at the Birchi-bagh picnic, his next year at college all the little inconsequential subjects which college boys think about. Now, so much had changed. The three years had been like a lifetime.
The station was crowded with the traffic of a country at war.
It was easy enough to slip away, a man carrying a little tin box shoving through the crowd at the ticket gate. Who could think that he was a fugitive a convicted murderer hiding from the law? Until evening, he loitered in the jungle on the hill behind the station yard. He concealed the tin box behind a tree and marked. down the place in his mind. Then he began his ten mile trek.
The road was the same, the forest was the same; the last time, he and Hari had walked side by side along the same road, jubilant at their success, discussing plans for the pooja that Hari had planned. They had walked because Hari had wanted to spare the feet of his bullocks, Raja and Sarja; Raja and Sarja whose bodies had been scarred for the production of smallpox serum and who were later sold to the butcher at Sonarwadi.
The Big House loomed out of the shadows, a light shining through an upper storey window. He wondered who was living in the Big House now. In the dark, with the solitary lamp, it looked forlorn and deserted. The thought crossed his mind that with Vishnu-dutt gone, he was the only remaining male heir in both families. Did that mean that the Big House belonged to him? He felt a little sad to see the house deserted and he hurried on.
He walked down the village street, his feet scuffing in the familiar dust. Now and then, a dog barked idly at him from some farmer's hut, but there were no lights in any of the houses. He felt like a ghost, haunting the scene of its past. At the turning of the road was the peepul tree, its leaves shimmering in the pale moonlight. Once, Vishnu-dutt had stood under the tree and taunted him as he passed by. Now there was no one about, only the rustle of leaves in the wind, and the faraway yelping of a dog. In the moonlight, the Little House looked just as neat and well-kept as in Hari's day, the shadows obscuring its blemishes. He could almost picture Aji waiting behind the door, clutching the tray with the oil lamps and the parched rice to propitiate the evil spirits.
Gian paused by the gate, gathering his thoughts. It was important not to let one's mind wander. He had work to do; work he must finish quickly and get away; get away because he had been foolish to come; get away because almost anyone who saw him was bound to recognize him. He crept to the side of the house, to the room Hari had always occupied. He knew that by lifting the panel of the window, he could release it from the hollow groove in which it was anchored. He put his hands under the edge and forced the whole window up. The frame slid out of its groove as he knew it would. He removed a panel and placed it against the wall. Then he entered the house, flashing his torch.
There was nothing in the house except a layer of dust. All the rooms and both the verandahs were absolutely empty. There was no furniture of any kind; not a single bed or a chair or a table. The cooking pots from the kitchen, the big copper handa for heating the bath water, the farming implements in the store- room at the back, everything had gone.
His legs felt weak as the explanation came to his mind; a demonstration of the Government's revenue collectors' tremen- dous zeal. They alone had the power to distrain all movable property from a farmer's house if the tax on the land was not paid. That was what must have happened after Aji's death. The taxes on the rice fields must have fallen due, and the men from the Tehsildar's office had come and taken away everything. He could picture the men coming, scavengers of a system, proud of their calling; they must have meticulously listed everything under the eyes of the panchas' or respected witnesses, and then taken the things out and put them up for auction. They were like vultures. Once they had come and gone, only the bare bones remained, picked clean, shining white in the moonlight.
He sat down, almost sinking to the floor, looking at the wreck of what Dada and Hari had tried to preserve. A sudden wave of anger came over him. That was what the Japanese had done to him. He had been happy in the Andamans, a feri earning sixty rupees a month, holding down a job in a British regimental office. From the blackness all round him, the sunlit land of convicts beckoned to him. That was where he had made some- thing of himself, working with zeal and honesty, that was where he belonged. Now he would have to resort to deceit, even to get himself a job. Could he not have stayed on in the Andamans?
But that was where he had disgraced himself too, he suddenly remembered. The petrified face of Debi-dayal, crouching over the fallen Gurkha, and then glaring at him in utter disbelief; Debi-dayal dangling naked from the flogging frame, his back and buttocks covered in blood. The shame of what he had done came back with such force that he had to grit his teeth to fight it down. He stood up, aware that the Andamans too were a chapter from his past: the land itself had discarded him, discarded him after giving him a legacy of shame to carry through life. He wondered what the Japanese had done to Debi-dayal; to all the other convicts. He thought of the body of the big Ramoshi with his lolling head laughing at him, the fluorescent ants crawling up to feast on his entrails. Was that what the Japanese did to all their prisoners?
Almost forcibly, he brought his mind to the present. The Little House had nothing to offer him. There was no use lingering, feeling sick over the past. It was time to go. It was almost an afterthought, a surrender to a quirk of sentiment, that made him go into the prayer room behind the kitchen; there, in the beam of his torchlight, stood Shiva. They had not dared to take Shiva away. The certainty of the wrath of the god of destruction had deterred them. Relief flooded his mind. They had spared the family god-perhaps the most valuable single object in the Little House. Gian lifted the statue. It was lighter than he had thought. He carried it out of the house. He went back and replaced the window pane he had removed. Then, with Shiva cradled in his arms, he crept away from the house.
The office was big, opulent, air-conditioned. The floor was covered with a dark-red Persian carpet. Near the window was a large, stuffed sofa and two chairs, and a blackwood coffee table with flowers in a vase. Above the opposite window, was an oil painting of the new Kalinadi bridge. On the wall behind the polished desk was a portrait of a woman with flowers in her hair. That must be Sundari's mother when she was young, Gian thought. On the desk itself, in a double silver frame, were the photographs of Sundari and Debi-dayal. On the high-backed chair behind the desk, sat Dewan-bahadur Tekchand.
Tekchand looked at the young man who sat opposite him and then at the statue of Shiva on the floor. He got up and walked up to the statue for a closer look. He ran his finger over its back and then tapped it with his finger-nail. "Could you put it on the shelf there, by the window?' he said.
Gian jumped to his feet. 'It might scratch the surface, sir,' he pointed out.
Yes, it might. Tekchand walked back to his desk and picked up an issue of Fortune magazine that lay in a tray. Here, put this underneath," he said.
After Gian had placed the statue on the shelf, Tekchand sat down and motioned Gian to a chair. "What made you bring it to me?' he asked.
The deception came easy. It was a part of his plan not to tell him that he had been to his house and seen the museum. 'I have heard people talk of your collection. Better than the Lahore museum, they say."
Tekchand peered at him and then at the statue. 'Excuse my saying so, but you must be really hard pressed to be wanting to sell it, Mr..
"Talwar,' Gian told him. 'Gian Talwar. The details had been worked out in his mind. He must give his correct name and tell as few lies as possible. The plan depended on his being able to establish his identity. 'Oh, yes, Mr. Talwar."
'As it happens, I am quite hard up. But I did not realize that it was so...so obvious." Hindus don't go about selling their gods, Mr. Talwar. I can see that the idol has been worshipped, worshipped till quite recently-all the marks of paste and ochre are still there."
I am not very religious. Few things are sacred to me.'
At your age! How old are you?"
" "Twenty-three, sir.'
Tekchand gave him a long, hard stare, an inspecting, searching sort of look, almost like the one he had given the statue. His eyes took in the work-hardened body, the calloused hands, the deep tan given by long hours in the sun, the width of the shoulders. A frown came over his face and cleared away again.
"It is quite brave to say "few things are sacred to me". Particu- larly when one is twenty-three. And there is still the point that you must be pretty hard-pressed to wish to sell a household god, something that other members of your family-your father or mother, perhaps have worshipped."
It was difficult not to flinch under that cold, probing stare. It is true that I am out of a job,' Gian confessed.
"That too does not fit in-not these days. A bright young man, obviously with education, used to hard work... No; hundreds of jobs, with all this spate of work-excuse me!' He picked up the white telephone on his desk which had given a discreet burr.
"Yes?' he said into the mouthpiece. 'Send him in in a minute, will you-well, three minutes. I should be finished by then." He replaced the receiver and turned to Gian.
Gian had just been on the verge of blurting out everything, telling him who he was, and what he wanted, when the telephone had intervened. He could see that Tekchand was suspicious; he remembered that he had always been reputed for his shrewdness. It was just as well to get it over. He hesitated, knowing that this was something that had to go right. He had to sell his story to this man; and this time there was no question of drawing out the coconut knife.
'Do you mind leaving the statue here for a while? I'd like to show it to some people-experts-before making an offer."
Gian was stung by the insinuation. 'It is not a stolen idol, Dewan-bahadur-sahib.'
'I have no doubt about that. At the same time, it is just as well to be sure what one is buying. It looks rather a special piece to me, and I would like to get a second opinion before making an offer."
"Would anyone else's opinion on old bronzes really influence your own judgment, sir ?''Gian asked. gave him a sharp look, a look almost of approval.
Tekchand 'If only to put a fair valuation on the piece,' he said. I would much rather you judged it for yourself-paid me whatever you think is fair... Have you any objection to leaving it behind?*
He felt cornered. No, none whatever."
Dewan-bahadur Tekchand rose to his feet. He walked over to the shelf and looked closely at the statue. From the side, and bending down like that, he looks so much like his son, Gian reflected. The same figure, the same cast of head, the air of breeding.
"There is a mark, quite sharp, on the shoulder-the left one." He lifted the image in his hands and turned it upside down. Then he put it back on the shelf. 'It must have been hit with great force, by some kind of steel instrument. Otherwise the mark wouldn't be there. They are almost indestructible-because of the five-metal alloy. Bullet-proof, absolutely, and so light too. They should make helmets of the stuff, for soldiers, and vests for the
Governors. Shall we leave it at that, then? Come over to my house-yes, I think you had better do that-let me see, tomorrow about five; yes, five in the evening. I have a meeting at four, but I shall have finished by then. Would that suit you?"
"Yes, sir,' Gian said, rising.
My house is in Kerwad Avenue, you know, near... "I know where it is."
"Good! Five o'clock tomorrow, then. And if I am not there, perhaps you wouldn't mind waiting."
'Not at all.'
'Oh, and in the meantime, Mr. Talwar, if you would like something in advance, say a hundred rupees or so, just to tide you over. 'No, thank you, sir; my need is not quite so. so urgent."
As soon as Gian had gone out of the room Lala Tekchand lifted his telephone. He told his secretary to get him the curator of the Lahore museum. He was still speaking to the secretary when the next visitor was ushered in.
