Chapter 3

'Hoon... hoon,' moaned Seth Prabh Dyal, as he strained to drag his bundle from under the bunk of a third class carriage in the slow train which jerkily ran from Sham Nagar to Daulatpur. The Seth, a broad-shouldered, tall, gaunt man from Kangra, who seemed more a soldier than a business man, was half asleep. He had sat through the night in an awk- ward, cramped position on the wooden boards in the packed compartment, and was getting ready to disembark long before the train was anywhere near its destination. He blew a mouthful of heavy breath as he struggled to gather his luggage from under the bunk where he had placed it, and mcpped his brow to wipe off the sweat. 'Hoon-an-haan . . . he heaved again. The bundle seemed heavy as lead, though it was soft to the touch and slippery. 'Hoooo.. haa,' he now dragged, willing more power into his limbs, and drew, half in fear, half in wondér, the sleeping body of Munoo from where it had lain all night buried amid the congestion of trunks, wooden boxes, rolled" up beddings, and bundles of all kinds, from dislocated bed- steads wound in their hemp mattresses to shapeless mounds of foodstuffs, clothing and nicknacks bound in sheets of cotton, roughly knotted on the top. 'Ram re Ram!' the Seth exclaimed, reverently but with a broad grin on his pale, brave face, adorned with a well- groomed black moustache. 'What occasion is there for such hilarity early in the morning!' muttered Ganpat, the Seth's young partner in business, with a dark brown goat-like face, hollow-cheeked and pinched, as he lay sprawled on some sacks of merchan- dise in a vain effort to sleep. 'La hol wallah!' shouted a Muhammadan peasant as he gazed at Munoo, who now lay curled up at Prabh Dyal's feet. 'Who could this be? The son of Eblis!' Wah Guru! Wah Guru!' whispered a Sikh peasant in consternation. 'Strange are the ways of the Wah Gurul' 'Is he alive or dead?' a woman strained to know as she crouched on the floor, holding the teats of her breast to give suck to the child in her arms. Other passengers in the compartment half opened their eyes through the dawn and, dazed with wonder at so un- canny a spectacle, began to ask: 'Who is it? Where does he come from?" Munoo could not speak. He was terror stricken. When Prabh Dyal fished him out he was in a nightmare, in which elephantine giants were trampling on his body and weird two-horned devils were lashing him with fury. 'Strange are the ways of God, indeed!' said Prabh Dyal, more to himself than to anyone else. 'He is a very auspicious find. He seems to be from the hills.' You should be happy now,' said Ganpat mocking. 'Here is a son for you, ready-made and complete. And you can forget all about the herbs that you were going to fetch for your wife or yourself, for I suspect,' he added grimly, 'that you want medicine for yourself. It is you who are impotent and not your wife who is barren!' 'What is your name? Where do you come from? Whose child are you?' asked Prabh Dyal in the hillman's accent that he had not forgotten, though he had left home early 2nd lived in the city of Daulatpur, working his way up from a coolie in the streets to the proprietorship of a pickle- making and essence-brewing factory. 'I was called Munoo at Bilaspur, Mundu at Sham Nagar,' Munoo began, as if the accent of the hills had suddenly re- leased his speech. 'My father died and then my mother died toc. My uncle, Daya Ram, who is a chaprasi in the office of the Bank at Sham Nagar got me a job as a servant in the house of a Babu. Yesterday the Babu beat me and I have run away.... 83 At this he was possessed by a mixture of fear and self-pity, and his face twisted against his will, and he began to cry. Then he was ashamed of his tears and he hid his eyes behind the rubbings of his right first. 'He is bithot tikkus!" said a young Hindu student, who affected an English accent both to impress the illiterate peasants and to live up to his strange conglomeration of English and Indian clothes--a faded, spotted necktie, a velvet waistcoat, a pair of khaki shorts and a most flam- boyant turban.. 'We had better take him with us,' said Prabh to his partner. 'We don't know who he is,' replied Ganpat. 'He may be a rogue, a thief. But, of course, we need another boy at the works to help Tulsi. Maharaj and Bonga, to run errands and do odd jobs. And, it seems, he will be glad enough to have the food, and we need not pay him." 'Will you come with us ohe Munoo?" asked Prabha, ignoring his partner's advice and gently stroking the boy's dark hair, which grew long on all sides and shadowed his wheat-coloured face. Will you come and live with us? I am from Hamirpur, near Bilaspur, so we will look after you.' Munoo moved his head up and down to signify assent, but did not speak as he hovered on the edge of a doubt. For he had not thought about what he was going to do since he had escaped, having been too occupied by the fear of being caught and taken back. The Seth Prabh Dyal patted the boy on his back and said: 'Come, come, now be a brave lad. Wipe your eyes. We will take care of you. Look, we are almost nearing Daulatpur!' He made room for the boy on the bunk, by withdrawing his left leg and squeezing him in the space thus vacated. He felt very tender towards the boy. He had suddenly recognised a kinship with him, the affinity his soul felt for his unborn son. Only he tried to make himself believe that it might be possible to regard this completely strange boy 84 as a son. He tried to imagine what his parents were. "They must have been poor,' he thought, 'but then all hill folk are poor.' He recalled the images of his own father and "They must have been poor,' he thought, but then all hill folk are poor.' He recalled the images of his own father and mother, who had died at Hamirpur during his absence in the city of Daulatpur: his earnings as a coolie had not been enough to procure them all rice twice a day. He wished they were alive now and could enjoy the comfortable in- come the factory brought in. He heaved a sigh to forget the impossible. This boy's parents,' he reflected, 'died before he became a wage-carner. He is not as guilty as I.' But the boy was like him really. He would probably feel the same about his parents. It was always like that except for a rich men's son like Ganpat, whose father was a successful broker and had given him money, even when Ganpat had dis- graced the family by gambling, drinking and whoring. 'Strange. Prabha wondered, 'that a youth like Ganpat who had everything should have warted his time, while I myself have pined for knowledge and have never had the chance of acquiring it. And this boy, I wonder whether he can read and write.... 'Did you go to school, ohe Munoo?' he asked gently, turning round. Yes I was in the fifth class when my uncle brought me to carn my living in town." . He will be able to do accounts for you,' mocked Ganpat, waking from a doze. "Yes, Prabha said, taking up the suggestion 87/350 make him our clerk.' Don't puff the boy up from the very start.' remarked Ganpat with bitter malice. "The seducer of his daughter! He won't rest his feet on earth, what with your desire to adopt him as a son and to give him the status of a Munshi. You hardly know yet who he is. He is probably a thief, the runaway scamp!' Prabha smiled sheepishly as if he were afraid of his part- ner. But he could not help being naturally paternal to the boy. The train was speeding, through the outskirts of Daulat- 85 pur. Munoo was staring out of the window. The golden domes of a temple flashed past his eyes on a background of broad-leaved banana trees. He inclined towards the window and traced the naked forms of men, some dragging water from a well and pouring it over their heads, some rubbing each other's bodies with oil, others wrestling on a pitch. But the scene passed before he had taken it in completely. He prepared himself to take in the next sight: a mosque with four minarets from which a green-turbaned, white- robed figure, whom he presumed to be a mullah, was bawl- ing out the call to prayers. His eyes sped past the scores of flat roofed houses and rows of stands and stalls at a crossing where, beyond a blue-uniformed signalman who waved a green flag to the train, crowds of quick-moving city folk were already busy buying and selling. Then Munoo's rudi- mentary stare travelled with the motor cars and lorries that moved, leaving clouds of dust behind them, along a road parallel to the railway. The smoke of a factory chimney on the back wall of which was written in huge Hindustani letters 'Soda water works' lured him beyond the neighbou ing tanks of the 'Burma Oi! Company,' to the heavens, where, unlike anything he had seen before, unlike anything he had ever imagined, flew a droning bird, a queer steel bird with straight wings, leaving a streamline of smoke in its trail across the even blue sky. Retracing their course to the earth, his eyes now surveyed miles and miles of the houses of Daulatpur city and, as if overpowered by the vast magnitude of this amorphous world, they turned to see the inmost thoughts in his breast. There was only a curious flutter of excitement in his heart, like the thrill of fear and happiness which had filled him when he first laid eyes on Sham Nagar, the fear of the unknown in his bowels and the stirring of hope for a better life in the new world he was entering.