Chapter 5- Part-2

Rangamma lifts her head a little and whispers respectfully, I don't think we need fear that, Bhattarè? The pariahs could always come as far as the temple door, couldn't they? And across the Mysore border, in Belur, they can even enter the temple once a year. . . .

'That is what you think, Rangamma. But I, who so often go to the city, I see it more clearly. Listen! Do you know Advocate Rama Sastri, the son of the old, orthodox Ranga Sastri, has now been talking of throw- ing open his temple to the pariahs? "The public temples are under the Government," he says, "but this one was built by my ancestors and I shall let the pariahs in, and which bastard of his father will say No?" I hope, however, the father will have croaked before that. But really, aunt, we live in a strange age. What with their modern education and their modern women. Do you know, in the city they already have grown-up girls, fit enough to be mothers of two or three children, going to the Universities? And they talk to this boy and that boy; and what they do amongst themselves, heaven alone knows. And one, too, I heard, went and married a Mohomedan. Really, aunt, that is horrible!'

'That is horrible,' repeats Satamma. After all, my son, it is the Kaliyuga-floods, and as the sastras say, there will be the confusion of castes and the pollution tomorrow they would like to be in the heart of it. They will one day put themselves in the place of the brahmins and begin to teach the Vedas. I heard only the other day that in the Mysore Sanscrit College some pariahs sought admission. Why, our Beadle Timmayya will come one of these days to ask my daughter in marriage! Why shouldn't he?'

Rangamma lifts her head a little and whispers respectfully, I don't think we need fear that, Bhattarè? The pariahs could always come as far as the temple door, couldn't they? And across the Mysore border, in Belur, they can even enter the temple once a year. . . .

'That is what you think, Rangamma. But I, who so often go to the city, I see it more clearly. Listen! Do you know Advocate Rama Sastri, the son of the old, orthodox Ranga Sastri, has now been talking of throw- ing open his temple to the pariahs? "The public temples are under the Government," he says, "but this one was built by my ancestors and I shall let the pariahs in, and which bastard of his father will say No?" I hope, however, the father will have croaked before that. But really, aunt, we live in a strange age. What with their modern education and their modern women. Do you know, in the city they already have grown-up girls, fit enough to be mothers of two or three children, going to the Universities? And they talk to this boy and that boy; and what they do amongst themselves, heaven alone knows. And one, too, I heard, went and married a Mohomedan. Really, aunt, that is horrible!'

'That is horrible,' repeats Satamma. After all, my son, it is the Kaliyuga-floods, and as the sastras say, there will be the confusion of castes and the pollution' of progeny. We can't help it, perhaps. But Rangamma whispers again from the corner: 'Has the Mahatma approved it? I don't think so. He always says let the castes exist, let the separate-eating exist, let not one community marry with the other- no, no, Bhattarè, the Mahatma is not for all this pollution.' 

'Is that why, Rangamma,' interrupts Bhatta angrily, Is that why the Mahatma has adopted a pariah girl as a daughter? He is a Vaisya and he may do what he likes. That does not pollute me. But, Rama-Rama, really if we have to hang the sacred thread over the shoulders of every pariah it's impossible, impossible.

In fact that's what I was saying to the Swami the other day.'

'Why, have you been to the Swami?' asks Satamma, eagerly.

'When I was last in the city, yes. He had come back from his tour in Mysore. And I, good brahmin that I am, I went to touch his feet and ask for the tirtham. You know our Seetharamu, Maddur Seetharamu, is his Master of the Household. And he is my wife's elder brother's wife's brother-in-law. And after I have seen the Swami, I go to see Seetharamu and we speak of this and that, of Hariharapura, of Kanthapura and Talassana, and then suddenly he turns to me and says, "I want your help, Bhattarè "And I say, "What can I do for you, Seetharamu-anything you like!"- he says, "The Swami is worried over this pariah move- ment, and he wants to crush it in its seed, before its cactus-roots have spread far and wide. You are a Bhatta and your voice is not a sparrow voice in your village, and you should speak to your people and organize a brahmin party. Otherwise brahminism is as good as kitchen ashes. The Mahatma is a good man and a simple man. But he is making too much of these carcass-eating pariahs. Today it will be the pariahs, tomorrow it will be the Mohomedans, and the day after the Europeans. We must stop this. The Swami ... says he will outcaste every brahmin who has touched a pariah. That is the right way to begin. Bhattarè, we need your help."-" Well, Seetharamu," say I," this Bhatta who has been a pontifical brahmin cannot be on the side of the pariahs. And I know that in our good village there is no brahmin who has drunk of our holy Himavathy's water and wants caste pollutions. I shall speak to our people," say I. And that is why I have come to see you.'

Rangamma and Satamma and Ramakrishnayya are troubled and silent. From the lit Front-House comes the

Rock, Rock,

Rock the cradle of the Dancer, Rock the cradle of the Blue-god,

Rock the cradle of the Blissful, Rock the cradle of the One,

Rock, Rock, Rock,

and from the byre comes the noise of the calves sucking and the spitting sounds of the wall-lizards, and from the Temple-Square-Tamarind comes the evening clamour of the hanging bats. Suddenly a shooting star sweeps across the sky between the house-roof and the byre-roof, and Ramakrishnayya says, 'Some good soul has left the earth'. This cools Bhatta, and wiping his forehead, he says:

'Rangamma, you are as a sister to me, and I am no butcher's son to hurt you. I know you are not a soul to believe in all this pariah business. But I only want to put you on your guard against Moorthy and these city boys. I see no fault in khadi and all that. But it is this pariah business that has been heavy on my soul. . . .

Our Rangamma is no village kid. It is not for nothing she got papers from the city, Tai-nadu, Vish- wakarnataka, Deshabhandu, and Jayabharatha, and she knows so many, many things, too, of the plants that weep, of the monkeys that were the men we have become, of the worms, thin-as-dust worms that get into your blood and give you dysentery and plague and cholera. She told us, too, about the stars that are so far that some have poured their light into the blue space long before you were born, long before you were born or your father was born or your grandfather was born; and just as a day of Brahma is a million million years of ours, the day of the stars is a million million times our day, and each star has a sun and each sun has a moon, and each moon has an earth, and some there are that have two moons, and some three, and out there between the folds of the milky way, she told us, out there, there is just a chink, and you put your eyes to a great tube and see another world with sun and moon and stars, all bright and floating in the diamond dust of God. And that gave us such a shiver, I tell you, that we would not sit alone in the kitchen that night or the night after. And she told us, too, how in the far- off countries there were air vehicles that move, that veritably move in the air, and how men sit in them and go from town to town; and she spoke to us, too, of the speech that goes across the air; and she told us, mind you, she assured us you could sit here and listen to what they are saying in every house in London and Bombay and Burma. But there was one thing she spoke of again and again-and, to tell you the truth, it was after the day the sandal merchant of the North came to sell us his wares and had slept on her veranda and had told her of the great country across the moun- tains, the country beyond Kabul and Bukhara and Lahore, the country of the hammer and sickle and electricity-it was then onwards that she began to speak of this country, far, far away; a great country, ten times as big as say Mysore, and there in that country there were women who worked like men, night and day; men and women who worked night and day, and when they felt tired, they went and spent their holiday in a palace-no money for the railway, no money for the palace and when the women were going to  have a child, they had two months' and three months' holiday, and when the children were still young they were given milk by the Government, and when they were grown up they were sent free to school, and when they grew older still they went to the Universities free, too, and when they were still more grown-up, they got a job and they got a home to live in and they took a wife to live with and they had many children and they lived on happily ever after. And she told us so many marvellous things about that country; and mind you, she said that there all men are equal-every one equal to every other and there were neither the rich nor the poor.... Pariah Ramakka, who heard of it one day, said, 'So in that country pariahs and brahmins are the same, and there are no people to give paddy to be husked and no people to do it strange country. Mother.' But Rangamma simply said, 'My paper says nothing about that,' and continued measuring the unhusked rice. Oh, she told us so many, many interesting things and all came from these white and blue papers, sister!

So, as I was saying, Rangamma was no village kid like us, and she could hold a word-for-word fight with Bhatta. But you know what a deferent, soft-voiced, gentle-gestured woman she is. She simply said some- thing about Gandhiji's Life, and how she would look into it, and how she would ask Moorthy-and at the name of Moorthy, Bhatta again went into a rage and said that the first time he will see Moorthy in the Pariah Street he will have him outcasted and old Rama- krishnayya said, with his usual goodness, that it was no use harming a young man, and that young men were always fervent till they touched the bitter leaves of life, and that Moorthy, particularly, was a nice brahminic boy-he neither smoked nor grew city-hair, nor put on suits and hats and boots. And at this Bhatta grew suddenly calm and respectful and he said it was all a passing anger, and that Moorthy was a good fellow and if only he would get married and settle down, nobody would be happier than this poor Bhatta, well-wisher of cows and men. .

Then Rangamma's sister Kamalamma came along with her widowed daughter Ratna, and Bhatta rose up to go, for he could never utter a kind word to that young widow, who not only went about the streets alone like a boy, but even wore her hair to the left like a concubine, and she still kept her bangles and her nose-rings and ear-rings, and when she was asked why she behaved as though she hadn't lost her husband, she said that that was nobody's business, and that if these sniffing old country hens thought that seeing a man for a day, and this when one is ten years of age, could be called a marriage, they had better eat mud and drown themselves in the river. But Kamalamma silenced her and called her shameless and wicked-tongued a creature and said that she ought never to have been sent to school, and that she would bring dishonour to the house. Ratna would beat her clothes on the river- stones, beat them and wet them and squeeze them, and packing them up, she would hurry back from the river alone all alone across the fields and the lantana growth. The other women would speak of the coming Rampur Temple festival or of the Dharmawar sari which young Suramma had bought for her son's hair- cutting ceremony, and when Kamalamma was gone they would spit behind her and make this face and that, and throwing a handful of dust in her direction, pray for the destruction of the house. Kenchamma protected virtue and destroyed evil. She would work the way of Dharma....

Bhatta, however, would not say all this. After all he was not a woman, and Ratna's father was, moreover, his second cousin. And Ratna had lain in his lap as a child, and had played with him in his courtyard, and if she was rough of tongue, she was of the Chanderhalli family and she would bring shame to none. And as for all these fools who were saying she was found openly talking to Moorthy in the temple, and alone too-well, let them say what they like. You cannot put wooden tongues to men.

But somehow Bhatta could not bear the sight of these modern ways' of Kamalamma's daughter, par- ticularly since she came of age, and when her sari fell over her shoulders, and bared her bodice it always made him feel uncomfortable. So he rose up and, say- ing 'I'll go,' went down the steps and disappeared into the night.At Agent Nanjudia's house they were haggling with some peasants, and in the Post-Office-House there was a lamp on the wall, and they were seated at their eating-leaves, and when Bhatta turned round the Promontory Corner and passed Rama Chetty's shop, he saw in front of him a figure moving with slow, heavy steps. And as the sky was all black now and not a star stood to the summit of the mountains, he thought it was Pandit Venkateshia going to see his daughter. But he could not make sure and something stopped him from saying Who's there?', and the nearer Bhatta came the slower moved the person, and at last, when Bhatta was by Dore's cardamom gardens, something in him trembled and he said 'Who's there, brother?' And there was no answer but a cough and a sneeze and the beating of a stick against the quiet branches of the pipal; and when Bhatta repeated 'Who's there, brother!', this time, firm and sharp, came the answer, 'What does that matter to you?' and as Bhatta enteredhis courtyard, there fell on the figure a pale, powdery light from the veranda lantern, showing a beard, a lathi, and a row of metal buttons. Then suddenly the figure turned to Bhatta and said: 'Oh, is it Bhattarè? Pardon me. . . . I'm Badè Khan the policeman. I'd just gone to Rama Chetty for some provisions. ... 'It does not matter, Sahib,' says Bhatta. 'Oh, it does matter, Maharaja. I fall at your feet.'