The Painter of Signs

  This Kabir Street is choking, he said to himself. How do people live here? He bicycled along and, at the intersection of Market Road, paused to consider what he should do next. Without dismounting, he rested his feet on a wayside culvert and asked himself, Where shall I go? He had spent two hours in the lawyer’s house. Nearing one o’clock in the afternoon. He realized that he had not been paid for his labour, and, technically speaking, the day had been wasted. He should be throwing good money after bad money if he tried to do another board for the lawyer. The plank had cost four rupees and a new brush one rupee and paint one rupee. The lawyer had paid him ten, and so he still had his margin.

  His reverie ended when a policeman on traffic duty at the fountain blew his whistle and gestured to him to move on. When Raman failed to obey, he blew his whistle again and flourished his arms wildly. Raman felt, They won’t leave one in peace. This is a jungle where other beasts are constantly on the prowl to attack and bite off a mouthful, if one is not careful. As if this were New York and I blocked the traffic on Broadway. He would not recognize it, but Malgudi was changing in 1972. It was the base for a hydro-electric project somewhere on the Mempi Hills, and jeeps and lorries passed through the Market Road all day. The city had a new superintendent of police who was trying out new ideas. Policemen were posted every few yards. They seem to be excited at the spectacle of all this traffic, he thought, imagining that we are on the verge of disaster, I suppose, with pedestrians and vehicles bumping into each other.

  When the policeman blew his whistle for the third time, he moved on slowly. They won’t give me time to think what I should do next, he said to himself. It’d have saved me a lot of worry if that lawyer had asked me to stay on to lunch. They were preparing a feast, I noticed, but that niggard disposed of me with two idlis and a coconut and no money.

  If the lawyer had given him the fee for the board, he might have eaten at Anand Bhavan, where one got a sort of Bombay food, but now one had to go home, or try a place in Ellaman Street known as The Boardless Hotel, run by a man who capitalized on the fact that he had no name for his restaurant, which made it attractive to a certain type of custom. ‘Can I do you a “nameless” board?’ Raman often quipped. He speculated sometimes what he would do for a living if everyone adopted the beardless notion. They might engage him to inscribe gossip or blackmail on public walls; do it on the command of one and rub it off on the command of another. Sivanand, the municipal chairman, would provide enough material for all the blank walls of the city. His enemies could offer five rupees a line for writing, and Sivanand’s supporters ten rupees for rubbing it off. A better medium than a scandal-sheet, less perishable. You could have a new item each day about this or that man, the renting of market stalls, the contract for that piece of roadmending, change of name in order to immortalize a visiting minister and gain his favour; and a thousand other sins. What about the American milk powder meant for the orphans of India and sold on the black market? What about the government hospital surgeon who flourished his knife like an assassin and made money and acquired the much-coveted building sites beyond the railway crossing! And that wholesale grain-merchant who cornered all the rationed articles and ran the co-operative stores meant for the poor? Raman would expose them to the world if someone paid him and provided him with a spacious wall, but ironically enough, he wrote sign-boards for most of them. A sign-board was inevitable in modern life, a token of respectable and even noble intentions. But he felt abashed when he realized that he was perhaps picking his own loot in the general scramble of a money-mad world! He wished he could do without it, but realized too that it was like a desire for a dry spot while drifting along neck deep in a cesspool. Ultimately he would evolve a scheme for doing without money. While bicycling, his mind attained a certain passivity, and ideas bubbled up, lingered a while, burst, and vanished.

  He went home, and straight on to his room, where he peeled off his shirt and vest, which had become sticky on this hot day. He opened the door at the back yard, passed swiftly across the sands to the river-steps, and dipped himself in the water. Felt refreshed. He noticed a woman standing knee deep in water, with her sari tucked up, washing clothes. He stepped further down until the water reached up to his chin, bowed his head, and plunged in for a brief moment, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, suffocating pleasantly with water shooting up his nostrils; even the rustle of leaves from the tall peepul trees was unheard for a while. When he emerged on the surface and opened his eyes, he noticed the woman’s thigh. Nice sight, he told himself, Thigh fairer than her face, naturally. He lingered on the spectacle for a little while, checked his thoughts as being unholy, averted his head, and hurried back home. Living on the river, he occasionally entertained himself by watching the bathers, and was fairly accustomed to the sight of the human figure in the wet; but it always ended in self criticism. He wanted to get away from sex thoughts, minimize their importance, just as he wished to reduce the importance of money. Money and sex, he reflected, obsessive thoughts, too much everywhere - literature, magazines, drama, or cinema deal with nothing but sex all the time, but the female figure, water-soaked, is enchanting.

  He had come back to his room, dried himself, and changed his clothes. His aunt, who had dozed off in her corner, now woke up to inquire, ‘I saw you bathe at the well this morning, why again at the river?’ He felt slightly irritated. Why should she bother about his bathing habits? She concluded, ‘Take care, you may catch a cold.’

  He spurned her advice and asked, ‘Have you eaten?’

  ’Today I fast,’ she said. Her fortnightly day of fasting. He didn’t like to announce that he had not eaten. He looked at himself in the mirror, combing his hair, as his comb splashed off water-drops from his hair. Must write a poem or something, he thought, about a man who looked into a mirror for the first time and collapsed with a groan. But I’m not so bad. One has to get used to appearances, I suppose. A question of usage.

  ’What was the feast like?’ she asked from her corner. He had told her in the morning that he was likely to eat at the lawyer’s.

  ’As usual,’ he said, avoiding the truth. He reflected, Truth? On three occasions, you need not speak the truth. To save a life, to save an honour ... and the third I can’t remember, but I suppose to save an aunt the bother of cooking for you.

  He quickly left, to lunch at The Boardless Hotel.

  Occupying his usual corner at the back of the smoky hall, he ate off a banana leaf spread out on a greasy teak-wood table, uttering pleasantries to a group of habitual fellow-lunchers, the most vociferous in the company being Gupta, who was always incensed over government policies at every level, city, state, national, and international, and who anticipated disaster every morrow. Raman, of course, did not think that Gupta’s comments were worth hearing. But Gupta gave him much work, as he started a new business under a new name each year in order to confound the sales tax, income tax, and all other governmental tax-devisers. Establishing a new enterprise meant only blacking out an old sign and writing a new one in its place, and he paid down five rupees per letter without a word. And he appreciated anyone who refrained from contradicting his political views. He ate every day at the same hour at The Boardless Hotel. ‘Indira Gandhi is dynamic, no doubt, but I do not approve of -’ it could be nationalization of banks, export policy, or anything.

  ’Yes, yes,’ murmured Raman, while at the back of his mind he regretted that he had hurried away from the river-steps instead of observing the woman fully.

  ’Or take the question of national integration. I’m a Gupta and you are a Raman, from different ends of the country. Yet I do my business here, and you do your business here ... do you ask a question?’

  ’No,’ said Raman weakly, and added emphatically, ‘of course not. Why should I?’ while mentally he completed the sentence with the inquiry, The girl at the river - was she a girl or lady or woman or just a female? Was she stocky, tall, fair, or ugly? Nothing noted. The glimpse of the thigh below the hem of her tucked-up sari had monopo
lized his attention, and then the quick and desperate effort to get away from the resulting sequence of thoughts, imagery, and wishful speculations: Why did I run away from the steps? Just my principle, and disciplining my mind against sex - obsessive sex.

  They had now reached the end of the meal. Buttermilk had been served. Gupta moved on to the wash-basin to clean his fingers and rinse his mouth noisily. Raman went to another wash-basin and left. On his way out, he picked up a pan from the table of the proprietor, who was waiting to collect the bills, and passed out of the door saying, ‘Put it down in my account,’ with the usual joke, ‘and keep it there until you decide to hang a sign-board to say “Boardless” on your door, which will settle our accounts.’ He had left Gupta somewhere at the rear part of the hall in semi-darkness. Good chap, never expected you to stay on for him to finish his speech.

  Raman crossed the street and was back in his house. Aunt had not bolted the door, and he was able to slip in and pass into his room without rousing her. He felt relieved that he could achieve it - as he always found her either asking questions or narrating a story or reminiscing. His room was without table or chair. He had a mat and a roll of bedding; when he wished to sleep, he unrolled the bed, but when he wanted to read, he sat reclining on the rolled-up bed, lost in the pages of some ancient volume. His cupboard overflowed with the books he had cherished since his college days - Plato to Pickwick Papers, some of them in double-column editions, with paper turning grey, yellow, and brown and etchings that transported him. He knew a second-hand bookseller at the market who gathered books from far and wide. Raman’s great delight in life was to pick up a bargain at the antiquarian shop. He wrote the bookseller’s sign-board for him and burnished it anew from time to time, and picked up a book or two instead of presenting a bill. He was fascinated by that man, as he had absolutely no customers coming into his shop, and what sustained him was his acceptance of failure. A pessimist revelling in pessimism, and gloating over his frustrations, with all kinds of books heaped around him. The patterns and designs that book-worms created on the book-covers and insides made him ecstatic. He spent his hours studying them and discussing them with Raman. ‘Book-worms possess a sense of design,’ he would explain. ‘Some books are tunnelled end to end, some they give up with the preface, in some they create a perfect wizardry of design but confined to the end-papers, never an inch beyond. A real masterpiece must be read only in an ancient edition and you could easily recognize it by the fact that the book-worm has already gone through it end to end and left its testimonial in its own code.’

  For browsing in the afternoon Raman hardly cared what book he chose; it might be Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or Kural — that tenth-century Tamil classic. He had a general philosophy of books - all the classification that mattered was good books and bad books, and the antiquarian could be depended upon not to nurture bad books. Raman’s practice was to put his hand into the cupboard and take out the first book that his finger touched. Before settling down, he shut his door so that he might not be disturbed either by his aunt or her afternoon visitors, who generally dropped in to seek her advice on some domestic matters, listen to her discourse on the gods, swallow some herbal remedy, or listen to her prophecies from a horoscope. Raman was so used to her that he hardly ever noticed how very versatile she was. Everyone who came across her was wonder-struck at the variety of her accomplishments. But Raman was indifferent, and could never get over a feeling that she was somewhat bogus.

  Whenever Raman’s aunt could catch his attention, mostly when serving food, she spoke non-stop and punctuated her statements with, ‘If you write my life, you will be producing a masterpiece, which people will read and enjoy.’ He generally listened to her passively. But one day, provoked by her challenge, ‘If you write my story, you will make more money than you do now writing sign-boards for all the merchants of the town,’ he answered back, ‘I write not for merchants alone, but also for lawyers, doctors, and government officers.’

  ’Maybe, but if you write my story, you may throw away your brush forever. So many persons come and listen to my narrative every day!’ She had sounded so eager to dictate her story that, after finishing his dinner, he went to his room, came back to her with a pad and pencil, and said, ‘Now come on, what’s your story?’

  She was cleaning up after the dinner. ‘Wait,’ she said, as he stood behind her with his pencil poised theatrically. She went on scrubbing the kitchen floor with a short broom; to the accompaniment of its continuous scratching sound, she said, ‘Remember I was not always seventy-five or eighty years old. There was a time when I was just ten years old. You write that down first.’

  Raman made a note of it and looked up: ‘What next?’

  ’Read it aloud,’ she said. And he repeated, ‘I was not born seventy-five or eighty years old.’

  She continued, ‘When I was ten years old, I remember clearly that I could just reach up to a mirror hung on the wall in our home, to arrange my hair, which was wavy and streamed down to my hips. People came and admired me in those days.’

  Raman proceeded to take it down, pausing to throw a brief glance at her head, now covered with a thin layer of milk-white hair gathered into a small knot at the back. She followed his look and patted her head, halting the scratchy broom for a moment. ’You don’t believe me? Surely. In those days no photography was known ... Otherwise ...’ She did not finish her sentence. He studied her. Impossible to connect this frail, shrinking, wrinkled personality with her own description of herself. She continued her narrative. ‘I was one of the several children in the house. It’s not like these days when people are afraid of children. The house was full in those days. But nothing bothered anyone in those days - as long as there was a well-stocked granary and the bronze rice-pot was on the boil. My father was a priest and officiated at birthdays, funerals, and all kinds of religious functions and brought home his fee in the form of rice and vegetables and coconut and sugar-cane. Occasionally he also brought in a cow, which, as you know, when gifted to a brahmin helps a dead man’s soul to ford a difficult river in the next world.’

  ’How?’ questioned the rationalist.

  ’Don’t ask me all that,’ Aunt said. ‘That’s what our shastras say, and we don’t have to question it. It is the duty of the living to help the dead with proper rituals,’ Raman felt irritated at her beliefs. How could the Age of Reason be established if people were like this! Impossible.

  He said, ‘All right, go on with your story.’

  ’We were a well-fed lot in our home. I was especially fortunate as I had the name of the Goddess of Wealth, Laxmi, and no one dared say, “Go away, Laxmi,” as it might be inauspicious. It was always good to say, “Oh, Laxmi, welcome to our house,” and I was invited ungrudgingly into any of the hundred houses in our village. I was pampered wherever I went, and grew fat.’

  ’Where is all that fat gone now?’ asked Raman.

  The old lady had by now finished her work, laid away the broom and vessels, and said, ‘One cannot forever flourish and fatten in a father’s house, especially one born woman.’ She dictated up to the stage where she married a head constable in a near-by village and his untimely death which left her barren and widowed.

  This afternoon Raman’s fingers had picked up a gilt-edged worm-eaten book of reminiscences by an early teaplanter who had had his estate on the Mempi Hills over a hundred years before. The planter had come all the way from Cornwall and spent a lifetime in the misty hills of Mempi range cultivating tea and surviving with the help of a double-barrelled gun and a devil-may-care attitude. Raman was lost in visions and dreams of those misty ranges, the dripping plantations in monsoon, the tigers and elephants warded off with gunfire, and the social background of a remote world consisting of a colony of estate workers dominated by an English planter with his nearest neighbour, another planter, fifty miles away. Raman said to himself, Must retire on an estate when all the sign-boards of this city are finished ... and dozed off with the book on his chest. He woke up
when the fat volume slipped down to the floor with a thud, and immediately thought, Must get the money from the bangle-seller. After six, the fellow will be gone. Have to buy a new brush with the money. The one in use has begun to scratch the board.

  Sound of unlocking the cycle roused his aunt’s attention. ‘Already leaving, why?’

  He mumbled some reply in slight irritation. Wants to know everything, he thought, took his cycle down the steps and was off before the old lady could come out and ask more questions. He entered the market by its western gate, wishing to avoid Jayaraj at the other gate, who fancied himself a sign-board painter. Illiterate fellow (had no elementary notion of length - his own sign-board jutted out of the wall, blocking half the way), but he snatched up a lot of orders and - subleasing the job - got them written by Antony, who was grateful to be paid twenty paisa per letter. This business was sinking to mean levels, with illiterates, possessing no feeling for calligraphy, handling it. If this continued, he’d abandon the town and look for a career on a tea estate, live in a hut, and watch the horizon at off-hours.

  The bangle-seller’s shop, that single cubicle beyond the banana godown, was crowded with women bargaining, chattering, selecting and changing their selections, and thrusting up their wrists for more bangles. The bangle-seller was continuously squeezing wrists while slipping on the bangles. Pleasantest job, Raman reflected. He noticed that the sign-board he had delivered on the previous day was still in a corner within its paper wrapper. Evidently the man had been holding hands continuously and could not find a free moment. The lecher! Raman picked up the board and held it aloft for him to see. Some schoolgirls read it out and giggled. STRICTLY CASH said the sign, in fiery, glowing colours, ‘Cash’ particularly had the appearance of live charcoal.

  This place smells too womanly - perfume, talcum, hair-oil, perspiration - suits that lecher perhaps, but not me, reflected Raman.