The previous day he had sat with the mendicants holding out their hands for alms on the temple steps. Some of them able-bodied like himself, some maimed, blind or half-witted, but all of them, though looking hungry, had a nonchalant air which he envied. At the evening time, worshippers passing the portals of the temple flung coins into the alms bowls, and it was a matter of luck in whose bowl a particular coin fell. There was a general understanding among the mendicants to leave one another alone to face their respective luck, but to pick a coin up for the blind man if it fell off his bowl. The hippie, having perfected the art of merging with his surroundings, was unnoticed among them. The priest, being in a good mood on this particular evening, had distributed to the mendicants rice sweetened with jaggery, remnants of offerings to the gods. It was quite filling, and after a drink of water from the street tap, the hippie had slept at the portal of the temple.
At dawn, he saw the cobbler arrive with a gunnysack over his shoulder and settle down under the branch of the margosa; he was struck by the composition of the green margosa bathed in sunlight looming over the grey temple wall. The hippie enjoyed the sense of peace pervading this spot. No one seemed to mind anything—the dust, the noise and the perils of chaotic traffic as cycles and pedestrians bumped and weaved their way through Moroccans, lorries and scooters, which madly careered along, churning up dust, wheels crunching and horns honking and screaming as if antediluvian monsters were in pursuit of one another. Occasionally a passer-by gurgled and spat out into the air or urinated onto a wall without anyone’s noticing or protesting. The hippie was struck by the total acceptance here of life as it came.
With his head bowed, the cobbler went on slicing off leather with an awl or stabbed his bodkin through and drew up a waxed thread, while stitches appeared at the joints as if by a miracle, pale strands flashing into view like miniature lightning. The cobbler had a tiny tin bowl of water in which he soaked any unruly piece of leather to soften it, and then hit it savagely with a cast-iron pestle to make it limp. When at rest, he sat back, watching the passing feet in the street, taking in at a glance the condition of every strap, thong and buckle on the footwear parading before his eyes. His fingers seemed to itch when they did not ply his tools, which he constantly honed on the kerbstone. Observing his self-absorption while his hands were busy, the hippie concluded that, apart from the income, the man derived a mystic joy in the very process of handling leather and attacking it with sharpened end. For him, even food seemed to be a secondary business. Beyond beckoning a young urchin at the corner food shop to fetch him a cup of tea or a bun, he never bothered about food. Sometimes, when he had no business for a long stretch, he sat back, looking at the tree-top ahead, his mind and attention switched off. He was quite content to accept that situation, too—there was neither longing nor regret in that face. He seldom solicited work vociferously or rejected it when it came. He never haggled when footwear was thrust up to him, but examined it, spread out the poster under the man’s feet, attended to the loose strap or the worn-out heel and waited for his wages. He had to be patient; they always took time to open the purse and search for a coin. If the customer was too niggardly, the cobbler just looked up without closing his fingers on the coin, which sometimes induced the other to add a minute tip, or made him just turn and walk off without a word.
While the cobbler was stitching his sandals, the hippie sat down on the sheet of paper provided for him. He was amused to notice that he had lowered himself onto the head of a colourful film-star. Not that he needed a paper to sit upon, but that seemed to be the proper thing to do here; otherwise, the cobbler was likely to feel hurt. The hippie was quite used to the bare ground; perhaps in due course he might qualify himself to sit on even a plank of nails with beatitude in his face. It was quite possible that his search for a guru might culminate in that and nothing more. In his wanderings he had seen in Benares yogis sitting on nails in deep meditation. He had seen at Gaya a penitent who had a long needle thrust through his cheeks—only it interfered with his tongue, which he didn’t mind, since he was under a vow of silence. The hippie had watched at Allahabad during Kumbha Mela millions praying and dipping at the confluence of the rivers Jumna and Ganges. In their midst was a sadhu who had a full-grown tiger for company, claiming it to be his long-lost brother in a previous birth; men handled deadly cobras as if they were ropes. There were fire-eaters, swallowers of swords and chewers of glass and cactus. Or the yogis who sat in cremation grounds in a cataleptic state, night and day, without food or movement, unmindful of the corpses burning on the pyres around them. In Nepal, a person produced a silver figure out of thin air with a flourish of his hand and gave it to the hippie; he treasured it in his bag—a little image of a four-armed goddess. In every case, at first he was filled with wonder and he wanted to learn their secret, found the wonder-workers willing to impart their knowledge to him for no higher exchange than a pellet of opium; but eventually he began to ask himself, ‘What am I to gain by this achievement? It seems to me no more than a moon walk. Only less expensive.’ He found no answer that satisfied his inquiry. He noticed on the highway, in villages and rice fields, men and women going about their business with complete absorption—faces drawn and serious but never agitated. He felt that they might have a philosophy worth investigating. He travelled by train, trekked on foot, hitchhiked in lorries and bullock carts. Why? He himself could not be very clear about it.
He wished to talk to the cobbler. He took out a beedi, the leaf-wrapped tobacco favoured by the masses. (The cigarette was a sophistication and created a distance, while a beedi, four for a paisa, established rapport with the masses.) The cobbler hesitated to accept it, but the hippie said, ‘Go on, you will like it, it’s good, the Parrot brand . . .’ The hippie fished matches from his bag. Now they smoked for a while in silence, the leafy-smelling smoke curling up in the air. Auto-rickshaws and cycles swerved around the corner. An ice-cream-seller had pushed his barrow along and was squeaking his little rubber horn to attract customers, the children who would burst out of the school gate presently. By way of opening a conversation, the hippie said, ‘Flowers rain on you,’ pointing to the little whitish-yellow flowers whirling down from the tree above. The cobbler looked and flicked them off his coat and then patted them off his turban, which, though faded, protected him from the sun and rain and added a majesty to his person. The hippie repeated, ‘You must be blessed to have a rain of flowers all day.’
The other looked up and retorted, ‘Can I eat that flower? Can I take it home and give it to the woman to be put into the cooking pot? If the flowers fall on a well-fed stomach, it’s different—gods in heaven can afford to have flowers on them, not one like me.’
‘Do you believe in God?’ asked the hippie, a question that surprised the cobbler. How could a question of that nature ever arise? Probably he was being tested by this mysterious customer. Better be careful in answering him. The cobbler gestured towards the temple in front and threw up his arm in puzzlement. ‘He just does not notice us sometimes. How could He? Must have so much to look after.’ He brooded for a few minutes at a picture of God, whose attention was distracted hither and thither by a thousand clamouring petitioners praying in all directions. He added, ‘Take the case of our big officer, our collector—can he be seen by everyone or will he be able to listen to everyone and answer their prayers? When a human officer is so difficult to reach, how much more a god? He has so much to think of . . .’ He lifted his arms and swept them across the dome of heaven from horizon to horizon. It filled the hippie with a sense of immensity of God’s programme and purpose, and the man added, ‘And He can’t sleep, either. Our pundit in this temple said in his lecture that gods do not wink their eyelids or sleep. How can they? In the winking of an eyelid, so many bad things might happen. The planets might leave their courses and bump into one another, the sky might pour down fire and brimstone or all the demons might be let loose and devour humanity. Oh, the cataclysm!’ The hippie shuddered at the vision of disaster that?
??d overtake us within one eye-winking of God. The cobbler added, ‘I ask God every day and keep asking every hour. But when He is a little free, He will hear me; till then, I have to bear it.’
‘What, bear what?’ asked the hippie, unable to contain his curiosity.
‘This existence. I beg Him to take me away. But the time must come. It’ll come.’
‘Why, aren’t you happy to be alive?’ asked the hippie.
‘I don’t understand you,’ the cobbler said, and at that moment, noticing a passing foot, he cried, ‘Hi! That buckle is off. Come, come, stop,’ to a young student. The feet halted for a second, paused but passed on. The cobbler made a gesture of contempt. ‘See what is coming over these young fellows! They don’t care. Wasteful habits, I tell you. That buckle will come off before he reaches his door; he will just kick the sandals off and buy new ones.’ He added with a sigh, ‘Strange are their ways nowadays. For five paise he could have worn it another year.’ He pointed to a few pairs of sandals arrayed on his gunnysack and said, ‘All these I picked up here and there, thrown away by youngsters like him. Some days the roadside is full of them near that school; the children have no patience to carry them home, or some of them feel it is a shame to be seen carrying a sandal in hand! Not all these here are of a pair or of the same colour, but I cut them and shape them and colour them into pairs.’ He seemed very proud of his ability to match odd shoes. ‘If I keep them long enough, God always sends me a customer, someone who will appreciate a bargain. Whatever price I can get is good enough.’
‘Who buys them?’
‘Oh, anybody, mostly if a building is going up; those who have to stand on cement and work prefer protection for their feet. Somehow I have to earn at least five rupees every day, enough to buy some corn or rice before going home. Two mouths waiting to be fed at home. What the days are coming to! Not enough for two meals. Even betel leaves are two for a paisa; they used to be twenty, and my wife must chew even if she has no food to eat. God punishes us in this life. In my last birth I must have been a moneylender squeezing the life out of the poor, or a shopkeeper cornering all the rice for profits—till I render all these accounts, God’ll keep me here. I have only to be patient.’
‘What do you want to be in your next birth?’
The cobbler got a sudden feeling again that he might be talking to a god or his agent. He brooded over the question for some time. ‘I don’t want birth in this world. Who knows, they may decide to send me to hell, but I don’t want to go to hell.’ He explained his vision of another world where a mighty accountant sat studying the debits and credits and drawing up a monumental balance sheet appropriate for each individual.
‘What have you done?’ asked the hippie.
A suspicion again in the cobbler’s mind that he might be talking to a god. ‘When you drink, you may not remember all that you do,’ he said. ‘Now my limbs are weak, but in one’s younger years, one might even set fire to an enemy’s hut at night while his children are asleep. A quarrel could lead to such things. That man took away my money, threatened to molest my wife, and she lost an eye in the scuffle when I beat her up on suspicion. We had more money, and a rupee could buy three bottles of toddy in those days. I had a son, but after his death, I changed. It’s his child that we have at home now.’
‘I don’t want to ask questions,’ said the hippie, ‘but I, too, set fire to villages and, flying over them, blasted people whom I didn’t know or see.’
The cobbler looked up in surprise. ‘When, where, where?’
The hippie said, ‘In another incarnation; in another birth. Can you guess what may be in store for me next?’
The cobbler said, ‘If you can wait till the priest of the temple comes . . . A wise man, he’ll tell us.’
The hippie said, ‘You were at least angry with the man whose hut you burned. I didn’t even know whose huts I was destroying. I didn’t even see them.’
‘Why, why, then?’ Seeing that the other was unwilling to speak, the cobbler said, ‘If it had been those days, we could have drunk and eaten together.’
‘Next time,’ said the hippie, and rose to go. He slipped his feet into the sandals. I’ll come again,’ he said, though he was not certain where he was going or stopping next. He gave the cobbler twenty-five paise, as agreed. He then took the silver figure from his bag and held it out to the cobbler. ‘Here is something for you . . .’
The cobbler examined it and cried, ‘Oh, this is Durga the goddess; she will protect you. Did you steal it?’
The hippie appreciated the question as indicating perfectly how he had ceased to look respectable. He replied, ‘Perhaps the man who gave it to me stole it.’
‘Keep it, it’ll protect you,’ said the cobbler, returning the silver figure. He reflected, after the hippie was gone, ‘Even a god steals when he has a chance.’
HUNGRY CHILD
With thatched sheds constructed in rows, blindingly floodlit, an old football ground beyond the level crossing had been transformed into Expo ’77-78 by an enterprising municipal committee. At the Expo, as they claimed, you could get anything from a pin to an automobile, although the only automobile in sight was a 1930 Ford displayed under a festoon of coloured bulbs and offered as a prize to anyone with a certain lucky number on his ticket. Special buses leaving the Market Road disgorged masses of humanity at the Expo archway all day. Loudspeakers mounted on poles every few yards saturated the air with an amalgam of commercial messages and film-songs, against the unceasing din of the crowd. The organizers had succeeded in creating an incredible world of noise, glare, dust and litter.
Raman found the crowd tiresome and the assaults on his eardrums painful. He wished that nature had provided the human ear with a flap to shut off noise. ‘Oh, then how blissfully I could move about, untouched by that incessant ranting about Tiger-brand underwear or that obscene film-song conveying the heartache of some damn fool . . .’ He further reflected, ‘I came here to escape boredom, but this is hell, a bedlam . . .’ He regretted the trip he had undertaken from Ellaman Street, but he could not make up his mind to leave; the bustle and pandemonium seemed to take him out of himself, which relief he needed these days. He drifted along with the crowd, occasionally pausing to take a professional and critical look at a signboard or poster. The one that arrested his attention at the moment was a huge placard outside a stall, depicting a woman who had the body of a fish from the waist down. He speculated how he would have dealt with this fish-woman if he had had a chance to design this and other signboards. He would have imparted a touch of refinement to the Expo and also minted money if only he had cared to seek their patronage. But he was in the grip of a deadly apathy. He saw no point in any sort of activity. For months he had not gone near his workshed, which proved a blessing to his rival Jayaraj of the Market Gate. ‘Let him prosper,’ Raman reflected, ‘although he has the artistic sense of a chimpanzee.’ He stared at the picture of the fish-woman with a mixture of disgust and fascination, while the promoter of this show stood on a platform and appealed through a tin megaphone, ‘Don’t miss the chance to see this divine damsel, a celestial beauty living half-sunk in water; rare opportunity, talk to her, ask her questions and she will answer . . .’
‘What questions?’ Raman asked himself. Could he ask how she managed not to catch a cold or what fabric was best suited to clothe her scaly body? While he was hesitating whether to go in or not, he heard over the babble the announcement ‘Boy of five, calls himself Gopu, cries for his parents, come at once to the Central Office and take him . . .’ For the fourth time this message was coming through the loudspeakers. He pulled himself out of the spell cast by the fish-woman, determined to go up and take a look at the lost child. ‘Must know what sort of a child gets lost. What sort of parents are those that prove so careless, or have they wilfully abandoned the child? Perhaps a bastard or a delinquent to be got rid of . . .’ He moved towards the Central Office, cleaving his way through a long queue of people outside a medical exhibition displaying hu
man kidney, heart, lungs and foetus, in glass jars, along with an X-ray of a live person.
On the way he noticed pink, gossamer-like candy spinning out of a rotating trough on wheels and bought one—it was very light but huge, and covered his face when he tried to bite it. ‘Rather absurd to be nibbling this in public,’ he thought. He held it away as if bearing it for someone else, and discreetly bit off mouthfuls now and then with relish. ‘Sweetest stuff on earth,’ he reflected. Holding it like a bouquet in one hand, only a few wisps around his mouth to betray his weakness for it, he stepped into the Central Office, which was at the southern gateway of the Expo. A busy place with typists at work and a variety of persons rushing in and out. In their midst he noticed a boy sitting on a bench, vigorously swinging his legs and amusing himself by twisting and bending and noisily rocking the bench on its rickety, uneven legs, much to the annoyance of a clerk at a table who kept saying, ‘Quiet, quiet, don’t make all that noise,’ at which the boy, who had rotund cheeks and a bulbous nose, grimaced with satisfaction, displaying a row of white teeth minus the two front ones. ‘Must be seven, not five,’ Raman thought on noticing it. Raman held up to him the half-eaten candy, at which the boy shot forward as if from a catapult, snatched it and buried his face in its pink mass. Raman appreciated his gusto and patted his head. The grumpy office clerk looked up to ask, ‘Are you taking him away?’
‘Yes,’ said Raman on a sudden impulse. The other thrust a register at him and said, ‘Sign here.’ Raman signed illegibly as ‘Loch Ness Monster’.
‘Why don’t you people keep an eye on your children? Don’t lose him again . . . It’s a bother to keep such a boy here . . . can’t attend to any routine work. Now I’ll have to stay here till midnight to clear my papers,’ said the clerk.
‘You announced that he was crying?’