Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (4 page)

Benazir Bhutto returns to Pakistan. Gorbachev – Reagan summit. Nuclear explosion at Chernobyl.

Seventy-two people killed by Sikh extremists.

Benazir Bhutto Prime Minister of Pakistan. George Bush elected US President. Gorbachev announces big troop reductions suggesting end of Cold War.

Pakistan rejoins the Commonwealth. V. P. Rao becomes Prime Minister of India. De Klerk becomes South African President. USSR loses control of Eastern Europe; fall of Berlin Wall.

V. P. Singh forms coalition government.

First Gulf War. Yeltsin President of Russia. USSR disbanded. Rajiv Gandhi assassinated during Indian election campaign by Tamil suicide bomber; Narashima Rao becomes Prime Minister in tenth general election. Destruction of the Mosque of Babur at Ayodhya by Hindus leads to Hindu – Muslim rioting in several Indian cities. Bill Clinton elected US President. Civil war in former Yugoslavia.

Israel hands over West Bank and Jericho to the Palestinians.

Mandela and ANC sweept to victory in South African elections. Rwandan massacres. Russian military action against the Chechen republic.

Bharatha Janata Party (BJP) government collapses after a matter of days. Bombay becomes Mumbai, Madras becomes Chennai. Fiftieth anniversary of Indian Independence. Death of Mother Teresa. India declares itself a nuclear weapons state. BJP form coalition government. Amartya Sen wins the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Pakistani troops cross India-Kashmir border leading to fierce fighting in Kargil – Drass region. Thirteenth general election; BJP government. India’s population reaches i billion. Sonia Gandhi becomes President of Congress Party. Vishvanath Anand wins World Chess Championship. Twin towers of World Trade Center in New York collapse after terrorist attack. Earthquake in northern Gujarat leaves
20,000
dead and an estimated 100,000 trapped in the debris. Terrorist attack on Indian parliament.

ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
is a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He is the author of over fifty books on a wide range of subjects, including the internationally bestselling novels of the No. I Ladies Detective Agency series and the Sunday Philosophy Club series. He lives in Scotland.

Unless you had an expert knowledge of the locality you would not reach the offices of
The Banner
. The Market Road was the life-line of Malgudi, but it had a tendency to take abrupt turns and disrupt itself into side-streets, which wove a network of crazy lanes behind the façade of buildings on the main road.

Kabir Lane was one such; if you took an inadvertent turn off the Market Road you entered it, though you might not if you intended to reach it. And then it split itself further into a first lane, a second lane, and so on; if you kept turning left and right you were suddenly assailed by the groans of the treadle in the Truth Printing Works; and from its top floor a stove-enamelled blue board shot out over the street bearing the sign ‘The Banner’.

It was the home of truth and vision, though you might take time to accept the claim. You climbed a flight of wooden stairs (more a ladder), and its last rung was the threshold of
The Banner
. It was a good deal better than most garrets: you wouldn’t knock your head on roof-tiles unless you hoisted yourself on a table; you could still see something of the sky through the northern window and hear the far-off rustle of the river, although the other three windows opened on the courtyards of tenement houses below. The owners of the tenements had obtained a permanent legal injunction that the three windows should not be opened in order that the dwellers below might have their privacy. There was a reference to this in the very first issue of
The Banner
. The editor said: ‘We don’t think that the persons concerned need have gone to the trouble of going to a court for it, since no one would open these windows and volunteer to behold the spectacle below.’

This stimulated a regular feature entitled ‘Open Window’, which stood for the abolition of slums and congestion. It
described the tenements, the pigsties constructed for human dwellings in the four corners of the town by rapacious landlords. It became an enemy of landlords. In fact, it constituted itself an enemy of a great many institutions and conditions. Within twelve pages of foolscap it attempted to set the world right.

From the garret of
The Banner
the world did not appear to be a common place. There always seemed to be something drastic to be done about it. It had all the appearance of a structure, half raised – and the other half might either go up or not at all. ‘Some day,’
The Banner
felt, ‘it must either go down or go up. It can’t be left standing as it is indefinitely.’ There was a considerable amount of demolition to be done, and a new way to be indicated. The possibilities of perfection seemed infinite, though mysterious, and yet there was a terrible kind of pig-headedness in people that prevented their going the right way.
The Banner
thus had twin work to do: on the one hand, attacking ruthlessly pig-headedness wherever found, and on the other prodding humanity into pursuing an ever-receding perfection. It was an immense task for anyone, with every conceivable equipment and support. It would be a tall order to give an editor. But in this case it worked because the editor had to take orders from only himself. And he felt that, after all, he had not made such a fool of himself as his well-wishers had feared, although the enterprise meant almost nothing to him financially.

In 1938, when the papers were full of anticipation of a world war, he wrote: ‘
The Banner
has nothing special to note about any war, past or future. It is only concerned with the war that is always going on – between man’s inside and outside. Till the forces are equalized the struggle will always go on.’

Reading it over a couple of weeks later, Srinivas smiled to himself. There was a touch of comicality in that bombast. It struck him as an odd mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. ‘There is a curse hanging over an editorial table, vitiating everything a man wishes to say. I can’t say “I want a cup of coffee” without appearing to be a slightly pompous donkey,’ he told himself. ‘I wish I could write all that stuff here,’ he reflected, lying on his mat at home. Going to an office, sitting up in a chair at the table – there was something wrong with the entire
procedure. ‘I wish I could do all my writing here,’ he said to himself again and looked forlornly about him. The house was very quiet now because it was eleven at night and all the nerve-racked neighbours and their children were asleep.

There were four other families living in the same house. The owner of the house himself lived in a small room in Anderson Lane – an old widower who tried to earn the maximum money and spend less than ten rupees a month on himself. He had several sons and daughters, all of them in various prosperous activities all over the country, from the Himalayas down to the South. He had a daughter in Malgudi, with whom he was not on speaking terms. He had led a happy family life in this house till the death of his wife, when the family scattered and disrupted. Thereafter the old man, with the help of a carpenter, partitioned off the entire house, so that half a dozen families might be lodged in it, the screens and partitions creating an illusion that each unit was living in a home with privacy for food, sleep and washing.

It was said that he bathed at the street-tap and fed himself on cooked rice, which was distributed as charity in a nearby temple. He was known to have declared to everyone concerned: ‘The true
Sanyasi
has no need to live on anything more than the leavings of God.’ He made himself out to be an ascetic. He collected the rent on the second of each month, took away the entire amount and placed it in Sarayu Street post-office bank. It was said that he never paid any rent for his room in Anderson Lane. The story was that he had advanced a small loan to the owner of the house, which multiplied with interest and became an unrecognizable figure to the borrower in due course. When his wife died the old man moved in to occupy the room in his debtor’s house at such a low rent that he could stay there for over twenty years working off the loan.

The very first time Srinivas met him he saw the old man bathing at a street-tap, while a circle of urchins and citizens of Anderson Lane stood around watching the scene. They were all waiting for the tap to be free. But the old man had usurped it and held his place. Srinivas felt attracted to him when he saw him spraying water on the crowd as an answer to their comments. The crowd
jeered: he abused it back; when they drew nearer he sprayed the water on them and kept them off, all the while going through his ablutions calmly. Srinivas asked someone in the crowd: ‘What is the matter?’ ‘Look at him, sir, this is the same story every day. So many of us wait here to fill our vessels, and he spends hours bathing there, performing all his prayers. Why should he come to the tap built for us poor people? We can’t even touch it till he has done with it.’

‘Perhaps he has no other place.’

‘No place!’ a woman exclaimed. ‘He is a rich man with many houses and relations!’ At the mention of houses, Srinivas pricked up his ears. He was desperately searching for a house: all his waking hours were spent on this task.

The old man came out of his bath dripping, clad only in a loincloth. He told the crowd: ‘Now go and drain off all the water you like. I don’t care.’ Srinivas felt it might be useful to ingratiate himself in his favour and asked: ‘Do you do this every day?’ The old man looked at him and asked: ‘Who are you?’

‘It is a profound question. What mortal can answer it?’

‘You are joking with me, are you?’ the old man said, briskly moving off. Srinivas watched the wet old man going away angrily. It seemed to him, watching his back, that the chance of a lifetime was receding from him. An irresistible piece of jocularity was perhaps going to place a gulf between him and this man, who might have provided a solution to his housing problem. ‘Half a moment, please,’ he cried and ran after him. ‘I have an answer for you. At the moment I am a frantic house-hunter.’ The other halted; his face was changed. ‘Why didn’t you say so? I will give you a house if you are prepared to abide by all the rules I mention. Make up your mind. I don’t want to meet indeterminate souls.’

‘What is your rent?’ asked Srinivas.

‘Tell me what you will pay. I have one for seventy-five, one for thirty, fifty, ten, five, one. What is it you want?’

‘I will tell you presently. But perhaps you might first like to go home and dry yourself.’

‘Home! Home!’ he laughed. ‘I have no home. Didn’t I tell you that I am a
Sanyasi
, though I don’t wear ochre robes? Come,
come with me. I live in a small room which a friend has given me.’ He went through the lane, pulled out a thin key knotted to his sacred thread, turned it in the lock and opened the door of a small room. It was roofed with old cobweb-covered tiles, with a window, one foot square, opening at the top of the wall; there was another window opening on the road. He stooped in through the narrow doorway. Srinivas followed him.

‘Sit down,’ said the old man. ‘You have to sit on the floor. I have not even a mat.’ Srinivas sat down, leaning against the wall. A few children from the main house came and stood by the doorway, looking in. The old man was spreading out his wet clothes on a cord tied across the wall. He opened a small wooden box and took out a dry
dhoti
and towel, a box containing ingredients for marking his forehead, and a rosary. He proceeded to decorate his forehead with a symbol, looking into a hand-mirror. The children stood in the doorway, blocking it. The old man turned from the mirror with a hiss. ‘Get away. What are you doing here? Do you think a fair is going on?’ The children turned and ran away, shouting mischievously, ‘Grandfather is angry.’ Srinivas felt hurt by the old man’s conduct. ‘Why are you hard upon those children?’

‘Because I don’t want them. Children are a bane. I must tell this fellow not to let them loose on me.’

‘They called you grandfather,’ Srinivas said.

‘They will call you uncle presently. How do you like it? I am only a tenant here. I hate all children. I have had enough trouble from my own children; I don’t want any more from strangers. Are you in the habit of praying?’

Srinivas fumbled for a reply. ‘Not exactly –’

‘Well, I am. I am going to pray for about fifteen minutes. You will have to wait.’ Srinivas settled down. The other took out his beads, shut his eyes, his lips muttering. Srinivas watched him for a moment and felt bored. He sat looking out. Someone was passing in and out of the main house. Children were dashing to and fro. The old man said, without opening his eyes: ‘If you are a lover of children you have plenty to watch. All the children of the town seem to be concentrated in this street.’ After this he continued his silent prayers.

Srinivas reflected: ‘Who will know I am here, cooped up in a cell with a monstrous old man? If I ceased to breathe at this moment, no one would know what had happend to me. My wife and son and brother –’ His thought went back to the home he had left behind. His elder brother could never understand what he was up to. ‘He has every right to think I am a fool,’ he reflected. ‘Man has no significance except as a wage-earner, as an economic unit, as a receptacle of responsibilities. But what can I do? I have a different notion of human beings. I have given their notions a fair trial.’ He thought of all those years when he had tried to fit in with one thing or another as others did, married like the rest, tried to balance the family budget and build up a bank balance. Agriculture, apprenticeship in a bank, teaching, law – he gave everything a trial once, but with every passing month he felt the excruciating pain of losing time. The passage of time depressed him. The ruthlessness with which it flowed on – a swift and continuous movement; his own feeling of letting it go helplessly, of engaging all his hours in a trivial round of actions, at home and outside. Every New Year’s Day he felt depressed and unhappy. All around he felt there were signs that a vast inundation was moving onward, carrying the individual before it, and before knowing where one was, one would find oneself senile or in the grave, with so little understood or realized. He felt depressed at the sight of his son: it seemed as though it was an hour ago that he was born, but already he was in Second Form, mugging history and geography and dreaming of cricket scores.

‘What exactly is it that you want to do?’ his brother asked him one day.

‘The answer is late in coming, but you will get it,’ Srinivas replied, feeling rather awkward. The question of a career seemed to him as embarrassing as a physiological detail. His brother was the head of the family, an advocate with a middling practice – a life of constant struggle with rustic clients and magistrates in that small town Talapur, where he had slipped into his position after his father’s death. His father had been an advocate in his time and had had a grand practice, acquired extensive property in the surrounding villages, and had become a very respectable citizen. The family tradition was that they should graduate at Malgudi in the Albert
Mission College, spend two years in Madras for higher studies in the law, and then return each to his own room in their ancient sprawling house.

This suited Srinivas up to a point. But he always felt suffocated in the atmosphere of that small town. His wife had to put up with endless misery at home through his ways, and his little son looked ragged. They put up with his ways for a considerable time before shooting the question at him. He remembered the day clearly even now. He had settled down in his room with a copy of an Upanishad in his hand. As he grew absorbed in it he forgot his surroundings. He wouldn’t demand anything more of life for a fortnight more, and then he observed his elder brother standing over him. He lowered the book, muttering ‘I didn’t hear you come in. Finished your court?’ And his brother asked: ‘What exactly is it that you wish to do in life?’ Srinivas flushed for a moment, but regained his composure and answered: ‘Don’t you see? There are ten principal Upanishads. I should like to complete the series. This is the third.’

‘You are past thirty-seven with a family of your own. Don’t imagine I am not willing to look after them, but they will be far happier if you think of doing something for their sake. They must not feel they are unwanted by you. Don’t think I wish to relieve myself of the responsibility.’ It was a fact: his elder brother looked after the entire family without making any distinction. ‘Such a question should not be fired at me again,’ he said to himself after his brother had left the room. He tried to get reabsorbed in the Upanishad he was reading. His mind echoed with the interview: perhaps something had been happening in the house. His mind wandered from one speculation to another; but he gathered it back to its task: