VI
Shankar could never speak. He could only shout. And you would hear him halfway up across the River at Ramnagar fort In any case he could not talk to you even if he wished to. He always had to speak to the uplifted sky. A husky high voice, a rough pockmarked face, thick glasses and many swear words that he had gathered from Hindi, Kannada, Tamil (his mother tongue), Marathi (his neigbour’s tongue) and even Gujarati because his father often had Gujarati clients who came to consult a horoscope, and, perchance invite him to a funeral feast when the Gujarati Brahmins were otherwise too busy, for Benares is a busy mart and many persons’ funeral anniversaries may fall under the very same star. And this again is a mystery which someday somebody may have to clarify to Benares Brahmins: Why on the same day so many more die than on another day according to the celestial calendar; say around April full-moon more than around the festivities of Dussehra. There are such laws, and the Brahmin has to accept this as one accepts the monsoon floods or the vivid summer heats. So many more in Gujarat and Maharashtra, in Mysore and in Peshawar have died — on exactly the same day, and on other days, the deaths are like cloud-wisps on pre-autumnal sky, you can count them, one, two, three, four, five, short, larger or elongated. To Shankar who studied mathematics at the university, and who knew some astrology, this was all a case of ‘cosmological equations’ as he learnedly called them. There is cosmology (which is based on geophysics) and astrology (which is based on pure numbers) and together you could make a happy mathematic and proclaim why the heavens desire (or order) the major number of deaths on one day, and such wretched few on others, so very discourteous to the Brahmins of Benares.
Our friend Madhobha (of the firewood shop) is one of Shankar’s friends. That is to say Shankar shouts, ‘Hé, Madho, what are you faking? Why don’t you come down and have a smoke?’ and Madhobha if he’s free at all will come out and stand by the gate, and talk of anything, especially of astrology. For Madhobha, however, his interest in astrology only started when he thought his Mohini was perhaps a wife of another life. Do such creatures exist? — one means by that, enticing subtle forms of women. He never confessed he saw a Mohini. No, Madhobha explained, he just asked because he’d heard, in his village, people speak of it. ‘What do I know, brother?’ Shankar would shout to the street, so that the boatmen landing passengers even could hear, despite the constant lapping of the Ganges waters. ‘The stars are there, high up there, my dear fellow, and man is here. Two there and two here make the same. Thus there’s intelligence between man and the star— through their common lingo: numbers. Hé, tell me, did you win in that bout with Abdullah? Somebody said Abdullah killed a tiger with a club when he was young. And you, you cannot even twist a cat’s ear with your big, big heart.’ ‘Oh, no,’ says Madhobha, ‘when I fight, I fight. You should one day come and see me in the ring?’ ‘Yes, I will,’ says Shankar.
But today Madhobha knows there’s business in the air. ‘Brother, how are you?’ asks Madhobha. ‘Well, well, the donkey kicks and the scorpion bites, and I smoke and shout,’ answers Shankar, laughing at himself. ‘I suppose you cannot leave the shop now.’ ‘No, brother, there have been only three clients since the morning. That’s why I could not leave when your brother Ramu came to fetch me. And the boss’s daughter has the fevers. Oh this Benares damp!’ ‘Yes, I had some business with you,’ says Shankar. He now lowers his voice. His voice becomes hoarser when lowered, and seems to come in rough irregular pitches. ‘You see, brother, I have to pay up my exam fees. At the University, they’re not our grandfathers. My only pupil has absconded to his village, and now there’s not even the mite of a mica to be given lessons in mathematics!’ ‘And how much would that be?’ asks Madhobha, scratching his head, and placing his right leg on a roadside boulder. He always had pains after a bout. ‘I need fifty-five rupees. It’s a degree exam you know. And once I pass my BA, I can become a millionaire, if I cared to. You know I am not a fool. I have stood first in physics — well, you don’t know what physics is. It is to do with the earth and the stars and so on. There was a great man, a very white man, called Newton, and he wrote some learned laws — just like, so to say, our Manu’s laws. That Jaunpur Astronomical Magic House, there downtown, is no good. It smells of curdled pandits. To have precision you must have a laboratory. You must come with me one day to the University.’ ‘Yes,’ said Madhobha. He always thought some alchemy could help materialize his Mohini. After all look at the telephone and the aeroplane! ‘I said fifty-five,’ shouted Shankar, ‘but actually I need a hundred. I can’t go to the examination hall in these torn clothes. Can I? They’ll fail me just looking at me.’ True, Shankar’s dhoti was torn all over and his shirt had a patch in the back.
Shankar loved to look like a Bhayya. He hated his father’s paunch, his palace shawls, his clever astrology, his greed for money, and his multicoloured lies. His father told lies ten annas to the rupee. But everybody admired him. ‘Hé Shastri, learned Shastri,’ and so on. And the Hé Shastri, learned Shastri, beat his children warm-heartedly, and sometime even threw firewood at his goddess-looking wife. He went further once and threatened to beat up his daughter-in-law, Padma, that is Shankar’s wife. Padma came from Bangalore and she was the favourite among eight children. Her father was a postmaster, and he was comfortable in his own way. Three thousand rupees dowry she brought the Shastri, and Shankar was tied to her like a bull to an oil-mill. ‘Hoy Hoy,’ you want to say when you think of marriage. Woman and all that, Shankar knew even when he was a boy. What mystery could there be? Already his brother who’s seventeen (and plays such excellent cricket) knows more about women than ever his grandfather did. This is of course not true for Shankar’s grandfather, the great Tyagaraja Shastri who was famous for his dharma sastra learning, was also courted by important Maharajas and singers. Well, he went so often to Laxmi Bai, the singer, that rumour is that the noted Ram Lal, her son, is, as it were, a cousin of Shankar’s father. The world you know is always round whatever you do with it, and the grandfather amassed a fortune reading sacred texts to Maharajas, and giving astrological consultation to concubines, and so the big Chatpadi House solidly stuck on the banks of the Ganges even rises three storeys high, and you’ve accommodation for ten Brahmin families, and at three rupees a month (pre-war rate), now thirty rupees a month (a rupee per day, new rate) they can run a kingdom on it.
The old Shastri is learned all right but nothing like his own father, neither in learning nor in goodness. Shankar is so much like him, even so. ‘Like grandson, like grandfather,’ his father used to say when on some evenings Shankar would come in, his only silk shirt shining on him, and much pan on his lips, bringing in such a powerful smell of rose-attar. ‘The marriage was so splendid,’ he shouts to his mother, who is such a goodly soul. ‘You had pheni and halva and silver-covered pedas. I met the bridegroom. He was a handsome, wonderful fellow.’ All this, everyone knew, was made up. He never went to a marriage. He never met any bridegroom. But all Benares is one gup1—so one less or one more, who’s there to care.
The father of course knew his father, so he knew his son. Where does the son get money from, became a problem. It transpired that the son was clever in wrestling bets. He applied his mathematics to astrology, and you often get the answer right, especially if you knew the horoscope of the wrestlers. And thus he made twenty or thirty rupees when he was lucky. Sometimes he was all wrong at these bets — and he would disappear, and go and watch ram-fights or cock-fights. And here, you could never know the star of the ram or the cock, brother, how could you? But you did something better. You went and watched that bearded Muslim youth’s face and you could say he was Capricorn (sometimes Western astrology also helped). Or that other middle-aged cockster was a Leo. When Leo meets Capricorn who wins unless that day the other stars were all wrong for the Leo, etc., etc.