‘Is there nothing that can be done now, Bhattarè?’ asks Narsamma, her voice trembling.
‘Nothing, Narsamma. If he goes on at this rate I will have to tell the Swami about it. I do not want our community polluted and the manes of our ancestors insatiate. Never, Narsamma, never. ’
‘But he is so reasonable, Bhattarè. I cannot imagine our Moorthy saying these things, Rama-Rama. ’
‘Poor Narsamma. You have never been to the city. You cannot even imagine the pollutions that go on there. It was not for nothing that Moorthy went to the university. Well, well, one has to close one’s eyes and ears, or else the food will not go down one’s throat these days. ’
Then Moorthy comes in, and Narsamma begins to weep and Bhatta grows silent, and when Moorthy has gone to wash his feet in the bathroom, Bhatta goes away, leaving Narsamma shaking with sobs. Moorthy does not go to her, says not even a kind word. Then Narsamma rises, wipes her face and goes into the kitchen, and when the food is cooked, she lays a leaf in the main hall, and does not even put a glass of water for the libations. And she goes to the veranda, where Moorthy is reading and says:
‘The leaf is laid.’
‘I’m coming.’ And Moorthy sits by the kitchen threshold and eats like a servant, in mouthfuls, slowly and without a word. And when he has eaten his meal, he goes and washes himself at the well, and Narsamma munches her food alone in the kitchen, while tears run down her cheeks. ‘Oh, this Gandhi! Would he were destroyed!’
From that day on they never spoke to each other, Narsamma and Moorthy. He sat and ate his food by the kitchen threshold and she in the kitchen, and everybody saw that Narsamma was growing thin as a bamboo and shrivelled like banana bark. But Moorthy went more and more into the Pariah quarters, and now he was seen walking side by side with them, and then one day when Beadle Timmayya’s son, Puttayya, lost his wife, he even carried the body for a while, and when everybody saw him doing this openly — for it was on the river path, mind you — they all cried, ‘Oh, he’s lost!’ And Bhatta ran down to the city that very morning and came back two days later with the word of the Swami that Moorthy was excommunicated, he, his family, and all the generations to come. ‘What! Never to go to the temple or to an obsequial dinner? Never to a marriage party, or a haircutting ceremony?. Oh!’ moaned Narsamma, and that very night, when the doors were closed and the voices had died away, she ran through the Brahmin street and the Potters’ street, and standing at the village gate, she spat once towards the east and once towards the west, once towards the south and once towards the north, and then, spitting again thrice at the Pariah huts, where the dogs began to raise a howl, she ran over the Fig-tree field bund, and she had such a shiver at the thought of all the ghosts and the spirits and the evil ones of flame, that she trembled and coughed. But there was something deep and desperate that hurried her on, and she passed by Rangamma’s sugar cane field and by the mango grove to the river, just where the whirlpool gropes and gurgles, and she looked up at the moonlit sky, and the winds of the night and the shadows of the night and the jackals of the night so pierced her breast that she shuddered and sank unconscious upon the sands, and the cold so pierced her that the next morning she was dead.
They burnt her where she lay, and when the ashes were thrown into the river, Rangamma turns to Bhatta and says:
‘He’s alone. The obsequial ceremonies will be held in our house.’
‘What obsequies?’
‘Why, Narsamma’s.’
‘But who will officiate?’
‘You.’
‘You can offer me a king’s daughter, but never will I sell my soul to a Pariah.’
But Moorthy left us that very night, and some said he went to Seringapatam, and some said to the Tungabhadra, and some said he went over to his brother-in-law of Harihar and there they did it all, but nobody thinks of it now and nobody talks of it, and when Moorthy came back he lived on in Rangamma’s house. They gave him food by the kitchen door as Narsamma did, and he still went to the Pariahs, and he still gave them cotton to spin and yarn to weave, and he taught them alphabets and grammar and arithmetic and Hindi, and now my Seenu, too, was going to go with him. When Seenu would begin to teach them, Moorthy would go up to the Skeffington Coffee Estate, for there, too, were Pariahs and they, too, wanted to read and to write. Moorthy would go there tomorrow.
5
The Skeffington Coffee Estate rises beyond the Bebbur mound over the Bear’s hill, and hanging over Tippur and Subbur and Kanthur, it swings round the Elephant valley, and rising to shoulder the Snow Mountains and the Beda Ghats, it dips sheer into the Himavathy, and follows on from the Balèpur tollgate corner to the Kenchamma hill, where it turns again and skirts Bhatta’s Devil’s fields and Rangè Gowda’s coconut garden, and at the Tippur stream it rises again and is lost amidst the jungle growths of the Horse-head hill. Nobody knows how large it is or when it was founded; but they all say it is at least ten thousand acres wide, and some people in Kanthapura can still remember having heard of the hunter sahib who used his hunter and his hand to reap the first fruits of his plantation; and then it began to grow from the Bear’s hill to Kanthur hill, and more and more coolies came from beneath the Ghats, and from the Bear’s hill and Kanthur it touched the Snow Mountains, and more and more coolies came; and then it became bigger and bigger, till it touched all the hills around our village, and still more and more coolies came — coolies from below the Ghats that talked Tamil or Telugu and who brought with them their old men and their children and their widowed women — armies of coolies marched past the Kenchamma temple, half-naked, starving, spitting, weeping, vomiting, coughing, shivering, squeaking, shouting, moaning coolies — coolie after coolie passed by the Kenchamma temple, the maistri before them, while the children clung to their mothers’ breasts, the old men to their sons’ arms, and bundles hung over shoulder and arm and arm and shoulder and head; and they marched on past the Kenchamma temple and up to the Skeffington Coffee Estate — coolies from below the Ghats, coolies, young men, old men, old women, children, baskets, bundles, pots, coolies passed on — and winding through the twists of the Estate path — by the Buxom pipal bend, over the Devil’s ravine bridge, by the Parvati-well corner — they marched up, the maistri before them, the maistri that had gone to their village, and to the village next to their village, and to the village next to that, and that is far away, a day’s journey by road and a night’s journey by train and a day again in it, and then along the Godavery’s banks, by road and by lane and by footpath, there he came and offered a four-anna bit for a man and a two-anna bit for a woman, and they all said, ‘Is there rice there?’ and he said, ‘There is nothing but rice around us’; and they all said, ‘That is a fine country, for here, year after year, we have had neither rain nor canal-water, and our masters have left for the city’; and so he gave them a white rupee for each and they said, ‘This is a very fine man,’ and they all assembled at night, and Ramanna the elder said, ‘Now we will go, a four-anna bit for a man and a two-anna bit for a woman,’ and they all said, ‘There, there’s rice’; and the pots became empty of water and the sacks began to grow fat with clothes, and the pots on their heads and the clothes in their arms, they marched on and on by the Godavery, by path and by lane and by road; and the trains came and they got into them, and the maistri bought them a handful of popped rice for each and a little salted gram for each, and he smiled so that they all said, ‘It will be fine there, a four-anna bit for a man and a two-anna bit for a woman,’ and the maistri said, ‘You will just pick up coffee seeds, just pick them up as you pick up pebbles by the river.’—’Is that all, maistri?’—’Of course, what else? And the sahib there, he is a fine man, a generous man — you will see. ’; and the trains moved on with the coolies, men, women, children; then plains came with dust and desert and then mountains rose before them, blue mountains, and the trains sneezed and wheezed and snorted and moved on; and the coolies all came out at Karwar and marched on, by the road and street and footpath, and they passed this way beneath hanging mountains, and that way over towering peaks, and the streamlets hissed over their shoulders and purred beneath their feet, and they said there were tigers and elephants and bears in the jungles, and when the children cried, the mothers said, ‘I’ll leave you here with the tigers; but if you don’t cry, I’ll take you over the mountains where you can have milk like water — just like water,’ and the child stopped crying; and the nearer they came, the harder became the road and the stiffer the maistri, and when they had all passed by the Kenchamma hill, the young men, old men, old women, children and mothers, the maistri stood at the back, and when they had all passed by the Estate entrance, one by one, he banged the gate behind him and they all walked up, coolie after coolie walked up, they walked up to the Skeffington bungalow.