We wake up in a truck and we are put on our legs by the promontory and we march back home, sixty-seven in all, for Siddavya and my Seenu, and Vasudev and Nanjamma’s husband, Subbu, and Rangè Gowda are taken to prison. But Moorthy they would not take, and God left him still with us.
The next morning we woke up to find that the Pariah street was filled with new huts and new fires and new faces and we knew that over three and thirty or more of the coolies of the Godaveri had come to live with us. And men on foot and horse and cart came from Kanthur and Subbur and Tippur and Bebbur to see Moorthy and join us. And we all said, ‘The army of the Mahatma is an increasing garland. May our hearts be pure as the morning flowers and may he accept them!’ For, after all, sister, when one has a light on the forehead one can march a thousand leagues. Siva is poison-throated, and yet He is the three-eyed. May the three-eyed Siva protect us.
16
Then the people in Rampur picketed the Rampur tollgate toddy booth, and the people of Siddapur, the Siddapur tea-estate toddy booth, and the people of Maddur, the Maddur fair toddy shop, and men and women and children would go to the toddy booths and call to the drinkers, ‘Brothers and sisters and friends, do not drink in the name of the Mahatma! The Mahatma is a man of God; in his name do not drink and bring sin upon yourself and upon your community!’ And songs were made by the people:
The toddy tree is a crooked tree,
And the toddy milk a scorpion milk,
And who is it that uses the scorpion milk, sister?
And who uses the scorpion milk, sister?
Why, the wandering witches of the marshes;
Say, sister, say the wandering witches of the marshes,
And the witch has a turban and a lathi stick,
O king, O king, why won’t you come?
and people sang it on the river path and behind the temple, and washing the thresholds and rinsing the vessels and plastering the walls with dung cakes did they sing, and women sang this to their men, and sons sang this to their fathers, and when somebody told how in Bombay and Lahore people gathered at dawn to go singing through the streets, women in Rampur said, ‘We, too, shall do it,’ and they, too, rose up at dawn and gathered at the temple, and they, too, went singing through the twilit streets and stood before house after house and sang:
Our king, he was born on a wattle mat,
He’s not the king of the velvet bed,
He’s small and he’s round and he’s bright
and he’s sacred,
O, Mahatma, Mahatma, you’re our king,
and we are your slaves.
White is the froth of the toddy, toddy,
And the Mahatma will turn poison into
nectar clear,
White will become blue and black will
become white,
Brothers, sisters, friends and all,
The toddy tree is a crooked tree,
And the toddy milk is scorpion milk,
O king, O king, when will you come?
And some who were intelligent, like the city boys, would say, ‘Oh, brothers, in the name of the Mahatma do not drink, for drinking is bad and the Government profits by your vice and the usurer profits by your debt and your wife goes unclothed and your children unfed and never again will you see a hut and hearth,’ and so on; and some, too, would come to fetch a Pariah or a Potter from Kanthapura to help them in their fight, and Moorthy would say, ‘Go, go with him,’ and through the night they would wade across the river by the Kenchamma hill, where no policeman could catch them, and off they would go through the cactus growth and the cardamom gardens and the tamarind groves to picket the toddy shops, and when they came back they told us this about their wounded and that about their women; and when Potter Ramayya came back from Santur he said that in house after house they had a picture of Moorthy, in house after house a picture of our Moorthy taken from city papers, and it seems they said, ‘Tell us something about this big man?’ and Potter Ramayya would weave out story after story and they would say, ‘You are a happy people to have a man like that.’ And we were so proud that we said we would bear the lathi blows and the prisons and we would follow our great Moorthy, and day after day we said, ‘What next, Moorthy?’ and day after day he would say, ‘Today fast, for Vasudev is going on hunger strike,’ or, ‘Today you will offer a feast for the liberation of Potter Chandrayya.’ And when the feast was ready we went, trumpet and horn before us, to receive Chandrayya, and he told us of the knuckle-beatings and back-canings. ‘Bend down and hold your toes,’ they were told, and when they bent down, a Red-man would come with canes kept in oil and — bang-bang — he would beat them on their buttocks and on their knees and on their thighs. And then he would say, ‘Salute,’ and they would say, ‘Salute what?’ and he would say, ‘The Government flag’; and someone would cry out, ‘Vandè Mataram!’ and everyone would take it up, and shout out, ‘Mataram Vandè!’ and there would be showers of lathi blows. And he told us, too, of the city boy who, while the lathi blows fell, rushed across the courtyard, clambered up the drainpipe or the guava tree or the roof and hoisted high the national flag, and he was dragged down and kicked and caned and given a solitary cell, and he could not speak a word, and they gave him only water as lentil soup and washed paddy as rice, and he would shout and say, ‘Take it away,’ and the jailer would bang the door behind him, and with the caning ceremony again, the food would be thrust into his mouth and pushed in with their fingers; and at every shriek came a swish of the cane, and then he would vomit all and lie in troubled sleep.
‘And yet he bore it all,’ said Chandrayya. ‘And though he was a Brahmin, he ate with us and slept by us and worked with us and said, “Brahmin or no Brahmin, the same stomach hungers in all men,” and he spoke of the hammer-and-sickle country, always and always of the hammer-and-sickle country, and so we called him the hammer-and-sickle boy. But they gave him a pair of fetters again and a solitary cell, and we never saw him again.’
But it was Seetharamu who came out of prison and told us the most terrible story. He said he had the great fever three days after he had been in prison, and they ordered him to get out as usual and grind the oil seed, and though he said he was too weak, the warders cried, ‘Ass! Pig! Badmash!’ and beat him with their canes and drove him to the yoke; and there they put him to a mill and, whip in hand, they cried, ‘Hoy-hoy,’ as though he were a bull, and made him run round and round the oil mill until he had ground three maunds of peanut oil. Then suddenly he could run no more and gasping he fell on the floor and nothing but blood came out of his mouth, blood and nothing but blood, and so they released him and he lay in Ratnamma’s house for a fortnight and more. And Moorthy said, ‘That is how you should be. Bear all as though your Karma willed it and everything will be borne.’ And we said, ‘So be it! If Seetharamu and Pariah Lingayya and Chandrayya and Ratnamma’s husband, Shamu, can bear it, why not we?’ and we said, ‘Let it come and we shall do this for Moorthy and that for Moorthy,’ and day after day we went out to picket this toddy shop and that, and Boranna said, ‘Now I am not going to keep a shop where there’s no sale,’ and he closed it, and Satanna closed his shop and said, ‘I am not going to bear in this life and in all lives to come the sin of women being beaten,’ and Madayya said, ‘Why, I am but a servant of the toddy contractor, and why should I see the police beat our women and men?’ and he joined us, and the blue paper said there were four-and-twenty shops closed in Kanthapura hobli and we said, ‘That is a great thing.’