Men will come from the city, after all, to protect us! We will go.!
We drew two carts across Sami’s courtyard so that nobody could see the procession we were preparing, and flowers were brought, and sandal and banana trunks, and Ratna went and brought a picture of Satyanarayana and stuck it in the middle, and somebody put a Gandhi at his feet and set a flower upon it, and even sajji was being made in the kitchen, and butter and banana and syrup, and when camphor trays and kumkum trays were decorated and the wicks sharpened, Ratna says somebody will blow the conch from the promontory at dusk-fall, and the men who would be lying hidden in the jungle and by the river, and village men and city men would rush from this side and that and, with the Satyanarayana procession in front of us, we would go through the Brahmin street and the Pariah street to the village gate and across the lanes and the pastures and the canal to do field-Satyagraha.
And now and again, when we heard footsteps, we all rushed back into the byre for fear we should be seen, and then Seethamma, who was plucking flowers in the backyard, came and said, ‘Sisters, sisters, do you know more buses have come and more men have come from the city for the auctions?’ and we all said, ‘Only a Pariah looks at the teeth of dead cows. What is lost is lost, and we shall never again look upon our fields and harvests.’ And then someone comes running in and says, ‘Why, there are women there, too,’ and we could not stop our fears and we rushed to see who these bitches could be, and Timmamma, who had keen eyes, says, ‘Why, they are our women; cannot you see? Agent Nanjundia’s wife Subbamma is there, and there is Kamalamma’s Kanchi sari too,’ and we all say, ‘Well, one soul lost for us.’ Then Timmamma says, ‘Why, there is Venkatalakshamma too — Venkatalakshamma who fed Moorthy. Why, sister, a woman who could have starved her stepchildren so, could never be a Gandhi woman,’ and Seethamma says, ‘And there is Priest Rangappa’s wife Lakshamma too, I think.’—’To buy off for Bhatta, surely,’ cried Ratna. And we sought to make out who this woman was and who that woman was, but we could hardly see, for the evening was drawing near. And then suddenly there arose the clamour of the Pariah women and the Sudra women, for a white man stood there on one of those trucks, and he was turning to this side and saying something, and turning to that side and saying something, and hands were thrust up, and people pressed against one another, and voices shot across the valley as clear and near as though they came from the other side of the Brahmin quarter, and the Pariah women shrieked and shrieked, they beat their mouths and shrieked, and the children joined them, and our hearts began to give way, and Ratna said, ‘Now no more of this — nobody wants to see a drowning person,’ and we all rushed back to the Satyanarayana procession-throne.
But the clamour still rises from beneath the promontory and we can hear Timmi, Timmayya’s Timmi, cry out, ‘Oh! The bel field! May your house be destroyed — may your wife die childless — I’ll sleep with your mother!’ And the lamentations begin and lathis strike and the shriekings die down; and then we turn back to see suddenly that there is a city man at the byre door, and Ratna says, ‘Why, that’s Sankaru,’ and we say, ‘Why, the Sankaru, the Sankaru,’ and we feel a holy presence among us, and behind him are more men, more boys from the city, and he walks silently towards us and sees our throne ready and says, ‘That is good,’ and Ratna is trembling with joy and she says, ‘Why, when did you come?’ and he says, ‘Never mind. Is everything ready, for soon must the conch be blown,’ and we all say, ‘Who will blow it? Who?’
And with the coming of the evening, we hear the last shouts from the Bebbur mound, and dogs bark and bats flap about, and then there is such a cry again from the Sudra lines and the Pariah lines that Ratna rushes to the backyard, and we all rush behind her, and from beneath the giant mango by the well we see the Pariah-looking men of the Bebbur mound go down crowd by crowd, sickle and scythe in hand, crowd by crowd to the big field and the Bebbur field and Lingayya’s field and Madanna’s field and Rangamma’s field and Satanna’s triangular field, and then the cars start, and one by one the cars go down and sail away beyond the Kenchamma hill, and we say, ‘It’s lost, it’s lost, but they are not going to reap tonight, and it shall be ours one night more.’ But from inside the trucks they take out big, strong gaslights of the city, and like a veritable marriage procession they bring the lights down — coolie behind coolie brings them down. Dusk falls and night comes and all our fields lie glimmering under the pale yellow lights of the city. Then Sankaru rushes in and cries out, ‘Now, Ratna, blow the conch!’
Ratna blew the conch from the top of the promontory, and with the blowing of the conch rose the ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai! Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’ from Sami’s courtyard, and the throne was lifted up, and we marched through the Brahmin street and the Potters’ street and the Pariah street and the Weavers’ street, and doors creaked and children ran down the steps, and trays were in their hands, and the camphor was lit and the coconuts broken and the fruits offered, and one by one behind the children came their mothers, and behind their mothers their grandmothers and grand-aunts, and people said, ‘Sister, let me hold the torch. Sister, let me hold the sacred fan.’ And shoulder after shoulder changed beneath the procession throne, and the cries of ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai! Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’ leapt into the air. And somebody said, ‘Let us sing “The Road to the City of Love”,’ and we said, ‘That’s beautiful,’ and we clapped our hands and we sang, ‘The road to the City of Love is hard, brother.’ And hardly were we by the temple corner than policeman upon policeman was seen by the village gate, and they were coming, their lathis raised up, and when they saw it was a religious procession they stopped, and we shouted all the louder to show it was indeed a religious song we were singing, and we came nearer. ‘It’s a religious procession, he, take care!’ says one of them, and Ratna says, ‘Oh yes, we’ll take care,’ and the policemen walked beside us, twisting their moustaches and swearing and spitting and blustering, and Ratna stopped every hundred steps and blew the conch three times, and camphors were lit again, and the coconuts broken, and, ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’ was shouted out into the night air. And the police turned to Lingamma and said, ‘Where are you going?’ and Lingamma said, ‘I do not know.’ And they turned to Madamma and said, ‘Where are you going?’ and Madamma said, ‘The gods know, not I,’ and they went this side and that and tried to threaten Lakkamma and Madamma and Seethamma and Vedamma, but they shouted out, ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’
And at last the police inspector came, and this time he was on foot, and a policeman followed him, lantern in hand, and he stops the procession and Ratna blows the conch three times and says, ‘Stop!’ and we stop, and he says to Ratna, ‘Where do you go?’ and Ratna says, head up, ‘Where the gods will,’ and he says, ‘Which way do your gods will?’ and he twists his face and laughs at his own joke, and Ratna says, ‘Where evil haunts.’—’You will get a nice two years, my nice lady.’—’So be it.’ And now, ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’ and she gave three long blasts with her conch.
And as we began to march, it was not ‘Satyanarayan Maharaj ki jai!’ that came to our throats, but ‘Vandè Mataram!’ and we shouted out, ‘Vandè Mataram — Mataram Vandè!’; and then suddenly from the darkened Brahmin street and the Pariah street and the Weavers’ street and the lantana growths came back the cry, ‘Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ and the police were so infuriated that they rushed this side and that, and from this courtyard and that garden, from behind this door and that byre, and from the tops of champak trees and pipal trees and tamarind trees, from beneath horse carts and bullock carts, men in white jumped out, men at last from the city, boys, young men, householders, peasants, Mohammedans with dhotis to the knees, and city boys with floating skirts and Gandhi caps, and they swarmed around us like veritable mother elephants round their young. And we felt so happy that we cried out, ‘Vandè Mataram!’ and with the groan of the boys and the cry of children under the lathi blows, from the Karwar road to the Kenchamma hill, voice upon voice rose, and from hill to hill like wildfire blared, ‘Mataram Vandè!’ And some near us stamped the earth and cried, ‘Inquilab Zindabad — Inquilab Zindabad!’ And ‘Inquilab, Inquilab, Inquilab,’ rapped out someone clear and fierce through the starlit air, and ‘Zindabad’ we roared back, and such a roar swept through the streets and the valley that we said there are more men still, ten and tens of thousands of men, and the policemen’s curses were lost in the ringing of bells and the blast of the conch. And then somebody behind us blew the long horn, and it twirled up and swung forth and clattered against the trees of the Skeffington Coffee Estate, and another and another curled up, and yet another that arched over the Kenchamma hill and the Bebbur mound and trailed away snaking up to the Blue Mountain tops. And we said more and more men will know of our fight, and more and more of them will come, and we clapped our hands and we stamped the earth and we marched on, and we shouted, ‘Inquilab, Inquilab Zindabad!’ and between two shouts we asked the city boys, ‘Where are we going, where?’ and the city boys said, ‘Why, to the barricades.’—’And what barricades?’—’Why, the Skeffington barricades,’ and a neighbour would pinch us and say, ‘Say Mahatma Gandhi ki jai!’ and we cried out, ‘Gandhi Mahatma ki jai!’ and the city boys would say, ‘We’ll take it, sister, we will. In Peshawar the whole city. ’ and lathi blows fell on us, but ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ was the only answer we gave.