Das Maluka Kah Gaye| Sabke Data RamMARCH 27, 2022 / PRAVEEN RAINA

The images of the floating corpses have been very distressing for me ever since from the news came out. Three days back at the dawn, I woke up with a start; in the back of my mind, the deep distress always bothered me. Countless stories have deep dived into human misery and subsequent courage. What has risen out of these stories is human courage and resilience. There are many Sarvans’ in the troubled hinterlands of Awadh orphaned yet rising like young lions to the dangers all around them. Salute!

The two of them lived just outside the village they were both called Ram, father was Khaderan Ram, son was Sravan-Sarvan, and for the village folks usually distinguished them as Bade Ram and Chote Ram. They themselves, however, addressed each other only as Babu. This was a habit of long standing: it may be that, having the same name, they felt themselves bound still more firmly together by using it unqualified in this way. Khaderan Ram was something over fifty, Sravan only just over twelve.

They were close together, the pair of them—each felt lost without the other. It had been like that ever since Sravan could remember. His father could look further back. He remembered that many years ago he lived in the village when he had a family of his own with a wife and three more children.

Then his luck turned and one disaster after another struck him. His livestock perished to pest and poverty, which is generally associated with penury because farmers in India do not earn a profit let alone have a paisa for medicine. And then, he lay to rest his children who followed each other in the great famine, which is always prevalent like an overhanging cloud in the blue sky of the countryside. Withering and whimpering, all three died close enough together. To pay his debts Khaderan had to give up his farm and sell the land. Then he made a hut near the river Ganges away from the village on an elevated sand mound he made a geographical periphery of dried sticks and bramble to grow some vegetable in the fertile river bank. When that was done, there was some money left to build himself a boat in which he used to carry goods and people to the other shore to the textile factory. This was the sum of his possessions.

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It was a poor and disappointing life they led there, Khaderan and his wife Bittan. They were both used to hard work, but they had had no experience of privation and constant care for the morrow. Most days it meant sailing on the river if they were to eat, and it was not every night they went to bed with a full stomach. There was little enough left over for clothing and comfort.

Each morning Khaderan used to drop his wife to the other bank in the creaking boat where she slaved as a textile dyer with other women folks of the village at the textile factory. Bittan toiled hard, the whole day she dipped her hands in the toxic dyes, but her labor could not earn her enough. She lived just long enough to give birth to Sarvan, and the last thing she did was to decide his name. From then on, father and son lived alone in the hut.

Sravan had vague memories of times of desperate misery. He had to stay at home alone through days of relentless aloneness and fright. There had been no one to look after him while he was too small to go off in the boat with his father, and Khaderan left him alone in the dirty hammock rocking and swinging when he sailed across the river bank, his eyes searing the hut looking for any sign of movement at the doorstep of his hovel, as was the infant who preened at the dry thatches in the roof waiting for the voice of his father. The trip back would take an hour to complete ferrying people across, because his private landing spot on the river was the best to cross the river shallow and a short route to the factory on the other side. Rest of the day he tinkered in his small patch of land growing vegetables to eat.

The boy had more memories of happier times, when he used to play on the jutted sand mound building dunes and when he felt hot deep diving from the mound into the river below, the low flying egrets and bobbing fish made him free and happy. An occasional bobbing Ganges dolphin would strike him in wonder; he had not seen such a big black fish. He remembered sitting in the stern and watching his father pulling in the net with trembling wet fishes ready to be sold off to the village market. However, even those times was mingled with sadness, when in the monsoon, it poured heavens and his father had to leave him alone in the hut.

But in time, Sravan grew big enough to go off with his father, whatever the weather. From then on contentedly, they shared most days and every night neither could be without the other for more than a minute. In the hot summer nights, his father would fan him with his dirty angaucha and keep away the flies and mosquitoes, sometimes he lost the battle with sleep then Sravan would ward off the flies and mosquitoes over his father.

For the villagers it was an odd couple to be left alone as the aloofness of their physical presence seeped into their characters. The villagers did not bother them much and both parties went their separate ways away from the village bustle. One might think that it was because they had a lot to talk about that they were so wrapped up in each other. But that was not so. They knew each other so well and their mutual confidence was so complete that words were unnecessary. For days together, no more than scattered phrases fell between them; they were as well content to be silent together as to be talking together. The one need only look at the other to make himself understood.

Among the few words that passed between them, however, was one sentence that came up repeatedly when Khaderan was talking to his son.

His words were “Babua! Das Maluka Kaah Gaye, sabke data Ram. Destiny is not arbitrary, it is orderly and reactional, it gives us reactions to our own past actions” himself had learnt it from his grandmother.

In fact, father and son together preferred to live on the edge of starvation rather than buy anything for which they could not pay. And they tack together bits of old clothes patched together so as to cover their nakedness, unburdened by debt.

Most of the villagers were in debt to the textile factory owner to some extent; some of them only repaid the interest, for generations together they were in debt to the family of the mill owner and they could never pay back the whole amount. But as far as Sravan knew, he and his father had never owed a penny to anyone. Before his times, his father had been on the factory owner’s loan books like everyone else, but that was not a thing he spoke much about. It was essential for the two of them to see they had supplies to last them through the hostile days when the boat was unmanageable to steer, when for many days’ of hale and strong monsoon winds defeated the already emancipated body and he did not have the strength to row. The meager money they had was subsisted to withstand the onslaught of the rainy days. Otherwise they had the small patch of land to grow vegetables what they felt they could spare was sold, so that there might be a little ready money in the house. There was rarely anything left, sometimes they had to make way to the sattua to quench the hunger pangs, and most often father and son knew what it was like to go hungry. Whenever the weather was fit, they put off in their boat but often-rowed back empty handed or with one skinny flatfish in the bottom. This did not affect their outlook. They never complained; they bore their burden of distress, heavy as it was, with the same even temper as they showed in the face of good fortune on the rare occasions it smiled on them; in this, as in everything else, they were in harmony. For them there was always comfort enough in the hope that, if they ate nothing today, God would send them a meal tomorrow or the next day. The advancing monsoon found them pale and hollow- cheeked, plagued by bad dreams, so that night after night they lay awake together. And one such downpour, a rain spell was strong enough to blow apart their shabby cover. The monsoon this year was terrible, it rained heavily, winds were strong, and the river swelled sweeping the weak hut in its wake, so the devil paid another visit to Khaderan’s home.

Ganga maiyya has her own twisted ways when she is angry and this night she was terribly angry, over the night the mighty river rose ferociously first it rocked the boat and then a flash flood carried Khaderan away drowning both father and son. By some inexplicable means, Sravan managed to cling to the boat, which was tethered below the hut damaged and broken. As soon as he realized that for all his efforts, he could not catch hold of his father’s lifeless body entangled in water hyacinth single-handed, he raced off to the village and got people out of their beds. Help came too late—when Sravan returned with handful villagers, his father was floating on the water hyacinth floating with the now calm floodwaters of the river, the old man had drowned.

The villagers took some bamboo poles and cajoled the lifeless Khaderan towards the devastated shore they laid him down on the swamp of the bank. For the time being his body was laid on the sands and later to the grounds where once the devastated hut. For a long time Sravan stood by old Khaderan and stroked his white hair; he murmured something as he did it, but no one heard what he said. But he did not cry and he showed no dismay. The villagers huddled together discussing plans of cremating the body, the men agreed that he was a strange lad, with not a tear for his father’s death, and they were half-inclined to dislike him for it. He is a hard one! They said, but not in admiration.

It was perhaps because of this that no one paid any further attention to Sravan. When the rescue-party and the people who had come out of mere curiosity made their way back to the village, the boy was left alone on the destroyed sand banks.

The rains had destroyed the hut and it was all a heap of wood and brambles lying down flat on the land, his pots lay crushed hither and thither and when he laid hold of them, they were as if like his own destiny destroyed and mutilated beyond repair. Sravan wandered down to the shore with the idea of seeing what had become of the boat. When he saw with what cold glee the waves were playing with its shattered fragments amongst the mass of water hyacinth, his frown deepened, but he did not say anything.

He did not stay long on the banks this time. When he got back to the hut, he sat down wearily besides his dead father. The aftermath of the floods is only humid putrid and obliterated. Gradually as the day progressed, heat and sweat drenched his body, scavenger birds and dogs hovered around the feeding grounds in the mud. It’s a poor stitch, he thought; he might have sold the boat if it hadn’t been smashed. Somewhere he had to get enough to pay for the funeral. Bade Ram had always said it was essential to have enough to cover your own funeral there was no greater or more irredeemable disgrace than to be shoved into the Ganga Maiyya as an abandoned ignominious corpse. Fortunately, his prospects weren’t so bad, he had said. They could both die peacefully whenever the time came there was the boat, and finally the land itself—these would surely fetch enough to meet the cost of cremation, as well as the death feast for anyone who would care to join the condolence. However, alas fate proved a better oracle than his father’s, he was dead and everything else had gone with him—except the land upon which Sravan was sitting. And how was that to be turned into cash. He would probably have to starve to death himself. Wouldn’t it be simplest to run down to the shore and throw himself in to the river?

Then both he and his father would have to be cremated by the villagers. There were only his shoulders to carry the burden. If they both rested in a shameful pier, it would be his fault he hadn’t the heart to do it.

Sravan’s head hurt with all this hard thinking. He felt he wanted to give up and let fate take its course; otherwise, also Ganges is notorious as ‘Karamnasa’.

But how can a man give up when he has nowhere to live? It would be cold spending the night out here in the open. The boy thought this out. Then he began to drag the boat to the corner with all his might straining on the ropes, he pulled out wooden planks from the boat’s seat and foraged in the ground for some bamboo poles. He then tied the bamboos together and put up a shade over his dead father. He badly wanted his father to be within four walls, covered them over, and filled the gaps with bits of tatters and anything else handy. Before long, it was rather better in the shelter than in the feeding grounds of the muddy ruins. Sravan knew he did not have enough strength to burn the pyre himself.

When Sravan had finished making his shelter, he crept inside and sat down with outstretched legs close to his father. By this time, the boy was tired out and sleepy. He was on the point of dropping off, when he remembered that he had still not decided how to pay for the funeral. He was wide awake again at once. That problem had to be solved without more ado, suddenly he saw a gleam of hope it wasn’t so unattainable after all—he might meet the cost of the funeral and maintain himself into the bargain, at any rate for a start. His drowsiness fell from him, he slipped out of the shelter he covered the mouth of the shelter from the marauding scavengers who were becoming plenty as the sun rose and strode off towards the river bank.

He ran towards the riverbank, and plunged into the floods, swimming in Ganges was his forte since he was 4 years of age. The current was strong and took all his strength nevertheless he crossed over. Dripping and catching his burdened breath he knocked on the door of the factory owner’s house oblivious to the looks of disgust of the workers, “Wretched boy he didn’t even cry when his father died!” were the silent accusations of those respectable, generous-hearted and high-minded folk.

In a moment the door was half opened by the owner himself, who, when he caught sight of Sravan and had heard about Khaderan’s fate looked him up and down, invited him in.

Sravan stood before him tall and confident and did not wait to be asked twice.

“Well, young man?” said the owner.

The boy nearly lost heart completely, but he screwed himself up and inquired diffidently whether the factory owner knew that there were unusually good landing-facilities out on his spot on the banks.

It is the shortest route to your factory for the village folks to come to work.

The factory owner had to smile at the gravity and spirit of the boy he confessed that he had heard it spoken of.

Then Sravan came to the heart of the issue if he let out the use of the landing-spot to the owner how easy would it be for him to ferry his staff and thus save him some money, but mind you it would be for this season only.

The owner marveled at the ingenuity of the young boy standing before him and said, “what if I bought the piece of land from you?” doing his best to conceal his amusement. Sravan stoutly rejected this suggestion, “I don’t want that. Then I have no home, if I sell the land, I mean.”

The factory owner tried to get him to see that he could not live there in any case, by himself, destitute, in the open.

“They will not allow it, Babua.”

The lad steadfastly refused to accept the notion that he would be in the open out there he had already built himself a shelter where he could lie. And by the next summer, I shall build another hut, it needn’t be big and there’s a good bit of wood out there. But, as I expect you know, I’ve lost my father and the boat. I don’t think there’s any hope of putting the bits of her together again. Now that I’ve no boat, I thought I might let out the landing-place, if I could make something out of it. Your villagers could come fast to the factory. They could row most ways from there. I’m not exaggerating they had to stay at home time and time again last monsoon, when it was easy for Bade Ram and me to put off. There’s a world of difference between a deepwater landing place and a shallow water one—that’s what Bade Ram said many a time.

The owner asked his visitor what price he had thought of putting on it for the summer. “I don’t know what the funeral will cost yet,” replied the orphan in worried tones. At any rate I should need enough to pay for Bade Ram’s funeral. Then I should count myself lucky.”

Then let’s say that, struck in the owner, and went on to say that he would see about the cost of cremation and other rituals there was no need for Sravan to fret about it anymore. Without thinking, he found himself opening the door for his guest, diminutive though he was,—but the boy stood there proud, and it was written clear on his face that he had not yet finished the business that brought him; the anxious look was still strong on his ruddy face, firm-featured beyond his years.

“When are you expecting to ship your clothes to Calcutta?”

The businessman replied that it would hardly come tomorrow look at the floods, perhaps a week after. It was a puzzle to know why the boy had asked!

Sravan did not take his eyes from the owner’s face. The words stuck in his throat, but at last he managed to get his question out, “In that case, wouldn’t the supervisor in need of a boy to help in the unloading?”

The owner did not deny it.

Nevertheless, he ought to be past his confirmation for preference, he added with a smile.

It looked as if Sravan was ready for this answer, and indeed his errand was now at an end, but he asked the owner to come out with him down the river bend. They went out, the boy in front, and onto the sand bank nearby. The boy stopped at a stone lying there, got a grip of it, lifted it without any obvious exertion and heaved it away from him. Then he turned to the owner, “I have more strength than the boy you employed last season. The boy you had last summer couldn’t lift it high enough to let the damp in underneath much less any further!”

“Oh, well then, seeing you are stronger than he was, it ought to be possible to make use of you in some way, even though you are on the wrong side of permissible age,” replied the owner in a serious voice.

“Do I get my wages while I’m with you? And the same wages as he had?” continued the small boy, who was the sort that likes to know where he stands in good time.

“But of course”, answered the owner, who for once was in no mood to drive a hard bargain.

“That’s good then I shan’t go to the villagers” said Sravan, and was easier in his mind.

Babu often used to say, “A man who can earn his living is a complete man”, and he straightened himself up proudly.

“Good-bye”, he said. “I shall come then not tomorrow but when the barge arrives in a week’s time.”

The owner told him to come in again for a minute and leading the way to the kitchen door he ushered Sravan into the warmth. He asked the cook if she could not give this boy here a bite of something to eat, preferably something warm he could do with it.

Sravan would not accept any food.

“Aren’t you hungry?” asked the astonished man.

The boy could not deny that he was and for the rest he could hardly get his words out with the sharpness of his hunger whetted still keener by the blessed smell of cooking. But he resisted the temptation.

“I am not a beggar”, he said.

The owner was upset and he saw that how clumsily he had put his offering before the proud lad. He went over to the stubborn youngster, patted his head, and, with a affirmative nod to the cook, led Sravan into the outer room.

“Have you never seen your father offering his guests a sliver of hospitality”.

Then little Sravan had to confess that his father had sometimes offered tea to his visitors?

“There you are then,” said the factory owner satisfied that he has won a single point with the little boy.

“It’s just simple good manners to offer hospitality and to accept it. Refusing a well-meant invitation for no reason can mean the end of a friendship. You are a visitor here, so naturally, I offer you something to eat, we have made an important deal, and, what’s more, we have come to terms over a job. If you won’t accept ordinary hospitality, it’s hard to see how the rest is going to work out.”

The boy sighed of course, it must be as the owner said. But he was in a hurry. Bade Ram was all by himself in the shelter waiting for him to return. His eyes wandered round the room then he added, very seriously,

“Destiny is not arbitrary, it is orderly and reactional, it gives us reactions to our own past actions.”

There was never a truer word spoken, agreed the local Shylock, and as he said it, he pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket.

He’s a chip of the old block, he muttered, and putting his hand on Sravan’s shoulder, he blessed him.

The boy was astonished to see a grown man with tears in his eyes.

Sravan never cried he said, and went on, “I haven’t cried either since I was little I nearly did when I knew Babu was dead. But I was afraid he wouldn’t like it, and I stopped myself.”

A moment later and tears overwhelmed Sravan. It is a consolation, albeit a poor one, to lean for a while on the bosom.