5 Indian Masters Read online

  5 Indian

  Masters

  SHORT STORY MASTERPIECES

  Raja Rao

  Premchand

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Dr. Mulk Raj Anand

  Khushwant Singh

  Published by Jaico Publishing House

  A-2 Jash Chambers, 7-A Sir Phirozshah Mehta Road

  Fort, Mumbai - 400 001

  [email protected]

  www.jaicobooks.com

  © Jaico Publishing House

  The Serpent and the Rope © Raja Rao

  The Cat and Shakespeare © Raja Rao

  The Chessmaster and His Moves © Raja Rao

  5 INDIAN MASTERS

  ISBN 81-7992-217-0

  First Jaico Impression: 2003

  Ninth Jaico Impression (Reformatted): 2012

  No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  Printed by

  Repro India Limited

  Plot No. 50/2, T.T.C. MIDC Industrial Area

  Mahape, Navi Mumbai - 400 710.

  Contents

  Raja Rao

  1 The Serpent and the Rope

  2 The Cat and Shakespeare

  3 The Chessmaster and His Moves

  Rabindranath Tagore

  4 The Cabuliwallah

  5 Price of a Head

  6 Guru Govinda

  7 The Ungrateful Sorrow

  Premchand

  8 Box of Jewels

  9 The New Bride

  10 The Police of Justice

  Dr. Mulk Raj Anand

  26 Lajwanti

  27 The Gold Watch

  Khushwant Singh

  28 Karma

  29 The Mark of Vishnu

  30 The Portrait of a Lady

  Acknowledgements

  For The Serpent and the Rope

  This excerpt is from The Serpent and the Rope as published in Raja Rao: Fictions in 1998 by Katha, a registered, nonprofit society devoted to enhancing the pleasures of reading. The excerpt was taken from The Serpent and the Rope, published by John Murray, London (1960). The copyright for the story is held by the author.

  For The Cat and Shakespeare

  These excerpts are from The Cat and Shakespeare as published in Raja Rao: Fictions in 1998 by Katha, a registered, nonprofit society devoted to enhancing the pleasures of reading. These excerpts were taken from The Cat and Shakespeare: A Tale of Modern India, published by Macmillan, New York (1965). An earlier version was published as The Cat in the Chelsea Review (New York) in 1959. The Copyright for the story is held by the author.

  For The Chessmaster and his Moves

  This excerpt is from The Chessmaster and his Moves as published in Raja Rao: Fictions in 1998 by Katha, a registered, nonprofit society devoted to enhancing the pleasures of reading. The excerpt was taken from The Chessmaster and his Moves, published by Vision Books, New Delhi (1988). The original punctuation has been retained. The copyright for the story is held by the author.

  Raja Rao

  1 The Serpent and the Rope

  I was born a Brahmin – that is, devoted to Truth and all that. “Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,” etc, etc…But how many of my ancestors since the excellent Yagnyavalkya, my legendary and Upanishadic ancestor, have really known the Truth excepting the Sage Madhava, who founded an empire, or, rather, helped to build an empire, and wrote some of the most profound of Vedantic texts since Sri Sankara. There were others, so I’m told, who left hearth and riverside fields, and wandered to mountains distant and hermitages “to see God face to face,” And some of them did see God face to face and built temples. But when they died – for indeed they did “die” – they too must have been burnt by tank or grove or meeting of two rivers, and they too must have known they did not die. I can feel them in me, and know they knew they did not die. Who is it that tells me they did not die? Who but me.

  So my ancestors went one by one and were burnt, and their ashes have gone down the rivers.

  This excerpt is from the beginning of The Serpent and the Rope (1960).

  Whenever I stand in a river I remember how when young, on the day the monster ate the moon and the day fell into an eclipse, I used with til and kusha grass to offer the manes my filial devotion. For withal I was a good Brahmin. I even know grammar and the Brahma Sutras, read the Upanishads at the age of four, was given the holy thread at seven – because my mother was dead and I had to perform her funeral ceremonies, year after year, my father having married again. So with wet cloth and an empty stomach, with devotion, and sandal paste on my forehead, I fell before the rice-balls of my mother and I sobbed. I was born an orphan, and have remained one. I have wandered the world and have sobbed in hotel rooms and in trains, have looked at the cold mountains and sobbed, for I had no mother. One day, and that was when I was twenty two, I sat in a hotel – it was in the Pyrenees – and I sobbed, for I knew I would never see my mother again.

  They say my mother was very beautiful and very holy. Grandfather Kittanna said, “Her voice, son, was like a vina playing to itself, after evensong is over, when one has left the instrument beside a pillar in the temple. Her voice too was like those musical pillars at the Rameshwaram temple – it resonated from the depths, from unknown space, and one felt God shone the brighter with this worship. She reminded me of Concubine Chandramma. She had the same voice. That was long before your time,” grandfather concluded, “it was in Mysore, and I have not been there these fifty years.”

  Grandfather Kittanna was a noble type, a heroic figure among us. It must be from him I have this natural love of the impossible – I can think that a building may just decide to fly, or that Stalin may become a saint, or that all the Japanese have become Buddist monks, or that Mahatma Gandhi is walking with us now. I sometimes feel I can make the railway line stand up, or the elephant bear its young one in twenty four days; I can see an aeroplane float over a mountain and sit carefully on a peak, or I could go to Fatehpur Sikri and speak to the Emperor Akbar. It would be difficult for me not to think, when I am in Versailles, that I hear the uncouth voices of Roi Soleil, or in Meaux that Bossuet rubs his snuff in the palm of his hand, as they still do in India, and offers a pinch to me. I can sneeze with it, and hear Bossuet make one more of his funeral orations. For Bossuet believed – and so did Roi Soleil – that he never would die. And if they’ve died, I ask you, where indeed did they go?

  Grandfather Kittanna was heroic in another manner. He could manage a horse, the fiercest, with a simplicity that made it go where it did not wish to go. I was brought up with the story of how Grandfather Kittanna actually pushed his horse into the Chandrapur forest one evening – the horse, Sundar, biting his lips off his face; the tiger that met him in the middle of the jungle; the leap Sundar gave high above my Lord Sher, and the custard apples that splashed on his back, so high he soared – and before my grandfather knew where he was, with sash and blue Maratha saddle, there he stood, Sundar, in the middle of the courtyard. The lamps were being lit, and when stableman Chowdayya heard the neigh he came and led the steed to the tank for a a swish of water. Grandfather went into the bathroom, had his evening bath – he loved it to be very hot, and Aunt Seethamma had always to serve him potful after potful – and he rubbed himself till his body shone as the young of a banana tree. He washed and sat in prayer. When Atchakka asked, “Sundar is all full of scratches…?” Then grandfather spoke of the tiger, and the leap. For him, if the horse had soared into the sky and landed in
holy Brindavan he would not have been much surprised. Grandfather Kittanna was like that. He rode Sundar for another three years, and then the horse died – of some form of dysentery, for, you know, horses die too-and we buried him on the top of Kittur Hill, with fife and filigree. We still make an annual pilgrimage to his tomb, and for Hyderabad reasons we cover it up with a rose-coloured muslin, like the Muslims do. Horses we think came from Arabia, and so they need a Muslim burial. Where is Sundar now? Where?

  The impossible, for grandfather, was always possible. He never – he, a Brahmin – never for once was afraid of gun or sword, and yet what depth he had in his prayers. When he came out, Aunt Seethamma used to say, “He has the shine of a Dharmaraja”.

  But I, I’ve the fright of gun and sword, and the smallest trick of violence can make me run a hundred leagues. But once having gone a hundred leagues I shall come back a thousand, for I do not really have the fear of fear. I only have fear.

  I love rivers and lakes, and make my home easily by any waterside hamlet. I love palaces for their echoes, their sense of never having seen anything but the gloomy. Palaces remind me of old and venerable women, who never die. They look after others so much – I mean, orphans of the family always have great aunts, who go on changing from orphan to orphan – that they remain ever young. One such was Aunt Lakshamma. She was married to a minister once, and he died when she was seven or eight. And since then my uncles and their daughters, my mother’s cousins and their grandchildren, have always had Lakshamma to look after them, for an orphan in a real household is never an orphan. Lakshamma preserved, all the clothes of the young in her eighteenth century steel and sheesham trunk, in the central hall, and except when there was a death in the house these clothes never saw the light of the sun. Some of them were fifty years old, they said. The other day – that is, some seven or eight years ago – when we were told that Aunt Lakshamma, elder to my grandfather by many years, had actually died, I did not believe it. I thought she would live three hundred years. She never would complain or sigh. She never wept. We never wept when she died. For I cannot understand what death means.

  My father, of course, loved me. He never let me stray in to the hands of Lakshamma. He said, “Auntie smells bad, my son. I want you to be a hero and a prince.” Some time before my mother died, it seems she had a strange vision. She saw three of my past lives, and in each one of them I was a son, and of course I was always her eldest born, tall, slim, deep voiced, deferential and beautiful. In one I was a prince. That is why I had always to be adorned with diamonds – diamond on my forehead, chest and ears. She died, they say, having sent someone to the goldsmith, asking if my hair-flower were ready. When she died they covered her with white flowers – jasmines from Coimbatore and champaks from Chamundi – and with a lot of kumkum on her they took her away to the burning ghat. They shaved me completely, and when they returned they gave me Bengal gram, and some sweets. I could not understand what had happened. Nor do I understand now. I know my mother, my Mother Gauri, is not dead, and yet I am an orphan. Am I always to be an orphan?

  That my father married for a third time – my stepmother having died leaving three children, Saroja, Sukumari, and the eldest, Kapila – is another story. My new stepmother loved me very dearly, and I could not think of a home without her bright smile and the song that shone like copper vessels in the house. When she smiled her mouth touched her ears – and she gave me everything I wanted. I used to weep, though, thinking of my own mother. But then my father died. He died on the third of the second moon month when the small rains had just started. I have little to tell you of my father’s death, except that I did not love him; but that after he died I knew him and loved him when his body was such pure white spread ash. Even now I have dreams of him saying to me, “Son, why did you not love me, you, my Eldest Son?” I cannot repent, as I do not know what repentance is. For I must first believe there is death. And that is the central fact – I do not believe that death is. So, for whom shall I repent?

  Of course, I love my father now. Who could not love one that was protection and kindness itself, though he never understood that my mother wanted me to be a prince? And sine I could not be a prince – I was born a Brahmin, and so how could I be a king? – I wandered my life away, and became a holy vagabond. If grandfather simply jumped over tigers in the jungles, how many tigers of the human jungle, how many accidents to plane and car have I passed by? And what misunderstandings and chasms of hatred have lain between me and those who first loved, and then hated, me? Left to myself, I became alone and full of love. When one is alone one always loves. In fact, it is because one loves, and one is alone, one does not die.

  I went to Benares, once. It was in the month of March, and there was still a pinch of cold in the air. My father had just died and I took Vishalakshi, my second stepmother, and my young stepbrother Sridhara – he was only eleven months old – and I went to Benares. I was twenty two then, and I had been to Europe; I came back when father became ill. Little Mother was very proud of me – shed said, “He’s the bearing of a young papal tree, tall and sacred, and the serpent-stones around it. We must go round him to become sacred.” But the sacred Brahmins of Benares would hear none of this. They knew my grandfather and his grandfather and his great-grandfather again, and thus for seven generations – Ramakrishnayya and Ranganna, Madhavaswamy and Somasundarayya, Manjappa and Gangadharayya and for each of them they knew the sons and grandsons (the daughters, of course, they did not quite know), and so, they stood on their rights. “Your son, “they said to Little Mother, “has been to Europe, and has wed a European and he has no sacred thread. Pray, Mother, how could the manes be pleased?” So Little Mother yielded and just fifty silver rupees made everything holy. Some carcassbearing Brahmins – “We’re the men of the four shoulders,” they boast – named my young brother Son of Ceremony in their tempestuous high and low of hymns – the quicker the better, for in Benares there be many dead, and all the dead of all the ages, the successive generations of manes after manes, have accumulated in the sky. And you could almost see them layer on layer, on the night of a moon-eclipse, fair and pale and tall and decrepit, fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, nephews, friends, king, Yogis, maternal uncles – all, all they accumulate in the Benares air and you can see them. They have a distanced, dull-eyed look and they ask – they beg for this and that, and your round white rice-balls and sesame seed give the peace they ask for. The sacred Brahmin too is pleased. He has his fifty rupees. Only my young brother, eleven months old, does not understand. When his mother is weeping – for death takes a long time to be recognized – my brother pulls and pulls at the sari fringe. I look at the plain, large river that is ever so young, so holy – like my mother. The temple bells ring and the crows are all about the white rice-balls. “The manes have come, look!” say the Brahmins. My brother crawls upto them saying “Caw-caw,” and it’s when he sees the monkeys that he jumps for Little Mother’s lap. He’s so tender and fine limbed, is my brother. Little Mother takes him into her lap, opens her choli and gives him the breast.

  The Brahmins are still muttering something. Two or three of them have already washed their feet in the river and are coming up, looking at their navels or their fine gold rings. They must be wondering what silver we would offer. We come from far and from grandfather to grandfather, they knew that everyone in the family had paid, in Moghul gold or in rupees of the East India Company, to the more recent times with the British Queen buxom and small-faced on the round, large silver. I would rather have thrown the rupees to the begging monkeys than to the Brahmins. But Little Mother was there. I took my brother in my arms, and I gave the money, silver by silver, to him. And gravely, as though he knew what he was doing, he gave the rupees to the seated Brahmins. He now knew too that father was dead. Then suddenly he gave such a shriek as though he saw father near us not as he was but as he had become, blue, transcorporeal. Little Mother always believes the young see the dead more clearly than we the
corrupt do. And little Mother must be right. Anyway, it stopped her tears, and now that the clouds had come, we went down the steps of the Harishchandra Ghat, took a boat and floated down the river.

  I told Little Mother how Tulsidas had written the Ramayana just there, next to the Rewa Palace, and Kabir had been hit on the head by Saint Ramanand. The Saint had stumbled on the head of the Muslim weaver and had cried Ram-Ram, so Kabir stood up and said, “Now, My Lord, be Thou my Guru and I Thy disciple.” That is how the weaver became so great a devotee and poet. Farther down, the Buddha himself had walked and had washed his alms-bowl – he had gone up the steps and had set the Wheel of Law a-turning. The aggregates, said the Buddha, make for desire and aversion, pleasure and ill, and one must seek that from which there is no returning. Little Mother listened to all this and seemed so convinced. She played with the petal-like fingers of my brother and when she saw a parrot in the sky, “Look, look, little one,” she said, “that is the Parrot of Rama.” And she began to sing:

  O parrot, my parrot of Rama

  and my little brother went to profoundest sleep.

  My father was really dead. But little Mother smiled. In Benares one knows death is an illusory as the mist in the morning. The Ganges is always there – and when the sun shines, oh, how hot it can still be …..

  I wrote postcards to friends in Europe. I told them I had come to Benares because father had died, and I said the sacred capital was really a surrealist city. You never know where reality starts and where illusion ends; whether the Brahmins of Benares are like the crows asking for funereal rice-balls, saying “Caw-caw”, or like the Sadhus by their fires, lost in such beautiful magnanimity, as though love were not something one gave to another, but what one gave to oneself. His trident in front of him, his holy books open, some saffron cloth drying anywhere – on bare bush or on broken wall, sometimes with an umbrella stuck above, and a dull fire eyeing him, as though the fire in Benares looked after the saints, not the cruel people of the sacred city – each Sadhu sat, a Shiva. And yet when you looked up you saw the lovely smile of some concubine, just floating down her rounded bust and nimble limbs, for a prayer and a client. The concubines of Benares are the most beautiful of any in the world, they say; and some say too, that they worship the wife of Shiva, Parvathi herself, that they may have the juice of youth in their limbs. That is why Damodhara Gupta so exaltedly started his book on bawds with Benares. “O Holy Ganga, Mother Ganga, thou art purity itself, coming down from Shiva’s hair,” When you see so many limbs go purring and bursting on the ghats by the Ganges, how can limbs have any meaning? Death makes passion beautiful. Death makes the concubine inevitable. I remembered again grandfather saying, “Your mother had such a beautiful voice. She had a voice like Concubine Chandramma. And that was in Mysore, and fifty years ago.”