Revolt

(A Short Story)

(1)

Padma was a soft-skinned, sweet-tempered, lotus-eyed lad of seventeen. He was the last born of a family of numerous fifteen, in which the daughters definitely predominated over the sons, indicating something of the virile share which Neelakshi had thrown into the conjugal partnership. But the daughters had a splendid success in the matrimonial market. For Neelakshi had succeeded not only in the mere minor triumph of transmitting her sex but also in reproducing in her daughters her glorious complexion and refined features. The far-seeing mother had bestowed on this lovely bunch of daughters infinite patience in the rearing and disposing of them. Calm and vigilant in the most intricate transactions of marriage, she always won the best of a wide range of suitors. Till she actually chose her son-in-law, she kept all of them hopeful and dreaming.

But Neelakshi found the upbringing of her sons a more difficult job. Her husband came of a family long ago settled on land. But she gave up the ancestral village in favour of Shiyali, a semi-urban centre, fortunately blessed with a railway station at which all trains stopped except the Boat Mail. All her five sons ran up to the matriculation class. Some negotiated the minor hurdles of class promotions at least the second time. But all of them found the matriculation examination too wide and disastrous a ditch for their jumping power.

The shrewd mother understood that she had not succeeded in transmitting her own quality to her sons. She deplored the lack of talent and ambition, alas, of the sons sprung of her own loins. A subtle reaction evidently pervaded the natal hour and withheld the classic qualities of the mother from her own sons. But Raghu, the last but one and the elder to Padma, was an exception to this reaction of quality in the male progeny. She knew Padma as an exception almost by natural insight and so she persevered with him and gave him her best.

Neelakshi had so far succeeded in scattering her ‘failed matriculates’ and S.S.L.C’s allover the Tamil districts–for she was fruitful over a wide period of time which the progressive University of Madras had beneficently used to experiment with the course of studies for the young. She had succeeded in securing for some, mainly with the help of her sons-in-law, minor jobs of clerkships in public offices and private firms. And some others not so good eyen for such jobs, she had wisely settled as part of the pannai of her richer sons-in-law who showed a melting tenderness for the affiliated blood.

(2)

Raghu really displayed great promise. He passed his S. S. L. C., the first in his high school at the first attempt. He read history with a discerning eye to the large movements of ideas that shaped human events, and specialised in Economics and Labour problems as subjects of increasing importance in the world’s affairs, especially in India’s unshapen future. He successfully graduated but missed very narrowly a first class in the University though he scored one in life by his marriage. In the final collegiate year his impoverished mother had to marry Raghu to an irrigation engineer’s daughter, solely with a view to avoid a financial breakdown. This happy event distracted Raghu’s attention from his studies, with its deepavali travels and presents and all the unrest which matrimony means at that tender age. That was the only mistake Neelakshi ever committed in her long and busy life, but she was obliged to do so to replenish her treasury. Except for a dilapidated house in the ancestral village, the family at this time owned nothing on earth. But thanks to this fortunate alliance it brought in three thousand rupees of the irrigation engineer’s over-stocked gold,–Raghu was sold at one hundred times his share of the inheritance value.

Raghu, with his resources so providentially supplemented, tried indeed very hard for the I. C. S. He went up to Delhi with conscious pomp by the Grand Trunk Express–he was far surer of his administrative capacity than of his academic talents–but failed of course for want of a few marks to get into the chosen arc. Then he tried several offices for a job till he had nearly run out the three thousands. And he quietly settled down to journalism which, thank God, required no capital except a pennyworth of ink and paper and of course postage to and fro to carry safely its own weight. Out of three dozens he conceived and wrote in the highest moments of his creative fancy, only three got locally published though he sent all of them abroad with amazing perseverance to the very ends of the earth, London to New York, New York to California. One of the three happened to be a laudatory research article on the economic and labour organisation in Vedic times. The local Deputy Collector happened to be similarly engaged in such research as a recreation from the exactions ofcivil and criminal administration and as a reaction to a promotion long overdue but denied. He wrote appreciatively of the maiden efforts of the young man and gave intelligent and elderly advice on the proper lines of research, and as an allied subject for collateral study suggested the Sumerian civilisation.

The young graduate, Raghu, enthusiastically responded to the generous words of praise, and sent in the next day an application for a clerkship at the earnest entreaty of Neelakshi not to miss the chance but to make hay while the sun shines. There was fortunately a vacancy in the Taluq office of Shiyali and the Deputy Collector, warm and intellectual by temperament, defied the standing orders that no Brahmin should be appointed to a clerkship in the Division until further orders, blessed Raghu with an appointment that carried initially twenty-five rupees a month and the baton of the field-marshal in the kinapsack. Raghu may still become a Collector some, day though just now crawling on the bottom rung.

There were no bounds to the joy at home that day. Neelakshi was overjoyed; for some monthly income was a dire necessity, as her daughter-in-law had already come home with a boy of five and a girl of two in the cradle. Raghu sincerely took to his slaving work at the desk for all his juvenile ambition, and became a happy bread-winner of the family. A few months rolled on and Raghu continued steadily his honest grind of revenue accounts.

And Padma, the last born, was in the sixth form preparing or supposed to prepare for the S. S. L. C. public examination. Padma’s forefathers were village magistrates before Neelakshi’s driving ambition and fertility drove the family to the adventures of town life. The hereditary taste for public affairs which expressed itself in Raghu in his passionate attachment to Economics and Labour problems, had a precocious outburst in Padma in patriotic song and deeds.

Padma, the lotus-eyed, for all his softness of features and kindly expression, was a born rebel whom the Time-spirit and a wooden system of education had kindled to quick flame. And the youngest in a joint Hindu family is either a born rebel or a slave of all work. On the inheritance side he gets nothing, as everything movable and immovable is exhausted by his elders before he sees the light of day or attains the age of discretion to commit indiscretions. And his boyhood nominally owing allegiance to school is more or less a period of menial service to the elders who boss over him.

Padma began to take recognition of this ill-jointed world very early in life. The unrest of the decade hatched him into a precocious public worker. Padma took to the Hindu news-paper and the patriotic meetings on the Uppanar sands like duck to water where ears of corn lay floating. His text-books, what few he had purchased, he had long ago sent down, the temple tank to consecrate some patriotic vow he had taken for public service. Still he kept on attending school just to gain those qualities of leadership which he hoped would stand him in good stead in later life.

Still for all his truancy to his studies Padma was easily successful in school. He regularly passed his class examinations without any sort of industry, to the amazement of his own teachers. So Padma was cocksure of success, for all his devotion to public work as a full-time local worker who met and garlanded at the station even at midnight every provincial and national hero who passed that way by any train except the Boat Mail, which did not stop there but for whose stopping Padma had already sent a monster petition to the Agent and the Railway Board at New Delhi.

Padma reckoned the selection examination by the headmaster as a tyrannical and wasteful diversion and mockery, and did it in a very perfunctory way. Still he hoped to pass the S.S.L.C. public examination by sitting up a few days before the ordeal, borrowing the books of so many rich lads who kept the books tidy for the next year, sure to fail this time. Raghu chided Padma for his patriotic vagrancy, and Padma mocked at Raghu, the distinguished student of Economics and Labour problems, for the slave’s work at the desk twelve hours a day, all too sterile for words or tears.

The Time-spirit played tragically through every nook and corner of life like a cyclone in its windiest hour before the rains.

(3)

It was a Saturday evening. Neelakshi was busy negotiating the price of a bundle of firewood which an old woman of the irulla caste was hawking in the streets for sale. Neelakshi with her sure business instinct knew how to negotiate successfully at rock-bottom rates with these poor and hungry vendors. Raghu had promised to return rather early for lunch that day and she was eagerly waiting for him to give him, hot and crisp, a few uthappams with a dainty ball of fresh butter riding over them. The firewood was knocked down at less than, the cost of labour for splitting the wood. Raghu came home and had a really nice lunch with his mother all alone.

Padma was busy in the streets of Shiyali,–he had not had even his breakfast at home,–gathering the vagrant lads up for a monster procession and a meeting of protest against some ill-conceived act of the Government of India and the support which the Secretary of State for India gave it in a speech at a luncheon given in his honour in London. Neelakshi’s maternal bosom heaved a sigh of pain at the thought that Padma was not there to share in the domestic lunch.

‘Raghu, you are becoming more and more indifferent to your home affairs, more and more absorbed in your official work. Padma is fast getting adrift–truant and reckless. You should check him immediately or the boy will be lost to us in the Gandhian flood.’

‘I should check him, mother!–and get a slap in the face! Already he is advising me to kick off my job and respond to the country’s call,–and that God would feed us all as he feeds the sparrow. He is an unruly colt, mother, though he looks so soft and speaks so soft. The blood of the rebel is in him. You alone should try to check him, your youngest,–and your dearest.’ Raghu finished with a significant laugh.

‘Yes, Raghu, I’m partly to blame–at least now I’ll give him a bit of my mind. For all his wildness, I trust, he will pull through the S.S.L.C.–and also the selection examination held last week. We’ve to pay his examination fees in a day or two as soon as the headmaster puts up the list–and I’ve not a pie on hand–I’ve tried all sources open to me and failed. Can you manage it, Raghu, in the office from your fellow-clerks?’

‘Manage it from my fellow-clerks! shrivelled up, old, battered affairs who daily depend on me and the karnams for a copper or two for their pan and snuff. I may as well ask the tahsildar for a loan!’

‘Then, Raghu, there must be many rich mirasdars whom you must have helped in many ways–will they not help you with such a trifling sum as this?’

‘That way surely, mother, red ruin lies, and it is dishonest. It would make my sweated and slaved food, mother, doubly repugnant.’

‘Only a loan I suggest, Raghu, not a bribe.’

‘It’s impossible, mother. No such distinction exists in the official world.’

Already the shouts of boys in multitudes and in moving procession were heard at the western end of the street corner. For, Padma had succeeded in declaring a school strike for the afternoon to protest in a moster meeting assembled on the sands of Uppanar against the action of the Government of India, And Padma bravely laid the route of the procession along his own street so that his mother may have a glimpse of the infant power that he was already in local affairs and in the country’s cause. He led the boys with banner in hand singing to himself a tune slightly different from the patriotic chorus-song of the crowd, Neelakshi’s heart was filled with both pride and anger.

Neelakshi openly called out for Padma in the crowd and scolded him vigorously for his wild, wasteful and unruly life, and spoke in a sharp voice of decision which she alone could command, a voice which was already fretting with the thought of lack of funds for the many vital, needs of home life.

‘I’m sure, Padma, you will fail in the examination, and it is a mere waste to send you up even if you chance to get into the selection list. Don’t enter my house, so long as you lead this reckless and vagrant life.’

The sensitive lad Padma stopped the tune he was singing to himself and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘All right, mother, I shall not enter your house, pass or fail. Be happy with Raghu, The call of the country calls me away from home.’ His mother’s words were a chastisement administered before a crowd, and his words, an oath of honour taken in an excited but sacred hour, taken in the presence of so many. It went deep into the sensitive mind of Padma.

(4)

It was an excited, crowded, unprecedentedly crowded, patriotic meeting that the boys held on the sands of Uppanar under the leadership of Padma. Raghu, his brother, was almost the only young man of his age in Shiyali who did not attend this monster meeting. There were as many as five speeches in English and seven in Tamil and one in Hindi for the unity of India. Padma who presided spoke first in English, then in Tamil, then in Hindi, broken but expressive. He scattered pellmell all through his speeches quotations from Sanskrit, especially from the Bhagavat-Gita, in support of his protest against the action of the Government of India.

The juvenile president had hardly closed the peroration of his closing speech in English when a smart young lieutenant of his ran up to him and whispered into his ears, ‘I hear the selection results have just been published, Padma, and your name is not there, nor mine! What shall we do?’

Padma did not lose his presence of mind. He courageously stood up and said to the boys in the meeting: ‘Before we dissolve this meeting I have to announce you today that the selection list has just been published and that the headmaster has cut down fifty per cent of us, including myself. We have just been protesting against the high-handed action of the Viceroy and the Government of India, and we should from now turn our attention to local affairs. Meanwhile let us go in a body and find out the facts.’

Yes, they marched to the school in crowded excitement under the leadership of Padma. They saw the list with perspiring eagerness. But it was a slender one of three in which Padma ranked first. Even his lieutenant who gave the news was not in the list. The other two, were notorious slackers, sons of local magnates who went to school because they had fine clothes to wear and were too troublesome at home.

In five minutes Padma found he, became a leper. One by one all his friends who applauded his eloquence but half an hour ago, till land and water echoed to the juvenile shouts, melted away quietly. He found himself reeling on the parallel bars for support almost all alone on the school playground. He was lost in thought for five minutes. But he quickly recovered himself as he thought of his mother and brother at home and the evening incident. He hastened towards the railway station side by the exit of the school along a short cut by the side of an irrigation channel, unnoticed by anybody. Nearing the station he heard the Parcel Express thundering on the fateful Uppanar Bridge. That settled his plan of future action. It was his first failure in life. The sensitive lad smarted under it. He took it to heart. But he gained the true taste of life from his first failure.

(5)

The Parcel Express came slowly steaming into the platform carrying as if with conscious pride its mixed load of perishables and imperishables; fruits, vegetables, and men. Padma had always a weird fancy for the steam engine as the very emblem of the glory of motion, and looked upon the station-yard as a place of the keenest pleasure for the study of men and women in the most liquid condition of their lives, and often longed, at the bottom of his juvenile heart, for the longest journeys. But this evening he did not feel the ecstasy of motion but felt a prisoner in the open space of the platform and the throng of men.

Just when the train whistled to start he slipped into one of the crowded compartments, and put out his head just to see who was the white-trousered gentleman who got into the next carriage. He could not see him though he craned his neck very hard but heard the gruff voice of the ticket-examiner calling for tickets. Padma had done many a time with his gay band of boys joyous free rides to the Coleroon in the same Parcel Express. But this time his heart strangely clicked alarm, and he felt that he was diminishing by inches almost to the vanishing point.

Padma had made up his mind to slip out of the train on the wrong side at the next station of Coleroon, and await the chances by another train. Padma effected his, escape safely. Quickly walking across the rails he gained the shelter of the darkness of the giant avenue trees growing rankly on the rich alluvial soil. The goods-shed lay like a mausoleum a little beyond.

A strange thought stole through his mind for the first time; ‘What is the worth of my life to me or to my fellows? Let me end it quietly in the glory of the Coleroon floods and reach the everlasting sea in half an hour.’ A fat, wild lizard clicked ‘amen’ from among the stored bags of paddy in the goods-shed, and a huge tree lizard murmured assent from amidst the dark leafy branches of a giant tree.

The gloom seemed to become darker, and at the mysterious prophetic voice of the lizard, Padma shuddered a little more and moved along the rails to the open sky towards the Coleroon bridge, soliloquising with a maturity which three hours of grief and failure had already given him: ‘I’m but one of fifteen to my mother, and why this wild profusion? It seems God has but wantonly made me only for waste. Let me carry out His wish; and my mother won’t miss me; drown myself in the mighty river after one splendid ecstasy of swimming. None loves a bath in roaming waters dearer than myself and it is a fitting close to my career; let me have the longest swim and the sweetest death;–and the sea throw up as feed for the vultures on the shore the body from which life had been taken out by the human vultures on the land; and perchance my ghost may haunt the soul, the sleeping and the waking hours of my headmaster.’

A new courage came to him with this resolve. With firm steps he marched on balancing lightly on the shining rails as if he were a trained trolley puller.

The magnificent Coleroon was but a furlong off the station. The rumbling sound of the Parcel Express thundering along the massive iron bridge had not yet died down. It but seemed to cheeer the pedestrian Padma to run along its wake and feel the joy of it for himself.

Padma balancing himself on the shining rails sped like a serpent along the lawn. He bet within himself that if he chanced to slip off the rails, would surely die. Strange to say, though he wanted to drop off he could not. Some magnet glow at his heels kept him to the shining rails. He did not and could not slip off. What a strange thing destiny is! He was so unhelpably alive even for a merry puzzle. So like a trolley-man he flew on the edge of the shining rails till he reached the wonderland of the river and the bridge. He saw the river by the crescent moonlight, not in the glory of floods but in the greater glory of sand, with deep pools of clear water here and there.

padma spoke to himself: ‘Are the pools deep enough to drown? Is Padma to leave his tender body floating in a stagnant pool against the gay morning sun? No, no. To be drowned in the Coleroon in floods has at least the glorious end of a rolling sea. No, Padma never will die in a pond like, a stoned frog.

He was already a few yards up on the railway bridge. He sat on the massive end of the third pier, looked on the glory of the river-bed bathed in crescent moonlight, and said to himself, ‘The river has cheated me of my resolve. Why not sleep over the rails forever and leave a mangled tender corpse just to illustrate the story of man’s misdeeds on earth once again?’

Before the thought could mature into a firm resolve, padma felt a native repugnance to this form of death. And all too soon a train came blazitig its searchlight along the track. It seemed a difficult job for Padma to face death before such blazing glory. He became undecided as the train drew nearer, grinding and whistling. He jumped over the bridge at the last moment as a compromise in conflict between life and death, courage and cowardice, and fell sheer eighteen feet below into a deep pool, splashing the quiet water to showering heights. It was indeed very deep and a little broad. Padma knew swimming as well as a fish. How could he get drowned for all his wish in a stagnant pool? He swam ashore briskly, walked in deep sand to the banks of the river, fell into a deep reverie. The cool bath refreshed his fevered brain and pulsed it to clearer thoughts of the joy of living. It cut a change for him from the immediate past.

An hour later Padma stood up and prostrated himself to the Unseen God once, twice, thrice, and stood up again transfixed in prayer for over half an hour with his palm joined to palm.

I’ll catch the Ceylon Boat Mail, and at Colombo get into one of the Australian steamers, hiding myself in the coal-bunks, even as Lord Reading did; return ten years hence to India if not as the Viceroy, at least as a pioneer with funds for a new system of education and of life–at any rate, having reached an age when none would ever think of putting me to school again.’

So with this deep resolve Padma waited at the Coleroon station for the Ceylon Boat Mail from Madras, hiding himself and his aching but active and dreaming youth behind the great banyan trees on the platform.