Mr Sampath-The Printer of Malgudi, the Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma (39 page)

‘I don’t think we ought to worry about a bare difference of twenty rupees,’ Margayya said, feeling happy that he could after all take part in the discussion.

‘I agree with you,’ said Lai. ‘Now about the style of binding, etc’

‘Oh, these details!’ Margayya exclaimed. ‘They should not come as far as me. You ought to decide those things yourself

‘But every item has to go into costs. I don’t want you to feel at any time that I have incurred any expense without your knowledge.’

‘That comes only at the end, doesn’t it?’ Margayya said.

‘Of course, in the first quarter following publication.’

And Margayya felt relieved – he had a gnawing fear lest he should have to shell out cash immediately.

‘And,’ said Lai, ‘my lawyer suggests that we had better call this book “Domestic Harmony” instead of “Bed Life”. Have you any objection?’

‘Oh, none whatever,’ said Margayya. ‘In these matters we must implicitly obey the lawyers.’

‘Otherwise we shall get into trouble.’

‘Yes, otherwise we shall get into trouble,’ echoed Margayya, adding: ‘We must do everything possible to avoid getting into trouble because a business man’s time is so precious.’

‘You are an uncanny fellow. You seem to understand everything,’ Lai said admiringly.

When Balu was six years old Margayya had him admitted to the Town Elementary School. Margayya made a great performance of it. He took the young man in a decorated motor with pipes and drums through the Market Road: the traffic was held up for half an hour when Balu’s procession passed. Balu sat with the top of his head shaved, with diamonds sparkling on his ear-lobes, and a rose garland round his neck, in a taxi with four of his picked friends by his side. Margayya walked in front of the car, and he had invited a few citizens of the road to go up with him as well. Strangest sight of all, his brother was also with him in the procession. They seemed to have made it up all of a sudden. On the eve of the Schooling Ceremony, Margayya stated: ‘After all, he is his own uncle, his own blood, my brother. Unless he blesses the child, of what worth are all the other blessings he may get?’ He grew sentimental at the thought of his elder brother. ‘Don’t you know that he brought me up?… But for his loving care …’ He rambled on thus. His wife caught the same mood and echoed: ‘No one prevents them from being friendly with us.’

‘There are times when we should set aside all our usual prejudices and notions – we must not let down ties of blood,’ Margayya said pompously. As a result of this sentiment, at five a.m. they both knocked on the door of the next house and quietly walked past the astounded stare of his brother as he held the door open. Margayya’s wife went straight into the kitchen to invite the sister-in-law, and Margayya stood before his brother in the hall and said: ‘All of you are keeping well as usual, I suppose?’ adding: ‘Balu’s Schooling Ceremony is tomorrow morning. Come and bless him –’

‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ his brother said, still somewhat dazed.

‘Bring yourself and all the children for a meal,’ Margayya said, and added, ‘You must not light the oven in your own house. Come in for morning coffee. Where is my sister-in-law?’

His brother said: ‘There.’

Margayya shouted: ‘Sister-in-law!’ familiarly, as he used to do in his boyhood days. It seemed to take him back decades when he was a student coming home during the afternoon recess for rice and buttermilk. He made a move towards the kitchen, when his wife came in the opposite direction, with bowed head, showing the respect due to the elder brother-in-law; she moved off fast, giving Margayya a swift glance, which he understood. He turned and followed his wife quietly into the street. Hardly had they gone up their veranda steps when she whispered: ‘She will not come.’

‘Why not?’ Margayya asked.

‘She bit her lips so and nodded – the vicious creature. She wouldn’t speak a word to me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not? Why not? Don’t keep saying that. She is that sort, that is all.’

‘She used to be very kind to me in those days.’ Margayya’s sentimentality still lingered in him, as he remembered his schooldays.

‘No one prevents you from going and asking her again.’

‘You invited her properly, I suppose,’ Margayya said.

She flared up: ‘I have abased myself sufficiently.’

‘That’s all right, that’s all right,’ Margayya said, scenting danger.

His brother and seven of his children came and presided over the function. He presented young Balu with a silver box, and at the sight of it Margayya felt very proud and moved. He asked his son to prostrate himself before his uncle ceremoniously and receive his blessings, after which the boy started out for his school in a procession.

Margayya’s son had a special standing in the school, for Margayya was the school secretary. Teachers trembled before him, and the headmaster stood aside while he passed. They knew Margayya was a powerful man and also that he could be a pleasant and kindly man, who listened to their troubles when they met him at home to discuss small promotions or redress. He listened to them most attentively and promised to do his best, but hardly remembered anything of it next moment. This was purely a defensive
mechanism. He simply could not keep in his head all the requests that people brought to him each day. The utmost he could do for them was to be pleasant to them. When they pestered him too much he merely said, ‘See here, I took up this work as a sort of service for our people, but this is not my only occupation. As a matter of fact I did not want all this business, but it was thrust upon me and they wouldn’t take my refusal.’

He spoke like the president of a political party after an election campaign, but his place on the school board did not come to him unsought nor was it thrust upon him. On the day he admitted Balu to the school he realized that his son would not have a chance of survival unless he admitted himself also to the school. Within fifteen days of the Schooling Ceremony he heard reports that Balu was being caned almost every day, was having his ears twisted by all and sundry, and that even the school peon pushed him about rudely. He loved his son and it seemed to him that the school was thoroughly in the wrong. He went there once or twice to rectify matters and was told by the headmaster that it was all false and perhaps the boy deserved all that and more. They treated him in an off-hand manner which angered him very much. They almost hinted that he might take his son away. At the end of the term Balu came home with his progress card marked zero. Margayya decided to take charge of the school.

He was a busy business man who could not afford the time for unprofitable honorary work, but he felt he ought to sacrifice himself for the sake of his son’s educational progress. He wanted Balu to grow up into an educated man, graduating out of a college and probably going for higher studies to Europe or America. He had immense confidence in himself now. He could undertake any plan with ease; he could shape his son’s future as if it were just so much clay in his hand. His son might become a great government official or something of the kind, or indeed anything in ten years, if this cursed school were not in his way … He watched for the next election time. It was a strategy of extraordinary complexity and meant expense too; but he did not grudge it. He felt that no expense was too great for a child’s future, and slipped into the place of a member whom he had persuaded to retire. After that one could notice a great improvement
in Balu’s career. He never lost his place in the class, and the teachers seemed to have adjusted themselves to his way of thinking. In addition Margayya picked up a home tutor for him. He made this selection with great astuteness. He kept an eye on all the teachers, and sounded his son himself as to whom he would like to have as teacher at home, to which Balu promptly replied, ‘No one.’

Margayya said, ‘You are not to say that. You must have a home teacher. Tell me whom you like most in your school.’

After a great deal of persuasion, the boy said ‘Nathaniel.’

Margayya knew him to be a mild Christian gentleman whom all the children loved because he told them numerous stories, let them do what they pleased, never frowned at them even once, and taught them history and such innocuous subjects rather than mathematics. Margayya decided at once to eliminate this gentleman from his list as a home tutor. ‘It is no good appointing a sheep to guard a tiger cub,’ he told himself. He suddenly asked: ‘Who is the teacher that beats the boys most?’

‘The science attender,’ replied the young innocent.

‘I don’t mean him,’ Margayya said, ‘I mean among the teachers.’

‘But the science attender says he is also a teacher. Do you know, father, he beats any boy who doesn’t call him “Sir”?’

‘He does that, does he!’ exclaimed Margayya angrily. ‘You go and tell him that he is merely a miserable science peon and nothing more, and if he tries to show off I will cut off his tail.’

‘Has he a tail, father?’ asked Balu. ‘Oh, I didn’t notice.’ He burst into a laugh, and laughed so loudly and rolled about so much that his father was forced to say, ‘Stop that … Don’t make all that noise.’ The vision of the science attender with a tail behind only made Balu roll about more and more. He made so much noise that his mother came out of the kitchen to ask, ‘What is the matter?’

‘Mother,’ the boy screamed, ‘father thinks that our science teacher has a tail, the science teacher has a tail …’ He danced about in sheer joy at this vision, and Margayya could not get anything more out of him. The boy was too wild. He left him alone for the moment but questioned him again later and found
that the teacher he most detested was Mr Murti, the arithmetic and English teacher, an old man who always carried a cane in his hand, shaved his head and covered it with a white turban, and wore a long coat. To Margayya it seemed to be a very satisfactory picture of a teacher. None of your smart young men with bare heads and crop, with their entertaining stories and so forth. He immediately asked Murti to see him at his house and fixed him up at once as Balu’s teacher at home and a sort of supervisor for him at school too. His own professional work was taking up more and more of his time each day; he wanted another agency to protect the interests of his son at school.

Murti was only too happy to accept this job since he earned only twenty-five rupees at school and the ten rupees that Margayya arbitrarily offered him was most welcome, as was the perpetual contact he would have with the Secretary of the School Board day in and day out. It enhanced his status at school among his colleagues and also with the headmaster, who, if he wanted to sound the secretary’s state of mind over any important question at school, called aside Murti and spoke to him in whispers. All this Murti welcomed, but he also lost something in the bargain, and that was his power over his pupil, Balu. He knew that although Margayya had asked him to handle him as he would any other boy, the plan would not work. He had far too much experience with people who had an only child and a lot of money. They never meant what they said with regard to their children. No one lost his head so completely over a question of discipline as the parent of an only child. Murti did not want to offend the young boy and lose his favour so that one day he might tell his father, ‘I won’t be taught by that teacher.’ On the other hand he did not want the father to feel that he was not able to handle Balu. So he walked warily. He tried to earn the goodwill and co-operation of the pupil himself so that his job might be easy. He gave him many gifts of sweets and pencils and rubbers if he did a sum well and forbore his mischief, and treated him generally as a friend. The scheme worked, although the boy was on the verge of blackmailing his teacher whenever he set him more sums than he cared to do. But on the whole the relationship was successful and Balu progressed steadily from class to class and reached the Fourth Form.

The teacher and the pupil were like old partners now, seasoned partners who knew each other’s strong points and weak points. Margayya stuck to his School Board election after election. He boasted to his friends and relations whenever he found a chance: ‘Balu is just thirteen you know, and in two years …’ He gloated over a vision of his son passing into a college. He would give him a separate study in the new house he was planning to build in New Extension. He would buy table lamps with green shades; they said that a green shade was good for the eyes. He would send him to Albert Mission College, although it was at the other end of the town, far away from New Extension. He would buy him a car. People would look at him and say, ‘Well, there goes Margayya’s son. Lucky fellows, these sons of business men.’

Margayya had converted the small room into a study for Balu. Every morning Margayya carried out an inspection of this room in order to see that his son learnt civilized ways and kept his things in their proper places, but he always found the mat not spread out on the floor, but stood up against a corner half-rolled, his books scattered on the floor, and his little desk full of stones, feathers, cigarette foils and empty packets. These were all collected from a small shop made of dealwood planks near by which had recently been set up by a man from Malabar. Margayya felt unhappy when he saw the condition of this room. In his view a study had to be a very orderly place, with books arrayed on one side, and the clothes of the scholar folded and in their place on the wire stretched across the wall. Margayya had secured a small framed picture of the Goddess Saraswathi, the Goddess of Learning and Enlightenment, sitting beside her peacock and playing on the strings of a
veena
. He hung it in the study and enjoined his son ceremoniously to pray to the Goddess every morning as soon as he got up from bed. He inquired untiringly, ‘Boy, have you made your prostrations before the Goddess?’

‘Yes,’ the boy answered, and ran in and performed them in a moment, then came back to the hall and just hung about staring at the sky or into the kitchen. Margayya felt angry. He told his son sharply: ‘God is not like your drill class, to go and dawdle about half-heartedly. You must have your heart in it.’

‘I prostrated all right, father.’

‘Yes, but your mind was where?’