The Painter of Signs Read online

  ‘But you are not married,’ he ventured to joke.

  She was grim when she said, ‘They must also have meant the company one keeps.’ She looked serious. Raman remained silent.

  The cartman, without turning his head, in between two swear-words aimed at his animal asked, ‘Did you have a fight?’

  ‘Yes,’ Raman said.

  ‘What about?’ he asked, looking ahead at the road.

  ‘Oh, you know, this and that ...’

  ‘I used to thrash my wife when I had drinks in me,’ the cartman said. ‘But you are educated persons, and you are different.’

  It turned out to be a rather grim journey homeward. After her mention of the tiger and the devil, Daisy just withdrew into herself. Raman was abashed to be sitting so close to one whom he had driven up a tamarind tree. What did she mean by this proverb? He had often heard his aunt mention it. Did she think of herself as married to him already? Or did she have any clue as to the thoughts crossing his mind? For a moment he felt happy and relieved that she was perhaps beginning to take him seriously. If so, why this silence? He threw a furtive look at her, and found her gazing at him; it was ridiculous to behave like dumb animals sitting within inches of each other. She looked frozen. Still, a few droplets of water stood along her brow like the jewels in a coronet. He said to break the awkwardness, ‘You remind me of Queen Victoria.’

  A reckless statement, but he had decided to be reckless. After the drive and pressure that he had felt last night he was resolved not to be submissive and timid, but prove himself her equal in toughness. She should learn to respect him and not treat him as if he were a hanger-on to be spoken to when it pleased her or dropped at other times. The moment of contrition was gone. He had done nothing to feel guilty about - the normal drive of a force which kept the whole world spinning. Nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be apologetic about. If he had not tried to make use of an opportunity in the normal manner, he would have been considered a worthless sot in some circles. She had no reason to be so grim, as he had done nothing to warrant such an attitude. He had obliged her by wandering like a vagrant with her, putting himself through all kinds of travails, giving up his normal business, friends, and Aunt - what did she mean by this haughty aloofness? He said several times to himself, I have done nothing wrong. He spoke now with some amount of arrogance. ‘You will say nothing in reply?’

  ‘I have nothing to say.’

  ‘I have called you Queen Victoria, and you have no comment to make!’

  She looked at him coldly and asked, ‘What are you trying? Joking, teasing, or worrying me?’ Her voice quivered a little and she glared at him.

  ‘I just want to cheer you up, that is all. There is no reason why you should sulk and treat me in this manner. After all, what have I done except to show my ... my -’

  At this point Daisy tapped the cart-driver on his shoulder and said, ‘Stop, hey, stop.’

  The cart-driver turned round, bewildered.

  She insisted, ‘I said, “stop.” ‘ He pulled up the reins, and the bullock, which had been trotting, came to a sudden halt. She picked up her little bag, slipped down from the carriage, and ordered the driver,’ Take that man where he wants to go. I am not riding in this any more.’

  The cartman smiled. ‘How will you get to the bus? It is quite far away.’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself with that. Take him, I tell you.’

  At this Raman picked up his own bag and stepped out, saying, ‘You get in, I will get out and walk.’

  The cartman got down from his seat and said, ‘Come, come. This won’t do. How can you get away from each other when God has put you in wedlock? Impossible. Where are your children? Quarrels and fights such as this are inevitable, and you should not make too much of it. Go back, get along. H’m, get in. You will both laugh at this when you have eaten in that coffee-house, we will reach it soon. How can you go apart and where? How long have you been married? Newlyweds?’

  She said, ‘Make no mistake. We are not married.’

  A desperate recklessness seized Raman. ‘Don’t believe her, we are married.’ He glared at Daisy.

  The cart-driver smiled knowingly. ‘Young people always fight after a night like the last night. It is very common. You were not comfortable. I knew that all along. After a night like that there is always bad temper.’

  Raman began to enjoy this situation immensely. Daisy repeated weakly, ‘We are not husband and wife. He only works for me. I pay him his wages for working for me.’

  Raman said, appealing to the conscience of the world, ‘See what is coming over wives these days! I work for her in order to be of help, and now she says -’

  She snarled, ‘He is a liar.’

  ‘Yes, I am a liar,’ said Raman cheerfully.

  The cart-driver said, ‘See there, he has already forgiven you. This mood will pass. Both of you must be hungry. I will get to the coffee-shop, and after a cup of coffee you will both laugh and embrace.’ And he gloated over that prospect.

  ‘This fellow is foul-tongued, doesn’t seem to realize what he is saying,’ she cried.

  The cart-driver suddenly made a deep obeisance. ‘Please get back, I will prostrate myself at your feet. We have still time to catch the bus, but if you delay you will be stranded again. I promise to twist the tail of that animal until he gallops for his life and takes you there in time for a cup of coffee, a rest, and then the bus. Please, please.’ The man suddenly prostrated himself on the ground at her feet. ‘Pray get in. I won’t rise until you get in.’

  ‘You should be ashamed of yourself. Such an elderly man to be driven to this. You should not put him to such a trial,’ said Raman. With that he gripped Daisy by the shoulder, propelled her to the cart, and commanded, ‘Get in, get in now. Come on. You are creating a scene for no reason whatever. You are only hysterical.’ He lifted her bodily, pushed her into the cart, and followed her in triumphantly. The cartman resumed his place, started to move; he looked back, gratified, and noticed Daisy sobbing, her face covered with her hands. Raman felt dejected but was trying to look masterful.

  The cartman whispered to him, ‘Let her have a good cry. It’ll do her good. Don’t interfere with her.’

  Raman, in spite of the erstwhile bravado, was disquietened by Daisy’s breakdown of spirits. He wondered if his grip on her shoulder had hurt her. While it gratified his masculine vanity to think that he was really strong, at least stronger than Daisy, he wondered at the same time if he had crushed her collar-bone inadvertently? - that could turn out to be a pretty serious matter. He might have to take her to Dr Anand and put her in plaster. He would tell Anand: Something has happened to my wife’s collarbone. Please -. He could picture the astonishment on Anand’s face. What! What do I hear? When? When? Dr Anand was one of his oldest friends, and was likely to shout, Bastard! you have gone and done it without a clue to us.

  That’s all right, we shall talk about it later. First give relief to my wife. He would trill that word ‘wife’ with pride, let it dwell on his tongue like a drop of nectar. And with the plaster cast on her collarbone, Daisy would have to depend on him, perhaps leaving aside the population-exploders. She might regret it but he wouldn’t. One sure way to win a bride seemed to be to crack her collar-bone gently. He sat opposite, but dared not concentrate his attention on her; he had a fear that if he saw her sobbing, he might himself break down clumsily. It was harrowing to see those firm shoulders heaving up and down, punctuated with a gentle sob now and then. He plucked up enough courage to stretch his hand and pat her comfortingly. But the moment such a contact was established, she pushed off his hand unceremoniously.

  She glared at him for a second, hissing, ‘Taking advantage! You will learn your lesson like others who have learnt their lessons. I’ll see that you go to jail for this. I’ll tell the police the first thing.’

  While it pleased him to notice her positive spirit reviving, at the same time he was filled with dread. What was she promising him now? He hoped she did not me
an literally that she would go to the police with a criminal complaint - that’d be a nice rounding off of his career indeed! The whole town would laugh at him and he’d be unfit to be seen again on his cycle on Market Road; Jayaraj would make capital out of it and corner all the sign-boards. ‘You know what that chap did, he tried to molest a customer, when she was stranded on the way, and this chap took advantage.’ There was so much evil packed in that single word ‘advantage’ uttered now by Daisy.

  He said, ‘Please forget everything. I am sorry, perhaps I tried to joke and carried it too far.’

  She just pursed her tips - her small, narrow lip line seemed to have become tighter and shorter. Did she also grind her teeth? If not, what was the noise he heard? Just his imagination, perhaps.

  The cartman derived the greatest enjoyment out of this situation. He kept turning round and winking at Raman as if to say, This is all a part of the game. Keep your side up, as ever. It made Raman furious - it was this old fool who had goaded him on to behave in this wild manner - this fellow and the hermit in the cave who gave him encouragement. God alone knew what was going to happen to him when they reached the end of the journey. He hoped there would be no police station in the vicinity of the bus-stand at Koppal. What a mess he had got into! He had a wild impulse to abandon the present company and run away. That’d make a police search for him a definite thing. He decided not to make it worse with further word or deed. Silence was golden. As the bullock-cart bore them along, he lapsed into a grave silence and tried to pretend to himself that he was journeying all alone. The hermit had said, ‘You will have trouble before and after.’ Did he mean the trouble he was now having? But that might mean that he was going to have later trouble. Even so, it held a promise that, in between the two troubles, he was going to achieve something. Was that it? He pulled his thoughts back - once again moving along the danger line.

  Koppal was a little village which stirred itself into activity when a bus arrived at the yard in front of the thousand-year-old temple, now abandoned for public use. A fruit-stall and a couple of petty kiosks stocked with odds and ends came to life at the bus-stop; hawkers, loungers, and mendicants converged on this spot, and melted out of sight when the last bus departed. The cartman was paid off. When he approached Daisy to take leave of her, she spurned him and looked away - as a cause of all her troubles. He stood around innocently, rather bewildered, and drove away his cart in search of passengers who might go his way. Raman tried to carry her bag, but she held it away from him, without a word. She put her bed roll down and sat on it, unmindful of the little crowd standing around. Raman went across the road into the coffee-house and sent a serving boy to ask the lady for her order, and ate his breakfast heartily, alone. When the bus arrived, Daisy got in without a look in his direction and took her seat. Raman got in and occupied a seat several rows behind her. When the conductor came up, he asked, ‘Has that woman bought her ticket?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One or two?’

  ‘One,’ said the conductor. Raman bought a ticket for himself, thanking God that up to that moment she had not gone near the police.

  At Malgudi, she got down first with her bag, hailed a jutka, and went off without a word or look in his direction. Eventually, worrying a great deal, Raman was back home in Ellaman Street.

  Part Three

  Dreary days followed. Raman was depressed, panicky, and bewildered. He went on speculating again and again whether Daisy would go to the police with a complaint. He was, of course, familiar with the superintendent of police, a friendly man who gave him a nod when they met at the market fountain, where he sometimes came to watch a procession or a political demonstration. Couldn’t call him his friend, but knew him. Would that man entertain any complaint from Daisy? On the other hand it was possible there would be a knock on the door, and he’d be marched down Ellaman Street in handcuffs, the neighbours and the customers at the Chettiar shop standing around, gaping and nudging each other and commenting, ‘A sign-board painter, after all, should have known his place.’

  ‘What a woman to pick up a fellow like that and encourage him and now goes and complains to the police? She can’t be all that innocent.’

  ‘After all, look at her job! Most provocative! She has no better business than enticing innocent fools like this Raman. Poor fellow. His elders such a respectable family. The old lady at home will kill herself now, I’m sure, for shame. All her life she has lived such a religious life. Never missed a single evening’s discourse at the temple. Such a person to face this disgrace!’

  Raman’s imagination had become overactive and he lost all peace of mind. He had not decided how to collect his charges from Daisy now. He didn’t want to risk going to her office: if she didn’t fling a chair at him, she might call the police. He rued the day that ever brought him to her notice. He’d have to write off this piece of work altogether, and concentrate on his usual jobs. He must start out on his normal rounds again. But he had lost confidence in himself. Felt self-conscious in public. When people looked at him, he felt awkward. He avoided going out, and spent more and more of his hours in his room, moping over some old volume.

  His aunt kept up her routine life from five in the morning till ten o’clock at night, when she laid her head on a wooden plank for a pillow, and slept on the bare floor, finding the coolness of the cement surface agreeable. Raman wished he had her stability of mind. She lived like clock-work, performing her duties at home without a question or doubt of any sort. She had been the same as long as he could remember. But lately, he realized, she was worrying about him secretly - ever since he had gone off with the family planner. People known to her whispered about him at the Chettiar shop and here and there, and she did not like the sly manner of their talk; although at first she had liked the girl and admitted her to the kitchen, she was suspicious of her type. Pursuing a young fellow like Raman! No one could say where it might lead, and now after all these weeks of wandering with her, he was home - but looked lustreless. What had this siren done to him? She couldn’t guess at all. Although she went about her days as usual without any outward sign of feeling, she was racked with fears and doubts. On that evening when he came back from his tour, he had walked straight to his room, unpacked and changed in silence, eaten his food in silence, never telling her where he had been or what he had seen, as he normally would even when he had returned from a trip to New Extension. He would always describe the people he had seen, joke about something, listen to her own talk, and so forth. But now he was strangely dumb and brooding. She only prayed that he had not got into any hopeless entanglement. Lord Krishna should protect him from that siren. She had ventured to ask, ‘Where had you been, all along?’

  ‘Lot of places,’ he had replied.

  ‘Was it enjoyable?’

  ‘Didn’t go for enjoyment, actually. It was work.’

  ‘Are you tired?’ she had asked.

  ‘Could be,’ he had replied.

  She felt that he didn’t want to pursue the subject. She went off at a tangent, which was always easier for her than proceeding in a single line of conversation. ‘The commissioner’s wife came to the temple. You know those people who used to — ’ She went on hopping from subject to subject freely, touching upon the past whenever possible - her usual irrelevances in talk. It relieved Raman that she was coming back to her normal state of communication without bothering about him.

  On the days following, she noticed him lounging in his room reading, as if he had an examination to face, never going near his work-shed or on his usual rounds of visits. While passing, she stood at his threshold to say, ‘That bangle shopman came in search of you.’

  Raman was surprised. That ‘Strictly-Cash’ rejector, and the squeezer of girls’ wrists! He had ignored him all these days.

  Then she said, ‘It seems you promised the doctor’s board. He had sent someone in to ask if it was ready. Plenty of people came in search of you when you were away ...’ and she trailed off and went back to her duties
.

  He was glad to be left alone. He put away the book he had been glancing through and decided to organize his papers, dumped in an old suitcase. Rummaging through them he came upon the little scroll given by the Town Hall Professor. This will pass. He kept looking at it, and then carefully folded and kept it in his purse, without any notion why. His torment came from mixed-up causes, panic on one hand, and through a terrible feeling of loss on the other. It was a horrifying prospect that Daisy might never see him again. He felt helpless about it and experienced a loneliness that he had never known before. Life without Daisy’s company seemed impossible. He had retained enough sense to ask himself how he could have come to rely so much on this person - the herbal fragrance, the sound of her voice, the movement, gesture, glint in her eye, even the solid silence that she could maintain and impose on her surroundings - these were rich items of memory, and he missed them. He would give anything to revive a bit of that experience. He would love to undertake an endless journey again in a bullock-cart - that had been a rare privilege he could never hope for a second time in his life. What a fool not to have known the value of it at the time and to have behaved like a drunken buffoon! He felt desperate and wanted to race down Market Road screaming, I have done no wrong. Most natural event between a man and a woman. Yet this lady spurns me. She causes me great anguish and has punctured the sails of my life.

  Under the stress of this emotion, he quickly composed a verse: ‘My sails filled and the boat went forth - but she took out a knife and gashed it; and the boat floundered.’ He reread it and wondered if it could be his own composition or an unconscious plagiarism out of one of his rare editions. He went on correcting the lines. A verse worthy of someone accustomed to the sea, but here in landlocked Malgudi it sounded false, and that made him suspicious that it might be someone else’s. Anyway, polishing it afforded him a little diversion. He felt he could now understand the outpourings of poets — the fellows must be in his state of love-sickness or some other agony all the time. His mind went back to This will pass — it sounded unreal and irritating. Time would not pass and he would not survive this trial. He lay dormant for a whole week and felt sick of it.