UNTOUCHABLE by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-06T22:00:00+00:00

The true reason for the sudden impulse that had come so usefully in the invention of his lie was inexplicable to anyone, even to himself. For even he did not realise why he was going to see the wedding of Ram Charan’s sister. He hadn’t been invited to go by Gulabo (of course he could not have been invited by her, quarrelsome as she was, abusing even such a docile person as Bakha for one thing or another, especially for his encouraging her son to truancy) or by Ram Charan. And he couldn’t have been asked by Ram Charan’s sister, because she had never talked to him since she was ten. Why then was he going ? What had made him decide so suddenly on such an extraordinary adventure ?

He only knew that he wanted to get away from home, his father, his brother, his sister, everyone. But he wouldn’t confess even to himself that he was going to see Ram Charan’s sister for the last time. A picture of her appeared from the past before his mind’s eye. She was a tiny girl with shaven head, wearing a miniature skirt of gaudy red cotton with a white pattern, that the washerwomen wear. She looked like a juggler’s little monkey. He himself was then a boy of eight, in a gold-embroidered cap which his father had begged from a moneylender who had three small sons whose discarded clothes fitted Lakha’s three children exactly. Bakha remembered how, while he had been playing with her brother and Chota in the barracks, they had come home and started to play at marriage. Ram Charan’s little sister was made to act the wife because she wore a skirt. Bakha was chosen to play the husband because he was wearing the gold-embroidered cap. The rest of the boys took the part of members of the marriage party. Bakha recalled how he had been ragged by Chota for acting as the husband of a shaven-headed, ridiculous little girl, and how he (Bakha) had been angry with him, although he himself thought she looked funny. There was something wistful about her, a soft light in her eyes, for which she had become endeared to him and for which, he remembered, he had actually quarrelled with his friend. Since then, of course, she had grown up to be a tall girl with a face as brown as ripe wheat and hair as black as the rain clouds. And Bakha always felt proud of having once acted as her husband. Being very reticent and shy, however, he seldom dared even to look at her. But in the depths of his being he had felt waves of confusion at the thought of her. Now at the age of fourteen she was being married off to a young washerman attached as a follower to the 31st Punjabis regiment. He had heard of this arrangement a year ago. It was common knowledge in the sweepers’ street that Gulabo had taken two hundred rupees for the hand of her daughter.

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