The Voice of Insult

 

He belonged to one of the low steps on the caste ladder, and as it happens usually, he was very poor; so his place in the world was now limited to the pitiable existence of an insect in the dust while the higher world fleeted more importantly. Absorbed in countless agonies at every step of life, he had his little share of some tiny ecstasies. After all, nature does very little discrimination in opening her smile on the persons of various castes and classes.

At his nondescript settlement, as it opened its idyllic eyes in the second half of February, a whole array of mist, fog and dew danced on the bucolic stage in the pre-twilight aura. He got up early and visited the fields to relieve himself of the nature’s call. So early in the morning, his mind less burdened with the worries of survival, he peeked into the rising hues of light across the fog. Without any discrimination, the light, fog and mists became his playmates.

An hour before the morning twilight, the sky was clear and visibility on ground was perfect, then some mysterious climatic wand would be swayed and the fog arrived like a silvery bluish pall of strange expectance. As the twilight broke over the light fog, it appeared as if the day was breaking from the sky overhead, illuminating a bluish circular stage around him, making him the undisputed king of this small sleepy world.

Sometimes the layers of mist would just float in pre-dawn tranquillity, hiding the lower canopies of the trees and then slowly, playfully, gently the scene around him would change, determined by those naughty floating particles carrying tiny load of condensation on their backs. His imagination would float with their ease, making him totally oblivious to the fact that he was born in the scavenger community—the bhangi or balmiki caste.

Well, on August 15, 1947 India won its freedom; but it was decades to go for the dawn when the proud Parliament of free India would first bring in the legislation to emancipate the manual scavengers—the community to which Ramu belonged—engaged in wretchedly degrading and criminally dehumanising task of manual scavenging at the lowest rung of Hindu caste hierarchy; and many decades still further when the pious intentions of Employment of Manual Scavengers and Construction of Dry Latrines (Prohibition) Act, 1993 would in fact percolate down to practice.

It was a province in India where the freer sun of India dawned a bit hesitatingly because the instrument of accession was still to be signed. The ruler was dilly-dallying with a multitude of interests. For decades, the people under the double shadow of authority—English and the ruler—had grown dispirited under the squeezing, oppressing talons of the two masters whose respective spheres of powers had sharp edges to tear their easy meat.

The monsoons had more or less done their task of turning the countryside lush green. Just like any other person of his caste, Ramu felt the brutal, confining chains of the obnoxious system of casteism. The real freedom appeared almost an unattainable dream. He wistfully looked at the casteless groups of birds flapping their wings in this natural pool of water on the outskirts of the sleepy township, which boasted of all the materiality of the ruler’s power and ordain.

The seven-year-old boy knew that theirs was the meanest and the pathetic most existence on earth. His father was employed as a manual scavenger to remove human excreta from the dry latrines of the training centre of the Maharaja’s little army under the tutelage of his British masters. Well, so much had changed in the form of lifestyles and fashion before the eyes of Ramu’s father. However, one thing remained the same which kept the deprived section pitted into the same horrible, ill-branded work of picking up human faeces manually. Ramu’s forefathers, the so called untouchables, slave chandalas, who were employed in cleaning the society of its most pitiable and dirty by-products, had a positive outlook towards the arrival of the Britishers. They believed that the enlightened white man will definitely do something by bringing some science in the domain of sanitation.

‘After all in their country there cannot be people like us. And still everyone must be purest and cleanest!’ his father wondered oftentimes.

However, why should the Britishers be unduly bothered about the mode of disposal of human excreta? In the enslaved country, they were fighting for bigger stakes, which demanded they must look over the social prejudices prevalent among the native population. So when urbanisation and industrialisation took first tentative steps under them, scores of manual scavengers were needed to clean both private and public dry latrines.

The twentieth century had seen decades of political movements in India and their patriotically charged reverberations echoed in princely India as well. Ramu’s father had his own dream-like versions of these andolans led by the Mahatma who had given them the name of Harijan, the people of God. Pocketed in this tiny province, where the free rays of India were still to shine, on this free morning, his fate came to be crushed by a British military expert, who shamefaced for the defeat and boiling in mood for packing his bags, found an outlet in this poor scavenger. The Englishman saw the cleaner affectionately offering a pure rose to his still purer girl child with his dirtiest of hands after he had removed the night soil from the apartment. He punished the cleaner by holding his face in the night soil. It proved a sacrament to his soul; this dip in the karambhoomi of his forefathers enlightened his soul. The humiliated man, as if unafraid of death and taking many clues from the freedom fighters, whose stories reached his ears through hearsay, got up, the filth dripping over his face. With a heaving breast, he yelled in the man’s face:

‘I’m not willing to live after this insult but I’ll live on to see you and your whole clan along with your shit being packed off forever from our land!’

He spat; not at the white man but on the ground, his soul heaving against his body. Meanwhile, his fellow scavengers trembled with fear. With firm steps he moved towards a water faucet, took a bath—all this while recalling what he had heard about the Mahatma—and once clean he thundered: ‘Safai Karamchari Andolan!’        

Ramu saw—as he came from the playful walk or rather jaunt—his father’s head and face turn a mass of pulpy red under the brutal strikes by the Maharaja’s sepoys, who under the spell of hurried loyalty went overzealous for the cause of their sovereign.

‘India gets freedom and even these dogs here in our Maharaja’s dominion start barking!’ a Brahmin sepoy gnashed his teeth. But he could sense the inevitability of the fall of his cherished sovereign.

Crying and shivering for the same fate, Ramu ran full 20 kilometres to his village, where the rest of his family lived. It was very late at night when Ramu beat his furtive palms against the rag-tag reed thatch door of their hutment. As fire was lit up and the monsoon clouds rumbled still at the tail end of their rainy orgy, he shivered in the lap of his blind grandmother, fatigued, torn, tattered and almost dead.

Next day, two of his fellow scavengers brought the body in a cart. ‘The word doing round in the city is that he turned a traitor,’ one of them said hesitatingly and his cowering eyes seemed to believe what his tongue was hesitating to put forth.

His grandmother, the old wrinkled black fairy, who couldn’t see but created and weaved a whole world through her words, was the one to whom he felt nearest in the family. In his otherwise ever-prostrating and servile childhood, sitting in her lap and listening about a world fantasised by her hollow-cheeked babbling, he would become the prince sovereign, who was casteless and beyond any stigma.

Of all her stories he remembered the one about herself with most vivid colours. She had once told him:

‘Even though not in the least ashamed of being a balmiki, somewhere deep down the heart, I feel that I’m a Brahmin, for I wasn’t born to your maternal grandfather. Years ago someone had dumped a newborn girl in a dry discarded well, half of which was full of waste and garbage. Blessed be Lord Hanuman for a herd of monkeys gathered around the well and started mocking at the human buffoonery in chattering, screeching voices. And who later became my father and the man who became your great grandfather rescued me and took me home for he had a big flock of boys only. He had some love in his heart for a girl child. Thus I was raised as a bhangi!’

Blind for the last 20 years, the sudden flashes of reminiscences would take her to childhood when during the scorching heat of June, the whole family dug a deep pit on a dry river bed to collect water. They had to fight for the protection of their pit, which was now moving laterally after going straight into the earth for 6-7 feet. Water quarry (open pit) we may call it. On this merciless hot day, when even the sweat beads won’t surface on their skin, for they had been dehydrated too much, the wind blew a sandstorm on the foot-printed soil around the pit. Twigs and boughs of dried bushes littered around like a cemetery. The water level was plummeting down rapidly and so was increasing their thirst. The father taking all responsibility on his head—for it was now very risky to get below the crumbling roof of the pit as the hole went laterally into the earth, while they anxiously watched from above—sat inside the cave precariously soaking a piece of gunny sack in the mud and step by step squeezed the coarse cloth to collect muddy water in an earthen pitcher. Their hearts beating under the impact of the risk hovering over the patriarch’s body they looked water-mouthed. There was more water in their mouths than in the fearsome pit’s guts. Much to its irritation, they had opened it too much and in trepidation it snapped its jaw. The earth overhead caved in and the family upkeeper was buried alive. Even with their maddest scamper, they could not bring him out before many minutes. The man had been buried under the fine sand for enough time to suffocate him to death.

Later, a similar shock of ill fate took her eyesight two decades back.

The family patriarch named Musla, her husband, was a man of kaleidoscopic libido that allured him to have illicit relationships with many ladies of his caste. However, it became a crime when a lady of the higher caste took fancy to his titillating escapades. It became almost cataclysmic news. It’s as good as the natural laws reversing overnight. The society feels threatened and they react very vehemently.

After getting caught, the lady had the right to accuse the lower caste man of rape. Since then the man was incarcerating in the riyasat jail. They were already outcaste but now the whole family cowered under the additional stigma of rape also. This kind of position squashes you among the lowest of the low.

As a mark of further revenge beyond the state’s formal judgement, the upper caste males along with their servants raped the family females for as long as the hissing snakes of their anger and lust allowed it. In desperation and unbearable agony, his grandmother banged her head against the stone mortar repeatedly and went blind at least to the visual aspects of their miseries.

To prove their human side, they gave a job to the rapist’s son befitting their hereditary profession. All it fetched was one meal a day and in addition carried perpetual humiliation and punishment to the soul as bonus. So Ramu’s father, right from the start of his boyhood, became the manual scavenger doing his duty anywhere the overfed aristocracy decided to scatter its excreta.

One tragedy had closed the doors to light. Whenever fate punished her, she further punished herself by striking her head against anything her searching fingers found. It became a habit.  As a result, her forehead and skull had many scars, perhaps even more than the ones she bore on her soul. In order to prevent the final fatality, they kept an eye on her lest she struck her head almost as an instinctive reaction to her quirk of mood on account of some bad news. Apart from these sudden volcanic eruptions, she was cool headed otherwise, smiled ironically, talked gently and told numerous stories to children.

Now when the dead body of her son arrived, the people around failed to notice her picking up the grinding stone bowl and hit it against her skull with as much force as she could manage. With a mourning cry and equally fearsome burst of blood she fell unconscious. One tragedy had sealed the doors of light to her, now this one brought her out of darkness. The sense of sight that had been exiled by the striking judgement of some precarious time was now restored by the hammering judgement of the tragedy of her son’s death. On opening her eyes she gave a strange cry of joy and sorrow.

‘It’s you Ramu!’ she pointed towards a child of his age, ‘Oh...Oh...where is...umm...let me guess...’

Those around her thought she had gone out of her senses after the gruesome self-strike. Then with a new purpose in her life and the light back in her world, the old lady cried her heart out over the darkness hovering around the dead body of her son.

****

The poorest of the poor and the lowest of the low hardly perceive any further fall or the degradation or the wretchedness caused by the leaps and bounds of ill-fate and tragedies. They take it for granted, a kind of habituation to humiliation. Although Ramu grew up among ever-increasing adversities, overall the life seemed more or less the same to him. The once obstinate Maharaja had, without wasting much time, signed the instrument of accession to India. So Ramu was now a subject of free India, where very soon untouchability would be declared illegal. However, he was many years from the glorious dawn when the mammoth banyan of casteism, standing sturdy and sprawling from many centuries, would finally yield to the face-lifting, almost artificial, stop-gap legislative measures.

There was a new police station in place of the old one. However, the family that had witnessed so much came across one more onerous turn of fate. All records pertaining to the condemned rapist were missing. When some liberal elements, too happy to attain freedom, took up the poor old man’s case, his bail plea was rejected on the grounds that all records were missing. So the trial court could neither grant him bail, nor take up the case to its conclusion without any reference material from the old office. Now the prison authorities at the district jail were worried whether to keep him as an undertrial or as a prisoner. They sought directive from the court regarding it. Almost famished and finished, the rape convict was presented before the additional sessions judge sahib. The latter was much puzzled and directed the district jailor to prepare a fresh charge sheet based on the memories of the still surviving persons and relatives on both sides. The old lady, allegedly raped, came out of her shy, traditional shackles and after a single performance the new court of free India, basing its unbiased judgement on the base of fresh assessment of the victim’s testimony noted:

‘We are sorry that the cause of justice has been delayed so long given the situation prevailing; we owe an apology to the victim because the offender has been enjoying life in jail, so to put up the insignia of free India, we sentence this man to death for the rape of ... held culpable under section ... based ...’

The over-enthused judge felt heroic and proud for accomplishing this—for drawing this first blood—marvellous judicial feat for the cause of mother India.

An overzealous law of a still overzealous new nation ensured that the message of justice should reach across the masses. After the sentence was upheld by the higher judiciary the old man was hanged. A widow now his grandmother took first tentative steps to survive as the family matriarch.

****

The urbanised pockets with their squalor, filth, mud, garbage and stinking wastes offered some opportunities to the scavenger community; and they, with bright hopeful eyes, ogled at the filthy stage which looked brightly and alluringly lit up by a beneficent new sun. To play their scavenging part, the family—consisting of malnutritioned children, spent out and worn out middle aged persons and almost dead but somehow living old bodies—moved to a filthy slum stinking and sticking like a lice to an urban body. And once settling here, saving the pittance that they salvaged from the filth, they lost the rest of the things which were available so far such as an unhindered view of the nature’s beauty, the pond’s water and free walks through the countryside provided it didn’t cross the interests of the higher varnas.

The grandmother during her youthful, seeing days had been a proud participant in the community festival linked to the caste’s not too proud, almost animistic, belief system. Being very near to Mother Nature, the folk dance was rustically gleaned to the proportions of a mysterious exoticism. With new spirit in her eyes, she recalled how for months they prepared artificial animals like lion, horse and tigers using the complex yet so simple folk art. First a cane frame was prepared using water-soaked switches and later it was stitched with a covering of animal skins and clothes of all types. The final shape could put to shame any stuffed tiger adoring the walls of a rich aristocratic hunter. It used to be in the form of a huge mask (the animal torso) to be worn by a man on his head, while the other man stooped at almost right angle carrying the rest of the body on his back.

This year, the old lady hoped they will soak their miseries by dancing all night in the heart of this merciless town. With clever fingers and a quickly recalling mind, she started on her long forgotten folk art. Much to Ramu’s surprise, the shape of a lion emerged from those cane switches, rags and hides leaving two openings in the lower part. She also prepared beautiful dolls of sawdust and clay and painted them bright. There was also a lovely cart of dung, mud and clothes. He was extremely happy to get toys for the first time in his life.

****

Who cares about the health, hygiene and sanitation of those who are expected to be among the filth? The waste water of their dirty unpaved alley drained down an open dug-out nullah and emptied its odorous self into a pit. And there the mud sank into a mysterious pool leaving a grimy layer of water above.

Taking a plastic bottle cut in half to serve as a mug, Ramu went to collect this water, walked a bit further and eased himself of the thing that his forefathers had been carrying on their head. He then realised how blissful were those days when he used clean waters of puddles and ponds to wash him after his toilet. While his bowels emptied to add to the filth around their huts, he was lost in the gloomy darkness in the mug. However, it was still relatively clean water because theirs were the hands that had been assigned the role of carrying human faeces, dead carcasses of animals and stinking mud without any feeling of contempt and revulsion.

These littlest bits of gloomy reverie were driven away by his excited heart that was now galloping at the prospect of watching the clapping dance performed by the grandmother’s lion in the evening.

The afternoon but witnessed a heavy rainfall and it continued to rain towards the night, raising squelching mud around their huts in the narrow streets. The little open space among the huts that was to serve as the ground for the event now bore the nasty look of a mud quagmire. Undeterred they came out. The shiny and beautifully painted lion came in full majesty. But very soon the rain and the splashing and flailing mud turned it into an ugly monster. Even the playful lion of a scavenger has to look dirty. Even nature seemed to be kow-towing the human discriminations. It appeared like a horrible deity worshipped by the savage and filthy people.

The excitement and verve in Ramu’s frenzied senses was short-lived as the favourite lion became an ugly monster. The beautiful appliqué cloth—purchased with the whole community’s donations—turned tabby and evil looking. The success of this dance depends upon the foot coordination between the man bearing the head and the bending man bearing the body. The mud however spoilt the rhythm and the second man tripped and went down. The first one with a stick tied to his back that held the animal torso above his head continued to drag the legless mass behind him. A very strange warmish creature it appeared now. Many of them took turns to enter into the frame. After a time, both the humans and their made-up lion were unrecognisable. It appeared a gathering of muddy ghosts. Ramu, his face and clothes bespattered with mud, wept inconsolably.

That night his mother consoled him:

‘Don’t cry son! A scavenger should be the last one to weep for getting his things, clothes and body including face muddled and spoiled by the filthiest of things. That is the karma and dharma of a scavenger. If you don’t soak muck into your soul then it will go against your karma as a balmiki. I’ve heard that no amount of filth on the body can touch the soul. It always remains clean like these higher castes!’

‘But the beautiful, shiny, clean lion was destroyed by mud,’ he sobbed.

‘We’ll make another for you, son.’

‘But again it will go all muddy. Gods want us to be filthy with even our playthings.’

‘Well son, may be a day will come when clean balmikis playing with a clean lion on a clean ground won’t appear unclean to the God, the rain and the society!’                           

With the cleanest emotion of a mother, she took him in her arms to calm him down and he slept. The old woman kept awake for a long time.

‘Will such a day really come?’ she thought.