Panchu's wife has just died of a lingering consumption. Panchu
must undergo a purification ceremony to cleanse himself of sin
and to propitiate his community. The community has calculated
and informed him that it will cost one hundred and twenty-three
rupees.
"How absurd!" I cried, highly indignant. "Don't submit to this,
Panchu. What can they do to you?"
Raising to me his patient eyes like those of a tired-out beast of
burden, he said: "There is my eldest girl, sir, she will have to
be married. And my poor wife's last rites have to be put
through."
"Even if the sin were yours, Panchu," I mused aloud, "you have
surely suffered enough for it already."
"That is so, sir," he naïvely assented. "I had to sell part of
my land and mortgage the rest to meet the doctor's bills. But
there is no escape from the offerings I have to make the
Brahmins."
What was the use of arguing? When will come the time, I
wondered, for the purification of the Brahmins themselves who can
accept such offerings?
After his wife's illness and funeral, Panchu, who had been
tottering on the brink of starvation, went altogether beyond his
depth. In a desperate attempt to gain consolation of some sort
he took to sitting at the feet of a wandering ascetic, and
succeeded in acquiring philosophy enough to forget that his
children went hungry. He kept himself steeped for a time in the
idea that the world is vanity, and if of pleasure it has none,
pain also is a delusion. Then, at last, one night he left his
little ones in their tumble-down hovel, and started off wandering
on his own account.
I knew nothing of this at the time, for just then a veritable
ocean-churning by gods and demons was going on in my mind. Nor
did my master tell me that he had taken Panchu's deserted
children under his own roof and was caring for them, though alone
in the house, with his school to attend to the whole day.
After a month Panchu came back, his ascetic fervour considerably
worn off. His eldest boy and girl nestled up to him, crying:
"Where have you been all this time, father?" His youngest boy
filled his lap; his second girl leant over his back with her arms
around his neck; and they all wept together. "O sir!" sobbed
Panchu, at length, to my master. "I have not the power to give
these little ones enough to eat--I am not free to run away from
them. What has been my sin that I should be scourged so, bound
hand and foot?"
In the meantime the thread of Panchu's little trade connections
had snapped and he found he could not resume them. He clung on
to the shelter of my master's roof, which had first received him
on his return, and said not a word of going back home. "Look
here, Panchu," my master was at last driven to say. "If you
don't take care of your cottage, it will tumble down altogether.
I will lend you some money with which you can do a bit of
peddling and return it me little by little."
Panchu was not excessively pleased--was there then no such thing
as charity on earth? And when my master asked him to write out a
receipt for the money, he felt that this favour, demanding a
return, was hardly worth having. My master, however, did not
care to make an outward gift which would leave an inward
obligation. To destroy self-respect is to destroy caste, was his
idea.
After signing the note, Panchu's obeisance to my master fell off
considerably in its reverence--the dust-taking was left out. It
made my master smile; he asked nothing better than that courtesy
should stoop less low. "Respect given and taken truly balances
the account between man and man," was the way he put it, "but
veneration is overpayment."
Panchu began to buy cloth at the market and peddle it about the
village. He did not get much of cash payment, it is true, but
what he could realize in kind, in the way of rice, jute, and
other field produce, went towards settlement of his account. In
two month's time he was able to pay back an instalment of my
master's debt, and with it there was a corresponding reduction in
the depth of his bow. He must have begun to feel that he had
been revering as a saint a mere man, who had not even risen
superior to the lure of lucre.
While Panchu was thus engaged, the full shock of the
__Swadeshi__ flood fell on him.