THOSE ROLLING EYES

“BUTCHI BABU”

(Translated from the original in Telugu by the Author)

It was in my friend Kutumba Rao’s house at Hyderabad that I first saw her. She was at the time eleven or twelve years old. My friend went out that morning on some work. I sat by the window looking into the newspaper. She took out a handful of flowers–Jasmines and Roses–from a ragged bag of red cloth, clumsily wrapped inside a large betel leaf and, having placed them on the table, began to smile. She had a thin oval face with sharp clean-cut features. Her complexion was somewhat dark like the glow of red earth in twilight. She had a small mouth and an even row of white teeth that shed a lustre vaguely calling to mind an image of flames. The spark of growing life in this girl shone like a precious gem embedded inside a fluid mass of clay. There was dust on her hair, her clothes–tell-tale marks–; she was not used to keeping her person well.

But what attracted me most was her eyes. There was in them a dark and penetrating brilliance–a haunting quality. They were not dark lustrous eyes which poets love to describe. Beauty is not the word for them. They had in them an arresting lustre–both attracting and repelling at the same time–that one associates with the light of a precious stone on the head of a fabulous creature that dwells in caves. You are startled, intrigued. Now, large round eyes are not necessarily beautiful. Her eyes were not really so large as all that, but because the dark pupils were so round and large, and incessantly moving in circles, you got the impression of largeness. Steady, settled vision–it was not. The pupils went round and round in circles and you felt she did not look at you but around you. There she stood in front of me, smiling and looking ‘around’ me.

Malenna, the boy at Kutumba Rao’s house, stepped in and took inside the bunch of flowers. The girl left the room and stood behind one of the doors left ajar, still looking at me curiously, still smiling. I signed to her to come forward. She nodded her head vigorously as though saying, “No, no, I won’t.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bi.”

“Come nearer.”

She came. Her eyes were taking in all that was around me–layer after layer in concentric circles.

“Look, you don’t wear any flowers in your hair?”

She shook her head in a gesture of confirmation. The plaits of hair round her neck moved vertically, in contrast with the horizontal movement of her head.

“How are you employed?”

She smiled, still no reply. She was looking at the table-fan by my side.

“You speak, don’t you?”

This time she moved her face from top to bottom. She stepped forward towards the fan and held up her hand at the revolving blades.

“Look, buy yourself some sweets.”

I said, giving her a nickel coin. Her gesture showed she was unwilling to take it.

“Please take it,” I said.

She took. She looked at the fan and stood smiling. The pupils of her eyes were going round and round following circular motion of the blades.

“You like the breeze?”

She nodded her head.

“Now?” I asked, having switched off the fan.

She was laughing. To her the fan was a strange thing, and the motion of the blades bordered on the magical.

“Oh! Please let it go,” she implored. I heaved a sigh of relief. She could talk, after all. I let the fan go. She was looking at it rapt in amazement, her eyes going round and round in unison with the fan. Presently she switched it off. Letting it on and off was great fun to her. After all the fan belonged to my friend, and I was worried whether I should let her play with it. There was a Radio receiver in the other room, kept high on a rack attached to the wall, beyond the reach of the children, who, my friend told me, were experts at demolishing mechanical contrivances. This fan did not have the protective mesh. A frame was fitted on to it which was only ornamental. Suddenly I heard a sharp cry and I turned to see the girl Hashima Bi, sucking at her forefinger which had evidently received a cut from the revolving blades as she attempted to touch them. She probably wanted to stop it by hand.

“Let me see. I hope it is not serious,” I said. She held up her finger for exaamination. There was no cut; the skin was slightly shrivelled and red. The boy Marenna shouted at what he considered a monkeyish prank and told her to ‘get out.’ “If you touch it again, I shall cut your finger,” he ended. I liked to see him shouting at the poor girl. Poor fellow, he seldom had an opportunity of showing his temper. The girl looked at me piteously, and I looked helpless. I was not Marenna’s master, nor did the fan belong to me.

“Look, never put a finger on any moving object.” I said, “It is dangerous.”

She nodded an ‘yes’ as she went out. Her exit was hastened by Marenna who banged the door on her.

The girl Hashima Bi was the daughter of a meat vendor in the street. Her mother did some tailoring and added to the family resources. Bi was a welcome caller at the many houses in the locality, for she was sent on sundry errands such as getting milk, flowers and papers–and what she earned was her pocket money. She was also in demand as a playmate for the children in the neighbourhood. She had also earned a reputation for stealthily walking into rooms where fans were on and placing her fingers through the mesh in an attempt to stop the moving blades.

This itch to tamper and tinker with mechanical objects is a characteristic of all children. Children are, as a rule, fond of moving objects. There is, for them a delight in stopping a moving thing, and then letting it go; it gives them a strange sense of power.

I noticed another characteristic. The boys are fond of moving objects, while the girls gloat over static objects. I don’t know if Bi was simply obeying a natural impulse, through her attempts to stop the fan in motion, thereby rendering it ‘Static’–turning it into an object beloved of girls.

The next day I saw another odd event. I was sitting by the window which opened out into the street below. There were a few meat shops in front of which people stood like clouds that surround the sinking sun. Somebody stood a bicycle on its stand on the left of the road beneath a tree. There I saw Hashima Bi standing in front of the bicycle and staring at it. She pulled at the pedal, and the wheel at the back started moving. She turned the pedal with increased force, and the wheel was moving faster. Suddenly she thrust her palm between the spokes of the revolving wheel, gave a cry, withdrew the hand, and stood sucking at her fingers. She looked round, vainly concealing the pain of her hand, only to see if anybody was looking at her. Her gaze rested on the window where I sat. I could see she was smiling at me. Quickly withdrawing her gaze, she went running and disappeared at the bend of the road.

I smiled to myself. I hardly knew her. Yet I felt there was between us some strange bond–a closeness of being which defies rational analysis. Heated by the blazing noonday Sun, the foam on the wave in the sea melts as vapour and rises as a cloud and at last breaks into rain, thereby binding the sky above and the Earth below. The bond between us was as substantial as the melting foam on the wave.

This strange impulse to put the finger in a revolving wheel, manifests itself in grown-ups too. Many a time I wanted to do so myself. Only Psychologists can explain the impulse. Curiosity is a feature of man’s intellect. What will it be like if I put my finger in the switch and receive an electric shock! How will it be if I stop the revolving fan with my hand! Yes, there will be pain–pain calling for self-pity. The pity focussed on one’s own self compensates for the neglect or antagonism sustained in the objecting world. Some such dark motive must be at the back of these vague, destructive impulses. When I go up on the roof of a tall building and look below from the edge, I feel like jumping headlong into the street below. I step with bated breath to the very edge of the roof, close my eyes preparatory to the fatal plunge, but, of course, I shall step back having gone through the experience only in imagination. Self-molestation is fraught with a sinister pleasure–this delight in self-inflicted pain. But in most people this impulse dwells only in the realm of thought and never descends to the plane of action.

With Bi it has escaped into the realm of action. She has done what I longed to do but could not do for lack of the final courage. Only thus can I explain the strange attraction I felt for her. “Look, you can’t do it yourself, can you?” She says in the language of nods and revolving eyes. “I will do it in a Jiffy,” and, having said it, she put her hand in the spokes and stopped the bicycle wheel. Having done it, she smiled at me and disappeared in a cloud of dust–of dust and triumph. This was the basis of the bond between us. Her life is hers–and mine is mine. Our paths are different. Even so, there was some inner agony, some mental pain–the agony in me of awareness that I could not remove the pain, her agony arising from an inability to penetrate and remove the pain in me–all this I can only see in her strange, circling eyes. Once a while there was a sudden flash in her smile–as though its settled beauty strove to stop and fix the circling eyes in a steady vision reflecting the inner peace. A momentary experience that dwelt in the past–yet I could see it as though it were protected and hung in the future.

Such were the thoughts that troubled me during those few days I spent at my friend’s house. My business concluded; I returned to my home town.

It was four years later that I had occasion to go to Hyderabad again, the occasion being a festivity at Kutumba Rao’s house. I had not seen Bi even once during my stay there. I casually asked my friend about her. I was told that a year ago she had married a Muslim youth by name Mahboob and the couple had set up house elsewhere.

“Yes, Sir, she will be coming here in a day or two,” said my old acquaintance, Marenna, the boy at Kutumba Rao’s. It was Marenna who had chided Bi’s antics with the fan and banged the door on her. I saw Marenna had by now grown up. His voice had split and it had acquired the heavy drawl characteristic of adolescence. His crop of hair was large and he took pleasure in brushing back the long loose hair that descended on his forehead. From time to time, he hid his face behind the door evidently attempting to conceal the puff of cigarette smoke from me, as a mark of respect.

“What is Bi’s husband?” I asked.

“Oh, mostly dashing about the roads on a motor cycle–fast and noisy–dr dr dr dr,–you know, Sir!” he said, laughing.

“But why are you laughing?”

“That girl–I mean his wife–she sits on his back–I mean, Sir, in the back of his back–a seat sort of ring it has–she sits there and the fellow goes with a ‘Whirr–noisy and fast, dr dr, br br, and she catches him hard-like so as not fall down with a Zr Zr br br.”

It Was amusing to me too. I felt like seeing Bi’s husband. The news of her marriage had crowded my memory with recollections of many a marriage scene which I had Witnessed as a boy–the thin veil across the bride’s face, the bridal procession of horses, the gaslights, the garlands of flowers, the heavy perfume, the gay rich costumes of the men and maidens slowly moving behind to the Shahna accompaniment. In the brilliance of lights you catch a fleeting glimpse of a pensive smile on the bride’s lips–as though they were pursed tight concealing precious gems.

I gathered from Kutumba Rao that Bi’s husband was in the Land Army. One day he would direct the Parade of a small force while Bi is standing beside him. She would give counter instructions to the confusion of everybody. If they were marching, she would probably cry ‘halt’. Mahboob had a motor cycle and on it they, on off duty, took fast and furious rides over the countryside. I stayed there for a couple of days, but Bi and her husband did not come there and Marenna, despite his linguistic attainments, was, after all, a false prophet.

A month after, returning to my home town, I had news of Bi, in a letter from my friend Kutumba Rao. It would appear that while Bi and her husband were going on their motor cycle, the vehicle had skidded and Mahboob fell on the road with a crash and sustained serious injuries–which proved fatal, for, soon after, he died in the hospital. Of course, Bi also had fallen down but she had received only minor injuries, which were treated at the hospital.

The news of the tragedy made me sad.

It is, of course, not difficult to reconstruct the details of the accident. Moreover, progress and speed–youth has always desired them. Bi loved to take long and fast drives seated on the pillion behind her husband. The motor cycle was going at a tremendous speed and she could tightly hold on to her husband’s shoulders. It must have been a tight grip–her fingers pulsating with primitive passion. Thrilled by the tightening grip, Mahboob let go the vehicle at top speed. Bi Watches the movement of the front wheel fascinated–and the old impulse to put a finger into it seizes her, but her hand wouldn’t reach it. What did she do? She might have tapped, with outstretched leg, the back wheel close to her; or, at any rate, she may have indulged in some act designed to stop the moving motor cycle. Mahaboob loses balance, negotiating some bend of the road, and off goes the cycle with a bang, his head caught beneath. Bi’s heart must have beat as fast as the moving motor cycle and her attempt to still both, to possess them, must have resulted in the tragedy. Some such explanation gives me relief!

I have in mind a quaint picture of Bi as a bride. Clad in a white pyjama and a green blouse with long sleeves, an orange-coloured silk shawl thrown across her shoulders revealing the ghost of plaited hair, her eyes winking in circles, her small firm breasts rumpling the blouse into queer angles and the waist falling down into a thin line like a tiny stream narrowed down further by the twin hillocks on either side–that is how I think of Bi as a bride.

And now she is a widow–relic of a short-lived passion, a passion recalling the vastness of a forest on fire, of an earthquake that devours everything it touches. The forest was burnt out, and like the unburnt trunk of a tree she remained to smile at her awesome handiwork! If and when the bridal couple salaamed to me after the wedding, I thought I would give them a present. Now I am happy I never saw them at the time.

My friend Kutumba Rao had seen her as a widow; she was seated by a window of her house gazing at the fading twilight. He agreed with me her gaze was not steady. Her eyes moved in circles.

Sometime after, I went to Hyderabad on business, but my friend had to leave the city on transfer. He kept his house, some pieces of furniture, and his boy Marenna, at my disposal as long as I wished to stay and had left for the town he was transferred to.

The street below the window, I saw, had altered much since my last visit. The meatshops had disappeared. There was instead a new tea shop sending out loud strains of gramophone music–day and night–to which I got used in a couple of days. Although I hated the noisy tea shop, its nearness had on me a peculiarly soothing effect. How easily man is reconciled to his environment!

That morning I saw a cycle in front of the tea shop–behind it a motor cycle. A group of urchins were examining it and I thought of Bi as a girl. Bi does not go out nowadays. I wanted to see her although I knew it would be a sad memory. Is there a secret fascination in us for the objects that repel us? Cleopatra, we hear, loved to play with a snake and Nefertiti romped about in thorny bushes. But these, today, are not accessible to Bi, who seems imprisoned inside the bars of History.

There are no princes for her to command; no kingdoms to claim her blood-red lips; no palanquins to go about the country-side in; no hearts on horseback came to her begging to be broken. She came across only one heart, which she crushed and destroyed inside a motor cycle.

News of her was given to me by a mutual friend, Rajanna. It would appear she had once visited their house in her mother’s company. There was an old wall clock in the house with a long pendulum. The glass door leading to the pendulum was inadvertently kept open, and Bi had promptly set at rest the moving pendulum. The upshot was the clock stopped going.

“Oh, she always does such things–fingering, and tinkering with, any moving object. Yes, and an injured and scratched finger in the bargain, well merited, you know?” Rajanna wound up.

“What about her future?” I asked.

“Oh, who cares! Her mother earns something by tailoring, and I suppose it keeps the pot boiling. Probably she takes up the same trade too.”

I had further news of her from my boy Marenna.

“She married another Muslim youth,” said Marenna with a hint of mockery in his tone.

“When was that?”

“Two months back–Mastan told me, Sir,–Mastan, the devil of a tailor. He is a Muslim boy from Malabar, not Mastan, Sir, but her new husband. His name is Hafeez.”

“What is he?”

“He is a pilot. They met in some place and they married–I mean this Hafeez and this girl–not Hafeez and the airplane. They go up in the plane–in a sort of whirr, or whizz or buzz–whichever you like, Sir,” said Marenna, making strange noises indicative of a plane in flight.

I felt relieved at the news. Marriage is the summit of a girl’s life, which is realized through motherhood. Not only in real life but in fiction also, a tale comes to a ‘finis’ with the wedding of the chief characters. The rest is left to the reader’s imagination. Of course, I wanted to see Bi with her husband Hafeez. He was employed at Aurangabad and there they had gone along with Bi’s mother. And I left for my place. I was becoming less curious about Bi’s strange mental manifestations, and except on occasions when I listened to the buzzing noise of an airplane above, my thoughts did not turn to her.

Some months later my friend Kutumba Rao, dissatisfied with the new place and unable to get transferred back, had gone on long leave and returned to Hyderabad. His health had begun to worry him and he got admitted into the hospital there for a general check-up. I could not say ‘no’ to his entreaty to come and look him up and, therefore, I went to Hyderabad.

Kutumba Rao was ordered complete rest by the hospital doctors. I always liked this diagnosis and envy the persons who undergo the suggested cure, provided there is the wherewithal to ensure creature comforts. Excessive work and the consequent tension, everyone is agreed, are at the back of the distempers of the modern age, and I have a notion that if everybody stopped working and worrying about not working for a day in the year, most of the ills of today would disappear. But who cares for what I say–any way, who am I to say it? The millions of worlds in space along with our tiny planet Earth are perpetually in motion. Civilizations grow, decay and die in cycles, and Man is caught up in the wheel of birth and death and none can stay them from motion. If, here and there, there are any like the foolish Hashima Bi who put a finger in the wheel, they are left with one finger less.

In the room next to Kutumba Rao’s, the tailor Mastan was in bed when I went to see him. He was thin and worn out, his clothes unkempt and dirty, even his red cap showed stitches. His beard was unshaven and his eyes sunken, and he looked woe-begone. He was laid up with some trouble in his joints and there was a rubber covering on his knee joint. He told me he was getting better and would be discharged in about a week’s time.

I said by way of consoling him:

“This knee trouble of yours is probably owing to constant movement of the legs on the pedal of the stitching machine. Why don’t you give it up and try working on the hand machine?”

The boy Marenna who was by my side smiled.

“Oh, Sir, this is his bad luck. Thousands there are every day hammering away with their legs on the machines and they are safe as young married couples.” His comparison amused me.

“In any case, the fellow deserved what he got,” he said in a tone of finality.

“How is that?” I asked.

“The military stores at Aurangabad were disposing of stitching machines by auction and Mastan went there to buy them by the dozen. Now, Sir, being old military machines, they shoot him, and down he falls on the ground.”

`Never a dull moment when Marenna is on the scene, I thought.

“How is Bi?” I asked.

“Oh, they are all right still. They sing and play in a furnished and small outhouse. Bi’s mother keeps house for them, and in her spare time earns a few rupees stitching clothes,” said Mastan, sadly looking at his crippled knee.

“How do they spend time, I mean, the couple?”

“They have a jeep and they go about….”

“Like that bir, bar thir gar chir...” cut in Marenna, making noises to recall a jeep in motion.

“Do they take flights in an aeroplane?” I asked Mastan.

“I don’t know. I was there only for a couple of days. The boy Hafeez has been practising to qualify for a pilot’s licence–. But they say women are not allowed inside in training flights.”

“Did you buy any machines at the auction?” I said, changing the subject and veering it back to himself.

“Yes, Sir, I bought one. I was pedalling the wheel for test purposes, when suddenly Bi came on to the verandah and pushed the wheel in the reverse direction. The result was I got a couple of stitches on my skin–lucky–there was no thread,” said Mastan, indulging in the ghost of a smile and displaying the back of his palm where the skin bled at the touch of the needle.

“And no doubt you deserved it richly too,” summarised the boy Marenna. We parted after the usual courtesies.

Two days after, we were making arrangements for taking Kutumba Rao back home from the hospital. After bidding farewell to the hospital staff I wanted to see Mastan and wish him well. We went into his room but he was not there. We searched all over the place but could not find him. Nor did we find Marenna. The nurses and ward boys had no answer. I’ll see him the next day, I told myself, and we returned to Kutumba Rao’s house.

Kutumba Rao was worried at Marenna’s disappearance, for, apart from other things, we badly needed the services of a boy. He, therefore, temporarily engaged the services of another Muslim girl by name ‘Khairunnissa’, daughter of a shop-keeper in the neighbourhood. She was a dark, little girl, with plenty of gilt ornaments hung across her ears. Her face was oval with a green tattoo design on the chin. She was sprightly and quick of movement but not given to much talking.

That morning we sent Khairunnissa to get us some bread from a hotel. I had a bath and was sitting in front of the window glancing at the pages of the morning paper. There was noise and bustle, much of it emanating from the tea shop below. To this was added the deafeaning film music from the loud speaker of the slow-moving cinema advertisement van. Curiously, the sounds had on me a soothing effect.

Suddenly the sounds had stopped. I was sharply awakened to the consciousness of silence as though I was thrown off the balance. I looked at the tea shop. A crowd swarmed before it like a hive of bees. But there was little talking. I could see the girl Khairunnissa in the tail of the crowd trying to have a look at–I know not what–through the spaces between the legs and hands of the people in front. Then she looked at our window and started running towards the house with the bread tightly held in her hands as though to prevent it from being snatched away.

I quickly ran towards her into the street anxious to know all about the crowd in front of the tea shop.

“What’s the matter?” I asked Khairunnissa.

“Bi is dead,” she replied and ran inside the house. Kutumba Rao joined me and we were staggered at the news.

“There, there is Marenna,” said Khairunnissa who returned from the house after putting away the bread. She was pointing towards the left of the crowd. We hurriedly walked towards him. Marenna was leading the tailor Mastan, who was limping.

“What happened?”

They said not a word but slowly moved to Kutumba Rao’s house, and there Mastan fell on the stairs in a heap.

“She died in the aeroplane,” he said at last. Kutumba Rao pressed him for details.

“God alone can say the truth, Sir. The fellow Hafeez got friendly with another girl. She was employed there as a sort of server handing tea and tiffin to the passengers in the plane. They asked Hafeez to take her on flights by way of training. He was often taking her with him on the plane, and this Bi did not like. She said it was only a pretext for him to be in her company, for they did not allow women in the plane. She told Hafeez twice or thrice warning him to reform and desist from going with the girl, but he never heeded her protests. She saw them going often in the jeep too. Bi got wild.. One evening Bi wanted to accompany her husband to the airship. He said ‘No’. “I will surely come,” she said. Hafeez ran giving her the slip. She ran too, not caring for the mother’s entreaties. At the airport, there was no one. It was deserted. Hafeez and his new girl-friend got inside the plane. They closed the door and started the plane. Bi went there and asked him to stop and struggled to get up and catch the door and her hand slipped and she fell down and died….That is what the girl says, Sir. Hafeez tells a different story, Sir. He says Bi stood in front of the plane waving her hands, but the plane moved and she got in the way and got knocked and he stopped it too late after a furlong’s run. So he says, and God alone can say what happened.” That was Mastan’s account of the tragedy. There was wetness in Kutumba Rao’s eyes and my heart was heavy with a fog of feeling.

In the evening I went out on a long walk. That took me outside the city. The place was desolate, hard with rocks with a plant that fain would sprout in between. Only the stars were twinkling steadily. I felt unburdened and a sense of repose descended on me. My mind began to dwell on the strange fate of the poor girl.

I had no doubt Hashima Bi ran and stood in front of the plane, bent on stopping its flight. The plane had started and the propellers had begun to move in circles and the old irresistible impulse to stop them had seized the poor girl.

It is a pity that the mind does not rest until it has delved deep and landed on a point or significance of the phenomenon. It is as though life sent forth a new man and told itself, ‘Let us see what this fellow achieves to me’. Thus each created life becomes an experimenter, a seeker after the mystery of existence, and the Goddess of creation alone knows whether he or she has succeeded in attaining the object of his or her quest. There may be a few who tend to overdo the quest, a little over-inquisitive and foolhardy, and the Goddess at once chides them because she does not like that any should overtake her in the march towards the ultimate mystery.

Hashima Bi strikes me as one of those few who over-reach and are accordingly warned. The warning went unheeded, with grave consequences to herself. But, to her, life was a continuous quest after the mystery of movement in the universe.

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