Six years have
slipped by since I came from the country to the capital. During that time the
number of so-called affairs of state I have witnessed or heard about is far
from small, but none of them made much impression. If asked to define their
influence on me, I can only say they made my bad temper worse. Frankly
speaking, they taught me to take a poorer view of people every day.
One small
incident, however, which struck me as significant and jolted me out of my
irritability, remains fixed even now in my memory.
It was the
winter of 1917, a strong north wind was blustering, but the exigencies of
earning my living forced me to be up and out early. I met scarcely a soul on
the road, but eventually managed to hire a rickshaw to take me to S- Gate.
Presently the wind dropped a little, having blown away the drifts of dust on
the road to leave a clean broad highway, and the rickshaw man quickened his
pace. We were just approaching S- Gate when we knocked into someone who slowly
toppled over.
It was a
grey-haired woman in ragged clothes. She had stepped out abruptly from the
roadside in front of us, and although the rickshaw man had swerved, her
tattered padded waistcoat, unbuttoned and billowing in the wind, had caught on
the shaft. Luckily the rickshaw man had slowed down, otherwise she would
certainly have had a bad fall and it might have been a serious accident.
She huddled
there on the ground, and the rickshaw man stopped. As I did not believe the old
woman was hurt and as no one else had seen us, I thought this halt of his
uncalled for, liable to land him in trouble and hold me up.
“It’s all
right,” I said. “Go on.”
He paid no
attention — he may not have heard — but set down the shafts, took the old
woman’s arm and gently helped up.
“Are you all
right?” he asked.
“I hurt myself
falling.”
I thought: I saw
how slowly you fell, how could you be hurt? Putting on an act like this is
simply disgusting. The rickshaw man asked for trouble, and now he’s got it.
He’ll have to find his own way out.
But the rickshaw
man did not hesitate for a minute after hearing the old woman’s answer. Still
holding her arm, he helped her slowly forward. Rather puzzled by this I looked
ahead and saw a police station. Because of the high wind, there was no one outside.
It was there that the rickshaw man was taking the old woman.
Suddenly I had
the strange sensation that his dusty retreating figure had in that instant
grown larger. Indeed, the further he walked the larger he loomed, until I had
to look up to him. At the same time he seemed gradually to be exerting a
pressure on me which threatened to overpower the small self hidden under my
fur-lined gown.
Almost paralyzed
at that juncture I sat there motionless, my mind a blank, until a police man
came out. Then I got down from the rickshaw.
The policemen
came up to me and said, “Get another rickshaw. He can’t take you any further.”
On the spur of
the moment I pulled a handful of coppers from my coat pocket and handed them to
the policeman. “Please give him this,” I said.
The wind had
dropped completely, but the road was still quiet. As I walked along thinking, I
hardly dared to think about myself. Quite apart from what had happened earlier,
what had I meant by that handful of coppers? Was it a reward? Who was I to judge
the rickshaw man? I could give myself no answer.
Even now, this
incident keeps coming back to me. It keeps distressing me and makes me try to
think about myself. The politics and the fighting of those years have slipped
my mind as completely as the classics I read as a child. Yet this small
incident keeps coming back to me, often more vivid than in actual life,
teaching me shame, spurring me on to reform, and imbuing me with fresh courage
and fresh hope.
July 1920
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