Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People
Life's Handicap
Being Stories of Mine Own People
by
Rudyard Kipling
eBooks@Adelaide
2009
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Table of Contents
- The Lang Men O’ Larut
- Reingelder and the German Flag
- The Wandering Jew
- Through the Fire
- The Finances of the Gods
- The Amir’s Homily
- Jews in Shushan
- The Limitations of Pambe Serang
- Little Tobrah
- Bubbling Well Road
- The City of Dreadful Night
- Georgie Porgie
- Naboth
- The Dream of Duncan Parrenness
- The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney
- The Courting of Dinah Shadd
- On Greenhow Hill
- The Man Who Was
- The Head of the District
- Without Benefit of Clergy
- At the End of the Passage
- The Mutiny of the Mavericks
- The Mark of the Beast
- The Return of Imray
- Namgay Doola
- Burtran and Bimi
- Moti Guj—Mutineer
- L’Envoi
Table of Contents
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Last updated on
Fri Mar 27 14:07:25 2009 for
eBooks@Adelaide.
Rudyard Kipling
Life's Handicap
Preface
In Northern India stood a monastery called The Chubara of Dhunni
Bhagat. No one remembered who or what Dhunni Bhagat had been. He had lived
his life, made a little money and spent it all, as every good Hindu should
do, on a work of piety—the Chubara. That was full of brick cells, gaily
painted with the figures of Gods and kings and elephants, where worn-out
priests could sit and meditate on the latter end of things; the paths were
brick paved, and the naked feet of thousands had worn them into gutters.
Clumps of mangoes sprouted from between the bricks; great pipal trees
overhung the well-windlass that whined all day; and hosts of parrots tore
through the trees. Crows and squirrels were tame in that place, for they
knew that never a priest would touch them.
The wandering mendicants, charm-sellers, and holy vagabonds for a
hundred miles round used to make the Chubara their place of call and rest.
Mahomedan, Sikh, and Hindu mixed equally under the trees. They were old
men, and when man has come to the turnstiles of Night all the creeds in
the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colourless.
Gobind the one-eyed told me this. He was a holy man who lived on an
island in the middle of a river and fed the fishes with little bread
pellets twice a day. In flood-time, when swollen corpses stranded
themselves at the foot of the island, Gobind would cause them to be
piously burned, for the sake of the honour of mankind, and having regard
to his own account with God hereafter. But when two-thirds of the island
was torn away in a spate, Gobind came across the river to Dhunni Bhagat’s
Chubara, he and his brass drinking vessel with the well-cord round the
neck, his short arm-rest crutch studded with brass nails, his roll of
bedding, his big pipe, his umbrella, and his tall sugar-loaf hat with the
nodding peacock feathers in it. He wrapped himself up in his patched quilt
made of every colour and material in the world, sat down in a sunny corner
of the very quiet Chubara, and, resting his arm on his short-handled
crutch, waited for death. The people brought him food and little clumps of
marigold flowers, and he gave his blessing in return. He was nearly blind,
and his face was seamed and lined and wrinkled beyond belief, for he had
lived in his time which was before the English came within five hundred
miles of Dhunni Bhagat’s Chubara.
When we grew to know each other well, Gobind would tell me tales in a
voice most like the rumbling of heavy guns over a wooden bridge. His tales
were true, but not one in twenty could be printed in an English book,
because the English do not think as natives do. They brood over matters
that a native would dismiss till a fitting occasion; and what they would
not think twice about a native will brood over till a fitting occasion:
then native and English stare at each other hopelessly across great gulfs
of miscomprehension.
‘And what,’ said Gobind one Sunday evening, ‘is your honoured craft,
and by what manner of means earn you your daily bread?’
‘I am,’ said I, ‘a kerani—one who writes with a pen upon paper, not
being in the service of the Government.’
‘Then what do you write?’ said Gobind. ‘Come nearer, for I cannot see
your countenance, and the light fails.’
‘I write of all matters that lie within my understanding, and of many
that do not. But chiefly I write of Life and Death, and men and women, and
Love and Fate according to the measure of my ability, telling the tale
through the mouths of one, two, or more people. Then by the favour of God
the tales are sold and money accrues to me that I may keep alive.’
‘Even so,’ said Gobind. ‘That is the work of the bazar story-teller;
but he speaks straight to men and women and does not write anything at
all. Only when the tale has aroused expectation, and calamities are about
to befall the virtuous, he stops suddenly and demands payment ere he
continues the narration. Is it so in your craft, my son?’
‘I have heard of such things when a tale is of great length, and is
sold as a cucumber, in small pieces.’
‘Ay, I was once a famed teller of stories when I was begging on the
road between Koshin and Etra; before the last pilgrimage that ever I took
to Orissa. I told many tales and heard many more at the rest-houses in the
evening when we were merry at the end of the march. It is in my heart that
grown men are but as little children in the matter of tales, and the
oldest tale is the most beloved.’
‘With your people that is truth,’ said I. ‘But in regard to our people
they desire new tales, and when all is written they rise up and declare
that the tale were better told in such and such a manner, and doubt either
the truth or the invention thereof.’
‘But what folly is theirs!’ said Gobind, throwing out his knotted hand.
‘A tale that is told is a true tale as long as the telling lasts. And of
their talk upon it—you know how Bilas Khan, that was the prince of
tale-tellers, said to one who mocked him in the great rest-house on the
Jhelum road: “Go on, my brother, and finish that I have begun,” and he who
mocked took up the tale, but having neither voice nor manner for the task
came to a standstill, and the pilgrims at supper made him eat abuse and
stick half that night.’
‘Nay, but with our people, money having passed, it is their right; as
we should turn against a shoeseller in regard to shoes if those wore out.
If ever I make a book you shall see and judge.’
‘And the parrot said to the falling tree, Wait, brother, till I fetch a
prop!’ said Gobind with a grim chuckle. ‘God has given me eighty years,
and it may be some over. I cannot look for more than day granted by day
and as a favour at this tide. Be swift.’
‘In what manner is it best to set about the task.’ said I, ‘O chiefest
of those who string pearls with their tongue?’
‘How do I know? Yet’—he thought for a little—‘how should I not know?
God has made very many heads, but there is only one heart in all the world
among your people or my people.
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