Yesterday, my father told me about the time his father gave his new silk shirt to the village’s resident beggar and then spent the next many days trying to get it back.
To me, a lot of things stood out as strange and difficult to explain. The first thing among these was that my father had never told me about this incident before. He was always full of stories, but over the last few years he had been repeating quite a few. My explanation for this was that at some point even the most interesting lives must stop living interestingly, and from there on, they must keep playing the best parts on a loop. My father had started doing it a while back. But for him to bring up a fresh tale was strange because the tale was only fresh in the telling of it. My grandfather had passed away many years back. He did leave behind a few things, like a house and a large family. But if he left any stories, we were not told. Until now.
The other thing I found strange was that there should be a resident beggar in a small village where everyone knew everyone. The beggar, it seemed, was there because the place needed one. Or as my father explained very matter-of-factly, every place needs someone they can give to as charity whenever the heart feels heavy on account of something they feel responsible for. So the beggar in the village played a role as important as the local halwai, the charpuoy weaver, the firewood delivery man. The beggar’s own fortune depended on the guilt that the villagers picked up on their way. And when my grandfather gave his new silk shirt to the man who wore little not because he couldn’t afford more, but because the weight on other people’s heart could not be lessened if the receiver of their benevolence were to display any signs of not needing it at all, I figured that he must have parted with it to lift something really heavy, a load that could only be matched by the feather light feeling of a silk garment.
“What could he have possibly done wrong?”
My father thought for a while, and then shrugged his shoulders. Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to say. He then proceeded to tell me about what followed. His father’s efforts to get the shirt off the back of the beggar and back on his own.
The beggar had never wanted the shirt. Even a humble cotton vest was a serious impediment to his work, and to people’s conscience. So it would have been easy to get it back, my grandfather thought at first. His first attempt, my father told me as he sipped his tea casually to match with the level of effort his own father had made, was to simply walk over to the man as he sat by the steps of the temple and ask him for his shirt that he had given in a moment of distraction. Of course, the beggar wasn’t wearing it right then. He was in his work clothes, which were little more than the bare basics. And even if he had understood the man, who was mumbling so that no one would hear him say it, it would have been a first time that the beggar had been asked of something. So he just looked at my grandfather blankly, and then thrust his palms forward, begging for alms. My grandfather understood that he was at work and it was perhaps not the best time to be disturb him. He retreated home, a little aware that this wasn’t going to be an easy task.
For the next two days, my father and his many brothers and sisters had to put up with the moods of a sullen father. They had to hide for longer behind their open books, stay in the fields for longer though the crops were doing fine without their help, and stay out of their mother’s kitchen, who herself had decided to spend more time inside. The shirtless man paced the wide open courtyard with its many arches and must have looked quite dramatic in those settings, if only from a distance.
The second time he made the attempt was at an hour when the temple was closed, and the beggar was home. He did have a home, and though he never married, he stayed with an elder brother who had, and his parents who obviously had been married too. The rest of the family had nothing to do with begging — the brother never had and had grown under the village cobbler’s guidance to set up a small shack of his own where he mended people’s slippers and shoes but stayed away from performing surgery on any item that was big and important like the reins on the bullock cart, leaving it for his master out of respect. The beggar’s father had been the beggar too, but had now retired comfortably on his life’s savings and he and his wife would often go to pilgrimages and were known to never ever give alms to the beggars thronging distant temples. He had no guilt, he would say, and so accounts to settle by charity.
The beggar was home, and wearing the silk shirt that he could never wear outside his home, nor any place where he might be seen. Which was a pity, really, for the shirt was really something anybody would love to be seen in. Which is what made my grandfather so upset that he could no longer be seen in it. He knocked on the open door to draw the man’s attention to him, and then he waited. From where he stood, he had told my father obviously in much detail, for every moment must have rankled, he could see the white of the shirt flit in and out of view through the partially opened door. If only he could have reached out and pulled it — his words, my father assured me — and he imagined the soft silk slither out of the thin opening, rustling through the gap and into his grasp. But when the beggar opened the door, he was shirtless, and vestless, and other than what he wore from the waist downwards, he was naked. Without the familiar garment in view, he had little to say. The beggar had quickly abandoned it, fearing it was someone from the village who would then carry this image of him in finery and then never ever be capable of giving him the money to buy his conscience.
The beggar remembered my grandfather as the giver of the smooth feel on his skin. He smiled and bowed, probably wondering if he had come to part with more of what he owned, for unknown sins and unspeakable crimes. But the visitor simply mumbled a question about his father being at home, and then retreating in an exceptionally sullen mood, which he brought back home and shouted at people for no reason, and even at some pots and pans that got in his way.
A few days after his futile trip to the beggar’s house, there was a wedding in the family. Not strictly in our family, my father told me, but in a way it was. Because almost everybody in the village in those days could trace their fathers and forefathers to a common mother or father. And my grandfather had set his mind to attending it only if he had the soft, silk shirt on his back. So having given himself a deadline, he decided to meet the man and confront him with the long-due demand.
A day before the wedding, my grandfather went up to the temple and stood lurking in the shadows of the stone pillars. And when it was time for the pandit to put the gods to sleep and walk home, he stepped out to look for the beggar. But as he approached the man, he saw that he was counting his day’s earning, and so my grandfather held himself back, not wanting to walk in on him in the middle of his work. But hidden though he was, my grandfather couldn’t help but see that the coins didn’t stop pouring, and even an occasional currency note would drop out of his bag. The beggar now had coins of different value stacked in rows, and my grandfather’s eyes — though not at their best at this late hour — could easily see that they must be amounting to something far more than he ever thought the man would be taking home at the end of each day. He even thought — my father said — that sitting by the entrance of a temple may mean that the beggar’s prayers were being answered almost on a daily basis, while his own prayer to take back what was his, wasn’t. And so when the beggar finally rolled all the money back into the bag, and went to the back of the temple to relieve himself, my grandfather, in a moment of whim that he could never explain, ran out, picked up the bag of money, and dashed into the darkness that filled up the spaces between the mango trees.
The next day, he went to the wedding wearing a brand-new silk shirt that he had bought the same morning. And when he told my father about this little incident many years later, on a day when he was in an unusually good mood, my father overcame his initial shock to ask him if he didn’t feel any guilt, stealing from a beggar, and then using it to buy a shirt for himself.
My grandfather gulped down the last of the rum in the glass, looked up at my father and said, “All our lives we keep balancing our guilt by giving to the needy. But sometimes, we overpay. The only way to settle the account, then, is to either take back the extra you paid. Or take on some more guilt.”