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LIFE'S HANDICAP

BEING STORIES OF MINE OWN PEOPLE

By Rudyard Kipling

1915


   TO
   E.K.R.
   FROM
   R.K.
   1887-89
   C.M.G.




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;