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Unit 9: The Shroud by Munshi Premchand

As the story unfolds, the reader is told about the way of life of these characters: marked by Notes
poverty, hunger and want yet also by a determination to do as little work as possible to get by.
At the door of their hut, father and son sat silendy beside dead fire while inside the son’s
young wife, Budhiya, was dirashing about in the agony of childbirth. From time to time, she
would let out such a piercing scream that both would get startled. It was a winter night.

Nature slept under a heavy blanket of silence. The entire village lay submerged beneath a
spell of darkness.
‘It seems she is not likely to make it. You have spent the whole day running to-and-fro—just
go in and have another look,’ Ghisu said.
Madhav answered in an irritated tone, ‘If she has to die, why doesn’t she get it over and done
with? What can I do by looking at her?’
‘You are a heartless fellow. Such infidelity to someone you lived with for a whole year.’
‘I can’t see her writhing and thrashing about’ They belonged to a family of chamars—the
lowest among the untouchable castes since their caste dealt with animal hides. And these two
had earned a particularly bad name for themselves in the entire village. Ghisu was notorious
for working for one day and taking off for three days. Madhav was such a shirker that if he
worked for half an hour, he would stop and smoke his pipe for an hour. So the two of them
seldom found work. If they had even a handful of grain in the house, they would swear off
work. A couple of days’ starvation would induce Ghisu to climb a tree and break off some
twigs for firewood, which Madhav would sell in the market. After this the two would loiter
about for as long as the money would last.
There was no dearth of work in the village. It was a village of farmers and for a hardworking man
there were any number of chores to be done. But these two were called only when one was
willing to be satisfied by getting one man’s work out of the two. If these two had been a pair
of wandering anchorites, they would have had no call to practise contentment and fortitude, restraint
and regulation. It was their nature. It came naturally to them. Theirs was indeed a strange life.
Their home could boast of no other worldly possession beside a pair of clay pots. They covered the
nakedness of their bodies with a few tattered rags and went on with the business of living. Their
lives were free of all worldly cares. They were steeped under debt. People heaped abuses on
them, even beat them — but they were without a care in the world. They were so poor that no
one could expect to have their money back, yet people would occasionally lend them a little
something They would steal some potatoes or peas from someone’s fields and roast them or
pluck half-a-dozen sugarcane to suck at night. Ghisu had led this happy-go-lucky existence for
sixty years and Madhav, like a dutiful son, was following in his father’s footsteps and, if
anything, he was giving an extra shine to his father’s name.

The two of them now sat before the fire, roasting potatoes they had earlier dug up from someone’s
field. Ghisu’s wife had died a long time ago. Madhav had got married last year. Ever since his
wife had entered their house, she had established some kind of order in their disordered lives
and strived to stoke the bellies of these two shameless wretches. With her arrival, the father and
son had become more slothful than ever, and cocky too, to boot. If someone wanted to hire them
for some work, they would boldly ask for double the normal wages. And this same woman now
lay dying in the agony of childbirth and these two were probably waiting for her to die, so
that they could go to sleep in peace and quiet.
Ghisu dug out another potato and spoke while peeling it, ‘Go and see how she is. Must be
under the spell of some she-devil, what else? If we call the village exorcist he won’t ask for
less than a rupee.’

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