49 pages • 1 hour read
Mulk Raj AnandCoolie
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1936A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
The following morning, travelers on the train happen on the sleeping Munoo, his tiny body crumpled up in the narrow space between cars. One couple, a chutney factory owner and his wife, on the way home to the small town of Daulatpur, more than six hours from Sham Nagar, take pity on the boy and offer to take him in. They are reeling from a recent miscarriage and are now struggling to conceive a child. They find in the runaway a surrogate child to nurture, the chance “to regard this completely strange boy as a son” (64). The wife, frail but with loving eyes, embraces Munoo with “wonderful eagerness.”
Before the train arrives at Daulatpur, the man, Prabha Dyal, explains to Munoo that he and a business partner, Ganpat, a son of wealthy parents, run the largest food processing factory in the state of Himachai. He offers Munoo work delivering the factory’s floral essences and pungents, pickle jams, mustard preserves, and chutney to shops in town. Prabha and his wife insist Munoo live with them in their huge house with marbled courtyards and open verandas. Munoo is happy for the first time since he left home. He cannot believe his good fortune.
The boy is eager to work. The factory employs dozens of coolies, and it is the first time Munoo has heard the term. To Munoo, the factory is a cavernous, scary place. Four smoky stone coal furnaces run all day. Viscous liquids boil in massive brass cauldrons. The factory itself is stiflingly hot and thick with flies. The stench of organic processing is overwhelming. In fact, Prabha and Ganpat face an ongoing dispute with a powerful local government official, Sir Todar Mal, who lives adjacent to the factory. Sir Todar has filed several complaints with the local housing commission about the heavy smoke and the stench from the factory. Keen to avoid being fined or even imprisoned over the conditions in the factory and equally eager to avoid investing the kind of money necessary to improve the factory conditions, Prabha and Ganpat arrange for bottles of factory products to be delivered to Sir Todar’s home as inducement not to pursue the complaint.
Munoo works for the factory through the winter and into spring. Every morning, he is up before dawn. Before he starts his deliveries in town, Munoo helps start and bank the massive fires that keep the ovens working. The job is dangerous and difficult, but he is a quick learner and avoids catastrophic injuries, although he burns his hand badly the first morning. Ganpat runs the factory floor. He constantly berates the coolies, demeans them, nags at them, and even beats them to meet the factory’s unreasonable quotas. Once the ovens are blasting away, the coolies tend to the fruit and vegetable processing. If Ganpat is offsite, the coolies sing the folk songs from the hill country as they work, making Munoo feel sad for home.
For the deliveries themselves, Munoo carries the pickles and jams and chutney in heavy copper flasks. It is backbreaking work for the small boy. In the early spring, the factory accepts a delivery of mangos fresh from the hill. Munoo, who remembers the sweet fruit from his home, cannot resist pilfering one or two. They are not entirely ripe, however, and Munoo gets sick. His eyes swell, he runs a high fever, and he cannot work. Meanwhile, Ganpat, sure that in delivering the bribes to Sir Todar, Munoo was currying favor, singles out the boy for particular abuse. Then, without explanation, Ganpat leaves town.
Rumors start to circulate among the coolies about financial problems with the factory. Prabha begins to see the villainy of his partner and understands why he suddenly bolted. For more than a year, Prabha discovers, his partner has been skimming money from the business profits and, to cover the stolen money, replacing it with money from the investment reserves intended to keep the company operational. It is when that money runs out that Prabha finds he has no operational funds left. With Ganpat long gone, Prabha faces the creditors alone. The police show up at the factory gates and demand to see Prabha. They interrogate him in front of his stunned work force and demand explanation. When he says, honestly, there is no money, the police investigator administers swift justice: Prabha is caned, receiving five deep, sharp blows from a lathi. Through no fault of his, Prabha is ruined. The factory must close. He and his wife lose their spacious home. His spirit is broken, his health fails, and he teeters on a nervous breakdown. His doctor advises him to leave town and head for a therapeutic respite in the hill country. When Munoo accompanies him and his wife and their few possessions to the train station, Prabha, in tears, gives Munoo a single rupee, worth about a nickel, and tells him, “May you live” (130).
Munoo is now homeless. He drifts to a place known as the Courtyard in town where the unemployed coolies gather. The mosquitos are thick, and the first night Munoo cannot sleep in the heat. In the morning he follows a crowd of coolies to the nearby grain market and secures work loading heavy bags of grain on horse carts headed for the train station. The bags are cumbersome, and Munoo drops one. It splits open. Munoo is chased off but finds similar work in the adjacent vegetable market, where the produce is considerably easier to lift. The pay is scant, and Munoo quickly joins the lines of beggars on the streets for stale bread and lentils. He longs for a bath and a simple night’s sleep. He struggles to get comfortable stretched out on the pavement in front of closed shops. One morning, in an effort to make some money, he goes to the train depot and helps carry luggage for travelers for a gratuity. When a constable tells him he needs a license, Munoo runs.
As he moves aimlessly along the shops, he sees elegant furnishings, framed photographs, and stylish dresses displayed in the windows of the European-inspired shops. He is uncertain how to feel: “Munoo regretted that he was not an Englishman, but was soon content to be the bare-footed little coolie with a dirty tunic and loincloth and the small strip of turban on his head” (139). He is distracted by the rhythms of a heavy drum beat. He sees two coolies in sandwich boards with posters announcing that a circus, on its way to Bombay, will be doing a show that night in Daulatpur. Munoo is certain the circus and Bombay are the answers to his problems. He goes to the outskirts of town where the circus tents are set up. He steals under a tent and watches in amazement as dazzling trapeze artists fly nimbly through the air. That, he decides, is what he wants to do. He wanders about the circus until he finds himself face-to-face with a tethered elephant. In return for helping him feed the elephant and strike the tents, the elephant keeper gives Munoo a few coins and helps him stow away the next morning when the circus train pulls out for Bombay.
Chapter 3 Analysis
During his months in Daulatpur, when Munoo ironically believes he is secure and that the quasi-adoption by Prabha and his wife offers him a loving home, he learns the reality of exploitation and the dark corruption of the world. The section moves from the relatively benign exploitation of Prabha and his wife to the corruption of the city’s officials, from the mercenary greed of Prabha’s own business partner to the ultimate demonstration of the venality of the town: the police caning the innocent Prabha. In this section, Munoo’s naivete becomes increasingly dangerous to him. His enthrallment with the circus at the end of the chapter reveals how his innocence is degrading into a fantasy that blinds him to a feral world with which he must come to terms. As the chapter ends, there is the feeling that Munoo’s innocence is now a luxury he cannot afford.
Initially, Prabha and his wife, who take in the homeless boy they find sleeping on the train to Daulatpur, seem to refute what Munoo learned in the Ram kitchen: how easy it is to disregard him as a person. Not only do they take the boy into their lavishly appointed home, but the husband offers Munoo a job in his successful chutney and pickle factory, the largest employer in the region. For her part, the wife smothers Munoo with hugs and sympathetic kisses. Munoo responds to the kindness, relaxing into an unfamiliar sense of comfort.
The problem, which Munoo cannot see (it is revealed only through the framing authority of the narrator), is that the couple is struggling to handle the depression after their miscarriage. If their embrace of Munoo seems excessive, it is because they are exploiting the boy. Munoo is their substitute child, their surrogate son. It is gentler exploitation, but there are parallels between the harsh treatment Munoo receives from Bibiji and the smothering affection he receives in Prabha’s household. Neither family cares about Munoo as Munoo. The narrator tells us as much: “The father tried to make himself believe that it might be possible to regard this completely strange boy as a son, his son” (64). Ganpat, Prabha’s business partner, reminds him of this point: “You hardly know yet who he is. He is probably a thief, a runaway scamp” (65). It is kindness uncomplicated by authenticity. Munoo delights in what he does not understand: He is being used.
Although he is happy in his work, the job his “loving” parents give him is dangerous and backbreaking. He must bank the factory’s massive oven fires in air heavy with the odors of unprocessed organic waste. In his delivery routes, he lugs essences in bulky copper flasks. The oven fires are terrifying to him. He can barely breathe in the toxic factory air. The deliveries are tiring and the tropical heat oppressive. The work is actually more dangerous, more labor intensive, more onerous than anything he was asked to do back in the Ram kitchen. Munoo is in fact worse off. Kangra is gone forever. Munoo gets sick when he feasts in the shipment of unripe mangos. He associates mangos with the carefree days in Kangra. He greedily eats the fruit assuming them to be the same rich, juicy fruits of those days. As he struggles to break the fever and the stomach pains, he glimpses the dark reality of his situation.
The depth of that reality is hinted first by the narrator in the account of Prabha’s long-standing bribery of the town official. In return for free products from the factory’s inventory, the official agrees to ignore the factory’s health code violations, most notably the particulate air pollution belching from the towering chimney stacks. That corruption naturally is beyond Munoo’s comprehension. He knows only the struggle to breathe in the factory, the sooty residue on the walls of Prabha’s home, and the gritty pall that settles on the roofs of homes that border the facility. Munoo, however, comes to realize the depth of the villainy of people he assumes he knows when the reality of Prabha’s swindling at the hands of his own partner closes the factory and destroys the man Munoo has come to regard as his surrogate father. Prabha does nothing to deserve the punishment he receives from the police. He does nothing to deserve the ruin of bankruptcy. He is broken largely because he trusts in the morality of people. He never suspects the scheme his partner has been using to drain the company’s operating expenses. He never questions his partner. The irony is that Ganpat himself comes from a rich family and does not even need the money he steals. The ruin of the factory was “his little game” (103). The caning is a sobering moment for Munoo. He witnesses the punishment, five lashes from the leather stick, trying to square how, or why, the world is punishing a good man.
After the factory closes, Munoo is on the street surrounded by hundreds of unemployed coolies, beggars, and lepers. The Courtyard scene reveals to Munoo the reality of who he is: another faceless coolie looking for work, desperate to eat, and scared to fall asleep. However, he refuses to accept the dimensions of that reality. When he sees the circus poster and hears the name “Bombay,” he is reanimated by dreams of prosperity, wealth, and plenty. The incongruity of his hope is underscored by his intoxication with the spectacle of the circus he steals in to see. He watches transfixed as the acrobats spin above his head. His certainty that he can do that reveals his vulnerability and his naivete.
Munoo still has much to learn. Even as he helps shovel manure from around the elephant and lugs water to the animal, Munoo, “his blood quickening” (145), convinces himself that Bombay is surely where he needs to be.
