Lifes Handicap

Life's Handicap

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Title: Life's Handicap
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5777] [Yes, we are more than one
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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