ARISTOCRATS

Can aristocracy be wiped out? There are many enthusiastic people who think so. They have, of course, their very good reasons. With taxes beginning with birth and extending far beyond death and comprehending unselfishly buying, selling, and gifts, profession, income and expenditure, water, light, house, education, pilgrimage and what not, how and where could aristocracy live, much less survive? Yet it lives. And it might live for ever.

I first realised this awkward truth in a moderate sized T. B. Hospital. I had accompanied a friend who wanted to be X-rayed. We had to wait. It was a long and tiresome waiting. The patients were only slowly gathering near the X-ray rooms, from the wards, from outside. There was certainly equality there, they were all suffering from the same disease. Yet what variety in their entrances! Some came walking briskly in, rosy cheeked, plump. Many were weak and thin and pale. A few came in with difficulty and had to lie flat on their backs and pant with closed eyes. One or two came in wheeled chairs. There was neither doctor nor nurse as yet; and there was talking, some laughing, even good jokes from the apparently depressed. Then a stretcher arrived. The gathering was suddenly struck dumb. All those who could, stood up; those who could not, turned their heads or eyes most respectfully. A fair smiling nurse suddenly appeared from nowhere, went grave and helped to lower the stretcher. The doctor too walked in, respectful, almost obedient. Other doctors, nurses, were soon racing from other wards leaving even rich patients attended only by their illness. No king, arriving to visit a moffusil hospital was ever received with so much real respect. A stretcher is a throne, a more comfortable one, for there one could fully stretch one-self. Surrounding it is no mock courtesy, no reluctant bending of knees or necks. Perhaps, there is some flattery, trying to make the patient believe that his condition is not so bad as he feels it to be or it really is. Some hypocritical cheerfulness too might be there, put on to conceal and dispel the misery within doctor and patient. If at any time one has the misfortune to enter a hospital, one must enter it on a stretcher. Better to be adored by the world for a few minutes and die, than be contemptuously dismissed with a scrap of paper before one has so much as opened one's mouth about one's complaint. That, at least, is the out patient's mind. The inpatient is luckier. He can be occasionally impatient. The 'innermost-patient', he who has been to the operation theatre, the sanctum sanctorum of the hospital, can even dictate a little if he has the energy. Even where illness levels all, what orders, privileges, classes, gradations! Consider also, with what contempt even lords of illness can and do treat those who escape with a weak's confinement.

That reminds one that one has the same feelings when one visits a jail. With what feelings of awe the visitor approaches the cells in which the condemned are lodged! Even the most virtuous, the most self-righteous of men would bow their heads (and hearts) before these offerings to the stern deity of The Law. The Jailors, the warders, the (other) criminals are no exception to this. The condemned are verily the kings of the jail. The solitaries, the lifers, are the lords. How they sneer and scoff at the riff-raff, the birds of passage, the ones who are making a grand jail a mere lock-up. There is and can be no mixing between these classes. Even in a jail-riot these distinctions will, doubtless, be kept up. There are, perhaps, as many class distinctions in a jail as there are sections and sub-sections in the penal code.

Coming back from the hospital with my friend, by train, I was struck by the same distinctions. (I am talking of those who travel third. I have no complaint against the other class system, because that is going if not gone) The best places, and more are occupied by the long-distance passengers the ones to Delhi for instance. They sleep out-stretched in the seats and berths, while most of us do not have even standing space, The ticket examiner, who is commanding and gruff to us, dare not disturb the snoring lord. He would, rather, soothe his pillow. Even we, the suffering short-distance passengers, if we are well-bred, are respectful. There are, ofcourse, the ill-bred, the savages of travel, who respect none. They would sit, as if by accident, on a long - distance man's sleeping head. But these are treated like the animals they are, by every one in the compartment. Every one, it seems, is for these distinctions. May be, they are right. At least I thought so, that day.