Half a Life

1

A Visit from Somerset Maugham

WILLIE CHANDRAN asked his father one day, “Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.”

His father said without joy, “You were named after a great English writer. I am sure you have seen his books about the house.”

“But I haven't read them. Did you admire him so much?”

“I am not sure. Listen, and make up your own mind.”

And this was the story Willie Chandran's father began to tell. It took a long time. The story changed as Willie grew up. Things were added, and by the time Willie left India to go to England this was the story he had heard.

*

THE WRITER (Willie Chandran's father said) came to India to get material for a novel about spirituality. This was in the 1930s. The principal of the maharaja's college brought him to me. I was doing penance for something I had done, and I was living as a mendicant in the outer courtyard of the big temple. It was a very public place, and that was why I had chosen it. My enemies among the maharaja's officials were hounding me, and I felt safer there in the temple courtyard, with the crowds coming and going, than in my office. I was in a state of nerves because of this persecution, and to calm myself I had also taken a vow of silence. This had won me a certain amount of local respect, even renown. People would come to look at me being silent and some would bring me gifts. The state authorities had to respect my vow, and my first thought when I saw the principal with the little old white fellow was that it was a plot to make me talk. This made me very obstinate. People knew that something was afoot and they stood around to watch the encounter. I knew they were on my side. I didn't say anything. The principal and the writer did all the talking. They talked about me and they looked at me while they talked, and I sat and looked through them like someone deaf and blind, and the crowd looked at all three of us.

That was how it began. I said nothing to the great man. It's hard to credit now, but I don't believe I had heard about him when I first saw him. The English literature I knew about was Browning and Shelley and people like that, whom I had studied at the university, for the year or so I was there, before I foolishly gave up English education in response to the mahatma's call, and unfitted myself for life, while watching my friends and enemies growing in prosperity and regard. That, though, is something else. I will tell you about it some other time.

Now I want to go back to the writer. You must believe that I had said nothing to him at all. But then, perhaps eighteen months later, in the travel book the writer brought out there were two or three pages about me. There was a lot more about the temple and the crowds and the clothes they were wearing, and the gifts of coconut and flour and rice they had brought, and the afternoon light on the old stones of the courtyard. Everything the maharaja's headmaster had told him was there, and a few other things besides. Clearly the headmaster had tried to win the admiration of the writer by saying very good things about my various vows of denial. There were also a few lines, perhaps a whole paragraph, describing—in the way he had described the stones and the afternoon light—the serenity and smoothness of my skin.

That was how I became famous. Not in India, where there is a lot of jealousy, but abroad. And the jealousy turned to rage when the writer's famous novel came out during the war, and foreign critics began to see in me the spiritual source of The Razor's Edge.

My persecution stopped. The writer—to the general surprise, an anti-imperialist—had, in his first Indian book, the book of travel notes, written flatteringly of the maharaja and his state and his officials, including the principal of the college. So the attitude of everybody changed. They pretended to see me as the writer had seen me: the man of high caste, high in the maharaja's revenue service, from a line of people who had performed sacred rituals for the ruler, turning his back on a glittering career, and living as a mendicant on the alms of the poorest of the poor.

It became hard for me to step out of that role. One day the maharaja himself sent me his good wishes by one of the palace secretaries. This worried me a lot. I had been hoping that after a time there might be other religious excitements in the city, and I would be allowed to go away, and work out my own way of life. But when during an important religious festival the maharaja himself came barebacked in the hot afternoon sun as a kind of penitent and with his own hand made me offerings of coconuts and cloth which a liveried courtier—a scoundrel whom I knew only too well—had brought, I recognised that breaking out had become impossible, and I settled down to live the strange life that fate had bestowed on me.

I began to attract visitors from abroad. They were principally friends of the famous writer. They came from England to find what the writer had found. They came with letters from the writer. Sometimes they came with letters from the maharaja's high officials. Sometimes they came with letters from people who had previously visited me. Some of them were writers, and months or weeks after they had visited there were little articles about their visits in the London magazines. With these visitors I went over this new version of my life so often that I became quite at ease with it. Sometimes we talked about the people who had visited, and the people with me would say with satisfaction, “I know him. He's a very good friend.” Or words like that. So that for five months, from November to March, the time of our winter or “cold weather,” as the English people said, to distinguish the Indian season from the English season, I felt I had become a social figure, someone at the periphery of a little foreign web of acquaintances and gossip.

It sometimes happens that when you make a slip of the tongue you don't want to correct it. You try to pretend that what you said was what you meant. And then it often happens that you begin to see that there is some truth in your error. You begin to see, for instance, that to subtract from someone's good name can also be said to detract from that name. In some such way, contemplating the strange life that had been forced on me by that meeting with the great English writer, I began to see that it was a way of life that for some years I had been dreaming of: the wish to renounce, hide, run away from the mess I had made of my life.

I must go back. We come from a line of priests. We were attached to a certain temple. I do not know when the temple was built or which ruler built it or for how long we have been attached to it; we are not people with that kind of knowledge. We of the temple priesthood and our families made a community. At one time I suppose we would have been a very rich and prosperous community, served in various ways by the people whom we served. But when the Muslims conquered the land we all became poor. The people we served could no longer support us. Things became worse when the British came. There was law, but the population increased. There were far too many of us in the temple community. This was what my grandfather told me. All the complicated rules of the community held, but there was actually very little to eat. People became thin and weak and fell ill easily. What a fate for our priestly community! I didn't like hearing the stories my grandfather told of that time, in the 1890s.

My grandfather was skin and bones when he decided he had to leave the temple and the community. He thought he would go to the big town where the maharaja's palace was and where there was a famous temple. He made such preparations as he could, saving up little portions of rice and flour and oil, and putting aside one small coin and then another. He told no one anything. When the day came he got up very early, in the dark, and began to walk to where the railway station was. It was very many miles away. He walked for three days. He walked among people who were very poor. He was more wretched than most of them, but there were people who saw that he was a starving young priest and offered him alms and shelter. At last he came to the railway station. He told me that he was by this time so frightened and lost, so close to the end of his strength and courage, that he was noticing nothing of the world outside. The train came in the afternoon. He had a memory of crowd and noise, and then it was night. He had never travelled by train before, but all the time he was looking inward.

In the morning they came to the big town. He asked his way to the big temple and he stayed there, moving about the temple courtyard to avoid the sun. In the evening, after the temple prayers, there was a distribution of consecrated food. He was not left out of that. It was not a great deal, but it was more than he had been living on. He tried to behave as though he were a pilgrim. No one asked questions, and that was the way he lived for the first few days. But then he was noticed. He was questioned. He told his story. The temple officials didn't throw him out. It was one of these officials, a kindly man, who suggested to my grandfather that he could become a letter-writer. He provided the simple equipment, the pen and nibs and ink and paper, and my grandfather went and sat with the other letter-writers on the pavement outside the courts near the maharaja's palace.

Most of the letter-writers there wrote in English. They did petitions of various sorts for people, and helped with various government forms. My grandfather knew no English. He knew Hindi and the language of his region. There were many people in the town who had run away from the famine area and wanted to get news to their families. So there was work for my grandfather and no one was jealous of him. People were also attracted to him because of the priestly clothes he wore. He was able after a while to make a fair living. He gave up skulking about the temple courtyard in the evenings. He found a proper room, and he sent for his family. With his letter-writing work, and with his friendships at the temple, he got to know more and more people, and so in time he was able to get a respectable job as a clerk in the maharaja's palace.

That kind of job was secure. The pay wasn't very good, but nobody ever got dismissed, and people treated you with regard. My father fell easily into that way of life. He learned English and got his diplomas from the secondary school, and was soon much higher in the government than his father. He became one of the maharaja's secretaries. There were very many of those. They wore an impressive livery, and in the town they were treated like little gods. I believe my father wished me to continue in that way, to continue the climb he had begun. For my father it was as though he had rediscovered something of the security of the temple community from which my grandfather had had to flee.

But there was some little imp of rebellion in me. Perhaps I had heard my grandfather tell too often of his flight and his fear of the unknown, only looking inward during those terrible days and not able to see what was around him. My grandfather grew angrier as he grew older. He said then that in his temple community they had been very foolish. They had seen the disaster coming but had done nothing about it. He himself, he said, had left it to the last moment to run away; which was why, when he came to the big town, he had had to skulk about the temple courtyard like a half-starved animal. These were terrible words for him to use. His anger infected me. I began to have some idea that this life we were all living in the big town around the maharaja and his palace couldn't last, that this security was also false. When I thought like that I could panic, because I couldn't see what I could do to protect myself against that breakdown.

I suppose I was ripe for political action. India was full of politics. But the independence movement didn't exist in the maharaja's state. It was illegal. And though we knew of the great names and the great doings outside we saw them at a distance.

I was now at the university. The plan was that I should get a BA degree and then perhaps get a scholarship from the maharaja to do medicine or engineering. Then I was to marry the daughter of the principal of the maharaja's college. All of that was settled. I let it happen, but felt detached from it. I became idler and idler at the university. I didn't understand the BA course. I didn't understand The Mayor of Casterbridge. I couldn't understand the people or the story and didn't know what period the book was set in. Shakespeare was better, but I didn't know what to make of Shelley and Keats and Wordsworth. When I read those poets I wanted to say, “But this is just a pack of lies. No one feels like that.” The professor made us copy down his notes. He dictated them, pages and pages, and what I mainly remember is that, because he was dictating notes and wanted them to be brief, and because he wanted us to copy down these notes exactly, he never spoke the name Wordsworth. He always said W, speaking just the initial, never Wordsworth. W did this, W wrote that.

I was in a great mess, feeling that we were all living in a false security, feeling idle, hating my studies, and knowing that great things were happening outside. I adored the great names of the independence movement. I felt rebuked in my idleness, and in the servility of the life that was being prepared for me. And when sometime in 1931 or 1932 I heard that the mahatma had called for students to boycott their universities, I decided to follow the call. I did more. In the front yard I made a little bonfire of The Mayor of Casterbridge and Shelley and Keats, and the professor's notes, and went home to wait for the storm to beat about my head.

Nothing happened. Nobody seemed to have told my father anything. No message came from the dean. Perhaps it hadn't been much of a bonfire. Books aren't so easy to burn, unless you have a good fire already going. And it was possible that in the untidiness and noise of the university front yard, with the life of the street just there, what I was doing in a little corner mightn't have seemed so strange.

I felt more useless than ever. In other parts of India there were great men. To be able to follow those great men, even to catch a sight of them, would have been bliss for me. I would have given anything to be in touch with their greatness. Here there was only the servile life around the palace of the maharaja. Night after night I debated what I should do. The mahatma himself, I knew, had gone through a crisis like this only a few years before in his ashram. Apparently at peace there, living a life of routine, adored by everyone around him, he had actually been worrying, to a pitch of torment, how he might set the country alight. And he had come up with the unexpected and miraculous idea of the Salt March, a long march from his ashram to the sea, to make salt.

So, living securely at home, in the house of my father the courtier in livery, still (for the sake of peace) pretending to attend the university, but tormented in the way I have said, I at last felt inspiration touch me. I felt with every kind of certainty that the decision that had come to me was just, and I was determined to carry it through. The decision was nothing less than to make a sacrifice of myself. Not an empty sacrifice, the act of a moment—any fool can jump off a bridge or throw himself in front of a train—but a more lasting kind of sacrifice, something the mahatma would have approved of. He had spoken much about the evils of casteism. No one had said he was wrong, but very few had done anything about it.

My decision was simple. It was to turn my back on our ancestry, the foolish, foreign-ruled starveling priests my grandfather had told me about, to turn my back on all my father's foolish hopes for me as someone high in the maharaja's service, all the foolish hopes of the college principal to have me marry his daughter. My decision was to turn my back on all those ways of death, to trample on them, and to do the only noble thing that lay in my power, which was to marry the lowest person I could find.

I actually had someone in mind. There was a girl at the university. I didn't know her. I hadn't spoken to her. I had merely noticed her. She was small and coarse-featured, almost tribal in appearance, noticeably black, with two big top teeth that showed very white. She wore colours that were sometimes very bright and sometimes very muddy, seeming to run into the blackness of her skin. She would have belonged to a backward caste. The maharaja gave a certain number of scholarships to “the backwards,” as they were called. The maharaja was known for his piety, and this giving of scholarships was one of his acts of religious charity. That, in fact, was my first thought when I saw the girl in the lecture room with her books and papers. A lot of people were looking at her. She wasn't looking at anyone. I saw her often after that. She held her pen in a strange, determined, childish way, and copied down the professor's notes about Shelley and W, of course, and Browning and Arnold and the importance in Hamlet of soliloquy.

The last word gave us a lot of trouble. The professor pronounced it in three or four different ways, according to his mood; and when he was testing our knowledge of his notes, and we had to speak the word, it was, you might say, every man for himself. Literature for many of us was this kind of confusion. I thought for some reason that the scholarship girl, since she was a scholarship girl, understood more than most of us. But then one day when the professor asked her a question— normally he didn't pay her too much attention—I saw that she understood a good deal less. She had almost no idea of the story of Hamlet. All she had been learning were words. She had thought that the play was set in India. It was easy for the professor to mock her, and people in the class laughed, as though they knew much more.

I began after this to pay more attention to the girl. I was fascinated and repelled by her. She would have been of the very low. It would have been unbearable to consider her family and clan and their occupations. When people like that went to the temple they would have been kept out of the sanctum, the inner cell with the image of the deity. The officiating priest would never have wanted to touch those people. He would have thrown the sacred ash at them, the way food is thrown to a dog. All kinds of ideas like that came to me when I contemplated the scholarship girl, who felt people's eyes on her and never returned their gaze. She was trying to keep her end up. It would have taken so little to crush her. And gradually, with my fascination, there came a little sympathy, a wish to look at the world through her eyes.

This was the girl I thought I should go and make a declaration to and in her company live out a life of sacrifice.

There was a tea-room or restaurant the students went to. We called it a hotel. It was in a lane off the main road. It was very cheap. When you asked the waiter for cigarettes he placed an open pack of five on the table, and you paid only for what you took. It was there one day that I saw the scholarship girl, alone in her muddy clothes at the little ring-marked table below the ceiling fan. I went and sat at her table. She should have looked pleased, but she looked frightened. And then I understood that though I might have known who she was, she perhaps had not looked at me. In the BA class I was not that distinctive.

So right at the beginning there was this little warning. I noted it, but I didn't heed it.

I said to her, “I've seen you in the English class.” I wasn't sure this was the right thing to say. It might have made her feel I had witnessed her humiliation when the professor had tried to get her to talk about Hamlet. She didn't say anything. The thin, shiny-faced waiter, in the very dirty white jacket he had worn for days, came and put a dripping glass of water on the table and asked what I wanted. That eased the embarrassment of the moment for me. But not for her. She was in a strange situation, and she was being witnessed. Her very dark top lip slipped slowly—with the wetness of a snail, I thought—over her big white teeth. For the first time I saw that she used powder. There was a thin white bloom on her cheeks and forehead; it made the black skin matt, and you could see where the powder ended and the shiny skin showed again. I was repelled, ashamed, moved.

I didn't know what to talk about. I couldn't say, “Where do you live? What does your father do? Do you have brothers? What do they do?” All of those questions would have caused trouble and, to tell the truth, I didn't want to know the answers. The answers would have taken me down into a pit. I didn't want to go there. So I sat and sipped at the coffee and smoked a thin cheap cigarette from the pack of five the waiter put down for me and said nothing. Looking down I caught sight of her thin black feet in her cheap slippers, and again I was surprised at how moved I was.

I took to going to the tea-shop as often as I could and whenever I saw the girl there I sat at her table. We didn't talk. One day she came in after me. She didn't come to my table. I was in a quandary. I considered the other people in the tea-shop, people with ordinary and secure lives ahead of them, and for a long minute or two I was, to tell the truth, a little frightened, and thought of giving up the idea of the life of sacrifice. I could simply have stayed at my table. But then, nagged by some feeling of failure and some irritation at the scholarship girl's indifference, I went and sat at her table. She seemed to expect it, and seemed very slightly to move to one side, as if making room for me.

That was how it was that term. No words spoken, no meeting of any sort outside the tea-shop, yet a special kind of relationship established. We began to get strange looks in the tea-shop, and I began to get those looks even when I was on my own. The girl was mortified. I could see that she didn't know how to deal with those judging eyes. But what mortified her gave me a strange satisfaction. I looked upon that kind of judgement—from waiters, students, simple people—as the first sweet fruit of my life of sacrifice. They were only the first fruits. I knew that there were going to be greater battles ahead, severer tests, and even sweeter fruit.

The first of those battles was not long in coming. One day in the tea-room the girl spoke to me. I had got used to the silence between us—it seemed a perfect way of communication—and this forwardness in someone I had thought of as backward took me by surprise. Mixed up with this surprise was my dismay at her voice. I realised then that in the class, even at the time of her trouble with the professor over Hamlet, I had only heard her mumble. Her voice, heard in this intimate way across the little square tea-table, was not soft and shy and aiming at sweetness, as you might have expected from someone so small and slight and diffident, but loud and coarse and rasping. It was the kind of voice I associated with people of her kind. I thought it might have been something that as a scholarship girl she had left behind.

I hated that voice as soon as I heard it. I felt, not for the first time, that I was sinking. But that was the terror that went with the life of sacrifice I had committed myself to, and I felt I had absolutely to go ahead.

I was so preoccupied with these thoughts—her forwardness, the hatefulness of her voice (like an expression of her big white top teeth and her powdered dark skin), my fear for myself—that I had to ask her to say again what she had said.

She said, “Somebody has told my uncle.”

Uncle? I felt she had no right to be dragging me into these unsavoury depths. Who was this uncle? What hole did he live in? Even the word “uncle”—which was a word that other people used of a sometimes precious relationship—was presumptuous.

I said, “Who is this uncle?”

“He is with the Labourers Union. A firebrand.”

She used the English word, and it sounded very strange and acrid in her mouth. We didn't have nationalist politics in the state—it wasn't allowed by the maharaja—but we did have this semi-nationalist subterfuge, which found pretty words, like “labourers” or “workers,” for the uglier words that were in everyday use. And, all at once, I knew who she might be. She would have been related to the firebrand, and this would have explained her getting the scholarship from the maharaja. In her own eyes she was a person of power and influence, someone on the rise.

She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession against you. Caste oppression.”

That would have suited me down to the ground. It would have made a public statement of my rejection of old values. It would have broadcast my adherence to the ideas of the mahatma, my life of sacrifice.

She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession and burn your house down. The whole world has seen you sitting with me in this tea-house week after week. What are you going to do?”

I was really frightened. I knew those firebrands. I said, “What do you think I should do?”

“You have to hide me somewhere, until things calm down.”

I said, “But that would be kidnapping you.”

“It is what you have to do.”

She was calm. I was like a drowning man.

A few short months before I had been an ordinary, idle young man at the university, the son of a courtier, living in my father's Grade C official house, thinking about the great men of our country and yearning to be great myself, without seeing any way, in the smallness of our life, of embarking on that career of greatness, capable only of listening to film songs, yielding to the emotion they called up, and then enfeebled by shameful private vice (about which I intend to say no more, since such things are universal), and generally feeling oppressed by the nothingness of our world and the servility of our life. Now in almost every particular my life had altered. It was as though, like a child seeing the sky reflected in a puddle after rain, I had, wishing to feel fear while knowing I was safe, let my foot touch the puddle, which at that touch had turned into a raging flood which was now sweeping me away. That was how in a few minutes I had begun to feel. And that in a few minutes became my view of the world about me: no longer a dull and ordinary place where ordinary people walked and worked, but a place where secret torrents flowed which might at any minute sweep away the unwary. It was what came to my mind now when I looked at the girl. All her attributes changed: the thin black feet, the big teeth, the very dark skin.

I had to find a place for her. It was her idea. A hotel or boarding house was out of the question. I thought of the people I knew. I had to forget family friends, university friends. I thought in the end I would try the image-maker in the town. There was an old connection between the factory and the temple of my ancestors. It was a place I had often gone to. I knew the master. He was a small dusty fellow with glasses. He looked blind, but that was because his glasses were always dusty with the chippings of his workmen. Ten or twelve of them were always there, small barebacked fellows, quite ordinary in appearance, chipping away in the yard, hammer on chisel, chisel on stone, making twenty or twenty-four separate sounds all the time. It wasn't easy to be in the middle of that noise. But I didn't think the scholarship girl would mind.

The image-makers were of a neutral caste, not low, but very far from being high, and perfect for my purpose. Many of the craftsmen lived in the master's compound with their families.

The master was working on a complicated drawing of a temple pillar. He was pleased as always to see me. I looked at his drawing, and he showed me others, and I worked the subject round to the girl, a “backward” who had been expelled and threatened by her family and was now in need of shelter. I decided not to speak shyly, but with authority. The master knew of my ancestry. He would never have associated me with such a woman, and I suggested that I was acting on behalf of someone very high indeed. It was well known that the maharaja was sympathetic to the backwards. And the master behaved like a man who knew the ways of the world.

There was a room at the back of the storehouse where there were images and statues and busts of various sorts. The dusty little fellow with the blind glasses was gifted. He didn't do only the deities, complicated things that had to be done in a precise way; he also did real people, living and dead. He did lots of mahatmas and other giants of the nationalist movement; and he did busts (from photographs) of people's parents and grandparents. Sometimes those family busts carried the real glasses of the people. It was a place full of presences, disturbing to me after a time. It was comforting to know that every deity was flawed in some way, so that its terrible power couldn't become real and overwhelm us all.

I wished I could have left the girl there and never gone back, but there was always the threat of the firebrand, her uncle. And the longer she stayed there the harder it became for me to send her away; the more it seemed that we were together for life, though I hadn't even touched her.

I lived at home. I went out to the university and pretended to be at the lectures, and then sometimes I would go to the sculptor's yard. I never stayed long. I never wanted the master to suspect anything.

Life couldn't have been easy for her. One day, in that room without light, where the dust of the sculptor's yard coated everything, and was like a powder on the girl's skin, she seemed to me to be very melancholy.

I said, “What's the matter?”

She said, in her terrible rough voice, “I was thinking how my life has changed.”

I said, “What about my life?”

She said, “If I was outside I would be doing the exams now. Are they easy?”

I said, “I am boycotting the university.”

“How will you get a job? Who will give you money? Go and do the exams.”

“I haven't studied. I can't learn those notes now. It is too late.”

“They will pass you. You know those people.”

When the results came out my father said, “I can't understand it. I hear that you knew nothing at all about the Romantics and The Mayor of Casterbridge. They wanted to fail you. The principal of the college had to talk them out of it.”

I should have said, “I burnt my books long ago. I am following the mahatma's call. I am boycotting English education.” But I was too weak. At a critical moment I failed myself. All I said was, “I felt all my strength oozing out of me in the examination room.” And I could have cried at my weakness.

My father said, “If you were having trouble with Hardy and Wessex and so on, you should have come to me. I have all my school notes still.”

He was off duty, in the hot little front room of our Grade C house. He was without his turban and livery, only in a singlet and dhoti. The maharaja's courtiers, in spite of their turbans and livery, with day coats and night coats, never wore shoes, and my father's soles were black and callused and about half an inch thick.

He said, “So I suppose it's the Land Tax department for you.”

And I began to work for the maharaja's state. The Land Tax department was very big. Everybody who owned any little piece of land had to pay an annual tax on it. There were officers all over the state surveying the land, recording ownership, collecting the tax, and keeping accounts. My job was in the central office. It was a pretty building in white marble and it had a high dome. It was full of rooms. I worked with twenty others in a big, high room. It was full of papers on desks and on deep shelves like those in the left-luggage rooms in railway stations. The papers were in cardboard folders tied with string; sometimes they were in bundles wrapped in cloth. The folders in the top shelves, many years old, were dingy with dust and cigarette smoke. The ceiling was brown with this smoke. The room was nicotine-brown at the top, dark-mahogany lower down, on the doors, desks and floor.

I grieved for myself. This kind of servile labour had formed no part of my vision of the life of sacrifice. But now I was glad to have it. I needed the money, paltry though it was. I was deep in debt. I had used my father's name and position in the palace and taken money from various moneylenders to support the girl in the room at the image-maker's.

She had made the place presentable. That had cost money; and then there had been the kitchen paraphernalia, and her clothes. So I had been having all the expenses of a married man, and living like an ascetic in my father's Grade C house.

The girl never believed I didn't have the money. She believed that people of my background had secret funds. It was part of the propaganda outside against our caste, and I endured what was said without comment. Whenever I took her another little piece of money from a moneylender she didn't look surprised. She might say, with irony (or sarcasm: I don't know what our professor would have said), “You look very sad. But your caste always look sad when they give.” She sometimes had the style of her uncle, the firebrand of the backwards.

I was full of grief. But she was happy about the new job.

She said, “I must say it would be nice to get some regular money for a change.”

I said, “I don't know how long I can last in that job.”

She said, “I've put up with a lot of hardship already. I don't intend to put up with much more. I could have been a BA. If you hadn't taken me away from the university I would have done the exam. My family went to a lot of trouble to send me to the university.”

I could have wept with rage.

Not so much at what she was saying, but at the idea of the prison-house in which I now had to live. Day after day I left my father's house and went to work. I felt like a child again. There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.” That was the way I felt about going to work in the Land Tax department, and the thought of going to work in a place like that every day every year until I died frightened me.

One day in the office the supervisor came and said, “You are being transferred to the audit section.”

In that section we had to look out for corruption among the tax-collectors and surveyors. Officers would take the land tax from poor people who couldn't read, and not give receipts, and the poor peasant with his three or four acres would have to pay the tax again. Or he would have to pay a bribe to get his receipt. It was endless, the petty cheating that went on among the poor. The officers were not much richer than the peasants. Who was suffering when the tax was not paid? The more I looked at these dirty pieces of paper the more I found myself on the side of the cheats. I began to destroy or throw away those damning little pieces of paper. I became a kind of saboteur, and it gave me great pleasure to think that in this office, without making any big statement, I was conducting my own kind of civil disobedience.

The supervisor said to me one day, “The Chief Inspector wants to see you.”

My bravery vanished. I thought of the debts, the moneylender, the girl in the room at the image-maker's.

The Chief Inspector sat at a desk and was surrounded by his own files, files of ill-doing that had been sifted at half a dozen desks and then sifted again and had at last arrived here, for this man's awful judgement.

He rocked back on his chair, looking at me through his thick-lensed glasses, and said, “Are you happy with your work here?”

I bowed my head. I didn't say anything.

He said, “From next week you will be an Assistant Inspector.”

It was a big promotion. I felt it was a trap. I said, “I don't know, sir. I don't feel I have the qualifications.”

He said, “We are not making you a full Inspector. We are only making you an Assistant Inspector.”

It was the first of my promotions. It didn't matter how badly I did my job, how much I sabotaged, they continued to promote me. It was like civil disobedience in reverse.

It worried me. I talked to my father about it one evening.

He said, “The school principal has great ambitions for his son-in-law.”

I said, “I can't be his son-in-law. I am already married.”

I don't know why it came to me to say that. It wasn't strictly true, of course. But that was the way I had begun to think about my relationship with the girl at the image-maker's.

My father went wild. All his tolerance and kindness disappeared. He became heart-broken. It was a very long time before he could ask me for the details.

“Who is the girl?”

I told him. He couldn't speak. I thought he was going to collapse. I wanted to calm him down. So I told him about the firebrand, the girl's uncle. I was trying to tell him, in a foolish kind of way, quite contrary to my ideas of sacrifice, that the girl had a background of some sort and wasn't a complete nobody. It made matters worse. He didn't like hearing about the firebrand. He lay down flat on an old bamboo mat on the concrete floor in our little front room, and he called for my mother. I could see very clearly the thick pads of hardened skin on the soles of his feet. They were dirty and cracked and there were little strips peeling off the side. As a courtier my father had never been allowed to wear shoes. But he had bought shoes for me.

He said at last, “You've blackened all our faces. And now we'll have to face the anger of the school principal. You've dishonoured his daughter, since in everybody's eyes you are as good as married to her.”

So, though I hadn't touched either of them, and though I had gone through no form of ceremony with either of them, there were two women whom I had dishonoured.

In the morning my father was hollow-eyed. He had slept badly. He said, “For centuries we have been what we are. Even when the Muslims came. Even when we starved. Now you've thrown our inheritance away.”

I said, “Now is a time for sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice, sacrifice. Why?”

“I am following the mahatma's call.”

That made my father stop, and I said, “I am sacrificing the only thing I have to sacrifice.” It was a line that had come to me the evening before.

My father said, “The school principal is a powerful man, and I am sure he will be finding ways of lighting a fire under us. I don't know how I can tell him. I don't know how I can face him. It's easy enough for you to talk of sacrifice. You can leave. You are young. Your mother and I will have to live with the consequences. It will be better, in fact, if you did leave. You wouldn't be allowed to live with a backward here. Have you thought of that?”

And my father was right. It was easy enough for me so far. I wasn't actually living with the woman. That idea became daily more concrete, and it repelled me more and more. So I was in a strange position.

For some weeks life went on as before. I lived in my father's government house. I made occasional trips to the image-maker's. I went to work in the Land Tax department. My father was always worried about the school principal, but nothing happened.

One day the messenger said to me, “The Chief Inspector wants to see you.”

The Chief Inspector had a pile of folders on his desk. I recognised some of them. He said, “If I tell you that you've been recommended for another promotion, would it surprise you?”

“No. Yes. But I am not qualified. I can't cope with these promotions.”

“That's what I feel, too. I've been going through some of your work. I am bewildered by it. Documents have been destroyed, receipts thrown away.”

I said, “I don't know. Some vandal.”

“I think I should tell you right away. You are being investigated for corruption. There have been complaints by senior officials. It's a serious matter, corruption. You can go to jail. RI, rigorous imprisonment. There is enough in these files to convict you.”

I went to the girl at the image-maker's. She was the only person I could talk to.

She said, “You were on the side of the cheats?” It seemed to please her.

“Well, yes. I didn't think they were ever going to find out. There's so much paper in that place. They could cook up any kind of case against anybody. The college principal is against me, I should tell you. He wanted me to marry his daughter.”

The girl understood the situation right away. I didn't have to say any more. She made all the connections.

She said, “I will get my uncle to take out a procession.”

Uncle, procession: a mob of backwards carrying their crude banners and shouting my name outside the palace and the secretariat. I said, “No, no. Please don't have a procession.”

She insisted. Her blood was up. She said, “He's a crowd-puller.” She used the English word.

The thought of being protected by the firebrand was unbearable. And I knew that—after all the blows I had dealt him—it would have killed my father. And that was when, caught between the girl and the school principal, the firebrand and the threat of imprisonment, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in every direction, as you might say, I began to think of running away. I began to think of taking sanctuary in the famous old temple in the town. Like my grandfather. At this moment of supreme sacrifice I fell, as if by instinct, into old ways.

I made my preparations secretly. There was not much to prepare. The hardest thing to do was to shave my head clean. And very early one morning, like the Lord Buddha leaving the revels of his father's palace, I left my father's house and, dressed like a man of my caste, I walked barefooted and barebacked to the temple. My father had never worn shoes. I had always worn them, except on certain religious occasions, and the soles of my feet were thin-skinned and soft, without my father's pads. Soon they were very tender, and I wondered what they would be like when the sun came up and the paving stones of the temple courtyard became hot.

Like my grandfather all those years ago I moved about the courtyard during the day to avoid the sun. After the prayers in the evening I was offered food. And when the time was ripe I declared myself a mendicant to the temple priests, and claimed sanctuary, letting them know my ancestry at the same time. I made no attempt to hide. The temple courtyard was as public as the main road. I thought that the more the public saw me, the more they got to know about my life of sacrifice, the greater was my security. But my case was not very well known, and it actually took some time, three or four days, for my presence in the temple to be known, and for the scandal to break out.

The school principal and the officials of the Land Tax department were about to pounce when the firebrand took out a procession. Everybody became very frightened. Nobody touched me. And that was how, to my mortification and sorrow, and with every kind of grief for my father and our past, I became part of the cause of the backwards.

This lasted for two or three weeks. I didn't know how to move, and had no idea where the whole thing was going to end. I had no idea how long I would last in that strange situation. The government lawyers were at work, and I knew that if it wasn't for the firebrand, no amount of sanctuary was going to save me from the courts. It occurred then to me to do as the mahatma had done at some stage: to take a vow of silence. It suited my temperament, and it also seemed the least complicated way out. The news of this vow of silence spread. Simple people who had come from afar to pay their respects to the temple deity would now also stop off to pay their respects to me. I became at once a holy man and, because of the firebrand and his niece outside, a political cause.

My case became almost as well known as that of a scoundrelly lawyer in another state, a jumped-up backward called Madhavan. That insolent fellow—going against all custom and decency—had insisted on walking past a temple while the priests were doing a long and taxing set of religious ceremonies. If you made one small mistake during those particular ceremonies you had to go back to the beginning. On such occasions it was better for backwards with their distracting babble to be out of the way, and the whole temple street was of course closed to them.

Elsewhere in the country they were talking of Gandhi and Nehru and the British. Here in the maharaja's state they were shut off from those politics. They were half-nationalists or quarter-nationalists or less. Their big cause was the caste war. For quite a time they did civil disobedience about the lawyer and me, campaigning for the lawyer's right to walk past the temple, and for my right to marry the firebrand's niece, or for her right to marry me.

The processions and the one-day strikes kept me safe from the school principal and the courts, and from the girl as well. But it pained me more than I can say to be put on a par with that lawyer. I thought it unfair that my simple life of sacrifice had taken that turn. I had wished, after all, only to follow the great men of our country. Fate, tossing me about, had made me a hero to people who, fighting their own petty caste war, wished to pull them down.

For three months or so I lived in this way, accepting homage from temple visitors, not noticing their gifts, and of course never talking. It actually wasn't a disagreeable way of passing the time. It suited me. And of course in my situation the vow of silence was a great help. I had no idea where the whole thing was going to end, but after a while I stopped worrying about that. I even began, when my silence overpowered me, a little bit to enjoy the feeling of being detached, of floating, with no links to anyone or anything. Sometimes for ten or fifteen minutes or longer I forgot my situation. Sometimes I even forgot where I was.

And that was when the great writer and his friend appeared, together with the school principal, and my life took yet another turn.

The principal was also director of the state's tourist publications and sometimes showed distinguished people around. He shot me glances of pure hatred—every kind of old anxiety came back to me then—and was for passing me by, but the writer's friend, Mr. Haxton, asked about me. The principal said, making an irritated, dismissing gesture with his hand, “Nobody, nobody.” But Mr. Haxton pressed, and asked why people were bringing me gifts. The principal told them I had taken a vow of silence, and had already been silent for a hundred days. The writer was very interested in that. The principal saw, and in the way of people of his kind, and as a good servant of the maharaja's tourist department, he began to say what he thought the old writer and his friend wanted to hear. He fixed his hard hating eyes on me and boasted about my priestly family and our temple ancestors. He boasted about my own early career, the bright prospects I had. All of these things I had mysteriously given away for the life of the ascetic, living in the courtyard, dependent on the bounty of pilgrims to the temple.

I was frightened of this eulogy by the principal. I thought he was plotting something nasty, and I looked away while he spoke, as though I didn't understand the language he was speaking.

The principal said, biting hard at each word, “He fears a great punishment in this life and the next. And he is right to fear.”

The writer said, “What do you mean?” He had a bad stammer.

The principal said, “Aren't we all every day both paying for past sins and storing up punishment for the future? Isn't that the trap of every man? It is the only explanation I have for my own misfortunes.”

I ignored the rebuke in his voice. I didn't turn back to face him.

The writer and his friend came again the next day, without the principal. The writer said, “I know about your vow of silence. But will you write down some answers to some questions I have?” I didn't nod or make any gesture of assent, but he asked his friend for a pad and he wrote on it in pencil, “Are you happy?” The question mattered to me, and I took the pad and pencil and wrote, with perfect seriousness, “Within my silence I feel quite free. That is happiness.”

There were a few more questions like that. Quite easy stuff, really, once I had got into it. The answers came to me without any trouble. I rather enjoyed it. I could see that the writer was pleased. He said to his friend, speaking quite loudly, as though because I wasn't speaking I was also deaf, “I feel this is a little bit like Alexander and the brahmin. Do you know that story?” Mr. Haxton said with irritation, “I don't know the story.” He was red-eyed and grumpy that morning. It might have been because of the heat. It was very bright, and the bleached stone of the temple courtyard gave off a lot of heat. The writer said with an easy malice, and without a stammer, “No matter.” Then he turned to me and we did a little more writing.

At the end of this meeting I felt I had passed an examination. I knew that word of this business would spread, and that because of the regard of the great writer, the principal and all the other officials of the state wouldn't be able to do me any harm. So it turned out. In fact, they had to start being proud of me while the writer was around. Like the poor school principal himself, they all had to start boasting about me a little bit.

In time the writer wrote his book. Then other foreign people came. And that was how, as I said earlier, even while the great independence struggle was going on outside, I began to acquire something like a reputation—modest, but nonetheless quite real—in certain quite influential intellectual or spiritual circles abroad.

There was no escaping the role now. In the beginning I felt I had trapped myself. But very soon I found that the role fitted. I became easier and easier with it, and I understood one day that, through a series of accidents, tossed as in a dream from one unlikely situation to another, acting always on the spur of the moment, wishing only to reject the servility of our life, with no clear view of what was to follow, I had fallen into ancestral ways. I was astonished and awed. I felt that some higher power had taken a hand and I had been shown the true path.

My father and the school principal thought otherwise. To them—in spite of all the praising things the principal had to say for official reasons—I was irredeemably tarnished, a fallen man of caste, and my path a mockery of sacred ways. But I let them be. They and their grief were far from me.

The time now came for me to regularise my life. I couldn't keep on living at the temple. I had in some way to set up on my own, and straighten out my life with the girl. I couldn't get away from her any more than I could give up my role. To abandon her would have been to compound the dishonour; and there was always the firebrand to reckon with. I couldn't simply say sorry to everybody and go back to what I had been.

All this while she had been living at the image-maker's, in her little lodging behind the storeroom with the finished deities and the white marble dummies of important local people. Every day our association, quite famous in our town now, seemed more settled, and I grew every day more ashamed of her. I was as ashamed of her as much as my father and mother and the principal, and people of our sort generally, were ashamed of me. This shame was always with me, the little unhappiness always at the back of my mind, like an incurable illness, corrupting all my moments, all my little triumphs (another reference in a book, another magazine article, another titled visitor). I began—though it might seem strange to say so—to take refuge in my melancholy. I courted it, and lost myself in it. Melancholy became so much part of my character that for long periods I could forget the cause.

So at last I became a man with an establishment of my own. There was one little blessing. It was assumed that I was married to the girl. So there was no ceremony. I don't think I could have gone through with that. My heart would not have taken the sacrilege. Privately, in the recesses of my heart, I took a vow of sexual abstinence, a vow of brahmacharya. Like the mahatma. Unlike him, I failed. I was full of shame. And I was very swiftly punished. I soon afterwards had to recognise that the girl was pregnant. That pregnancy, that distending of her stomach, that alteration of her already unattractive body, tormented me, made me pray that what I was witnessing wasn't there.

All my anxiety, when little Willie was born, was to see how much of the backward could be read in his features. Anyone seeing me bend over the infant would have thought I was looking at the little creature with pride. In fact, my thoughts were all inward, and my heart was sinking.

A little later, as he started to grow up, I would look at him without saying anything and feel myself close to tears. I would think, “Little Willie, little Willie, what have I done to you? Why have I forced this taint on you?” And then I would think, “But that is nonsense. He is not you or yours. His face makes that plain. You have forced no taint on him. Whatever you gave him has disappeared in his wider inheritance.” But some little hope for him always stayed with me. I would, for instance, see someone of our kind and think, “But he looks like Willie. He is the image of little Willie.” And with this hope beating in my heart I would go and look at him, and at the first glimpse I would know I had fooled myself again.

All this was a private drama. It was absorbed into my melancholy. I opened myself to no one about it. I wonder what Willie's mother would have said if she knew. With the birth of her son she came into a kind of horrible flowering. She seemed to forget the nature of my calling. She became house-proud. She took lessons in flower arrangement from the wife of an English officer—independence had not yet come: we still had a British garrison in the town—and she took lessons in cooking and housecraft from a Parsi lady. She tried to entertain my guests. I was mortified. I remember one dreadful occasion. She had set or laid out the table in her new way. On the side plate of each guest she had placed a towel. I didn't think it was right. I had never read about towels on a dining table or seen them in any of the foreign films I had gone to. She insisted. She used the word “serviette” or something like that. She was no longer on the defensive these days, and soon she was saying foolish things about my ancestors, who knew nothing about modern housecraft. Nothing was resolved when the first guest came (a Frenchman who was doing a book about Romain Rolland, whom we all adored in India, because he was said to be an admirer of the mahatma), and I had to retreat into my melancholy, and go through the whole evening with those towels on the table.

This was the nature of my life. My utter wretchedness, my self-disgust, can be imagined when, with everything I have spoken about, and in spite of my private vow of brahmacharya, which represented the profoundest part of my nature, Willie's mother became pregnant for the second time. This time it was a girl, and this time there was no room for any kind of self-delusion. The girl was the image of her mother. It was like divine punishment. I called her Sarojini, after the woman poet of the independence movement, in the hope that a similar kind of blessing might fall on her, because the poet Sarojini, great patriot though she was, and much admired for that, was also remarkably ill-favoured.

*

THIS WAS THE STORY that Willie Chandran's father told. It took about ten years. Different things had to be said at different times. Willie Chandran grew up during the telling of this story.

His father said, “You asked me many years ago, before I began the story, whether I really admired the writer after whom you are named. I said I wasn't sure, that you would have to make up your own mind. Now that you've heard what I had to say, what do you think?”

Willie Chandran said, “I despise you.”

“That is your mother talking.”

Willie Chandran said, “What is there for me in what you have said? You offer me nothing.”

His father said, “It has been a life of sacrifice. I have no riches to offer you. All I have are my friendships. That is my treasure.”

“What about poor Sarojini?”

“I will speak to you frankly. I feel she was sent to try us. I can tell you nothing about her appearance that you don't already know. Her prospects in this country are not bright. But foreigners have their own ideas of beauty and certain other things, and all I can hope for Sarojini is an international marriage.”