Half a Life, Page 3

  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 w
e'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.”