Читать книгу Out of India - Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Страница 10
ОглавлениеLast week Rahul went on a hunger strike. He didn’t have to suffer long—his family got very frightened (he is the only son) and by the second day they were ready to do anything he wanted, even to let him marry me. So he had a big meal, and then he came to tell me of his achievement. He was so proud and happy that I too pretended to be happy. Now his father and Daddy are friends again, and they sit downstairs in the study and talk together about their university days in England. His mother too comes to the house, and yesterday his married sister Kamla paid me a visit. The last time I had met Kamla was when she told me all those things on their veranda, but neither of us seemed to have any recollection of that. Instead we had a very nice conversation about her husband’s promotion and the annual flower show for which she had been asked to organize a raffle. Mama walks around the house looking pleased with herself and humming snatches of the national anthem (out of tune—she is completely unmusical). No one ever mentions M. any more.
It is two years now since he went away. I don’t know where he is or what he is doing. Perhaps he is meditating somewhere in the Himalayas, or wandering by the banks of the Ganges with an orange robe and a begging bowl; or perhaps he is just living in another town, trying to start a newspaper or a school. Sometimes I ask myself: can there really have been such a man? But it is not a question to which I require any answer.
The first time I saw M., I was just going out to tennis with Rahul. I hardly glanced at him—he was just one of the people who came to see Daddy. But he returned many times, and I heard Daddy say: “That young man is a nuisance.” “Of course,” said Mama in a sarcastic way, “you can never say no to anyone.” Daddy looked shy: it was true, he found it difficult to refuse people. He is the Director of Education, and because it is an important position, people are always coming, both to the house and to his office, to ask him to do something for them. Mostly there is nothing he can do, but because he is so nice and polite to them, they keep coming again. Then often Mama steps in.
One day, just as I was going out to Rahul’s house, I heard her shouting outside the door of the study. “The Director is a busy man!” she was shouting. She had her back against the door and held her arms stretched out; M. stood in front of her, and his head was lowered. “Day after day you come and eat his life up!” she said.
I feel very embarrassed when I hear Mama shouting at people, so I went away quickly. But when I was walking down the road, he suddenly came behind me. He said, “Why are you walking so fast?”
I said nothing. I thought it was very rude of him to speak to me at all.
“You are running away,” he said.
Then in spite of myself I had to laugh: “From what?”
“From the Real,” he said, and he spoke so seriously that I was impressed and stood still in the middle of the road and looked at him.
He was not really young—not young like I am, or like Rahul. His hair was already going gray and he had lines around his eyes. But what eyes they were, how full of wisdom and experience! And he was looking at me with them. I can’t describe how I felt suddenly.
He said he wanted Daddy to open a new department in the university. A department for moral training. He explained the scheme to me and we both stood still in the road. His eyes glowed. I understood at once; of course, not everything—I am not a brilliant person such as he—but I understood it was important and even grand. Here were many new ideas, which made life seem quite different. I began to see that I had been living wrongly because I had been brought up to think wrongly. Everything I thought important, and Daddy and Mama and Rahul and everyone, was not important: these were the frivolities of life we were caught up in. For the first time someone was explaining to me the nature of reality. I promised to help him and to speak to Daddy. I was excited and couldn’t stop thinking of everything he had said and the way he had said it.
He often telephoned. I waited for his calls and was impatient and restless till they came. But I was also a little ashamed to talk to him because I could not tell him that I had succeeded. I spoke to Daddy many times. I said, “Education is no use without a firm moral basis.”
“How philosophical my little girl is getting,” Daddy said and smiled and was pleased that I was taking an interest in higher things.
Mama said, “Don’t talk so much; it’s not nice in a young girl.”
When M. telephoned I could only say, “I’m trying.”
“You are not trying!” he said; he spoke sternly to me. “You are thinking of your own pleasures only, of your tennis and games.”
He was right—I often played tennis, and now that my examinations were finished, I spent a lot of time at the Club and went to the cinema and read novels. When he spoke to me, I realized all that was wrong; so that every time he telephoned I was thoughtful for many hours afterward and when Rahul came to fetch me for tennis, I said I had a headache.
But I tried to explain to Rahul. He listened carefully; Rahul listens carefully to everything I say. He becomes very serious, and his eyes, which are already very large, become even larger. He looks so sweet then, just as he did when he was a little boy. I remember Rahul as a little boy, for we always played together. His father and Daddy were great friends, almost like brothers. So Rahul and I grew up together, and later it was decided we would be married. Everyone was happy: I also, and Rahul. We were to be married quite soon, for we had both finished our college and Rahul’s father had already got him a good job in a business firm, with very fine prospects.
“You see, Rahul, we live in nice houses and have nice clothes and good education and everything, and all the time we don’t know what reality is.”
Rahul frowned a bit, the way he used to do over his sums when they were difficult; but he nodded and looked at me with his big sweet eyes and was ready to listen to everything else I would tell him. Rahul has very smooth cheeks and they are a little bit pink because he is so healthy.
One day when M. telephoned he asked me to go and meet him. At first I tried to say no, but I knew I really wanted to go. He called me to a coffeehouse I had never been to before, and I felt shy when going in—there were many men and no girls at all. Everyone looked at me; some of them may have been students from the university and perhaps they knew me. It was noisy in there and full of smoke and smelled of fritters and chutney. The tablecloths were dirty and so were the bearers’ uniforms. But he was there, waiting for me. I had often tried to recall his face but I never could: now I saw it and—of course, of course, I cried to myself, that was how it was, how could I forget.
Then I began to meet him every day. Sometimes we met in that coffeehouse, at other times in a little park where there was a broken swing and an old tomb and clerks came to eat their lunch out of tiffin carriers. It was the end of winter and the sky was pale blue with little white lines on it and the sun was just beginning to get hot again and there were scarlet creepers all over the tomb and green parrots flew about. When I went home, I would lie on the bed in my room and think. Rahul came and I said I had a headache. I hardly knew anything anyone was saying. I ate very little. Mama often came into my room and asked, “Where did you go today?” She was very sweet and gentle, the way she always is when she wants to find out something from you. I would tell her anything that came into my head—an old college friend had come from Poona, we had been to the cinema together—“Which cinema?” Mama said, still sweet and gentle and tidying the handkerchiefs in my drawer. I would even tell her the story of the film I had not seen. “Tomorrow I’m meeting her again.” “No, tomorrow I want you to come with me to Meena auntie—”
It began to be difficult to get out of the house. Mama watched me every minute, and when she saw me ready to leave, she stood in the doorway: “Today you are coming with me.”
“I told you, I have to meet—”
“You are coming with me!”
We were both angry and shouted. Daddy came out of the study. He told Mama, “She is not a child. . . .”
Then Mama started to shout at him and I ran out of the house and did not look back, though I could hear her calling me.
When I told M., he said, “You had better come with me.” I also saw there was no other way. On Friday afternoons Mama goes to a committee meeting of the All-India Ladies’ Council, so that was the best time. I bundled up all my clothes and jewels in a sheet and I walked out of the house. Faqir Chand, our butler, saw me, but he said nothing—probably he thought I was sending my clothes to the washerman. M. was waiting for me in a tonga by the post office and he helped me climb up and sit beside him; the tonga was a very old and shaky one, and the driver was also old and so was the horse. We went very slowly, first by the river, past the Fort and through all the bazaars, he and I sitting side by side at the back of the tonga with my bundle between us.
We had such a strange wedding. I laugh even now when I think of it. He had a friend who was a sign painter and had a workshop on the other side of the river. The workshop was really only a shed, but they made it very nice—they turned all the signboards to the wall and they hung my saris over them and over the saris they hung flower garlands. It looked really artistic. They also bought sweetmeats and nuts and put them on a long table that they had borrowed from a carpenter. Several friends of his came and quite a lot of people who lived in sheds and huts nearby. There was a priest and a fire was lit and we sat in front of it and the priest chanted the holy verses. I was feeling very hot because of the fire and of course my face was completely covered by the sari. It wasn’t a proper wedding sari, but my own old red sari that I had last worn when Mama gave a tea party for the professors’ wives in our drawing room, with cakes from Wenger’s.
M. got very impatient, he kept telling the priest, “Now hurry hurry, we have heard all that before.”
The priest was offended and said, “These are all holy words.”
I couldn’t help laughing under my sari, even though I was crying at the same time because I was thinking of Daddy and Rahul and Mama.
There was a quarrel—his friends also told him to keep quiet and let the priest say his verses in the proper manner, and he got angry and shouted, “Is it my marriage or yours?”
At last it was finished and we were married and everyone ate sweetmeats and nuts, even people who just wandered in from the road and whom no one knew.
We stayed a few days with his friend. There was a little room built out of planks just off the workshop and in that we all slept at night, rolled up in blankets. In the day, when the friend painted signs, we stayed in the room by ourselves, M. and I, and no one came in to disturb us. When he slept, I would look at him and look; I studied all the lines on his face. After I had looked my fill, I would shut my eyes and try and see his face in my mind, and when I opened them again, there he was really, his real face, and I cried out loud with joy.
After some days we went on a bus to Niripat. The journey was four hours long and the bus was crowded with farmers and laborers and many old women carrying little bundles. There was a strong smell of poor people who can’t afford to change their clothes very often and of the food that the old women ate out of their bundles and the petrol from the bus. I began to feel a little sick. I often get carsick: when we used to drive up to Naini Tal for the summer holidays, Daddy always had to stop the car several times so that I could go out and take fresh air; and Mama would give me lemon drops to suck and rub my temples with eau de cologne.
In Niripat we stayed with M.’s cousin, who had a little brick house just outside the town. They were a big family, and the women lived in one side of the house, in a little set of dark rooms with only metal trunks and beds in them, and the men on the other side. But I ran all over the house; I was singing and laughing all the time. In the evenings I sat with the men and listened to them talking about religion and philosophy and their business (they had a grinding mill); and during the day I helped the women with their household work. M. and I went out for walks and sometimes we went swimming in a pond. The women of the house teased me a lot because I liked M. so much. “But look at him,” they said, “he is so dark; and see! his hair is going gray like an old man’s.” Or, “He is just a loafer—it is only talking with him and never any work.” I pretended to be annoyed with them (of course, I knew they were only joking) and that made them laugh more than ever. One of them said, “Now it is very fine, but just wait, in the end her state will be the same as Savitri’s.”
“Savitri?” I said.
So that was how I first heard about Savitri and the children. At first I was unhappy, but M. explained everything. He had been married very young and to a simple girl from a village. After some years he left her. She understood it was necessary for him to leave her because he had a task to fulfill in the world in which she could not help him. She went back to her parents, with the children. She was happy now, because she saw it was her duty to stay at home and look after the children and lead the good, simple, self-sacrificing life of a mother. He talked of her with affection: she was patient and good. I too learned to love her. I thought of her in the village, with the children, quietly doing her household tasks; early in the mornings and in the evenings she said her prayers. So her life passed. He had gone to see her a few times and she had welcomed him and been glad; but when he went away again, she never tried to keep him. I thought how it would be if he went away from me, but I could not even bear the idea. My heart hurt terribly and I stifled a cry. From that I saw how much nobler and more advanced Savitri was than I; and I hoped that, if the time ever came, I too could be strong like her. But not yet. Not yet. We sold my pearl brooch and sent money to her; he always sent money to her when he had it. Once he said of her: “She is a candle burning in a window of the world,” and that was how I always thought of her—as a candle burning for him with a humble flame.
I had not yet written to Daddy and Mama, but I wrote to Rahul. I wrote, “Everything is for the best, Rahul. I often think about you. Please tell everyone that I am all right and happy.” M. and I went to the post office together to buy a stamp and post the letter. On the way back he said, “You must write to your father also. He must listen to our ideas.” How proud I was when he said our ideas.
Daddy and Mama came to Niripat. Daddy sent me a letter in which it said they were waiting for me at the Victoria Hotel. M. took me there, and then went away; he said I must talk to them and explain everything. The Victoria Hotel is the only hotel in Niripat and it is not very grand—it is certainly not the sort of hotel in which Mama is used to staying. In front there is the Victoria Restaurant, where meals can be had at a reduced rate on a monthly basis; there is an open passage at the side that leads to the hotel rooms. Some of the guests had pulled their beds out into the passage and were sitting on them: I noticed a very fat man in a dhoti and an undervest saying his prayers. But Daddy and Mama were inside their room.
It was a very small room with two big beds in it and a table with a blue cotton tablecloth in the middle. Mama was lying on one of the beds; she was crying, and when I came in, she cried more. Daddy and I embraced each other, but Mama turned her face away and pressed her eyes with her handkerchief and the tears rolled right down into her blouse. It made me impatient to see her like that: every mother must part with her daughter sometime, so what was there to cry about? I squeezed Daddy’s hands, to show him how happy I was, but then he too turned his face away from me and he coughed. Here we were meeting after so many days, and they were both behaving in a ridiculous manner. I spoke to them quite sharply: “Every individual being must choose his own life and I have chosen mine.”
“Don’t, darling,” Daddy said as if something were hurting him.
Mama suddenly shouted, “You are my shame and disgrace!”
“Quietly, quietly,” Daddy said.
I felt like shouting back at her, but I controlled myself; I had not come there to quarrel with her, even if she had come to quarrel with me. I was a wiser person now than I had been. So I only said: “There are aspects of life which you will never grasp.”
A little servant boy came in with tea on a tray. Mama sat up on the bed—she is always very keen on her tea—but after a while she sank back again and said in a fainting sort of voice, “There is something dirty in the milk.” I had a look and there were only bits of straw, from the cowshed, which I fished out easily with a teaspoon.
Daddy gave a big sigh and said, “You had better let me speak with the young man.”
So then I was happy again: I knew that when Daddy really spoke to him and got to know him, he would soon realize what sort of a person M. was and everything would be all right.
And everything was all right. It was true, Daddy couldn’t start the department of moral training for him, as we had hoped, because the university didn’t have enough funds for a new department; and also, Daddy said, he couldn’t get him an academic post because M. didn’t have the necessary qualifications. (How stupid are these rules and regulations! Here was a wonderful gifted person like M., with great ideas and wide experience of life, who had so much to pass on; yet he had to take a backward place to some poor little M.A. or Ph.D. who knows nothing of life at all except what he has read in other people’s books.) So all Daddy could do was get him a post as secretary to one of the college principals; and I think it was very nice of M. to accept it, because it was not the sort of post a person such as he had a right to expect. But he was always like that: he knew nothing of petty pride and never stood on his dignity, unlike many other people who have really no dignity at all to stand on.
I was sorry to leave Niripat, where I had been so happy with everyone, and to go home again. But of course it was different now, because M. was with me. We had the big guest room at the back of the house and at night we made our beds out on the lawn. Sometimes I thought how funny it was—only a few weeks ago Mama had tried to turn him out of the house and here he was back in the best guest room. It is true that the wheel of fate has many unexpected revolutions. I think he quite liked living in the house, though I was afraid at first he would feel stifled with so many servants and all that furniture and carpets and clocks and Mama’s china dinner-services. But he was too great in soul to be bothered by these trivial things; he transcended them and led his life and thought his thoughts in the same way as he would have done if he had been living in some little hut in the jungle.
If only Mama had had a different character. But she is too sunk in her own social station and habits to be able to look out and appreciate anything higher. She thinks if a person has not been abroad and doesn’t wear suits and open doors for ladies, he is an inferior type of person. If M. had tried, I know he could have used a knife and fork quite as well as Mama or anyone, but why should he have tried? And there were other things like not making a noise when you drink your tea, which are just trivial little conventions we should all rise above. I often tried to explain this to Mama but I could never make her understand. So it became often quite embarrassing at meal times, with Mama looking at M. and pretending she couldn’t eat her own food on account of the way he was eating his. M. of course never noticed, and I felt so ashamed of Mama that in the end I also refused to use any cutlery and ate with my hands. Daddy never said anything—in fact, Daddy said very little at all nowadays, and spent long hours in his office and went to a lot of meetings and, when he came home, he only sat in his study and did not come out to talk to us.
I often thought about Rahul. He had never answered my letter and when I tried to telephone, they said he was not at home. But I wanted very much to see him; there were so many things I had to tell him about. So one day I went to his house. The servants made me wait on the veranda and then Rahul’s married sister Kamla came out. Kamla is a very ambitious person and she is always scheming for her husband’s promotion (he is in the Ministry of Defense) so that she can take precedence over the other wives in his department. I was not surprised at the way she talked to me. I know a person like Kamla will always think only petty thoughts and doesn’t understand that there is anything transcending the everyday life in which she is sunk up to her ears. So I let her say what she wanted and when she told me to go away, I went. When Mama found out that I had been to Rahul’s house, she was furious. “All right, so you have lost all pride for yourself, but for your family—at least think of us!” At the word pride I laughed out loud: Mama’s ideas of pride were so different from mine and M.’s. But I was sorry that they wouldn’t let me see Rahul.
M. went out every day, and I thought he went to his job in the university. But one day Daddy called me into his study and he said that M. had lost his job because he hadn’t been going there for weeks. I had a little shock at first, but then I thought it is all right, whatever he wants to do is all right; and anyway, it hadn’t been a suitable post for him in the first place. I told Daddy so.
Daddy played with his silver paper-knife and he didn’t look at me at all; then he said, “You know he has been married before?” and still he didn’t look at me.
I don’t know how Daddy found out—I suppose he must have been making inquiries, it is the sort of thing people in our station of life always do about other people, we are so mistrustful—but I answered him quite calmly. I tried to explain to him about Savitri.
After a while Daddy said, “I only wanted you to know that your marriage is not legal and can be dissolved any time you want.”
Then I told him that marriages are not made in the sight of the law but in the sight of God, and that in the sight of God both Savitri and I were married to M., she there and I here. Daddy turned his head away and looked out of the window.
M. told me that he wanted to start a school and that he could do so if Daddy got him a grant from the Ministry. I thought it was a very exciting idea and we talked a lot about it that night, as we lay together on our beds. He had many wonderful ideas about how a school should be run and said that the children should be taught to follow only their instincts, which would lead them to the highest Good. He talked so beautifully, like a prophet, a saint. I could hardly sleep all night, and first thing in the morning I talked to Daddy. Unfortunately Mama was listening at the door—she has a bad habit of doing that—and suddenly she came bursting in. “Why don’t you leave your father alone?” she cried. “Isn’t it enough that we give you both food and shelter?”
I said, “Mama please, I’m talking important business with Daddy.”
She began to say all sorts of things about M. and why he had married me. Daddy tried to keep her quiet but she was beyond herself by that time, so I just covered my ears with my hands and ran out. She came after me, still shouting these horrible things.
There in the hall was M., and when I tried to run past him, he stopped me and took my hands from my ears and made me listen to everything Mama was saying. She got more and more furious, and then she went into one of her hysterical fits, in which she throws herself down and beats her head on the floor and tears at her clothes. Daddy tried to lift her up, but of course she is too heavy for him. She went on screaming and shouting at M.
M. said, “Go and get your things,” so I went and wrapped everything up in the sheet again, his things and mine, and he slung the bundle over his shoulder and went out of the house, with me walking behind him.
I hoped we would go back to Niripat, but he wanted to stay in the city because he had several schemes in mind—there was the school, and he also had hopes of starting a newspaper in which he could print all his ideas. So he had to go around and see a lot of people, in ministries and so on. Sometimes he got quite discouraged because it was so difficult to make people understand. Then he looked tired and the lines on his face became very deep and I felt such love and pity for him. But he had great inner strength, and next day he always started on his rounds again, as fresh and hopeful as before.
We had no proper home at that time, but lived in several places. There was the sign painter, and another friend had a bookshop in one of the government markets with a little room at the back where we could stay with him; and once we found a model house that was left over from a low-cost housing exhibition, and we lived in that till workmen came to tear it down. There were plenty of places where we could stay for a few days or even weeks. In the evenings there were always many friends and all sat and discussed their ideas, and some of them recited poetry or played the flute, so that sometimes we didn’t go to sleep at all. We never had any worries about money—M. said if one doesn’t think about money, one doesn’t need it, and how true that is. Daddy sent me a check every month, care of the friend who kept the bookshop, and we still had some of my jewelry, which we could sell whenever we wanted; so there was even money to send to Savitri and the children.
Once I met Rahul, quite by chance. That was at the time when we had just moved out of the exhibition house. M. had to go to one of the ministries to see an under-secretary, and I was taking our bundle to an orphanage, run by a friend of M.’s, where we were going to stay. I was waiting for a bus, holding the bundle; it wasn’t heavy at all anymore, so there was no need to take a tonga. Rahul came out of a music shop with some records that he had just bought (he is very fond of dance records—how often we have danced together to his gramophone!). I called to him and when he didn’t hear me, I went up to him. He lowered his eyes and wouldn’t look at me and hardly greeted me.
“Rahul,” I said in the stern voice I always use with him when I think he is misbehaving.
“Why did you do it?” he said. “My family are very angry with you and I’m also angry.” He sulked, but he looked so sweet; he still had his pink cheeks.
“If you have your car, you can give me a lift,” I said. Rahul is always a gentleman, and he even carried my bundle for me to his car.
It took us a long time to find the orphanage—it was right at the back of the Fatehpuri mosque somewhere—so there was plenty of time for me to talk to him. He listened quite quietly, driving the car through all that traffic. When at last we found the orphanage and I was ready to get out, he said, “Don’t go yet.” I stayed with him for a while, even though the car was parked very awkwardly in that crowded alleyway, and men with barrows swore at us because they could not get past.
Soon afterward a friend of M.’s who was in the railways got transferred, and as he lived in a house with a very low rent, it was a good opportunity for us and we took it over from him. There were two rooms and a little yard at the back, and upstairs two families were living. Daddy would send a check for the rent. I cooked for us and cleaned the house and talked with the families upstairs, while M. went out to see people about his ideas. But after a time he began to go out less and less, and he became depressed; he said the world had rejected him because he was not strong enough yet. Now it was his task to purify himself and make himself stronger. He stayed at home and meditated. A strange change came over him. Most of the time he sat in one of our rooms, in a corner of the floor by himself, and he wouldn’t let me come in. Sometimes I heard him singing to himself and shouting—he made such strange noises, almost like an animal. For days he ate nothing at all and, when I tried to coax him, he upset the food I had brought and threw it on the floor. I tried to be patient and bear and understand everything.
His friends stopped coming and he hardly ever left that little room for two months. Then he started going out by himself—I never knew where and could not ask him. He had an expression on his face as if he were listening for something, so that one felt one couldn’t disturb him. When he talked to me, he talked as if he were someone else and I were someone else. At night I slept in the yard at the back with the families from upstairs, who were always kind to me.
Then visitors began to come for him—not his old friends, but quite new people whom I had never seen before. They sat with him in the little room and I could hear him talking to them. At first only a few men used to come, but then more and more came, and women too. I also sat in the room sometimes and listened to him talk; he told strange stories about parrots and princes and tigers in the jungle, all of which had some deep meaning. When the people understood the deep meaning, they all exclaimed with pleasure and said God was speaking through his mouth.
Now they began to bring us gifts of food and money and clothes and even jewelry. M. never took any notice, and I just piled the things in the other room, which was soon very crowded. We ate the food and I also gave it to the families upstairs, but there was still plenty left over, and at night someone used to come from the beggars’ home to take it away. I sent a lot of money to Savitri. The house was always full of people now, and they spilled over into the yard and out into the street. More and more women came—most of them were old but there were some young ones too, and the young ones were even more fervent and religious than the old ones. There was one plump and pretty young widow, who was always dressed very nicely and came every day. She said she was going mad with love of God and needed words of solace and comfort from M. She touched his feet and implored him to relieve her, and when he took no notice of her, she shook him and tugged at his clothes, so that he became quite angry.
Mama often came to see me. In the beginning she was very disgusted with the house and the way we lived and everything, but afterward, when she saw how many people came and all the things they brought and how they respected M., she kept quiet on that subject. Now she only said, “Who knows what is to become of it all?” Mama is not really a religious person, but she has a lot of superstitions. When holy men come begging to her house, she always gives them something—not because of their holiness, but because she is afraid they will curse her and bring the evil eye on us all. She no longer said anything bad about M., and when she talked about him, she didn’t say, “that one” as she used to, but always “He.” Once or twice she went and sat with the other people in the little room in which he was, and when she came out, she looked so grave and thoughtful that I had to laugh.
Rahul also visited me. At first he was stiff and sulky, as if he were doing me a favor by coming; but then he began to talk, all about how lonely he was and how his family were trying to persuade him to marry girls he didn’t like. I felt sorry for him—I knew it is always difficult for him to make friends and he has never really had anyone except me. I let him talk, and he kept coming again and again. There was a little space with a roof of asbestos sheet over it in the yard where I did my cooking, and it was here that Rahul and I sat. It was not a very private place because of all the people in the yard, waiting to see M., but Rahul soon got used to it and talked just as he would have done if we had been sitting in Mama’s drawing room. He was very melancholy, and when he had finished telling me about how lonely he was, he only sat and looked at me with big sad eyes. So I let him help me with the cooking—at first he only sifted the rice and lentils, but after a time I let him do some real cooking and he enjoyed it terribly. He would make all sorts of things—fritters and potato cakes and horseradish pancakes—and they were really delicious. We ate some ourselves and the rest we sent to the beggars’ home.
There were always a few young men who stayed at night and slept outside the door of the room where M. was. I often heard him get up in the night and walk up and down; and sometimes he shouted at the young men sleeping outside his door, “Go home!” and he kicked them with his foot, he was so impatient and angry with them. He was often angry nowadays. I heard him shouting at people and scolding them for coming to pester him. When he scolded them, they said he was right to do so, because they were bad, sinful people; but they did not go away and, on the contrary, even more came.
One night I felt someone shaking me to wake up. I opened my eyes and it was M. I jumped up at once and we went out into the street together and sat on a doorstep. Here and there people were sleeping on the sidewalk or on the platforms of shuttered shops. It was very dark and quiet. Only sometimes someone coughed in his sleep or there was a watchman’s cry and the tap of his stick. M. said, “Soon I shall have to go away.”
Then I knew that the time I had always feared was near.
He said, “It will be best for you to go home again.” He spoke very practically, and with gentleness and great concern for me.
But I didn’t want to think about what I was going to do. For the moment I wanted it to be only now—always night and people always sleeping and he and I sitting together like this on the doorstep for ever and ever.
The plump young widow still came every day and every day in a different sari, and she made such scenes that in the end M. forbade her to come any more. So she hung about outside in the yard for a few days, and then she started peeping into his room and after that she crept in behind the others and sat quietly at the back; till finally she showed herself to him quite openly and even began to make scenes again. “Have pity!” she cried. “God is eating me up!” At last he quite lost his temper with her. He took off his slipper and began to beat her with it and when she ran away, screaming and clutching her sari about her, he ran after her, brandishing his slipper. They were a funny sight. He pursued her right out into the street, and then he turned back and began to chase all the other people out of the house. He scattered them right and left, beating at them with his slipper, and cursing and scolding. Everyone ran away very fast—even Rahul, who had been cooking potato cakes, made off in a great fright. When they had all gone, M. returned to his room and locked the door behind him. He looked hot and angry.
And next day he was gone. People came as usual that day but when they realized he was no longer there, they went away again and also took their gifts back with them. That night the men from the beggars’ home were disappointed. I stayed on by myself, it didn’t matter to me where I was. Sometimes I sat in one of the rooms, sometimes I walked up and down. The families from upstairs tried to make me eat and sleep, but I heard nothing of what they said. I don’t remember much about that time. Later Daddy came to take me away. For the last time I tied my things up in a sheet and I went with him.
I think sometimes of Savitri, and I wonder whether I too am like her now—a candle burning for him in a window of the world. I am patient and inwardly calm and lead the life that has been appointed for me. I play tennis again and I go out to tea and garden parties with Mama, and Rahul and I often dance to the gramophone. Probably I shall marry Rahul quite soon. I laugh and talk just as much as I used to and Mama says I am too frivolous, but Daddy smiles and encourages me. Mama has had a lot of new pieces of jewelry made for me to replace the ones I sold; she and I keep on quarreling as before.
I still try and see his face in my mind, and I never succeed. But I know—and that is how I can go on living the way I do, and even enjoy my life and be glad—that one day I shall succeed and I shall see that face as it really is. But whose face it is I shall see in that hour of happiness—and indeed, whose face it is I look for with such longing—is not quite clear to me.
