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
