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