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.