meant but—together with the revolutionary teaching of my mother's uncle—it tainted the man and his riches for me. The merchant must have reached some crisis in his life; and, as a devout man, he had come to my father for advice and comfort. After the usual salutations and small talk, the merchant said, “Master, I find myself in a difficult situation.” The merchant paused; my father waited. The merchant said, “Master, I am like King Dasaratha.” Dasaratha was a sacred name; he was the ruler of the ancient kingdom of Kosala, and the father of the hero-divinity Rama. The merchant smiled, pleased at what he had said, pleased at easing himself with piety into his story; but my father was not pleased at all. He said in his severe way, “How are you like King Dasaratha?” The merchant should have been warned by my father's tone, but he continued to smile, and said, “Perhaps I am not quite like Dasaratha. He had three wives. I have two. And that, Master, is at the root of my troubles—” He was not allowed to say any more. My father said, “How dare you compare yourself to gods? Dasaratha was a man of honour. His reign was of unparalleled righteousness. His later life was a life of sacrifice. How dare you compare yourself and your squalid bazaar lusts with such a man? If I were not a man of peace I would have you whipped out of my ashram.” The episode added to my father's reputation, and when, as now happened, we children found out about the shamelessness of the merchant's life, we were as appalled as my father. To have two wives and two families was to violate nature. To duplicate arrangements and affections was to be perpetually false. It was to dishonour everyone; it was to leave everyone standing in quicksand.
That was how it had looked to me when I was ten. Yet now every day I faced Ana without shame, and whenever I saw Luis, Graça's husband, I dealt with him with a friendship that was quite genuine, since it was offered out of gratitude for Graça's love.
I soon discovered that he was a drinking man, that the impression he had given at our first meeting of being a violent man who was holding himself in check had to do with his affliction. He drank right through the day, Graça told me, as though he had always to top up the energy that kept him going. He drank in small, undetectable quantities, a quick shot or two of rum or whisky, never more; and he never looked drunk or out of control. In fact, in company his drinking style made him seem almost abstemious. All Graça's married life had been dictated by this drinking of her husband's. They had moved from town to town, house to house, job to job.
She blamed the nuns for her marriage. At a certain stage in the convent school they had begun to talk to her about becoming a nun. They did that with girls who were poor; and Graça's family was poor. Her mother was a mixed-race person of no fortune; her father was second-rank Portuguese, born in the colony, who did a small job in the civil service. A religious charity had paid to send Graça to the convent, and it seemed to Graça that the nuns were now looking for some return. She was shy with them; she had always been an obedient child, at home and at school. She didn't say no; she didn't want to appear ungrateful. For months they tried to break her down. They praised her. They said, “Graça, you are not a common person. You have special qualities. We need people like you to help lift the order up.” They frightened her, and when she went home for the holidays she was unhappier than she had ever been.
Her family had a small plot of land, perhaps two acres, with fruit trees and flowers and chickens and animals. Graça loved all of these things. They were things she had known since childhood. She loved seeing the hens sitting patiently on their eggs, seeing the fluffy little yellow chicks hatching out, cheeping, all of the brood being able to find shelter below the spread-out wings of the fierce, clucking mother hen, following the mother hen everywhere, and gradually, over a few weeks, growing up, each with its own colour and character. She loved having her cats follow her about