My job was in the central office. It was a pretty building in white marble and it had a high dome. It was full of rooms. I worked with twenty others in a big, high room. It was full of papers on desks and on deep shelves like those in the left-luggage rooms in railway stations. The papers were in cardboard folders tied with string; sometimes they were in bundles wrapped in cloth. The folders in the top shelves, many years old, were dingy with dust and cigarette smoke. The ceiling was brown with this smoke. The room was nicotine-brown at the top, dark-mahogany lower down, on the doors, desks and floor.
I grieved for myself. This kind of servile labour had formed no part of my vision of the life of sacrifice. But now I was glad to have it. I needed the money, paltry though it was. I was deep in debt. I had used my father's name and position in the palace and taken money from various moneylenders to support the girl in the room at the image-maker's.
She had made the place presentable. That had cost money; and then there had been the kitchen paraphernalia, and her clothes. So I had been having all the expenses of a married man, and living like an ascetic in my father's Grade C house.
The girl never believed I didn't have the money. She believed that people of my background had secret funds. It was part of the propaganda outside against our caste, and I endured what was said without comment. Whenever I took her another little piece of money from a moneylender she didn't look surprised. She might say, with irony (or sarcasm: I don't know what our professor would have said), “You look very sad. But your caste always look sad when they give.” She sometimes had the style of her uncle, the firebrand of the backwards.
I was full of grief. But she was happy about the new job.
She said, “I must say it would be nice to get some regular money for a change.”
I said, “I don't know how long I can last in that job.”
She said, “I've put up with a lot of hardship already. I don't intend to put up with much more. I could have been a BA. If you hadn't taken me away from the university I would have done the exam. My family went to a lot of trouble to send me to the university.”
I could have wept with rage.
Not so much at what she was saying, but at the idea of the prison-house in which I now had to live. Day after day I left my father's house and went to work. I felt like a child again. There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.” That was the way I felt about going to work in the Land Tax department, and the thought of going to work in a place like that every day every year until I died frightened me.
One day in the office the supervisor came and said, “You are being transferred to the audit section.”
In that section we had to look out for corruption among the tax-collectors and surveyors. Officers would take the land tax from poor people who couldn't read, and not give receipts, and the poor peasant with his three or four acres would have to pay the tax again. Or he would have to pay a bribe to get his receipt. It was endless, the petty cheating that went on among the poor. The officers were not much richer than the peasants. Who was suffering when the tax was not paid? The more I looked at these dirty pieces of paper the more I found myself on the side of the cheats. I began to destroy or throw away those damning little pieces of paper. I became a kind of saboteur, and it gave me great pleasure to think that in this office, without making any big statement, I was conducting my own kind of civil