the trap of every man? It is the only explanation I have for my own misfortunes.”
I ignored the rebuke in his voice. I didn't turn back to face him.
The writer and his friend came again the next day, without the principal. The writer said, “I know about your vow of silence. But will you write down some answers to some questions I have?” I didn't nod or make any gesture of assent, but he asked his friend for a pad and he wrote on it in pencil, “Are you happy?” The question mattered to me, and I took the pad and pencil and wrote, with perfect seriousness, “Within my silence I feel quite free. That is happiness.”
There were a few more questions like that. Quite easy stuff, really, once I had got into it. The answers came to me without any trouble. I rather enjoyed it. I could see that the writer was pleased. He said to his friend, speaking quite loudly, as though because I wasn't speaking I was also deaf, “I feel this is a little bit like Alexander and the brahmin. Do you know that story?” Mr. Haxton said with irritation, “I don't know the story.” He was red-eyed and grumpy that morning. It might have been because of the heat. It was very bright, and the bleached stone of the temple courtyard gave off a lot of heat. The writer said with an easy malice, and without a stammer, “No matter.” Then he turned to me and we did a little more writing.
At the end of this meeting I felt I had passed an examination. I knew that word of this business would spread, and that because of the regard of the great writer, the principal and all the other officials of the state wouldn't be able to do me any harm. So it turned out. In fact, they had to start being proud of me while the writer was around. Like the poor school principal himself, they all had to start boasting about me a little bit.
In time the writer wrote his book. Then other foreign people came. And that was how, as I said earlier, even while the great independence struggle was going on outside, I began to acquire something like a reputation—modest, but nonetheless quite real—in certain quite influential intellectual or spiritual circles abroad.
There was no escaping the role now. In the beginning I felt I had trapped myself. But very soon I found that the role fitted. I became easier and easier with it, and I understood one day that, through a series of accidents, tossed as in a dream from one unlikely situation to another, acting always on the spur of the moment, wishing only to reject the servility of our life, with no clear view of what was to follow, I had fallen into ancestral ways. I was astonished and awed. I felt that some higher power had taken a hand and I had been shown the true path.
My father and the school principal thought otherwise. To them—in spite of all the praising things the principal had to say for official reasons—I was irredeemably tarnished, a fallen man of caste, and my path a mockery of sacred ways. But I let them be. They and their grief were far from me.
The time now came for me to regularise my life. I couldn't keep on living at the temple. I had in some way to set up on my own, and straighten out my life with the girl. I couldn't get away from her any more than I could give up my role. To abandon her would have been to compound the dishonour; and there was always the firebrand to reckon with. I couldn't simply say sorry to everybody and go back to what I had been.
All this while she had been living at the image-maker's, in her little lodging behind the storeroom with the finished deities and the white marble dummies of important local people. Every day our association, quite famous in our town now, seemed more settled, and I grew every day more ashamed of her. I was as ashamed of her as much as my father and mother and the principal, and people of our sort generally, were ashamed of me. This shame was always with me, the little unhappiness always at the back of my mind, like an incurable illness, corrupting all my moments, all my little triumphs (another reference in a book, another magazine article, another