“Darya would have been here to greet you,” his father replied, “except he has gone and got himself arrested. He is in jail.”
“In jail!” Ted exclaimed.
“Darya has committed himself to that fellow Gandhi.” His father’s voice was calm, but Ted knew his elder well enough to see the signs of concern, if not of agitation in his look, in his lips pressed together in his heard.
“But jail!” Ted remonstrated.
“Darya wanted to go to jail. I cannot understand what is going on in India nowadays. There is a perfect madness to get into prison, a passion for martyrdom, a perversity of patriotism. The Viceroy is deeply troubled, because he believes firmly in India’s right to eventual independence. It is simply a matter of when the people can be made ready. But Darya has become almost as fanatical as Gandhi himself. He even protested the Durbar.”
“I never thought Uncle Darya a fanatic,” Ted said. “He was a little sad — or so I remember him.”
“He became a different man after he lost his family. I have had you but he has no one nearer than his brothers and their children. He is a very personal sort of man, as Indians are, affectionate and so on. It was difficult for him to adjust. An ordinary Indian would simply have married again, but Darya seems really to have loved his wife. Did you know her name was Leilamani? Your grandmother’s name was Leila.”
“I know. And so now what will happen?”
The servant was passing spinach cooked until it was grey, and peas black with pepper. He had forgotten about the execrable vegetables, cooked always as Indians ate them. But his father took them as habit and helped himself to both.
“Sooner or later Gandhi will have to be put down,” his father was saying with sudden vigor. “Government cannot tolerate this sort of thing. Nonviolence sounds mild enough, but it can cause the greatest annoyance and real disruption, the people lying on railroad tracks, for example, with complete disregard for their lives, and of course they can’t be ran over or the country would be in an uproar. I shan’t be surprised if we hear of riots in a day or two about the Prince himself.”
“Have you ever seen this man Gandhi?” Ted inquired.
“Only at a distance,” his father replied. “An insignificant ugly little man. I am surprised that Darya finds anything in him.”
“I’d rather like to talk with Gandhi,” Ted persisted.
“I advise you to stay away from him and all his works,” his father said rather stiffly.
They ate in silence for a few minutes. At some point, Ted was thinking, he would say to his father that now he was a man, young it was true, but his own master nevertheless, and he must decide for himself what he would do, whom he would see.
“At least you wouldn’t mind my going to visit Uncle Darya in prison?”
David hesitated. “I suppose not, though he won’t be there long. Government simply wants to make an example. The Viceroy has talked at length with me about the strategy.”
“Rather a pity that they had the Durbar at this moment, don’t you think? A sort of display of power?”
His father corrected him. “A display of strength, not power, and strength is essential.”
Now or never, Ted thought, and from the very beginning he must have courage to disagree with his father.
“I wonder, even so, if it is wise,” he said pleasantly. “The people here have such a profound recklessness of themselves. They have so little to lose, I suppose, a mud hut, two lengths of cotton cloth, a handful of pulse or wheat. They don’t mind death, it comes so soon anyway — twenty-seven years is the life span, isn’t it? And I suppose for most of them prison is a good deal better than everyday life for at least they get fed.”
“I agree that they have too little,” his father replied. “And it has been the whole purpose of my life to create better leadership for them, so that conditions can be improved. I think I am making the greatest possible contribution toward their independence in providing educated Indian leaders, Christian if possible. The sooner, then, can independence became a reality. England would welcome responsible Indian leaders but not a fanatic who insists upon wearing a dhoti and spends half his time spinning on a primitive wheel, so that the people won’t buy good English cloth.”
“I know too little to agree or disagree,” Ted said honestly. “But I shall go to see Uncle Darya.”
His father did not answer. The plates were removed and the servant brought on what Miss Parker, Ted remembered, used to call a shape. It was a trembling block of blancmange, surrounded by a circle of thick yellow custard. He helped himself to the accustomed dish and ate it without too much difficulty.
“Go to the villages,” Darya said.
The guard had allowed the tall red-haired young American a special favor. He need not talk with the prisoner through the barricade. Instead the wooden gate was unlocked and Ted had come into the bare room opening upon a grey dusty patch of ground. Here he had found Darya alone, writing at a table made of two boards supported on posts driven into the earthen floor. He had looked up startled and for a full second he did not recognize his visitor. Then he saw who it was and he sprang to his feet and threw his arms about him.
“Ted, my friend, my son—”
“Uncle Darya, I had to come as soon as I knew you were here.”
“Your father did not object?”
“No.”
So they had begun their talk. Ted sat down cross-legged on the earth, refusing the stool Darya tried to give him, and one question was enough, “Uncle Darya, how came you here?”
“You must know,” Darya began, and he took up the story of his life from the moment when he saw his little younger son die and after him the older son, and then Leilamani had died and the baby girl and at last Darya was left alone.
“I said I would become a sadhu,” Darya declared. His great eyes darkened, his mobile face grew tragic. “I divided my property between my brothers, I put on common clothes and sandals, I set forth by foot to travel everywhere through the villages, not begging as true sadhus must do, for I knew myself still richer than the people in the villages, and I fed myself and even gave to them when they starved. Oh Ted, if you would know India, go to the villages!”
Ted did not speak. Across his clasped knees he listened, watching the handsome weary face of his father’s friend.
“North and south I went,” Darya was saying, “east and west I traveled, alone and always on foot, and I slept at night with the peasants, I ate with them, I listened to their talk, staying sometimes for days and weeks in a single place until I knew the people as my own. I buried my sorrow in their sorrows, I forgot the death in my house because they died by the thousands and the hundreds of thousands. I saw my India, a wretched starving suffering people, living upon a rich soil never their own, oppressed by greedy landlords and driven by debt and taxation. The whole country moves to and fro with the restlessness of the misery of the people and I forgot all that I had ever been. I am become another man, a single flame burns here—”
He knotted his hands on his breast, “And then I found Gandhiji.”
His hands dropped. “Mind you, I am not a blind worshiper of this man. No, indeed, I can see him as he is, but still I will follow him because he is not working for himself. Ted, I tell you, renunciation is the test. If a man renounces all that he has for the sake of others, then that man can be trusted. Without renunciation, trust none.”