‘Did you learn any Bengali?’ Dominic asked with interest.
She looked up at him quickly. Her eyes were really an extraordinary colour, pale yet very bright, like a slightly troubled sea over sunlit sand. ‘Some. I can get by, but I couldn’t conduct a real conversation. Oh, it’s been fine in its way, I’m not complaining. Only I came here thinking this was where the low living and high thinking was, and the way to understanding, and India was going to show me what was wrong with all the rest of us. And what do you know? – here they are, almost the most quarrelsome race I’ve ever struck, almost the most corrupt, and all the high thinking is just talk, talk, talk, and the government is as mixed-up and inhibited and old and tired as any of ours, and I can’t see any end to it – or even any beginning of getting out of the mess. But maybe it’s me,’ she said disarmingly, and smiled up suddenly at Priya, and at Lakshman. ‘Don’t get me wrong! The best here are the best – the best you’re going to find anywhere on earth. But as for the system – did we really ever expect so much of it?’ She tilted her head, looking from Larry to Dominic, for plainly they were in this, too. ‘I’m on my finishing leave now, I get two months paid, and I’m still travelling hopefully. But where to, God knows! How have you managed?’
Dominic waited for Larry to speak, and he didn’t; for some reason Patti had shaken him, and his brooding face was the only thing about him that was going to be eloquent just yet. So Dominic filled the gap.
‘I was lucky. Every time I hear anyone else talk about India I realise it. I got pitched in here on a special job, without any time to have preconceived ideas, and everything about the job came unstuck, and I was left living off the country. When there’s a real crisis you find out who amounts to anything, and who doesn’t. That’s when I met the man I’m working for now – the Swami Premanathanand. You couldn’t very well be any luckier than that, whatever the hole you’re in. No, India didn’t let me down. That’s why I came back. But to work, not to meditate.’ He was aware that that might sound a trifle superior, but that was something he couldn’t help. ‘That’s the way it hit me, and I got hooked accordingly. And I’ve said I was lucky.’
‘But where are they going?’ persisted Patti fretfully. ‘I can’t see any future.’
‘I haven’t looked, I’ve been too busy with the present.’
‘But what do you actually do, then?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘I work for the Swami’s foundation, the Native Indian Agricultural Mission, on one of their farms near Tiruvallur. Doing anything – driving, messenger-boy, vet’s assistant, whatever’s needed. But mostly I seem to have become the district tractor-mechanic.’
‘But isn’t that sort of set-up just another way of being a big land-owner?’ Patti objected warmly.
‘Hardly! Everything we run is run on a co-operative basis. Each village is its own board of directors, and everything above a bare living for the central staff is ploughed back into the business.’ But he was not particularly disposed to talk about it; he was on leave, and she already knew everything she needed to know about him.
‘Do you think all that’s really going to change anything?’ she wondered wistfully.
‘It already has. Since we set up this particular grouping we’ve nearly doubled our rice yield annually – partly by increasing acreage, and partly with better double-cropping. Did you know that Tamil Nadu is going to be a surplus state any minute now? Not just through us, of course, we’re a very minor force, but we do work in with the government’s intensive district programme, and that’s far from minor.’
She looked reluctantly impressed, and at once sadly incredulous and warily hopeful. ‘I suppose your people farm back home? I didn’t have anything as practical as that in my background. My dad’s a retired army officer. I was born into the establishment.’
‘So was I,’ said Dominic with a fleeting grin, ‘only a different branch. Mine’s a policeman. Well, no uniform now, actually, he’s deputy head of the county C. I. D. I haven’t got anything more practical to offer than an arts degree, either, and that doesn’t dig any wells here. Or at home, for that matter. Everybody thinks it entitles him to be a teller, when we’ve already got too many tellers and not enough doers. So I thought I’d come over here and see how the doers live.’
‘Awful waste of a degree, though,’ protested Patti, rather surprisingly reverting to type.
‘Not a bit! It won’t rot.’
She considered him thoughtfully for a moment, background, parentage, eccentricities and all, and looked more than half convinced. ‘Well, maybe you’ve found something that’ll stand by you,’ she said handsomely. ‘I wasn’t that lucky. I never felt I was doing anything much, or getting anywhere. It seemed as if you’d have to smash the whole thing and start afresh before you’d see any results.’
‘And what will you do now?’ asked Larry, watching her soberly over the bowl of fruit. “When your paid leave’s over, I mean? Go home?’
‘I suppose so. I’ve got some of my A levels to repeat if I want to teach seriously, but I haven’t made up my mind yet. Yes, I guess I shall go home. Maybe try somewhere else. There’s supposed to be a second country somewhere for everybody, so they say. Maybe the stars have to be right. How about you?’
‘Me? Oh, I suppose I came here looking for the pure wisdom, like you. Though I ought to have known better. I’m an anthropologist by inclination, but a civil engineer by profession. I’ve been working on the plans for a small irrigation project up in Gujarat, but it looks as if various committees are now going to sit on the idea for years, and if they don’t squash it altogether they’ll probably alter it around until it’s useless. I thought I might as well have a look around the country while they’re considering the matter, so I bought the Land-Rover in Bombay, and set off more or less at random southwards. And Lakshman here comes along to take care of me.’
Lakshman gazed back at him serenely and amiably, but did not return his smile. Indian people, except those of the hills, do not find it necessary to smile whenever they catch your eye, but will gaze back at you directly with faces unyieldingly grave and thoughtful. In the hills they smile because they obviously enjoy smiling. And Indian people, Dominic thought critically, studying the two golden amber faces beside him, who can be the noisiest people on earth, also know how to be securely silent and to withhold even an eloquent gesture. Priya’s delicate face, silken-skinned and serene, betrayed nothing at all beyond a general, detached benevolence. Suddenly he felt more curiosity about her than about her companion.
‘Now we’ve all declared ourselves, except you, Miss Madhavan.’
‘I am not at all novel or interesting,’ she said in her quiet, lilting voice; and now she did smile, her chiselled lips curving and unfolding as smoothly as rose-petals. ‘I am a nurse at the General Hospital in Madras. I have a large family of brothers and sisters, and my eldest sister happens to be a teacher in Bengal, and a colleague of Patti’s. So now that I have my long leave, and Patti is free to visit the south, I invited her to meet me in Madras and come home with me for a visit. That is all about me.’