The journalist replied first. Dear Chandran, Of course I remember your father. My favourite babu… “Babu,” an anglicised Indian, was a mistake; the word should have been “sadhu,” an ascetic. But Willie didn't mind. The letter seemed friendly. It asked Willie to come to the newspaper office, and early one afternoon a week or so later Willie made his way to Fleet Street. It was warm and bright, but Willie had been made to believe that it rained all the time in England, and he wore a raincoat. The raincoat was very thin, of a rubbery material that sweated on the very smooth inside almost as soon as it was worn; so that by the time Willie had got to the big black newspaper building the top and sides of his jacket and the back of his collar were damp, and when he took off the sweated, clinging raincoat he looked as though he had walked through a drizzle.
He gave his name to a man in uniform, and after a while the journalist, in a dark suit and not young, came down and he and Willie talked standing up in the lobby. They didn't get on. They didn't have anything to talk about. The journalist asked about the babu; Willie didn't correct him; and when they had finished that subject they both looked about them. The journalist began to talk about the newspaper in a defensive way, and Willie understood that the newspaper didn't like Indian independence and was not friendly to India and that the journalist himself had written some hard pieces after his visit to the country.
The journalist said, “It's Beaverbrook, really. He has no time for Indians. He's like Churchill in some respects.”
Willie said, “Who is Beaverbrook?”
The journalist dropped his voice. “He's our proprietor.” It amused him that Willie didn't know something so stupendous.
Willie noticed, and thought, “I am glad I didn't know. I am glad I wasn't impressed.”
Somebody had come through the main door, which was at Willie's back. The journalist looked to one side of Willie, to follow the progress of the new arrival.
He said, with awe, “That's our editor.”
Willie saw a dark-suited middle-aged man, pink-faced after lunch, going up the steps at the far side of the lobby.
The journalist, gazing at his editor, said, “His name is Arthur Christiansen. They say he is the greatest editor in the world.” Then, as though speaking to himself, he said, “It takes a lot to get there.” Willie looked with the journalist at the great man going up the steps. Then, setting aside that mood, the journalist said in a jokey way, “I hope you haven't come to ask for his job.”
Willie didn't laugh. He said, “I'm a student. I am here on a scholarship. I am not looking for a job.”
“Where are you?”
Willie gave the name of his college.
The journalist didn't know it. Willie thought, “He's trying to insult me. My college is quite big and quite real.”
The journalist said in his new jokey way, “Are you asthmatic? I ask only because our proprietor is asthmatic and he has a special feeling for asthmatics. If you wanted a job it would be something in your favour.”
That was where the meeting ended, and Willie was ashamed for his father, who must have been mocked by the journalist in what he wrote, and ashamed at himself for having gone back on his decision to stay away from his father's friends.
A few days later there came a letter from the great writer after whom Willie was named. It was on a small sheet of Clar-idge's paper—the very hotel from where Krishna Menon had set out on his short walk to the park that afternoon, no doubt to think about his United Nations speech about Suez. The letter was typewritten, double-spaced and with wide margins. Dear Willie Chandran, It was nice getting your letter. I have very nice memories of India, and it is always nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely … And the shaky, old man's signature was yet carefully done, as though the writer felt that was the point of his letter.
Willie thought, “I misjudged my father. I used to think that the world was easy for him as a brahmin and that he became a fraud out of idleness. Now I begin to understand how hard the world must have been for him.”
Willie was living in the college as in a daze. The learning he was being given was like the food he was eating, without savour. The two were inseparable in his mind. And just as he ate without pleasure, so, with a kind of blindness, he did what the lecturers and tutors asked of him, read the books and articles and did the essays. He was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead. He still had no idea of the scale of things, no idea of historical time or even of distance. When he had seen Buckingham Palace he had thought that the kings and queens were impostors, and the country a sham, and he continued to live within that idea of make-believe.
At the college he had to re-learn everything that he knew. He had to learn how to eat in public. He had to learn how to greet people and how, having greeted them, not to greet them all over again in a public place ten or fifteen minutes later. He had to learn to close doors behind him. He had to learn how to ask for things without being peremptory.
The college was a semi-charitable Victorian foundation and it was modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. That was what the students were often told. And because the college was like Oxford and Cambridge it was full of various pieces of “tradition” that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn't explain. There were rules, for instance, about dress and behaviour in the dining hall; and there were quaint, beer-drinking punishments for misdemeanours. Students had to wear black gowns on formal occasions. When Willie asked about the gowns, he was told by one of the lecturers that it was what was done at Oxford and Cambridge, and that the academic gown was descended from the ancient Roman toga. Willie, not knowing enough to be awed, and following mission-school ways, looked up the matter in various books in the college library. He read that, in spite of all the toga-clad statues from the ancient world, no one had so far been able to work out how the old Romans put on their togas. The academic gown probably was copied from the Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe.
Yet something strange was happening. Gradually, learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see—and it was upsetting, at first—that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.
His mother's firebrand uncle had agitated for years for freedom for the backwards. Willie had always put himself on that side. Now he saw that the freedom the firebrand had been agitating about was his for the asking. No one he met, in the college or outside it, knew the rules of Willie's own place, and Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry.
And just as in the college he had boasted in the beginning in an innocent, lonely way of the friendship of his “family” with the famous old writer and the famous Beaverbrook journalist, so now he began to alter other things about himself, but in small, comfortable ways. He had no big over-riding idea. He took a point here and another there. The newspapers, for instance, were full of news about the trade unions, and it occurred to Willie one day that his mother's uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, who sometimes at public meetings wore a red scarf (in imitation of his hero, the famous backward revolutionary and atheistic poet Bharatidarsana), it occurred to Willie that this uncle of his mother's was a kind of trade-union leader, a pioneer of workers' rights. He let drop the fact in conversation and in tutorials, and he noticed that it cowed people.