My decision was simple. It was to turn my back on our ancestry, the foolish, foreign-ruled starveling priests my grandfather had told me about, to turn my back on all my father's foolish hopes for me as someone high in the maharaja's service, all the foolish hopes of the college principal to have me marry his daughter. My decision was to turn my back on all those ways of death, to trample on them, and to do the only noble thing that lay in my power, which was to marry the lowest person I could find.
I actually had someone in mind. There was a girl at the university. I didn't know her. I hadn't spoken to her. I had merely noticed her. She was small and coarse-featured, almost tribal in appearance, noticeably black, with two big top teeth that showed very white. She wore colours that were sometimes very bright and sometimes very muddy, seeming to run into the blackness of her skin. She would have belonged to a backward caste. The maharaja gave a certain number of scholarships to “the backwards,” as they were called. The maharaja was known for his piety, and this giving of scholarships was one of his acts of religious charity. That, in fact, was my first thought when I saw the girl in the lecture room with her books and papers. A lot of people were looking at her. She wasn't looking at anyone. I saw her often after that. She held her pen in a strange, determined, childish way, and copied down the professor's notes about Shelley and W, of course, and Browning and Arnold and the importance in Hamlet of soliloquy.
The last word gave us a lot of trouble. The professor pronounced it in three or four different ways, according to his mood; and when he was testing our knowledge of his notes, and we had to speak the word, it was, you might say, every man for himself. Literature for many of us was this kind of confusion. I thought for some reason that the scholarship girl, since she was a scholarship girl, understood more than most of us. But then one day when the professor asked her a question— normally he didn't pay her too much attention—I saw that she understood a good deal less. She had almost no idea of the story of Hamlet. All she had been learning were words. She had thought that the play was set in India. It was easy for the professor to mock her, and people in the class laughed, as though they knew much more.
I began after this to pay more attention to the girl. I was fascinated and repelled by her. She would have been of the very low. It would have been unbearable to consider her family and clan and their occupations. When people like that went to the temple they would have been kept out of the sanctum, the inner cell with the image of the deity. The officiating priest would never have wanted to touch those people. He would have thrown the sacred ash at them, the way food is thrown to a dog. All kinds of ideas like that came to me when I contemplated the scholarship girl, who felt people's eyes on her and never returned their gaze. She was trying to keep her end up. It would have taken so little to crush her. And gradually, with my fascination, there came a little sympathy, a wish to look at the world through her eyes.
This was the girl I thought I should go and make a declaration to and in her company live out a life of sacrifice.
There was a tea-room or restaurant the students went to. We called it a hotel. It was in a lane off the main road. It was very cheap. When you asked the waiter for cigarettes he placed an open pack of five on the table, and you paid only for what you took. It was there one day that I saw the scholarship girl, alone in her muddy clothes at the little ring-marked table below the ceiling fan. I went and sat at her table. She should have looked pleased, but she looked frightened. And then I understood that though I might have known who she was, she perhaps had not looked at me. In the BA class I was not that distinctive.
So right at the beginning there was this little warning. I noted it, but I didn't heed it.
I said to her, “I've seen you in the English class.” I wasn't sure this was the right thing to say. It might have made her feel I had witnessed her humiliation when the professor had tried to get her to talk about Hamlet. She didn't say anything. The thin, shiny-faced waiter, in the very dirty white jacket he had worn for days, came and put a dripping glass of water on the table and asked what I wanted. That eased the embarrassment of the moment for me. But not for her. She was in a strange situation, and she was being witnessed. Her very dark top lip slipped slowly—with the wetness of a snail, I thought—over her big white teeth. For the first time I saw that she used powder. There was a thin white bloom on her cheeks and forehead; it made the black skin matt, and you could see where the powder ended and the shiny skin showed again. I was repelled, ashamed, moved.
I didn't know what to talk about. I couldn't say, “Where do you live? What does your father do? Do you have brothers? What do they do?” All of those questions would have caused trouble and, to tell the truth, I didn't want to know the answers. The answers would have taken me down into a pit. I didn't want to go there. So I sat and sipped at the coffee and smoked a thin cheap cigarette from the pack of five the waiter put down for me and said nothing. Looking down I caught sight of her thin black feet in her cheap slippers, and again I was surprised at how moved I was.
I took to going to the tea-shop as often as I could and whenever I saw the girl there I sat at her table. We didn't talk. One day she came in after me. She didn't come to my table. I was in a quandary. I considered the other people in the tea-shop, people with ordinary and secure lives ahead of them, and for a long minute or two I was, to tell the truth, a little frightened, and thought of giving up the idea of the life of sacrifice. I could simply have stayed at my table. But then, nagged by some feeling of failure and some irritation at the scholarship girl's indifference, I went and sat at her table. She seemed to expect it, and seemed very slightly to move to one side, as if making room for me.
That was how it was that term. No words spoken, no meeting of any sort outside the tea-shop, yet a special kind of relationship established. We began to get strange looks in the tea-shop, and I began to get those looks even when I was on my own. The girl was mortified. I could see that she didn't know how to deal with those judging eyes. But what mortified her gave me a strange satisfaction. I looked upon that kind of judgement—from waiters, students, simple people—as the first sweet fruit of my life of sacrifice. They were only the first fruits. I knew that there were going to be greater battles ahead, severer tests, and even sweeter fruit.
The first of those battles was not long in coming. One day in the tea-room the girl spoke to me. I had got used to the silence between us—it seemed a perfect way of communication—and this forwardness in someone I had thought of as backward took me by surprise. Mixed up with this surprise was my dismay at her voice. I realised then that in the class, even at the time of her trouble with the professor over Hamlet, I had only heard her mumble. Her voice, heard in this intimate way across the little square tea-table, was not soft and shy and aiming at sweetness, as you might have expected from someone so small and slight and diffident, but loud and coarse and rasping. It was the kind of voice I associated with people of her kind. I thought it might have been something that as a scholarship girl she had left behind.
I hated that voice as soon as I heard it. I felt, not for the first time, that I was sinking. But that was the terror that went with the life of sacrifice I had committed myself to, and I felt I had absolutely to go ahead.
I was so preoccupied with these thoughts—her forwardness, the hatefulness of her voice (like an expression of her big white top teeth and her powdered dark skin), my fear for myself—that I had to ask her to say again what she had said.