The writer said, “What do you mean?” He had a bad stammer.
The principal said, “Aren't we all every day both paying for past sins and storing up punishment for the future? Isn't that 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 titled visitor). I began—though it might seem strange to say so—to take refuge in my melancholy. I courted it, and lost myself in it. Melancholy became so much part of my character that for long periods I could forget the cause.
So at last I became a man with an establishment of my own. There was one little blessing. It was assumed that I was married to the girl. So there was no ceremony. I don't think I could have gone through with that. My heart would not have taken the sacrilege. Privately, in the recesses of my heart, I took a vow of sexual abstinence, a vow of brahmacharya. Like the mahatma. Unlike him, I failed. I was full of shame. And I was very swiftly punished. I soon afterwards had to recognise that the girl was pregnant. That pregnancy, that distending of her stomach, that alteration of her already unattractive body, tormented me, made me pray that what I was witnessing wasn't there.
All my anxiety, when little Willie was born, was to see how much of the backward could be read in his features. Anyone seeing me bend over the infant would have thought I was looking at the little creature with pride. In fact, my thoughts were all inward, and my heart was sinking.
A little later, as he started to grow up, I would look at him without saying anything and feel myself close to tears. I would think, “Little Willie, little Willie, what have I done to you? Why have I forced this taint on you?” And then I would think, “But that is nonsense. He is not you or yours. His face makes that plain. You have forced no taint on him. Whatever you gave him has disappeared in his wider inheritance.” But some little hope for him always stayed with me. I would, for instance, see someone of our kind and think, “But he looks like Willie. He is the image of little Willie.” And with this hope beating in my heart I would go and look at him, and at the first glimpse I would know I had fooled myself again.
All this was a private drama. It was absorbed into my melancholy. I opened myself to no one about it. I wonder what Willie's mother would have said if she knew. With the birth of her son she came into a kind of horrible flowering. She seemed to forget the nature of my calling. She became house-proud. She took lessons in flower arrangement from the wife of an English officer—independence had not yet come: we still had a British garrison in the town—and she took lessons in cooking and housecraft from a Parsi lady. She tried to entertain my guests. I was mortified. I remember one dreadful occasion. She had set or laid out the table in her new way. On the side plate of each guest she had placed a towel. I didn't think it was right. I had never read about towels on a dining table or seen them in any of the foreign films I had gone to. She insisted. She used the word “serviette” or something like that. She was no longer on the defensive these days, and soon she was saying foolish things about my ancestors, who knew nothing about modern housecraft. Nothing was resolved when the first guest came (a Frenchman who was doing a book about Romain Rolland, whom we all adored in India, because he was said to be an admirer of the mahatma), and I had to retreat into my melancholy, and go through the whole evening with those towels on the table.
This was the nature of my life. My utter wretchedness, my self-disgust, can be imagined when, with everything I have spoken about, and in spite of my private vow of brahmacharya, which represented the profoundest part of my nature, Willie's mother became pregnant for the second time. This time it was a girl, and this time there was no room for any kind of self-delusion. The girl was the image of her mother. It was like divine punishment. I called her Sarojini, after the woman poet of the independence movement, in the hope that a similar kind of blessing might fall on her, because the poet Sarojini, great patriot though she was, and much admired for that, was also remarkably ill-favoured.