*
THIS WAS THE STORY that Willie Chandran's father told. It took about ten years. Different things had to be said at different times. Willie Chandran grew up during the telling of this story.
His father said, “You asked me many years ago, before I began the story, whether I really admired the writer after whom you are named. I said I wasn't sure, that you would have to make up your own mind. Now that you've heard what I had to say, what do you think?”
Willie Chandran said, “I despise you.”
“That is your mother talking.”
Willie Chandran said, “What is there for me in what you have said? You offer me nothing.”
His father said, “It has been a life of sacrifice. I have no riches to offer you. All I have are my friendships. That is my treasure.”
“What about poor Sarojini?”
“I will speak to you frankly. I feel she was sent to try us. I can tell you nothing about her appearance that you don't already know. Her prospects in this country are not bright. But foreigners have their own ideas of beauty and certain other things, and all I can hope for Sarojini is an international marriage.”
2
The First Chapter
WILLIE CHANDRAN and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, “What does your father do?” It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the various degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shameless-ness. But now when the question was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with irritation, “You all know what my father does.” The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.
Willie Chandran's mother had been educated at the mission school, and it was her wish that her children should go there. Most of the children at the school were backwards who would not have been accepted at the local schools for people of caste, or would have found life hard if they had got in. She herself in the beginning had gone to one of those caste schools. It was a broken-down and dusty shack in a suburb far from the maharaja's palace and all his good intentions. Broken-down though it was, the teachers and the school servants didn't want Willie Chandran's mother there. The school servants were even more fierce than the teachers. They said they would starve rather than serve in a school which took in backwards. They said they would go on strike. Somehow in the end they all swallowed their pride and their talk of going on strike, and the girl was allowed in. Things went wrong on the first day. In the morning recess the girl ran with the other children to the place in the schoolyard where a ragged and half-starved school servant was giving out water from a barrel. He used a long-handled bamboo dipper and when a student appeared before him he poured water into a brass vessel or an aluminium one. Willie Chandran's mother wondered in a childish way whether she would get brass or aluminium. But when she appeared before him no choice like that was offered her. The ragged half-starved man became very angry and frightening and made the kind of noise he would have made before he beat a stray dog. Some of the children objected, and then the water man made a show of looking for something and from somewhere on the ground he picked up a rusty and dirty tin jagged at the edges from the tin-opener. It was a blue Wood, Dunn butter tin from Australia. Into that he poured the water for the girl. That was how Willie Chandran's mother learned that in the world outside aluminium was for Muslims and Christians and people of that sort, brass was for people of caste, and a rusty old tin was for her. She spat on the tin. The half-starved water man made as if to hit her with the bamboo dipper and she ran out of the schoolyard fearing for her life, with the man cursing her as she ran. After some weeks she began to go to the mission school. She should have gone there from the start, but her family and group knew nothing about anything. They didn't know about the religion of the people of caste or the Muslims or the Christians. They didn't know what was happening in the country or the world. They had lived in ignorance, cut off from the world, for centuries.
Willie's blood boiled whenever he heard the story about the Wood, Dunn butter tin. He loved his mother, and when he was very young he used such money as came his way to buy pretty things for her and the house: a bamboo-framed mirror, a bamboo wall-stand for a vase, a nice length of block-stamped cloth, a brass vase, a painted papier-mâché box from Kashmir, crêpe-paper flowers. But gradually as he grew up he understood more about the mission school and its position in the state. He understood more about the pupils in the school. He understood that to go to the mission school was to be branded, and he began to look at his mother from more and more of a distance. The more successful he became at school—and he was better than his fellows—the greater that distance grew.
He began to long to go to Canada, where his teachers came from. He even began to think he might adopt their religion and become like them and travel the world teaching. And one day, when he was asked to write an English “composition” about his holidays he pretended he was a Canadian, with parents who were called “Mom” and “Pop.” Mom and Pop had one day decided to take the kids to the beach. They had gone upstairs early in the morning to the children's room to wake them up, and the children had put on their new holiday clothes and they had driven off in the family car to the beach. The beach was full of holidaymakers, and the family had eaten the holiday sweets they had brought with them and at the end of the day, tanned and content, they had driven home. All the details of this foreign life—the upstairs house, the children's room—had been taken from American comic books which had been circulating in the mission school. These details had been mixed up with local details, like the holiday clothes and the holiday sweets, some of which Mom and Pop had at one stage out of their own great content given to half-naked beggars. This composition was awarded full marks, ten out of ten, and Willie was asked to read it out to the class. The other boys, many of whom lived very poor lives, had had no idea what to write about, and had not even been able to invent, knowing nothing of the world. They listened with adoration to Willie's story. He took the exercise book and showed it to his mother, and she was pleased and proud. She said to Willie, “Show it to your father. Literature was his subject.”
Willie didn't take the book directly to his father. He left it on the table in the verandah overlooking the inner ashram yard. His father had coffee there in the morning.
He read the composition. He was ashamed. He thought, “Lies, lies. Where did he get these lies from?” Then he thought, “But is it worse than Shelley and W and the rest of them? All of that was lies too.” He read the composition again. He grieved at his disappearance and thought, “Little Willie, what have I done to you?” He finished his coffee. He heard the first of the day's suppliants assembling in the main courtyard of his little temple. He thought, “But I have done him nothing. He is not me. He is his mother's son. All this Mom-and-Pop business comes from her. She can't help it. It's her background. She has these mission-school ambitions. Perhaps after a few hundred rebirths she will be more evolved. But she can't wait like other decent folk. Like so many backwards nowadays, she wants to jump the gun.”
He never mentioned the composition to Willie, and Willie never asked. He despised his father more than ever.
One morning a week or so later, while his father was with clients on the ashram side of the house, Willie Chandran again left his composition exercise book on the table in the verandah of the inner courtyard. His father saw the book at lunchtime, and became agitated. His first feeling was that there was another offensive composition in the book, more about Mom and Pop. He felt the boy, true son of his mother, was challenging him, with all the slyness of a backward, and he wasn't sure what he should do. He asked himself, “What would the mahatma do?” He decided that the mahatma would have met this kind of sly aggression with his own kind of civil disobedience: he would have done nothing. So he did nothing. He didn't touch the exercise book. He left it where it was, and Willie saw it when he came back from school during the lunch hour.