From the garden came the sound of a whistle.
"Excuse me," said the little nurse and went to the window. Smiling happily at what she saw, she waved her hand. "It's Ranga."
"Who's Ranga?"
"That friend of mine I was talking about. He wants to ask you some questions. May he come in for a minute?"
"Ofcourse."
She turned back to the window and made a beckoning gesture.
"This means, I take it, that the white satin pajamas are completely out of the picture."
She nodded. "It was only a one-act tragedy. I found my head almost as quickly as I'd lost it. And when I'd found it, there was Ranga, the same as ever, waiting for me." The door swung open and a lanky young man in gym shoes and khaki shorts came into the room.
"Ranga Karakuran," he announced as he shook Will's hand.
"If you'd come five minutes earlier," said Radha, "you'd have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Bahu."
"Was he here?" Ranga made a grimace of disgust.
"Is he as bad as all that?" Will asked.
Ranga listed the indictments. "A: He hates us. B: He's Colonel Dipa's tame jackal. C: He's the unofficial ambassador of all the oil companies. D: The old pig made passes at Radha. And E: He goes about giving lectures about the need for a religious revival. He's even published a book about it. Complete with preface by someone at the Harvard Divinity School. It's all part of the campaign against Palanese independence. God is Dipa's alibi. Why can't criminals be frank about what they're up to? All this disgusting idealistic hogwash-it makes one vomit."
Radha stretched out her hand and gave his ear three sharp
tweaks.
"You little ..." he began angrily; then broke off and laughed. "You're quite right," he said. "All the same, you didn't have to pull quite so hard."
"Is that what you always do when he gets worked up?" Will enquired of Radha.
"Whenever he gets worked up at the wrong moment, or over things he can't do anything about."
Will turned to the boy. "And do you ever have to tweak her
ear?"
Ranga laughed. "I find it more satisfactory," he said, "to smack her bottom. Unfortunately, she rarely needs it."
"Does that mean she's better balanced than you are?"
"Better balanced? I tell you, she's abnormally sane."
"Whereas you're merely normal?"
"Maybe a little left of center." He shook his head. "I get horribly depressed sometimes-feel I'm no good for anything."
"Whereas in fact," said Radha, "he's so good that they've given him a scholarship to study biochemistry at the University
of Manchester."
"What do you do with him when he plays these despairing, miserable-sinner tricks on you? Pull his ears?"
"That," she said, "and . . . well, other things." She looked at Ranga and Ranga looked at her. Then they both burst out laughing.
"Quite," said Will. "Quite. And these other things being what they are," he went on, "is Ranga looking forward to the prospect of leaving Pala for a couple of years?"
"Not much," Ranga admitted.
"But he has to go," said Radha firmly.
"And when he gets there," Will wondered, "is he going to be happy?"
"That's what I wanted to ask you," said Ranga. "Well, you won't like the climate, you won't like the food, you won't like the noises or the smells or the architecture. But you'll almost certainly like the work and you'll probably find that you can like quite a lot of the people." "What about the girls?" Radha enquired. "How do you want me to answer that question?" he asked. "Consolingly or truthfully?" "Truthfully."
"Well, my dear, the truth is that Ranga will be a wild success. Dozens of girls are going to find him irresistible. And some of those girls will be charming. How will you feel if he can't resist?" "I'll be glad for his sake."
Will turned to Ranga. "And will you be glad if she consoles herself, while you're away, with another boy?"
"I'd like to be," he said. "But whether I actually shall be glad-that's another question."
"Will you make her promise to be faithful?" "I won't make her promise anything." "Even though she's your girl?" "She's her own girl."
"And Ranga's his own boy," said the little nurse. "He's free to do what he likes."
Will thought of Babs's strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously. "And free above all," he said, "to do what he doesn't like." He looked from one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, "But I'd forgotten," he added. "One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this mental case from the outside is talking about?" And without leaving them time to answer his question, "Tell me," he asked, "how long is it-" He broke off. "But perhaps I'm being indiscreet. If so, just tell me to mind my own business. But 1 would like to know, just as a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends."
"Do you mean 'friends'?" asked the little nurse. "Or do you mean 'lovers'?"
"Why not both, while we're about it?"
"Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we've been lovers-except for that miserable white pajama episode-since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen- just about two and a half years."
"And nobody objected?"
"Why should they?"
"Why, indeed," Will echoed. "But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected."
"What about other boys?" Ranga asked.
"In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice . . . Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?"
"Of course."
"I'm surprised."
"Surprised? Why?"
"Seeing that girls aren't out of bounds."
"But one kind of love doesn't exclude the other."
"And both are legitimate?"
"Naturally."
"So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?"
"Not if it was a good sort of relationship."
"But unfortunately," said Radha, "the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn't be interested in anyone but her- and, of course, himself."
"No boys?"
"Maybe now. I don't know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State."
"Three weeks ago," said Ranga, "he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan's ideas-on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit."
"Did he make any converts?"
Ranga shook his head. "Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don't feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, vour revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of maithuna?" he asked.
"Maithuna? What's that?"
"Let's start with the historical background," Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. "Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we're Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?"