Who told Shantha then that I had fallen unconscious? She said my son (in her) told her so. She went to Govindan Nair’s house, and she and Tangamma stood at the wall, while Shridhar came to open my window. Shantha would never come to me. How could she come to my wife’s house? She looked from under the bilva tree, her figure square and big, and I could see tears fall from her eyes. She seemed to be more in prayer than in sorrow; her skin shone like black ivory, so it had the colour of blue. I could almost (I used to tease her) see the white hands of the child inside of her (for I am sort of Brahmin-fair). Will this illness affect the child? I must build a house, a house three storeys high.
Destiny brings to us little slips of paper, as the office peon does from some visitor or the boss. What does a name really mean? The British bubo is a name given by my friend Govindan Nair to an unknown phenomenon of physiological eruption, when pus and blood seem to rise on the skin, round themselves up like a country mango, and split, and the flies and the lizards have the feast. Now that the bubos are finished, tell me, who will feast the lizards? Who will feed the bacilli, if indeed it was a bacillus and it came from Benghazi? Is it really so hot in Benghazi? What made some autonomous invisible crawly active entity enter into an Indian soldier in his wars with Hitler and Rommel, burst into a million bloody worms which having travelled through boats, trains, restaurants (through the files of the sanitary inspectors’ reports), penetrate into some flies perchance that sat on a cow whose milk my milkman brings, and, having gone into my intestines where the bacilli field was relatively vacant (like an empty conference room, chairs and tables set out and the meeting might begin at any time and the resolution be passed), give me, sir dear sir, my beautiful British bubo? Everybody must do something — the clerk must correct his files, the fleas must bite. Illness come, and one goes to Narayan Pandita Vaidyan, and the horse-dung medicine is given. I go for the purge, the sun is hot, I tumble against the threshold and fall. And that’s Shridhar’s death. For him an unconscious state is death. What is sleep then to Shridhar?
Poor Shridhar was also ill. He had malaria (or was it filaria?) — another flea bite. So he did not go to school. One goes to school when one is well (and when Uncle is not ill). Thus the two flea families had made a pact. Across the wall they said to each other: ‘We will change the world. You come from Benghazi and I come from, say, Uzhavezhapuram. We met and we shall play destiny.’ Invisible are the ways of destiny. Food will go across the wall — Shridhar will not go to school. ‘Pappadam and rice will I take down to Uncle.’ The bilva tree will bless.
Shantha is carrying four months. I can just see the rise in her belly, from where I lie. Her smile is freedom of the world. It is trust in herself. She looks in as I look out (as Shridhar does). To trust is to be. She can lean against the wall whispering out words to me, as if the world would create itself to her wishes for me. She created a child for herself and gave it to me. She said, ‘This is yours.’ And that is the truth. Who can create a child but God. What is the relation between God and Shantha?
‘I go and come.’ Shantha smiles from the wall. She, as it were, bows to me behind her back. Then slowly I hear the leaves of the jack trees crunch under her. I now see the head first, blue as sky, then the hair (with flat big chignon), and then she is gone. For a long time I go on listening to myself like a lizard. It is beginning to be hot already. Tangamma sends Shridhar with some coffee to console me. Then Govindan Nair (with sandal paste on his forehead and his packet of betel leaves and tobacco) jumps across the wall.
‘How are you, my lord and liege?’
‘Better than if the kingdom were at peace and no wars anywhere.’
‘The Hitlers are in us, like objects in seeing. We think there is Hitler, when Hitler is really an incarnation of what I think. You are bad because I am. You are good because I am. The sun is because I see. You do not suffer because you are the British bubo. Ah, brother, you too be British’—and he guffawed. He liked his own jokes, and tears came to his eyes. Then he smiled in love. ‘I love the British. I respect them because they are such shopkeepers. What can you do after all? If you have to buy you must sell. If you want betel and tobacco, you must work in numbers. You issue ration cards, six hundred seventy a day, and God gives food to the needful. I must say I have never come across so much respect for God as amongst the British. I often think God is a ledger keeper. Loss and gain do not interest him. Accounts do. Even a rat can give trouble to the British.’
‘How so?’ I ask. Govindan Nair’s methods are so devious. I just do not understand.
‘Rats eat up accounts. That is how we explained away the ration given to Kolliathur village. When the big boss asked, ‘Where are the files?’ we made such a grand search. First my boss said: ‘We have misplaced it.’ Then he said: ‘We do not think we have it in this office.’ Finally he wrote: ‘Eaten away by rats. Please ask the Public Works Dept. Officer to come to Ration Office No. 66 for inspection. Two reports on rat pest remain unanswered.’
‘What happened then?’
‘He built a house, that is John did. He built a modest little house. He said it was done from the proceeds of his wife’s property sale. Her grandmother had just died. Everybody has a grandmother, you know.’
‘Where is the house?’
‘On the Karamanai side.’
‘Is it expensive?’
‘Only some fifteen thousand rupees. The Brahmins are getting poorer with the wars. So they sell their houses. Why, soldiers earn more than clerks today. That is the law of the rats.’
‘What do you do then for the rats?’
‘We encourage them. We even invite them, like the Pied Piper, with music.’
‘Seriously speaking?’
‘Dead seriously. Rats are necessary for the ration shops. Otherwise who will eat up all the rice? If you want the population of Trivandrum to feed on food, then you have to employ other means.’
‘What?’ I asked in my denseness.
‘Ah, sir, you need the mother cat,’ he said in utter gravity, then rose and spat out tobacco.
‘Shridhar!’ he shouted. ‘Bring two cups of coffee.’ And settling down, he put some more chalk to his betel, and started chewing again.
‘You need education, sir. You are poor in general knowledge. You do not know you have a grandmother. You know too little about rats. You must become a pathologist and write a paper on the nature of bacteria, as seen in ration-shop ledgers. One rich man in the north, so I heard, was travelling on a train. Where are you going, Seth Sahib? they asked him. I’m going to Jagannath Puri, sirs, for the annual festival of the Lord of Earth. Why, do you belong hereabouts? they said. No, sirs, I come from Calcutta. I am a grain merchant, he said. The famine, we hear is very serious now, they said. Yes sirs, who should know it but me? he said. It must be terrible, they said. Yes, I am going to Jagannath Puri. I am giving the Lord a silver spire, the grain merchant said. Now, I ask of you, my friend, when shall we build your golden spire?’
‘When do you want to?’
‘In four or five months Shantha will have an heir. Let us build a spire ten men high.’
‘It will be three storeys high.’
‘First let us build one two storeys high.’
‘Anything you like,’ I said, laughing.
‘No sir, it is a dead serious matter. A woman bears a child. The child needs a basic house to be born in. You cannot be born just anywhere. Let us buy this house itself,’ he said, spitting out his tobacco. Shridhar had brought in the coffee. He stood there, amazed and in admiration before his father. His father looked like a sea captain hatching plans to decoy a cargo. The night is falling. The sea is calm. The sea will obey the captain. ‘Captain, the sea of Arabia is mild.’ ‘Turn towards the Laccadive Archipelago.’ ‘The Dutch ships sail.’ ‘Who cares if they have guns? We have sinews. You build empires. We build houses. Slaves, to the nor’east!’