One must build a house if one has to have a house, I say to myself. We’ll plant a bilva tree by it. Shantha will look at me, whispering words. How beautiful it is to be pregnant. Why not always be pregnant and four months carrying? You can play with bilva leaves, and, like the hunter, you can go on dropping them on the silence below. Shiva will appear. I envy women that they bear children.
‘Usha will be coming back from school,’ I sit and say, as if to the chair. I have a canvas chair, and, my feet on its edge, I scratch the curve of my limbs, and I think. The coffee has just gone down my throat. I have been to the Home Friends to have my bad cup of coffee. (Sometimes I want to avoid this, and go to the milk bar near my office and gulp a cup of milk. I feel so virtuous after that. But milk is never an immediate friend like coffee. In life we search for truth but live in the illusion of permanence. Milk is good for me. ‘It is good for the mother cat,’ Govindan will shout, and laugh, ‘No cat will ever touch your potion of the dark bean. We have no feline instinct. We live like rats,’ etc., etc.) Thinking of Usha of an evening is a pleasant thing. I could always take her out on a walk: ‘Come, child,’ and she will leave her book and give her little finger for me to take. And so we go. Usha is the dearest thing in my life. She is my child. She is not merely that. She is child. When I hear somebody say, he walks, you may think it is an impersonal, a grammatically correct statement. I walk, he walks, they walk. But for me walking is Usha. When she sits it is sitting. Shantha understands this. Shantha’s silence has all that logic cannot compute. Saroja wants two and two to make four, and if I say, ‘What about your dreams, there do two and two make four?’ she says, ‘It always makes four, according to me. Yet in the logic of my dreams it’s seven. But I am not living in a dream. Usha is five years old. She is not ten. You can open the school register and see.’
When you have Saroja’s logic, what can you do? What logic, Usha must ask herself, has the railway train that says Kimkoo-chig, chug, chug, as if it were a great-aunt, and it goes on spitting out fire at the Elayathur railway station? The train watches all school returners. Evening after evening it will come and spit out friendly smoke. The cigarette vendors, the wada sellers, the coolies, the jhatka- and bandi-walas6 outside will all have a logic with the train system. Soon after the train arrives, passengers will get out. They have so many bundles. Usha is sure the train knows it. She knows too that jhatkas come in the right numbers. As there are so many benches at the school every morning for so many children, you have so many jhatkas. Every evening you have so many bandis. Snakes know when the school children pass. The train has told them: Take care, take care, they are under my protection.
I love Usha for the way she comes back from school. She dreams of the train behind her. She has no fear. For the train will let her pass first on the Sethupallea bridge. Then you go down and stand in the field below, under the small young coconut tree. The train is happy. The tree says, ‘Good morning,’ as the soldiers say to one another. Usha and her friends put stones around the tree. They are building a marriage house. Once the train has passed with all the men and women, faces and shouts, Usha feels she can go home. Saroja does not wait for her. She is busy inspecting the rope making. Saroja is a tremendous worker. For her fact is that which yields. Her fathers have left thirty-three acres of wet land. They worked hard. They gave her and her sister education. Land is a fact. You reap what you sow.
I have a system of no logic, and that is the story. What logic can speak of Usha? How and what shall I say about Shantha? She lives backwards, as it were, when, with her rounded belly, she moves forward. Birth is instantaneous with time. Who is born where? Time is born in time. And that is Shantha. To be a wife is not to be wed. To be a wife is to worship your man. Then you are born. And you give birth to what is born in being born. You annihilate time and you become a wife. Wifehood, of all states in the world, seems the most holy. It stops work. It creates. It lives on even when time dies. Suppose you broke your clock, would the garden go? Suppose the garden were burned, where will the sky go? Such is woman.
I was thinking of the house and of Usha, scratching my feet, sitting on the canvas chair. The evening will slowly draw in bringing the sea nearer. How the night coming gives trees and sound a peculiar shy truth. They want to hide and go and come. Morning will reveal them, as if they had gone somewhere, and returned. The bilva tree always seems on a voyage to nowhere. It has gone and come like a clock that ticks. Time ticks. You close your eyes and open. I want to be free.
Shall I build a house for Usha? Who will give the money? I ask myself. Shantha could if she wished. My office can have her papers registered, and she could then have her disputed land, and she can sell it. Shantha loves Usha without having seen her. Shantha’s house will be the right house for Usha. Vithal my son will inherit from his mother.
‘Don’t worry, brother,’ says Govindan Nair, coming in after his bath. He has The Hindu in his hand. The newspaper is visible truth, is one of his theories. When truth becomes visible, it is a life. So the world is a life, etc., etc.
‘As true as The Hindu, I tell you I will help you to build the house.’
‘With what?’ I ask.
‘With bricks,’ he says, and roars in laughter. ‘A house, dear sir, is built with bricks. In dreams you can build it in gold. In the Mahabharata you build it in lacquer. I will build it for you in stone.’
‘But stone will make it hot.’
‘Stone gives permanence to objects. You must have a house that will last five hundred years. Someone in history will say: This house of stone, in the ruins of old Trivandrum, is one thousand one hundred years old. Look at its inscriptions. They are in Roman characters. That was the character used universally for some five hundred years. It was called the period of the big empires. They set. The Indians quarrelled among themselves. Then the Huns came. We fought the Huns. Some soldiers scratching the wall found a name. It read: Govindan Nair, Ration Clerk. They thought it meant a general. Or a prince. He who gives is a prince. I give rations or rather ration cards, so I give food. I am a prince, we will therefore build a palace. The palace of truth.’
I never could understand all that he meant. He always seemed to be pulling my leg. ‘Yes, sir, the cat always meows. That is my nature, to say meow-meow. All my language can be reduced to that — meow, meow, meowooow.’
I love Govindan Nair.
Hearing I was ill, Saroja brought Usha by the morning train. It comes in at ten-ten and she left by the evening local at four forty-three. She had boat repairs to inspect — boats had to carry away coconut shells. Her land is in the Elayathur lagoon. A patch of land surrounded by water. There are such deep-bent coconut trees. And you hear the sea.
Shantha said to me one evening: ‘When my land is sold, we’ll buy this house,’ by which she meant my house. She never came inside, but it was this house for it was mine. That is the way with woman. What belongs to you belongs to me, what belongs to the lord alone belongs. For woman is belonging, as mind is belonging — belonging to me. You can only shine of light. The shine knows its light, but to whom does the light belong? Light belongs to light. Lord, how beautiful thou hast made woman! She tells you. If woman were not, would you know you were? Shantha said: ‘You,’ and I saw I. Wonderful is man. He needs to be told he is. Then he knows he is. Looking alone he sees himself and tries to say: You. He is dumb. He cannot speak. He makes a bare movement of lips. The mirror says so. There is no sound. But sound comes and tells him: ‘You.’ Who said ‘You?’ She. Thus the world goes moving on its pivot.