Out of India Read online

  “Savitri?” I said.

  So that was how I first heard about Savitri and the children. At first I was unhappy, but M. explained everything. He had been married very young and to a simple girl from a village. After some years he left her. She understood it was necessary for him to leave her because he had a task to fulfill in the world in which she could not help him. She went back to her parents, with the children. She was happy now, because she saw it was her duty to stay at home and look after the children and lead the good, simple, self-sacrificing life of a mother. He talked of her with affection: she was patient and good. I too learned to love her. I thought of her in the village, with the children, quietly doing her household tasks; early in the mornings and in the evenings she said her prayers. So her life passed. He had gone to see her a few times and she had welcomed him and been glad; but when he went away again, she never tried to keep him. I thought how it would be if he went away from me, but I could not even bear the idea. My heart hurt terribly and I stifled a cry. From that I saw how much nobler and more advanced Savitri was than I; and I hoped that, if the time ever came, I too could be strong like her. But not yet. Not yet. We sold my pearl brooch and sent money to her; he always sent money to her when he had it. Once he said of her: “She is a candle burning in a window of the world,” and that was how I always thought of her—as a candle burning for him with a humble flame.

  I had not yet written to Daddy and Mama, but I wrote to Rahul. I wrote, “Everything is for the best, Rahul. I often think about you. Please tell everyone that I am all right and happy.” M. and I went to the post office together to buy a stamp and post the letter. On the way back he said, “You must write to your father also. He must listen to our ideas.” How proud I was when he said our ideas.

  Daddy and Mama came to Niripat. Daddy sent me a letter in which it said they were waiting for me at the Victoria Hotel. M. took me there, and then went away; he said I must talk to them and explain everything. The Victoria Hotel is the only hotel in Niripat and it is not very grand—it is certainly not the sort of hotel in which Mama is used to staying. In front there is the Victoria Restaurant, where meals can be had at a reduced rate on a monthly basis; there is an open passage at the side that leads to the hotel rooms. Some of the guests had pulled their beds out into the passage and were sitting on them: I noticed a very fat man in a dhoti and an undervest saying his prayers. But Daddy and Mama were inside their room.

  It was a very small room with two big beds in it and a table with a blue cotton tablecloth in the middle. Mama was lying on one of the beds; she was crying, and when I came in, she cried more. Daddy and I embraced each other, but Mama turned her face away and pressed her eyes with her handkerchief and the tears rolled right down into her blouse. It made me impatient to see her like that: every mother must part with her daughter sometime, so what was there to cry about? I squeezed Daddy’s hands, to show him how happy I was, but then he too turned his face away from me and he coughed. Here we were meeting after so many days, and they were both behaving in a ridiculous manner. I spoke to them quite sharply: “Every individual being must choose his own life and I have chosen mine.”

  “Don’t, darling,” Daddy said as if something were hurting him.

  Mama suddenly shouted, “You are my shame and disgrace!”

  “Quietly, quietly,” Daddy said.

  I felt like shouting back at her, but I controlled myself; I had not come there to quarrel with her, even if she had come to quarrel with me. I was a wiser person now than I had been. So I only said: “There are aspects of life which you will never grasp.”

  A little servant boy came in with tea on a tray. Mama sat up on the bed—she is always very keen on her tea—but after a while she sank back again and said in a fainting sort of voice, “There is something dirty in the milk.” I had a look and there were only bits of straw, from the cowshed, which I fished out easily with a teaspoon.

  Daddy gave a big sigh and said, “You had better let me speak with the young man.”

  So then I was happy again: I knew that when Daddy really spoke to him and got to know him, he would soon realize what sort of a person M. was and everything would be all right.

  And everything was all right. It was true, Daddy couldn’t start the department of moral training for him, as we had hoped, because the university didn’t have enough funds for a new department; and also, Daddy said, he couldn’t get him an academic post because M. didn’t have the necessary qualifications. (How stupid are these rules and regulations! Here was a wonderful gifted person like M., with great ideas and wide experience of life, who had so much to pass on; yet he had to take a backward place to some poor little M.A. or Ph.D. who knows nothing of life at all except what he has read in other people’s books.) So all Daddy could do was get him a post as secretary to one of the college principals; and I think it was very nice of M. to accept it, because it was not the sort of post a person such as he had a right to expect. But he was always like that: he knew nothing of petty pride and never stood on his dignity, unlike many other people who have really no dignity at all to stand on.

  I was sorry to leave Niripat, where I had been so happy with everyone, and to go home again. But of course it was different now, because M. was with me. We had the big guest room at the back of the house and at night we made our beds out on the lawn. Sometimes I thought how funny it was—only a few weeks ago Mama had tried to turn him out of the house and here he was back in the best guest room. It is true that the wheel of fate has many unexpected revolutions. I think he quite liked living in the house, though I was afraid at first he would feel stifled with so many servants and all that furniture and carpets and clocks and Mama’s china dinner-services. But he was too great in soul to be bothered by these trivial things; he transcended them and led his life and thought his thoughts in the same way as he would have done if he had been living in some little hut in the jungle.

  If only Mama had had a different character. But she is too sunk in her own social station and habits to be able to look out and appreciate anything higher. She thinks if a person has not been abroad and doesn’t wear suits and open doors for ladies, he is an inferior type of person. If M. had tried, I know he could have used a knife and fork quite as well as Mama or anyone, but why should he have tried? And there were other things like not making a noise when you drink your tea, which are just trivial little conventions we should all rise above. I often tried to explain this to Mama but I could never make her understand. So it became often quite embarrassing at meal times, with Mama looking at M. and pretending she couldn’t eat her own food on account of the way he was eating his. M. of course never noticed, and I felt so ashamed of Mama that in the end I also refused to use any cutlery and ate with my hands. Daddy never said anything—in fact, Daddy said very little at all nowadays, and spent long hours in his office and went to a lot of meetings and, when he came home, he only sat in his study and did not come out to talk to us.

  I often thought about Rahul. He had never answered my letter and when I tried to telephone, they said he was not at home. But I wanted very much to see him; there were so many things I had to tell him about. So one day I went to his house. The servants made me wait on the veranda and then Rahul’s married sister Kamla came out. Kamla is a very ambitious person and she is always scheming for her husband’s promotion (he is in the Ministry of Defense) so that she can take precedence over the other wives in his department. I was not surprised at the way she talked to me. I know a person like Kamla will always think only petty thoughts and doesn’t understand that there is anything transcending the everyday life in which she is sunk up to her ears. So I let her say what she wanted and when she told me to go away, I went. When Mama found out that I had been to Rahul’s house, she was furious. “All right, so you have lost all pride for yourself, but for your family—at least think of us!” At the word pride I laughed out loud: Mama’s ideas of pride were so different from mine and M.’s. But I was sorry that they wouldn’t let me see Rahu
l.

  M. went out every day, and I thought he went to his job in the university. But one day Daddy called me into his study and he said that M. had lost his job because he hadn’t been going there for weeks. I had a little shock at first, but then I thought it is all right, whatever he wants to do is all right; and anyway, it hadn’t been a suitable post for him in the first place. I told Daddy so.

  Daddy played with his silver paper-knife and he didn’t look at me at all; then he said, “You know he has been married before?” and still he didn’t look at me.

  I don’t know how Daddy found out—I suppose he must have been making inquiries, it is the sort of thing people in our station of life always do about other people, we are so mistrustful—but I answered him quite calmly. I tried to explain to him about Savitri.

  After a while Daddy said, “I only wanted you to know that your marriage is not legal and can be dissolved any time you want.”

  Then I told him that marriages are not made in the sight of the law but in the sight of God, and that in the sight of God both Savitri and I were married to M., she there and I here. Daddy turned his head away and looked out of the window.

  M. told me that he wanted to start a school and that he could do so if Daddy got him a grant from the Ministry. I thought it was a very exciting idea and we talked a lot about it that night, as we lay together on our beds. He had many wonderful ideas about how a school should be run and said that the children should be taught to follow only their instincts, which would lead them to the highest Good. He talked so beautifully, like a prophet, a saint. I could hardly sleep all night, and first thing in the morning I talked to Daddy. Unfortunately Mama was listening at the door—she has a bad habit of doing that—and suddenly she came bursting in. “Why don’t you leave your father alone?” she cried. “Isn’t it enough that we give you both food and shelter?”

  I said, “Mama please, I’m talking important business with Daddy.”

  She began to say all sorts of things about M. and why he had married me. Daddy tried to keep her quiet but she was beyond herself by that time, so I just covered my ears with my hands and ran out. She came after me, still shouting these horrible things.

  There in the hall was M., and when I tried to run past him, he stopped me and took my hands from my ears and made me listen to everything Mama was saying. She got more and more furious, and then she went into one of her hysterical fits, in which she throws herself down and beats her head on the floor and tears at her clothes. Daddy tried to lift her up, but of course she is too heavy for him. She went on screaming and shouting at M.

  M. said, “Go and get your things,” so I went and wrapped everything up in the sheet again, his things and mine, and he slung the bundle over his shoulder and went out of the house, with me walking behind him.

  I hoped we would go back to Niripat, but he wanted to stay in the city because he had several schemes in mind—there was the school, and he also had hopes of starting a newspaper in which he could print all his ideas. So he had to go around and see a lot of people, in ministries and so on. Sometimes he got quite discouraged because it was so difficult to make people understand. Then he looked tired and the lines on his face became very deep and I felt such love and pity for him. But he had great inner strength, and next day he always started on his rounds again, as fresh and hopeful as before.

  We had no proper home at that time, but lived in several places. There was the sign painter, and another friend had a bookshop in one of the government markets with a little room at the back where we could stay with him; and once we found a model house that was left over from a low-cost housing exhibition, and we lived in that till workmen came to tear it down. There were plenty of places where we could stay for a few days or even weeks. In the evenings there were always many friends and all sat and discussed their ideas, and some of them recited poetry or played the flute, so that sometimes we didn’t go to sleep at all. We never had any worries about money—M. said if one doesn’t think about money, one doesn’t need it, and how true that is. Daddy sent me a check every month, care of the friend who kept the bookshop, and we still had some of my jewelry, which we could sell whenever we wanted; so there was even money to send to Savitri and the children.

  Once I met Rahul, quite by chance. That was at the time when we had just moved out of the exhibition house. M. had to go to one of the ministries to see an under-secretary, and I was taking our bundle to an orphanage, run by a friend of M.’s, where we were going to stay. I was waiting for a bus, holding the bundle; it wasn’t heavy at all anymore, so there was no need to take a tonga. Rahul came out of a music shop with some records that he had just bought (he is very fond of dance records—how often we have danced together to his gramophone!). I called to him and when he didn’t hear me, I went up to him. He lowered his eyes and wouldn’t look at me and hardly greeted me.

  “Rahul,” I said in the stern voice I always use with him when I think he is misbehaving.

  “Why did you do it?” he said. “My family are very angry with you and I’m also angry.” He sulked, but he looked so sweet; he still had his pink cheeks.

  “If you have your car, you can give me a lift,” I said. Rahul is always a gentleman, and he even carried my bundle for me to his car.

  It took us a long time to find the orphanage—it was right at the back of the Fatehpuri mosque somewhere—so there was plenty of time for me to talk to him. He listened quite quietly, driving the car through all that traffic. When at last we found the orphanage and I was ready to get out, he said, “Don’t go yet.” I stayed with him for a while, even though the car was parked very awkwardly in that crowded alleyway, and men with barrows swore at us because they could not get past.

  Soon afterward a friend of M.’s who was in the railways got transferred, and as he lived in a house with a very low rent, it was a good opportunity for us and we took it over from him. There were two rooms and a little yard at the back, and upstairs two families were living. Daddy would send a check for the rent. I cooked for us and cleaned the house and talked with the families upstairs, while M. went out to see people about his ideas. But after a time he began to go out less and less, and he became depressed; he said the world had rejected him because he was not strong enough yet. Now it was his task to purify himself and make himself stronger. He stayed at home and meditated. A strange change came over him. Most of the time he sat in one of our rooms, in a corner of the floor by himself, and he wouldn’t let me come in. Sometimes I heard him singing to himself and shouting—he made such strange noises, almost like an animal. For days he ate nothing at all and, when I tried to coax him, he upset the food I had brought and threw it on the floor. I tried to be patient and bear and understand everything.

  His friends stopped coming and he hardly ever left that little room for two months. Then he started going out by himself—I never knew where and could not ask him. He had an expression on his face as if he were listening for something, so that one felt one couldn’t disturb him. When he talked to me, he talked as if he were someone else and I were someone else. At night I slept in the yard at the back with the families from upstairs, who were always kind to me.

  Then visitors began to come for him—not his old friends, but quite new people whom I had never seen before. They sat with him in the little room and I could hear him talking to them. At first only a few men used to come, but then more and more came, and women too. I also sat in the room sometimes and listened to him talk; he told strange stories about parrots and princes and tigers in the jungle, all of which had some deep meaning. When the people understood the deep meaning, they all exclaimed with pleasure and said God was speaking through his mouth.

  Now they began to bring us gifts of food and money and clothes and even jewelry. M. never took any notice, and I just piled the things in the other room, which was soon very crowded. We ate the food and I also gave it to the families upstairs, but there was still plenty left over, and at night someone used to come from the beggars’ home to
take it away. I sent a lot of money to Savitri. The house was always full of people now, and they spilled over into the yard and out into the street. More and more women came—most of them were old but there were some young ones too, and the young ones were even more fervent and religious than the old ones. There was one plump and pretty young widow, who was always dressed very nicely and came every day. She said she was going mad with love of God and needed words of solace and comfort from M. She touched his feet and implored him to relieve her, and when he took no notice of her, she shook him and tugged at his clothes, so that he became quite angry.

  Mama often came to see me. In the beginning she was very disgusted with the house and the way we lived and everything, but afterward, when she saw how many people came and all the things they brought and how they respected M., she kept quiet on that subject. Now she only said, “Who knows what is to become of it all?” Mama is not really a religious person, but she has a lot of superstitions. When holy men come begging to her house, she always gives them something—not because of their holiness, but because she is afraid they will curse her and bring the evil eye on us all. She no longer said anything bad about M., and when she talked about him, she didn’t say, “that one” as she used to, but always “He.” Once or twice she went and sat with the other people in the little room in which he was, and when she came out, she looked so grave and thoughtful that I had to laugh.

  Rahul also visited me. At first he was stiff and sulky, as if he were doing me a favor by coming; but then he began to talk, all about how lonely he was and how his family were trying to persuade him to marry girls he didn’t like. I felt sorry for him—I knew it is always difficult for him to make friends and he has never really had anyone except me. I let him talk, and he kept coming again and again. There was a little space with a roof of asbestos sheet over it in the yard where I did my cooking, and it was here that Rahul and I sat. It was not a very private place because of all the people in the yard, waiting to see M., but Rahul soon got used to it and talked just as he would have done if we had been sitting in Mama’s drawing room. He was very melancholy, and when he had finished telling me about how lonely he was, he only sat and looked at me with big sad eyes. So I let him help me with the cooking—at first he only sifted the rice and lentils, but after a time I let him do some real cooking and he enjoyed it terribly. He would make all sorts of things—fritters and potato cakes and horseradish pancakes—and they were really delicious. We ate some ourselves and the rest we sent to the beggars’ home.