frightening; it was burdensome. It was not a time for new decisions. It was time to call a halt.
I lay on the bed watching the ceiling, watching the sky. The door was pushed open. It was Priya. 'My goodness, Santosh! How long have you been here? You have been so quiet I forgot about you.'
He looked about the room. He went into the bathroom and came out again.
'Are you all right, Santosh?'
He sat on the edge of the bed and the longer he stayed the more I realized how glad I was to see him. There was this: when I tried to think of him rushing into the room I couldn't place it in time; it seemed to have occurred only in my mind. He sat with me. Time became real again. I felt a great love for him. Soon I could have laughed at his agitation. And later, indeed, we laughed together.
I said, 'Sahib, you must excuse me this morning. I want to go for a walk. I will come back about tea time.' He looked hard at me, and we both knew I had spoken truly.
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ONE OUT OF MANY / 273 1
'Yes, yes, Santosh. You go for a good long walk. Make yourself hungry with walking. You will feel much better.'
Walking, through streets that were now so simple to me, I thought how nice it would be if the people in Hindu costumes in the circle were real. Then I might have joined them. We would have taken to the road; at midday we would have halted in the shade of big trees; in the late afternoon the sinking sun would have turned the dust clouds to gold; and every evening at some village there would have been welcome, water, food, a fire in the night. But that was a dream of another life. I had watched the people in the circle long enough to know that they were of their city; that their television life awaited them; that their renunciation was not like mine. No television life awaited me. It didn't matter. In this city I was alone and it didn't matter what I did.
As magical as the circle with the fountain the apartment block had once been to me. Now I saw that it was plain, not very tall, and faced with small white tiles. A glass door; four tiled steps down; the desk to the right, letters and keys in the pigeonholes; a carpet to the left, upholstered chairs, a low table with paper flowers in the vase; the blue door of the swift, silent elevator. I saw the simplicity of all these things. I knew the floor I wanted. In the corridor, with its illuminated star-decorated ceiling, an imitation sky, the col- ours were blue, grey and gold. I knew the door I wanted. I knocked.
The hubshi woman opened. I saw the apartment where she worked. I had never seen it before and was expecting something like my old employer's apartment, which was on the same floor. Instead, for the first time, I saw something arranged for a television life.
I thought she might have been angry. She looked only puzzled. I was grateful for that.
I said to her in English, 'Will you marry me?'
And there, it was done.
'It is for the best, Santosh,' Priya said, giving me tea when I got back to the restaurant. 'You will be a free man. A citizen. You will have the whole world before you.' I was pleased that he was pleased.
So I am now a citizen, my presence is legal, and I live in Washington. I am still with Priya. We do not talk together as much as we did. The restaurant is one world, the parks and green streets of Washington are another, and every evening some of these streets take me to a third. Burnt-out brick houses, broken fences, overgrown gardens; in a levelled lot between the high brick walls of two houses, a sort of artistic children's playground which the hubshi children never use; and then the dark house in which I now live.
Its smells are strange, everything in it is strange. But my strength in this house is that I am a stranger. I have closed my mind and heart to the English language, to newspapers and radio and television, to the pictures of hubshi runners and boxers and musicians on the wall. I do not want to understand or learn any more.
I am a simple man who decided to act and see for himself, and it is as though I have had several lives. I do not wish to add to these. Some afternoons I walk to the circle with the fountain. I see the dancers but they are separated from me as by glass. Once, when there were rumours of new burnings, someone scrawled in white paint on the pavement outside my house: Soul Brother. I understand the words; but I feel, brother to what or to whom?
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2752 / TOM STOPPARD
I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.
1971
TOM STOPPARD
b. 1937 Tom Stoppard was born Tomas Straussler in the former Czechoslovakia. His family emigrated to Singapore in 1939 to escape the Nazis and moved to India in 1941 to escape the Japanese. His father stayed behind and was killed in the invasion of Singapore. Tom and his mother went to England in 1946; on her remarriage he took his stepfather's name of Stoppard. After leaving Pocklington School in Yorkshire at seventeen, he became a journalist, wrote a novel, and in 1962 had two short plays broadcast on the radio. The British theater had been dominated for a decade by realistic 'kitchen sink' dramas when Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) appeared and was hailed as a major theatrical event. Critics recognized a debt to Waiting for Godot, but where Samuel Beckett had focused on the hopelessness of his two abandoned characters, Stoppard celebrates the gaiety and perverse vitality that can be generated from despair.
He frequently uses plays by other playwrights as launching pads for his own: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern step out of the shadows of Shakespeare's Hamlet; The Real Inspector Hound (1968) parodies Agatha Christie's classic country-house murder- mystery play, The Mousetrap; and the plot of Travesties (1974) is entwined with that of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest. Past and present are again entwined, though not intertextually, in his masterpiece, Arcadia (1993), which explores the nature of Nature, classical and Romantic theories of landscape gardening, literary history and historians, truth and time. As is appropriate for a play with a double time frame (early nineteenth century spliced with late twentieth century), Arcadia has the intricate movement of a grandfather clock, its characters and their concerns interacting with finely geared precision. Appropriately again, the classical mechanism is driven by a Romantic power source: sex?'the attraction which Newton left out.'
