All my anxiety, when little Willie was born, was to see how much of the backward could be read in his features. Anyone seeing me bend over the infant would have thought I was looking at the little creature with pride. In fact, my thoughts were all inward, and my heart was sinking.
A little later, as he started to grow up, I would look at him without saying anything and feel myself close to tears. I would think, “Little Willie, little Willie, what have I done to you? Why have I forced this taint on you?” And then I would think, “But that is nonsense. He is not you or yours. His face makes that plain. You have forced no taint on him. Whatever you gave him has disappeared in his wider inheritance.” But some little hope for him always stayed with me. I would, for instance, see someone of our kind and think, “But he looks like Willie. He is the image of little Willie.” And with this hope beating in my heart I would go and look at him, and at the first glimpse I would know I had fooled myself again.
All this was a private drama. It was absorbed into my melancholy. I opened myself to no one about it. I wonder what Willie's mother would have said if she knew. With the birth of her son she came into a kind of horrible flowering. She seemed to forget the nature of my calling. She became house-proud. She took lessons in flower arrangement from the wife of an English officer—independence had not yet come: we still had a British garrison in the town—and she took lessons in cooking and housecraft from a Parsi lady. She tried to entertain my guests. I was mortified. I remember one dreadful occasion. She had set or laid out the table in her new way. On the side plate of each guest she had placed a towel. I didn't think it was right. I had never read about towels on a dining table or seen them in any of the foreign films I had gone to. She insisted. She used the word “serviette” or something like that. She was no longer on the defensive these days, and soon she was saying foolish things about my ancestors, who knew nothing about modern housecraft. Nothing was resolved when the first guest came (a Frenchman who was doing a book about Romain Rolland, whom we all adored in India, because he was said to be an admirer of the mahatma), and I had to retreat into my melancholy, and go through the whole evening with those towels on the table.
This was the nature of my life. My utter wretchedness, my self-disgust, can be imagined when, with everything I have spoken about, and in spite of my private vow of
*
THIS WAS THE STORY that Willie Chandran's father told. It took about ten years. Different things had to be said at different times. Willie Chandran grew up during the telling of this story.
His father said, “You asked me many years ago, before I began the story, whether I really admired the writer after whom you are named. I said I wasn't sure, that you would have to make up your own mind. Now that you've heard what I had to say, what do you think?”
Willie Chandran said, “I despise you.”
“That is your mother talking.”
Willie Chandran said, “What is there for me in what you have said? You offer me nothing.”
His father said, “It has been a life of sacrifice. I have no riches to offer you. All I have are my friendships. That is my treasure.”
“What about poor Sarojini?”
“I will speak to you frankly. I feel she was sent to try us. I can tell you nothing about her appearance that you don't already know. Her prospects in this country are not bright. But foreigners have their own ideas of beauty and certain other things, and all I can hope for Sarojini is an international marriage.”
2
WILLIE CHANDRAN and his sister Sarojini went to the mission school. One day one of the Canadian teachers asked Willie, in a smiling friendly way, “What does your father do?” It was a question he had put at various times to other boys as well, and they had all readily spoken of the various degraded callings of their fathers. Willie wondered at their shameless-ness. But now when the question was put to him, Willie found he didn't know what to say about his father's business. He also found he was ashamed. The teacher kept on smiling, waiting for an answer, and at last Willie Chandran said with irritation, “You all know what my father does.” The class laughed. They laughed at his irritation and not at what he had said. From that day Willie Chandran began to despise his father.
Willie Chandran's mother had been educated at the mission school, and it was her wish that her children should go there. Most of the children at the school were backwards who would not have been accepted at the local schools for people of caste, or would have found life hard if they had got in. She herself in the beginning had gone to one of those caste schools. It was a broken-down and dusty shack in a suburb far from the maharaja's palace and all his good intentions. Broken-down though it was, the teachers and the school servants didn't want Willie Chandran's mother there. The school servants were even more fierce than the teachers. They said they would starve rather than serve in a school which took in backwards. They said they would go on strike. Somehow in the end they all swallowed their pride and their talk of going on strike, and the girl was allowed in. Things went wrong on the first day. In the morning recess the girl ran with the other children to the place in the schoolyard where a ragged and half-starved school servant was giving out water from a barrel. He used a long-handled bamboo dipper and when a student appeared before him he poured water into a brass vessel or an aluminium one. Willie Chandran's mother wondered in a childish way whether she would get brass or aluminium. But when she appeared before him no choice like that was offered her. The ragged half-starved man became very angry and frightening and made the kind of noise he would have made before he beat a stray dog. Some of the children objected, and then the water man made a show of looking for something and from somewhere on the ground he picked up a rusty and dirty tin jagged at the edges from the tin-opener. It was a blue Wood, Dunn butter tin from Australia. Into that he poured the water for the girl. That was how Willie Chandran's mother learned that in the world outside aluminium was for Muslims and Christians and people of that sort, brass was for people of caste, and a rusty old tin was for her. She spat on the tin. The half-starved water man made as if to hit her with the bamboo dipper and she ran out of the schoolyard fearing for her life, with the man cursing her as she ran. After some weeks she began to go to the mission school. She should have gone there from the start, but her family and group knew nothing about anything. They didn't know about the religion of the people of caste or the Muslims or the Christians. They didn't know what was happening in the country or the world. They had lived in ignorance, cut off from the world, for centuries.
Willie's blood boiled whenever he heard the story about the Wood, Dunn butter tin. He loved his mother, and when he was very young he used such money as came his way to buy pretty things for her and the house: a bamboo-framed mirror, a bamboo wall-stand for a vase, a nice length of block-stamped cloth, a brass vase, a
