Half a Life

His sister, Sarojini, wrote from Germany. Willie didn't want to open the envelope. He remembered, with shame, how it would have excited him at home, at the ashram or the mission school, to see a German or any foreign postage stamp on a letter. The design of the stamp would have set him dreaming of the country, and he would have thought the sender of the letter blessed.

Dear Willie, I wonder if you know what worry you're giving us. You do not write and we have no idea what you are doing. Can you take a degree at this college where you are, and will that degree get you a job? You have the example of your father before you, and if you aren't careful you will become an idler like him. Things work like that in families.

Willie thought, “I used to worry about this girl. I didn't think she had a chance, and I would have done anything to help her become a happy woman. Then this old German man comes along and ugly little Sarojini changes. She becomes the complete married woman, as though that woman was there all along. She has become just like my mother. I feel as if all my worry and love has been mocked. I am not sure I like this Sarojini.”

Wolf and I are about to go to Cuba and other places. Wolf has talked to me a lot about revolutionary ideas. He is like our mother's uncle, but of course he has had more opportunities and is better educated, and of course he has seen much more of the world than our poor uncle. I wish you could take after that side of the family, and then you will see how much there is to do in our world, and how you are selfishly wasting your life in London doing this little thing and that little thing and not knowing why you are doing anything. Wolf and I are in Germany for a few weeks. Wolf has film people and government people to see here. When things settle down I will come to London for a few days to see you.

Willie thought, “Please don't come, Sarojini. Please don't come.”

But in due course she came, and for three or four days she turned his life upside down. She stayed in a small hotel near the college—she had arranged that herself, before she left Germany—and she came every day to Willie's college room and prepared a rough little meal. She asked for his help in nothing. She bought cheap new pots and pans and knives and spoons, found out about greengrocers, came in every day with fresh vegetables, and cooked things on the little electric heater in Willie's room. She lay the heater on its back and she set the pots on the metal guards above the glowing electric coils. They ate off paper plates and she washed up the pots in the sink at the end of the corridor. Sarojini had never been a good cook, and the food she cooked in the college room was awful. The smell stayed in the room. Willie was worried about breaking the college rules, and he was just as worried about people seeing the dark little cook—clumsily dressed, with a cardigan over her sari and socks on her feet—who was his sister. In her new assertive way, but still not knowing too much about anything, in five minutes she would have babbled away all Willie's careful little stories about their family and background.

She said, “When you get this famous degree or diploma, what will you do with it? You will get a little teaching job and hide away here for the rest of your life?”

Willie said, “I don't think you know. But I've written a book. It's coming out next year.”

“That's a lot of nonsense. Nobody here or anywhere else will want to read a book by you. I don't have to tell you that. Remember when you wanted to be a missionary?”

“What I mean is that I feel I should wait here until the book comes out.”

“And then there'll be something else to wait for, and then there'll be something after that. This is your father's life.”

For days after she left the smell of her cooking was in Willie's room. At night Willie smelt it on his pillow, his hair, his arms.

He thought, “What she says is right, though I don't like her for saying it. I don't know where I am going. I am just letting the days go by. I don't like the place that's waiting for me at home. For the past two and a half years I have lived like a free man. I can't go back to the other thing. I don't like the idea of marrying someone like Sarojini, and that's what will happen if I go home. If I go home I will have to fight the battles my mother's uncle fought. I don't want to fight those battles. It will be a waste of my precious life. There are others who would enjoy those battles. And Sarojini is right in the other way too. If I get my teaching diploma and decide to stay here and teach it will be a kind of hiding away. And it wouldn't be nice teaching in a place like Notting Hill. That's the kind of place they would send me, and I would walk with the fear of running into a crowd and being knifed like Kelso. It would be worse than being at home. And if I stay here I would always be trying to make love to my friends' girlfriends. I have discovered that that is quite an easy thing to do. But I know it to be wrong, and it would get me into trouble one day. The trouble is I don't know how to go out and get a girl on my own. No one trained me in that. I don't know how to make a pass at a stranger, when to touch a girl or hold her hand or try to kiss her. When my father told me his life story and talked about his sexual incompetence I mocked him. I was a child then. Now I discover I am like my poor father. All men should train their sons in the art of seduction. But in our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me about the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims. Now we live like incestuous little animals in a hole. We grope all our female relations and are always full of shame. Nobody talked about sex and seduction at home, but I discover now that it is the fundamental skill all men should be trained in. Marcus and Percy Cato, and Richard, seemed to be marvellous that way. When I asked Percy how he had learned he said he started small, fingering and then raping little girls. I was shocked by that. I am not so shocked now.”

He telephoned Perdita early one morning. “Perdita, please come to the college this weekend.”

“This is foolish, Willie. And it's not fair to Roger.”

“It isn't fair. But I have a need of you. I was bad the last time. But I'll tell you. It's a cultural matter. I want to make love to you, want desperately to make love to you, but then at the actual moment old ideas take over and I become ashamed and frightened, I don't know of what, and it all goes bad. I'll be better this time. Let me try.”

“Oh, Willie. You've said that before.”

She didn't come.

He went looking for June. He hadn't seen her for some months. He wondered what had happened to the house in Notting Hill, and whether, after the riots, it would still be possible for them to go there. But June wasn't at the