Half a Life

words. She had thought that the play was set in India. It was easy for the professor to mock her, and people in the class laughed, as though they knew much more.

I began after this to pay more attention to the girl. I was fascinated and repelled by her. She would have been of the very low. It would have been unbearable to consider her family and clan and their occupations. When people like that went to the temple they would have been kept out of the sanctum, the inner cell with the image of the deity. The officiating priest would never have wanted to touch those people. He would have thrown the sacred ash at them, the way food is thrown to a dog. All kinds of ideas like that came to me when I contemplated the scholarship girl, who felt people's eyes on her and never returned their gaze. She was trying to keep her end up. It would have taken so little to crush her. And gradually, with my fascination, there came a little sympathy, a wish to look at the world through her eyes.

This was the girl I thought I should go and make a declaration to and in her company live out a life of sacrifice.

There was a tea-room or restaurant the students went to. We called it a hotel. It was in a lane off the main road. It was very cheap. When you asked the waiter for cigarettes he placed an open pack of five on the table, and you paid only for what you took. It was there one day that I saw the scholarship girl, alone in her muddy clothes at the little ring-marked table below the ceiling fan. I went and sat at her table. She should have looked pleased, but she looked frightened. And then I understood that though I might have known who she was, she perhaps had not looked at me. In the BA class I was not that distinctive.

So right at the beginning there was this little warning. I noted it, but I didn't heed it.

I said to her, “I've seen you in the English class.” I wasn't sure this was the right thing to say. It might have made her feel I had witnessed her humiliation when the professor had tried to get her to talk about Hamlet. She didn't say anything. The thin, shiny-faced waiter, in the very dirty white jacket he had worn for days, came and put a dripping glass of water on the table and asked what I wanted. That eased the embarrassment of the moment for me. But not for her. She was in a strange situation, and she was being witnessed. Her very dark top lip slipped slowly—with the wetness of a snail, I thought—over her big white teeth. For the first time I saw that she used powder. There was a thin white bloom on her cheeks and forehead; it made the black skin matt, and you could see where the powder ended and the shiny skin showed again. I was repelled, ashamed, moved.

I didn't know what to talk about. I couldn't say, “Where do you live? What does your father do? Do you have brothers? What do they do?” All of those questions would have caused trouble and, to tell the truth, I didn't want to know the answers. The answers would have taken me down into a pit. I didn't want to go there. So I sat and sipped at the coffee and smoked a thin cheap cigarette from the pack of five the waiter put down for me and said nothing. Looking down I caught sight of her thin black feet in her cheap slippers, and again I was surprised at how moved I was.

I took to going to the tea-shop as often as I could and whenever I saw the girl there I sat at her table. We didn't talk. One day she came in after me. She didn't come to my table. I was in a quandary. I considered the other people in the tea-shop, people with ordinary and secure lives ahead of them, and for a long minute or two I was, to tell the truth, a little frightened, and thought of giving up the idea of the life of sacrifice. I could simply have stayed at my table. But then, nagged by some feeling of failure and some irritation at the scholarship girl's indifference, I went and sat at her table. She seemed to expect it, and seemed very slightly to move to one side, as if making room for me.

That was how it was that term. No words spoken, no meeting of any sort outside the tea-shop, yet a special kind of relationship established. We began to get strange looks in the tea-shop, and I began to get those looks even when I was on my own. The girl was mortified. I could see that she didn't know how to deal with those judging eyes. But what mortified her gave me a strange satisfaction. I looked upon that kind of judgement—from waiters, students, simple people—as the first sweet fruit of my life of sacrifice. They were only the first fruits. I knew that there were going to be greater battles ahead, severer tests, and even sweeter fruit.

The first of those battles was not long in coming. One day in the tea-room the girl spoke to me. I had got used to the silence between us—it seemed a perfect way of communication—and this forwardness in someone I had thought of as backward took me by surprise. Mixed up with this surprise was my dismay at her voice. I realised then that in the class, even at the time of her trouble with the professor over Hamlet, I had only heard her mumble. Her voice, heard in this intimate way across the little square tea-table, was not soft and shy and aiming at sweetness, as you might have expected from someone so small and slight and diffident, but loud and coarse and rasping. It was the kind of voice I associated with people of her kind. I thought it might have been something that as a scholarship girl she had left behind.

I hated that voice as soon as I heard it. I felt, not for the first time, that I was sinking. But that was the terror that went with the life of sacrifice I had committed myself to, and I felt I had absolutely to go ahead.

I was so preoccupied with these thoughts—her forwardness, the hatefulness of her voice (like an expression of her big white top teeth and her powdered dark skin), my fear for myself—that I had to ask her to say again what she had said.

She said, “Somebody has told my uncle.”

Uncle? I felt she had no right to be dragging me into these unsavoury depths. Who was this uncle? What hole did he live in? Even the word “uncle”—which was a word that other people used of a sometimes precious relationship—was presumptuous.

I said, “Who is this uncle?”

“He is with the Labourers Union. A firebrand.”

She used the English word, and it sounded very strange and acrid in her mouth. We didn't have nationalist politics in the state—it wasn't allowed by the maharaja—but we did have this semi-nationalist subterfuge, which found pretty words, like “labourers” or “workers,” for the uglier words that were in everyday use. And, all at once, I knew who she might be. She would have been related to the firebrand, and this would have explained her getting the scholarship from the maharaja. In her own eyes she was a person of power and influence, someone on the rise.

She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession against you. Caste oppression.”

That would have suited me down to the ground. It would have made a public statement of my rejection of old values. It would have broadcast my adherence to the ideas of the mahatma, my life of sacrifice.

She said, “He says he is going to take out a procession and burn your house down. The whole world has seen you sitting with me in this tea-house week after week. What are you going to do?”

I was really frightened. I knew those firebrands. I said, “What do you think I should do?”