Half a Life

“You have to hide me somewhere, until things calm down.”

I said, “But that would be kidnapping you.”

“It is what you have to do.”

She was calm. I was like a drowning man.

A few short months before I had been an ordinary, idle young man at the university, the son of a courtier, living in my father's Grade C official house, thinking about the great men of our country and yearning to be great myself, without seeing any way, in the smallness of our life, of embarking on that career of greatness, capable only of listening to film songs, yielding to the emotion they called up, and then enfeebled by shameful private vice (about which I intend to say no more, since such things are universal), and generally feeling oppressed by the nothingness of our world and the servility of our life. Now in almost every particular my life had altered. It was as though, like a child seeing the sky reflected in a puddle after rain, I had, wishing to feel fear while knowing I was safe, let my foot touch the puddle, which at that touch had turned into a raging flood which was now sweeping me away. That was how in a few minutes I had begun to feel. And that in a few minutes became my view of the world about me: no longer a dull and ordinary place where ordinary people walked and worked, but a place where secret torrents flowed which might at any minute sweep away the unwary. It was what came to my mind now when I looked at the girl. All her attributes changed: the thin black feet, the big teeth, the very dark skin.

I had to find a place for her. It was her idea. A hotel or boarding house was out of the question. I thought of the people I knew. I had to forget family friends, university friends. I thought in the end I would try the image- maker in the town. There was an old connection between the factory and the temple of my ancestors. It was a place I had often gone to. I knew the master. He was a small dusty fellow with glasses. He looked blind, but that was because his glasses were always dusty with the chippings of his workmen. Ten or twelve of them were always there, small barebacked fellows, quite ordinary in appearance, chipping away in the yard, hammer on chisel, chisel on stone, making twenty or twenty-four separate sounds all the time. It wasn't easy to be in the middle of that noise. But I didn't think the scholarship girl would mind.

The image-makers were of a neutral caste, not low, but very far from being high, and perfect for my purpose. Many of the craftsmen lived in the master's compound with their families.

The master was working on a complicated drawing of a temple pillar. He was pleased as always to see me. I looked at his drawing, and he showed me others, and I worked the subject round to the girl, a “backward” who had been expelled and threatened by her family and was now in need of shelter. I decided not to speak shyly, but with authority. The master knew of my ancestry. He would never have associated me with such a woman, and I suggested that I was acting on behalf of someone very high indeed. It was well known that the maharaja was sympathetic to the backwards. And the master behaved like a man who knew the ways of the world.

There was a room at the back of the storehouse where there were images and statues and busts of various sorts. The dusty little fellow with the blind glasses was gifted. He didn't do only the deities, complicated things that had to be done in a precise way; he also did real people, living and dead. He did lots of mahatmas and other giants of the nationalist movement; and he did busts (from photographs) of people's parents and grandparents. Sometimes those family busts carried the real glasses of the people. It was a place full of presences, disturbing to me after a time. It was comforting to know that every deity was flawed in some way, so that its terrible power couldn't become real and overwhelm us all.

I wished I could have left the girl there and never gone back, but there was always the threat of the firebrand, her uncle. And the longer she stayed there the harder it became for me to send her away; the more it seemed that we were together for life, though I hadn't even touched her.

I lived at home. I went out to the university and pretended to be at the lectures, and then sometimes I would go to the sculptor's yard. I never stayed long. I never wanted the master to suspect anything.

Life couldn't have been easy for her. One day, in that room without light, where the dust of the sculptor's yard coated everything, and was like a powder on the girl's skin, she seemed to me to be very melancholy.

I said, “What's the matter?”

She said, in her terrible rough voice, “I was thinking how my life has changed.”

I said, “What about my life?”

She said, “If I was outside I would be doing the exams now. Are they easy?”

I said, “I am boycotting the university.”

“How will you get a job? Who will give you money? Go and do the exams.”

“I haven't studied. I can't learn those notes now. It is too late.”

“They will pass you. You know those people.”

When the results came out my father said, “I can't understand it. I hear that you knew nothing at all about the Romantics and The Mayor of Casterbridge. They wanted to fail you. The principal of the college had to talk them out of it.”

I should have said, “I burnt my books long ago. I am following the mahatma's call. I am boycotting English education.” But I was too weak. At a critical moment I failed myself. All I said was, “I felt all my strength oozing out of me in the examination room.” And I could have cried at my weakness.

My father said, “If you were having trouble with Hardy and Wessex and so on, you should have come to me. I have all my school notes still.”

He was off duty, in the hot little front room of our Grade C house. He was without his turban and livery, only in a singlet and dhoti. The maharaja's courtiers, in spite of their turbans and livery, with day coats and night coats, never wore shoes, and my father's soles were black and callused and about half an inch thick.

He said, “So I suppose it's the Land Tax department for you.”

And I began to work for the maharaja's state. The Land Tax department was very big. Everybody who owned any little piece of land had to pay an annual tax on it. There were officers all over the state surveying the land, recording ownership, collecting the tax, and keeping accounts. My job was in the central office. It was a pretty building in white marble and it had a high dome. It was full of rooms. I worked with twenty others in a big, high room. It was full of papers on desks and on deep shelves like those in the left-luggage rooms in railway stations. The papers were in cardboard folders tied with string; sometimes they were in bundles wrapped in cloth. The folders in the top shelves, many years old, were dingy with dust and cigarette smoke. The ceiling was brown with this smoke. The room was nicotine-brown at the top, dark-mahogany lower down, on the doors, desks and