floor.
I grieved for myself. This kind of servile labour had formed no part of my vision of the life of sacrifice. But now I was glad to have it. I needed the money, paltry though it was. I was deep in debt. I had used my father's name and position in the palace and taken money from various moneylenders to support the girl in the room at the image- maker's.
She had made the place presentable. That had cost money; and then there had been the kitchen paraphernalia, and her clothes. So I had been having all the expenses of a married man, and living like an ascetic in my father's Grade C house.
The girl never believed I didn't have the money. She believed that people of my background had secret funds. It was part of the propaganda outside against our caste, and I endured what was said without comment. Whenever I took her another little piece of money from a moneylender she didn't look surprised. She might say, with irony (or sarcasm: I don't know what our professor would have said), “You look very sad. But your caste always look sad when they give.” She sometimes had the style of her uncle, the firebrand of the backwards.
I was full of grief. But she was happy about the new job.
She said, “I must say it would be nice to get some regular money for a change.”
I said, “I don't know how long I can last in that job.”
She said, “I've put up with a lot of hardship already. I don't intend to put up with much more. I could have been a BA. If you hadn't taken me away from the university I would have done the exam. My family went to a lot of trouble to send me to the university.”
I could have wept with rage.
Not so much at what she was saying, but at the idea of the prison-house in which I now had to live. Day after day I left my father's house and went to work. I felt like a child again. There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.” That was the way I felt about going to work in the Land Tax department, and the thought of going to work in a place like that every day every year until I died frightened me.
One day in the office the supervisor came and said, “You are being transferred to the audit section.”
In that section we had to look out for corruption among the tax-collectors and surveyors. Officers would take the land tax from poor people who couldn't read, and not give receipts, and the poor peasant with his three or four acres would have to pay the tax again. Or he would have to pay a bribe to get his receipt. It was endless, the petty cheating that went on among the poor. The officers were not much richer than the peasants. Who was suffering when the tax was not paid? The more I looked at these dirty pieces of paper the more I found myself on the side of the cheats. I began to destroy or throw away those damning little pieces of paper. I became a kind of saboteur, and it gave me great pleasure to think that in this office, without making any big statement, I was conducting my own kind of civil disobedience.
The supervisor said to me one day, “The Chief Inspector wants to see you.”
My bravery vanished. I thought of the debts, the moneylender, the girl in the room at the image-maker's.
The Chief Inspector sat at a desk and was surrounded by his own files, files of ill-doing that had been sifted at half a dozen desks and then sifted again and had at last arrived here, for this man's awful judgement.
He rocked back on his chair, looking at me through his thick-lensed glasses, and said, “Are you happy with your work here?”
I bowed my head. I didn't say anything.
He said, “From next week you will be an Assistant Inspector.”
It was a big promotion. I felt it was a trap. I said, “I don't know, sir. I don't feel I have the qualifications.”
He said, “We are not making you a full Inspector. We are only making you an Assistant Inspector.”
It was the first of my promotions. It didn't matter how badly I did my job, how much I sabotaged, they continued to promote me. It was like civil disobedience in reverse.
It worried me. I talked to my father about it one evening.
He said, “The school principal has great ambitions for his son-in-law.”
I said, “I can't be his son-in-law. I am already married.”
I don't know why it came to me to say that. It wasn't strictly true, of course. But that was the way I had begun to think about my relationship with the girl at the image-maker's.
My father went wild. All his tolerance and kindness disappeared. He became heart-broken. It was a very long time before he could ask me for the details.
“Who is the girl?”
I told him. He couldn't speak. I thought he was going to collapse. I wanted to calm him down. So I told him about the firebrand, the girl's uncle. I was trying to tell him, in a foolish kind of way, quite contrary to my ideas of sacrifice, that the girl had a background of some sort and wasn't a complete nobody. It made matters worse. He didn't like hearing about the firebrand. He lay down flat on an old bamboo mat on the concrete floor in our little front room, and he called for my mother. I could see very clearly the thick pads of hardened skin on the soles of his feet. They were dirty and cracked and there were little strips peeling off the side. As a courtier my father had never been allowed to wear shoes. But he had bought shoes for me.
He said at last, “You've blackened all our faces. And now we'll have to face the anger of the school principal. You've dishonoured his daughter, since in everybody's eyes you are as good as married to her.”
So, though I hadn't touched either of them, and though I had gone through no form of ceremony with either of them, there were two women whom I had dishonoured.
In the morning my father was hollow-eyed. He had slept badly. He said, “For centuries we have been what we are. Even when the Muslims came. Even when we starved. Now you've thrown our inheritance away.”
