I said, “Now is a time for sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice, sacrifice. Why?”
“I am following the mahatma's call.”
That made my father stop, and I said, “I am sacrificing the only thing I have to sacrifice.” It was a line that had come to me the evening before.
My father said, “The school principal is a powerful man, and I am sure he will be finding ways of lighting a fire under us. I don't know how I can tell him. I don't know how I can face him. It's easy enough for you to talk of sacrifice. You can leave. You are young. Your mother and I will have to live with the consequences. It will be better, in fact, if you did leave. You wouldn't be allowed to live with a backward here. Have you thought of that?”
And my father was right. It was easy enough for me so far. I wasn't actually living with the woman. That idea became daily more concrete, and it repelled me more and more. So I was in a strange position.
For some weeks life went on as before. I lived in my father's government house. I made occasional trips to the image-maker's. I went to work in the Land Tax department. My father was always worried about the school principal, but nothing happened.
One day the messenger said to me, “The Chief Inspector wants to see you.”
The Chief Inspector had a pile of folders on his desk. I recognised some of them. He said, “If I tell you that you've been recommended for another promotion, would it surprise you?”
“No. Yes. But I am not qualified. I can't cope with these promotions.”
“That's what I feel, too. I've been going through some of your work. I am bewildered by it. Documents have been destroyed, receipts thrown away.”
I said, “I don't know. Some vandal.”
“I think I should tell you right away. You are being investigated for corruption. There have been complaints by senior officials. It's a serious matter, corruption. You can go to jail. RI, rigorous imprisonment. There is enough in these files to convict you.”
I went to the girl at the image-maker's. She was the only person I could talk to.
She said, “You were on the side of the cheats?” It seemed to please her.
“Well, yes. I didn't think they were ever going to find out. There's so much paper in that place. They could cook up any kind of case against anybody. The college principal is against me, I should tell you. He wanted me to marry his daughter.”
The girl understood the situation right away. I didn't have to say any more. She made all the connections.
She said, “I will get my uncle to take out a procession.”
Uncle, procession: a mob of backwards carrying their crude banners and shouting my name outside the palace and the secretariat. I said, “No, no. Please don't have a procession.”
She insisted. Her blood was up. She said, “He's a
The thought of being protected by the firebrand was unbearable. And I knew that—after all the blows I had dealt him—it would have killed my father. And that was when, caught between the girl and the school principal, the firebrand and the threat of imprisonment, caught between the devil and the deep blue sea in every direction, as you might say, I began to think of running away. I began to think of taking sanctuary in the famous old temple in the town. Like my grandfather. At this moment of supreme sacrifice I fell, as if by instinct, into old ways.
I made my preparations secretly. There was not much to prepare. The hardest thing to do was to shave my head clean. And very early one morning, like the Lord Buddha leaving the revels of his father's palace, I left my father's house and, dressed like a man of my caste, I walked barefooted and barebacked to the temple. My father had never worn shoes. I had always worn them, except on certain religious occasions, and the soles of my feet were thin-skinned and soft, without my father's pads. Soon they were very tender, and I wondered what they would be like when the sun came up and the paving stones of the temple courtyard became hot.
Like my grandfather all those years ago I moved about the courtyard during the day to avoid the sun. After the prayers in the evening I was offered food. And when the time was ripe I declared myself a mendicant to the temple priests, and claimed sanctuary, letting them know my ancestry at the same time. I made no attempt to hide. The temple courtyard was as public as the main road. I thought that the more the public saw me, the more they got to know about my life of sacrifice, the greater was my security. But my case was not very well known, and it actually took some time, three or four days, for my presence in the temple to be known, and for the scandal to break out.
The school principal and the officials of the Land Tax department were about to pounce when the firebrand took out a procession. Everybody became very frightened. Nobody touched me. And that was how, to my mortification and sorrow, and with every kind of grief for my father and our past, I became part of the cause of the backwards.
This lasted for two or three weeks. I didn't know how to move, and had no idea where the whole thing was going to end. I had no idea how long I would last in that strange situation. The government lawyers were at work, and I knew that if it wasn't for the firebrand, no amount of sanctuary was going to save me from the courts. It occurred then to me to do as the mahatma had done at some stage: to take a vow of silence. It suited my temperament, and it also seemed the least complicated way out. The news of this vow of silence spread. Simple people who had come from afar to pay their respects to the temple deity would now also stop off to pay their respects to me. I became at once a holy man and, because of the firebrand and his niece outside, a political cause.
My case became almost as well known as that of a scoundrelly lawyer in another state, a jumped-up backward called Madhavan. That insolent fellow—going against all custom and decency—had insisted on walking past a temple while the priests were doing a long and taxing set of religious ceremonies. If you made one small mistake during those particular ceremonies you had to go back to the beginning. On such occasions it was better for backwards with their distracting babble to be out of the way, and the whole temple street was of course closed to them.
Elsewhere in the country they were talking of Gandhi and Nehru and the British. Here in the maharaja's state
