Srinivas wended his way home through the dark, ill-lit lanes. Ravi followed him silently. ‘Isn’t it very late for you?’ Srinivas asked. ‘It is all the same,’ the other remarked. ‘I really enjoyed being in your office. In fact, I love this whole place.’ He pointed at the soft stabs of feeble, flickering light emanating from door chinks and the windows of humble homes, the only light available here, since the municipal lighting stopped at Market Road. ‘I like this lighting. I feel like doing an entire picture with half-lights and shadows some day; I don’t know when.’
His aged mother waited at the door anxiously. ‘Ravi!’ she exclaimed anxiously. ‘Why are you so late?’ His youngest brother and sister clung to his arms as he turned into his portion of the house without a word.
With a copy of the latest Banner rolled in his hand Srinivas entered his home. His wife sat by the lamplight reading her novel. He held his latest copy to her with the remark: ‘I hope you will find something to interest you at least this week.’ She hastily opened it, ran her eyes through and put it away with: ‘I will read it later,’ and she went in to get his dinner ready. She had accommodated herself to his habits fairly well now, and accepted his hours without much grumbling. But she was an uncompromising critic of his journal. She always glanced through the copy he brought in and said: ‘Why don’t you put in something to interest us?’
‘If you keep on reading it, you will find it interesting,’ he said, and loathed himself for appearing to be so superior. He felt that in all the welter of economic, municipal, social and eternal questions he was threshing out he was making the journal somewhat heavy and that he was putting himself one remove from his public. This was a pathological mood that seized him now and then, whenever he thought of his journal. He was never very happy on the day his journal came out. He ate his dinner silently ruminating over it. His wife stooped over his leaf to serve him. She had fried potato chips in ghee for him and some cucumber soaked in curd; she had spent the day in the excitement of preparing these and was now disappointed to see him take so little notice of them. She watched him for a moment as he mechanically picked up the bits and stuffed them into his mouth. He was thinking: ‘There is some deficiency in The Banner. I wish I knew what it was. Something makes it not quite acceptable to the people for whom it is intended. There is a lot of truth in my wife’s complaint.’ She watched him for a moment and asked: ‘Do you remember what you have just been eating?’ He came to himself with a start and smiled uncomfortably. She could not be put off with that. She insisted: ‘Tell me what you have eaten off that corner.’ He looked at the corner of the leaf helplessly and answered: ‘Some fried stuff’ ‘Yes – what vegetable?’ He puckered his brow in an effort to recollect. He knew how much it would hurt his wife. He felt rather pained. ‘I’m sorry, I was thinking of something else. Was it raw plantain?’
She lightly patted her brow with her hand and said: ‘Raw plantain! What an irony! Here I have spent the whole evening ransacking my money-box and procuring you potato for frying, and you see no difference between it and raw plantain. Why should we take all this trouble if it makes so little difference?’ He looked up at her. By the dim light he saw that her face was slightly flushed. Clearly she was annoyed at his indifference. He felt angry with himself. ‘I don’t know the art of family life. There is something lacking in me as in the journal, which leaves a feeling of dissatisfaction in people’s minds.’ He saw that unless he was careful he might irritate her. He merely said: ‘Don’t make much of all this,’ and cut her short. He went through his meal silently, washed his hands, sat down on his mat with The Banner held close to a lamp; he glanced through it again, line by line, in order to decide what changes he should adopt for the next issue. A corner of his brain was noticing the noise in the kitchen: his wife scrubbing the floor, the clanking of vessels being restored to their places, and the blowing out of the kitchen lamp and finally the shutting of the kitchen door. She paused before him for a moment and then went to her bed and lay down beside their sleeping son. Srinivas noted it and felt pity for her. He viewed her life as it was: a lonely, bare life. He had not the slightest notion how she was spending her days: she probably spent them awaiting his return from the office. She was justified if she felt her grievances were there. ‘I have neglected her lately. It seems ages since I touched her, for when all is said and done a husband – wife relationship is peculiar to itself, being the most tactile of all human relationships. Perhaps she is wilting away without the caress and the silly idiom softly whispered in the ear.’ He hesitated for a moment, undecided whether to follow up this realization. But he put away the question for the moment to finish the work on hand, and reached out for a tablet on which to note down his points.
Srinivas decided to spend the next day completely at home. The day after the issue of the journal must be a holiday. ‘I must remember I’m a family man,’ he told himself. Next morning he surprised his wife by lying on in bed. His wife woke him up at seven-thirty. ‘Don’t you have to get up?’
‘No, my dear sir!’ he said. ‘It is a holiday. I won’t go near the office today.’ She let out a quiet little cry of happiness. ‘Will you be at home all day?’
‘Absolutely.’ She called: ‘Ramu, Ramu,’ and their little son came in from somewhere. ‘What is it, Mother?’
‘Your father is not going to his office today.’
‘Why, Father?’ he asked, looking at him dubiously. Srinivas had no ready answer to give. He was really very pleased to see the effect of his decision. ‘Well, now run off; I will sleep for half an hour more and then you will know.’
The boy picked up his top and string and ran out again. Srinivas shut his eyes and let himself drown in the luxury of inactivity. Mixed sounds reached him – his wife in the kitchen, his son’s voice far off, arguing with a friend, the clamour of assertions and appeals at the water-tap, a pedlar woman crying ‘Brinjals and greens’ in the street – all these sounds mingled and wove into each other. Following each one to its root and source, one could trace it to a human aspiration and outlook. ‘The vegetable-seller is crying because in her background is her home and children whose welfare is moulded by the amount of brinjals she is able to scatter into society, and there now somebody is calling her and haggling with her. Some old man very fond of them, some schoolboy making a wry face over the brinjal, diversity of tastes, the housewife striking the greatest measure of agreement, and managing thus – seeing in the crier a welcome solution to her problems of house-keeping, and now trying to give away as little of her money as possible in exchange – therein lies her greatest satisfaction. What great human forces meet and come to grips with each other between every sunrise and sunset!’ Srinivas was filled with great wonder at the multitudinousness and vastness of the whole picture of life that this presented; tracing each noise to its source and to its conclusion back and forth, one got a picture, which was too huge even to contemplate. The vastness and infiniteness of it stirred Srinivas deeply. ‘That’s clearly too big, even for contemplation,’ he remarked to himself, ‘because it is in that total picture we perceive God. Nothing else in creation can ever assume such proportions and diversity. This indeed ought to be religion. Alas, how I wish I could convey a particle of this experience to my readers. There are certain thoughts which are strangled by expression. If only people could realize what immense schemes they are components of!’ At this moment he heard over everything else a woman’s voice saying: ‘I will kill that dirty dog if he comes near the tap again.’
‘If you speak about my son’s dog I will break your pot,’ another voice cried. ‘Get away both – I’ve been here for half an hour for a glass of water.’ Now they formed to him a very different picture. A man’s voice ordered: ‘I will remove this tap if you are all going to –’ It was the voice of the old landlord and quietened the people. One heard only the noise of water falling in a pot. Next moment the old man appeared in the doorway, peeped in and called: ‘Mister Srinivas. Oh, still sleeping? Not keeping well?’ He wal
ked up to Srinivas lying in bed and stood over him: ‘I thought you would be getting ready to go out.’ He sat down on the floor, beside his bed, and said: ‘I tell you, I sometimes feel I ought to lock up all my houses and send away all those people. They seem to be so unworthy of any consideration.’
‘What consideration do you show them?’
‘I’ve given them a water-tap which they have not learnt to use without tearing each other. I sometimes feel so sick of seeing all these crudities that I blame God for keeping me in this world so long.’
‘If it makes you so sick, why don’t you put up a couple of taps more?’
‘Give them twenty more taps, they would still behave in the same manner,’ he said irrelevantly. ‘I have known days when people managed without any tap at all; there used to be only a single well for a whole village. It doesn’t depend upon that, but people have lost all neighbourliness in these days, that is all.’ He went on with further generalizations. Srinivas felt that it would be useless to remain in bed any longer; he got up, rolled up his bed, and picked his green-handled toothbrush and paste from a little wall-shelf and unscrewed the toothpaste top. The old man remarked: ‘What is the world coming to? Everybody has taken a fancy to these toothbrushes; they are made of pig’s tail, I’m told. Why should we orthodox, pure Aryans go in for these things? Have you ever tried Margosa or Banyan twigs? They are the best and they were not fools who wrote about them in the shastras. They knew more science than any of us today – you see my teeth.’ He bared his teeth. ‘How do you like them?’
‘Most of them are missing,’ Srinivas said.
‘Never mind the missing ones, but they stayed long enough when they did. And do you know what I’ve used?’ Srinivas didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence, but made his way towards the bathroom.
He stayed in the bathroom just a little longer, hoping that the old man would have left by then. But he found him still there when he returned, sitting just as he had left him. He came rubbing a towel over his face, and the old man asked: ‘What are these towels, looking like some hairy insect? Must be very costly.’
‘H’m, yes, if you are still thinking of your own days,’ said Srinivas.
‘You are right. Do you know, I used to buy twenty towels to a rupee, the Malayalam variety? I’m still using some of them I bought in those days.’
‘It was due to bargains like yours that no industry ever found it possible to raise its head in our country.’
‘You are right,’ said the old man without comprehending the other’s statement. ‘They should not try to rob us of all we have with their prices.’ Srinivas moved to the window-sill, on which was fixed a small looking glass; there was a small wooden comb beside it. He ran it through his greying hair mechanically as by immemorial custom, wondering what comment this was going to provoke in the old man. It was not long in coming. He said with a cynical leer: ‘Fancy men parting and combing their hair like women! How beautiful and manly it was in those days when at your age you had only a very small tuft and shaved off the head. That’s why people in those days were so clear-headed.’
‘Yes, but we don’t get the same amount of co-operation from our barbers these days. That is the worst of it,’ said Srinivas. ‘And so we are compelled to go from stupidity to stupidity.’
‘The old man laughed at the joke and said: You have not yet asked my purpose in visiting you today.’ ‘Just a minute,’ Srinivas said and went into their small kitchen. His wife was at the little oven, frying a rice-cake. Her eyes seemed swollen with smoke. But she seemed to be in great spirits. She was sitting with her back to him, humming a tune to herself as she turned the cake. The place was fragrant with the smell of burning ghee. Srinivas stood in the doorway for a moment and listened. ‘That is a nice bit of singing,’ he said. She turned to him with a smile. ‘I’m making these cakes for you. Don’t drink up your coffee yet.’ He had never been given tiffin in the morning except today, and he understood that she was celebrating his holiday. He was disturbed for a moment by the thought that his holiday pleased her so much more than his working – when all his pride and seriousness were bestowed on the latter. ‘Your meal will be late today,’ she explained. ‘I’m going to give you Aviyal for your dinner; Ramu has gone out to the market to buy the vegetables for it.’ A stew of over a dozen vegetables; Srinivas was very fond of it: his mother used to feed him with it whenever he came home during vacation in those days: how the girl remembered his particular taste in all these things and with what care she tended him now. He was touched for a moment. ‘But all this puts an additional burden on one in life,’ he told himself. He asked: ‘I’ve a guest; can you manage some coffee for him?’
‘Yes, who is he?’ He held the door slightly open for her to see through. ‘Oh, that man!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why has he come? Have you not paid the rent?’ She added: ‘Not enough coffee for two.’ Srinivas said: ‘Hush! Don’t be so cantankerous. Poor fellow! Put out the sitting-planks.’
The old man was overjoyed when he heard the invitation. He became nearly incoherent with joy. He was torn between the attraction of the offer and shyness. For the first time Srinivas observed that the man could be moved by shyness. ‘No, no, I never eat anywhere. Oh, don’t trouble yourself about it … No, no …’ he said, but all the same got up and followed Srinivas into the kitchen. He grinned affably at Srinivas’s wife and commented flatteringly: ‘I have always told a lot of people to come and observe this lady for a model. How well she looks after the house. I wish modern girls were all like her.’ Srinivas gently propelled him to a plank, on which he sat down. He observed from his wife’s face that she was pleased with the compliment, and Srinivas felt that the old man’s coffee was now assured him. His wife came out with a tumbler of water and two leaves and set them in front of them. She then served a couple of cakes on each leaf, and the old man rubbed his hands with the joy of anticipation. At a signal from Srinivas he fell to; and Srinivas wondered how long it was since the other had had any food. ‘What do you eat at nights?’ he asked testingly. The old man tore off a piece of cake and stuffed it in his mouth and swallowed it before he answered, shaking his head: ‘I’m not a youth. Time was when I used to take three meals a day – three full meals a day in addition to tiffin twice a day. Do you know –’
‘That’s remarkable,’ agreed Srinivas admiringly. ‘But now what do you do?’
‘I’m a Sanyasi, my dear young man – and no true Sanyasi should eat more than once a day,’ he said pompously. He ate the cakes with great relish. When a tumbler of coffee was placed beside him he looked lovingly at it and said: ‘As a Sanyasi I have given up coffee completely, but it is a sin not to accept something offered,’ he said.
‘You are right,’ Srinivas replied, and added: ‘So drink it up now.’ The old man raised the tumbler, tilted back his head, and poured the fluid down his throat; he put down the tumbler and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He shook his head appreciatively and murmured: ‘If somebody is going to make coffee as good as this, it will prove very difficult for people like me to who wish give it up.’ Srinivas’s wife acknowledged the compliment with a smile and asked, half peeping out of the doorway: ‘When are you going to give us another tap?’
‘Oh!’ cried the old man. ‘How many people ask me this question every morning!’
‘I have to fill up every vessel at three in the morning, and even then people try to be there earlier,’ she said. The old man made a noise of sympathy, clicking his tongue, got to his feet and passed on to the washing-room without a word. After cleaning his hands and face he went on to the front room and sat down on the mat. Srinivas still sat on the plank, saying something to his wife, and the old man’s voice reached him from the hall. ‘Just one small piece of areca-nut, please; cannot do without it after eating anything – one bad habit which I’m not able to conquer …’
Srinivas asked his wife: ‘Have you apiece of areca-nut anywhere?’ His wife muttered: ‘The old man is making himself a thorough guest to
day, although he is so indifferent about the water-tap.’ She went over to a cupboard, took out a small wicker-basket and gave Srinivas a pinch of spiced areca-nut. Srinivas transferred it immediately to his mouth. ‘Fine stuff,’ he said.
‘It’s not for you!’ she cried. She handed him another pinch and said: ‘Let him demand them immediately if he wants betel leaves also.’
Srinivas felt himself in a leisurely mood – the sort of relaxation he had never experienced for months now. ‘Even an oven is given its moments of rest to cool,’ he told himself. ‘It’s senseless to go on working and forgoing this delicious feeling of doing nothing,’ he muttered to himself, as he carried the pinch of areca-nut to his guest. The old man sprinkled it on his tongue and shut his eyes in an ecstasy of relish. ‘You don’t want betel leaves and lime or tobacco?’ ‘Oh, no,’ the old man replied with a shudder. ‘Do you want to see me make a fool of myself, with my lips reddened with betel juice at my age!’ He seemed to view it as a deadly sin, and Srinivas left it at that and began to wonder what he should do next. The old man now said, looking up at him, moving away a little on the mat: ‘Won’t you sit down for a moment?’ Srinivas remained silent, wondering if he could conjure up some excuse which might be both truthful and tactful and free him of the other’s company. But the old man followed up: ‘You have not yet asked me what business brought me here so early in the day. I have come here on a definite business.’ Srinivas sat down beside him, leaned on the wall and stretched his legs, saying: ‘Do you mind my stretching before an elder?’ ‘Not at all. It is your house as long as you pay the rent regularly,’ he replied. He bent over and said: ‘Do you know, I have a granddaughter of marriageable age?’