The Householder (15 page)

But Hans was still walking around the room in agitation, so at last Prem said shyly from the floor, ‘I am also suffering from this same difficulty.'

Hans stopped pacing, and he squatted down on his haunches in front of Prem. He scanned Prem's face.

‘Yes, I—you see,' but now that it came to confessing, Prem did not know how to.

‘That is interesting, very interesting,' Hans said, his eyes still roaming Prem's face as if he wanted to read secrets there.

Prem looked down and drew invisible patterns on the floor. He wanted to tell Hans, but found it unbearably difficult to do so.

‘Your mind is also fixed too much on the things of the world?'

Prem nodded silently. He swallowed, wanting to define what things they were specifically fixed on, but instead of speaking he cleared his throat. Telling of these things would involve mentioning, or at least referring to, the existence of Indu; and he could not bring himself to that.

‘But for you, an Indian, how easy it is!' Hans cried. ‘By nature you are unworldly. But my nature is so that I thrust outwards to adventure and action——'

‘I am weak,' Prem murmured, sinking his head lower and lower while he continued furiously to draw imaginary patterns.

‘A Westerner's nature is so that he feels he must conquer the world. Can I change my nature so that I can conquer myself? This is what I strive for.'

‘I have not been married very long,' Prem said in what was hardly more than a whisper. ‘Perhaps that is why' but he could not say it further. He tried to force himself. It is my duty to tell, he persuaded himself; he is my friend. ‘I believe very much in friendship,' he said. Hans looked at him attentively, as if he hoped to hear something very wise and true. ‘Friends must share everything. They must not hide anything from each other. Even if they don't like to tell something to their friend, still they must tell it.' Hans continued to look at him with that same expression of attentiveness, his pale eyes eager for knowledge. ‘For instance,' Prem said, ‘I am your friend. But what do you know of me? Only by looking at my face you can learn nothing. If I want you to know me, I must open my heart to you and let you read everything that is there——'

‘I understand you!' Hans cried. ‘Maya! Illusion! You are saying the outward thing, the face, is Illusion, and only what is inside is the Reality! How wise you speak!' He grasped Prem's hands and squeezed them. Admiration shone from his face. Prem, allowing his hands to be squeezed, thought it better not to say anything further. He was embarrassed and also disappointed, but he did not wish to destroy the good impression he had apparently created.

There was still no letter from Indu. Every day he looked for one and every day he was disappointed. He left for the college in the morning with this feeling of disappointment, but returned at lunchtime buoyant with hope because the midday post might have brought a letter. Then he was disappointed again; and in the evening the process was repeated.

Sometimes he got angry and wanted to write her an angry letter. Once he did actually write such a letter. He had set his class a Hindi poem to paraphrase into prose; and while they were busy with this, he took a piece of paper and began to write to Indu. His students shuffled in their seats, sucked their pens and appealed to one another for help. Mr. Chaddha marched up and down in front of his blackboard, with his hands behind his back, lecturing in an important voice on the origins and development of the Congress movement. Prem thought only of his letter. He frowned as he wrote: ‘What harm did I do that you had to run from me without leaving even one note for me, and also no letter have you sent for me? Do I drink spirits or I beat you or perhaps I do not give you sufficient money for your household that you must treat me like this?' The more he wrote the angrier he became. There was perspiration on his forehead and he was biting his lip. He did not notice that his students had finished or had given up and had gathered into groups to play four-on-ace. ‘It is the wife's duty to stay with her husband, when once she has been married to him then she must stay with him and not run home to her parents when this whim comes over her.' It was only when the bell rang to mark the end of the lesson that he remembered his class. He gathered in the exercise they had done, and spoke to them with a severity which was calculated to make up for his previous neglect. His letter he had folded tightly and thrust into his pocket. He did not tell himself that he did not mean to post it, but on his way home he tore it into very small pieces and threw it into the sewage canal.

He spent as much time as his mother would let him lying on the big bed in his bedroom. He looked at the two cupids with their arms and wings entwined at the head of the bed and felt great longing and loneliness. How he had loved this bed, this room. But now it had lost everything; he sniffed the air, but instead of the smell of perspiration, hair-oil and vanilla essence there was only the smell of the disinfectant soap with which his mother had had the floor washed. He opened the drawer and took out the piece of pink satin he had bought, and he stroked it and admired it and put his lips to it. Then he went back to lie on the bed and looked with melancholy eyes at the cupids. Soon his mother would be calling him—‘Son? What are you doing, son?'—and he would have to go and sit with her in the living-room and listen to her talk about Ankhpur and her sons-in-law and the new Principal. And about the servant-boy. Every day she said, ‘He must be told to go.' Every day Prem promised to dismiss him. Yet he never did.

He had always been rather put out by the boy's indifferent, indeed almost contemptuous, attitude towards himself, and there had been a time when he would have dearly liked to get rid of him. But lately—in fact, ever since Indu's departure—he felt that the boy had softened towards him. Not that they ever spoke together or that the boy put himself out to serve Prem. But somehow he made it clear that he no longer regarded Prem as an enemy; and he even managed to suggest that they were allies. Allies against whom and in what common cause Prem did not wish to think. But he did nothing to contradict the tacit suggestion. Thus, when Prem's mother began to scold in the kitchen, the boy would usually come into the room where Prem was sitting and pretend to have some work to do there. He never appealed to Prem for support, indeed he never as much as looked at him; he had his back to him and made idle dusting gestures or rubbed at a stain on the wall. Prem in return pretended not to notice that he was there. It was only when his mother followed from the kitchen and began to abuse the boy in front of Prem, that Prem made a show of joining in the scolding. But he felt that the boy understood that he had to do it, for appearance sake.

His days seemed very dull to Prem. He could get no interest out of the college—everything there was every day so very much the same. He no longer felt even the stirrings of ambition. There seemed no point in being a good teacher in a college where the students were only interested in getting into another, better college. Teaching was a job that had to be got through from eight to five every day in order to enable one to collect a salary on the third of every month. That was the way Sohan Lal and most of the other teachers looked at it. Perhaps they too had started off with high ideals the way he had; maybe they even still held them; but it was, he recognized, impossible to reconcile such ideals with the reality of Khanna Private College.

He thought, vaguely, of looking for another job, in some finer better college where ideals were high and students looked up to their teachers and respected and even revered them, and the teachers loved their students and strove to mould them to the best principles, and the Principal was concerned not with profit but with an ideal of service to youth. But for one thing he did not know where to find such a college, and for another he doubted whether he would be accepted there. He was lucky to have even got into Khanna Private College, for he had only a second-class B.A. and no teaching experience : he knew it was the influence of his father's friends that had placed him here, and perhaps Mr. Khanna's willingness to be satisfied with less than others since the salaries he paid out were also less than those of others.

The question of salary irked Prem less than it had been doing up till now. He even felt too listless to think about it much. And what was the use of thinking about an increase in salary? With Indu away, it was almost as if he had no wife; and with her away, he found it impossible to take the coming of a baby seriously. So the burden of supporting a family, the thought of which had so oppressed him, had lifted from him. But now he missed it. Now that it was gone from him, he craved again for the sensation of being a family man with duties and responsibilities. He thought almost enviously of Raj, who had a wife and daughter to look after, and was frowning and anxious with worrying about how to get the lavatory repaired or pay the school fees in the coming years when his child would have to start going to school. At least with such burdens one was someone—a family man, a member of society, living next to, in rows and colonies with, other such members of society who had the same worries. But Prem—what was he? He was no longer a student living in his father's house: he had lost interest in his mother and in her cooking and in talk of Ankhpur. But what was he instead? Where did he belong? It seemed to him now that he belonged nowhere, was nothing, was nobody.

He became daily more depressed, and it was in this mood that he decided to go and visit the swami again. He was not sure quite what it was he wanted or hoped from the swami, but he felt a quite urgent desire to visit him. He did not tell Sohan Lal of this desire, but went quietly, almost furtively, by himself. He thought he knew exactly where the house was, but when he got into the main bazaar, he found he had forgotten which side street it was they had taken. He tried several, but they all turned out to be the wrong ones. It was confusing, for in each of these narrow alleys were the same cloth stalls Prem had remembered from his first visit, with it seemed the same sleek merchants in fine white muslin clothes sitting on mats inside them, smoking hookahs or writing in large ledgers or only staring out with uninterested eyes. The stalls were all large and prosperous and as calm and peaceful as a drawing-room. But though Prem thought every time that this surely was the one, he could never find the archway leading to the courtyard of the swami's house. There were other doorways and he hopefully went through them, only to find himself once in the precincts of a disused mosque, another time in a large carpenter's workshop, a third time in a nest of squatters who had settled down in the niches of an old house and cluttered up the courtyard with their cooking-fires, their washing, with their battered tins, their useless stubble-chinned old men and hordes of children.

But at last he found it. He passed through one arched and fretted old doorway and then through another, and there he was in the courtyard where the cobbler sat under a tree hammering nails into a shoe. Prem walked up the narrow staircase. Now that he had actually got here, he felt shy. He did not know whether the swami would remember him and, if he did remember him, whether he would not reproach him for having stayed away so long. He wished he had come with Sohan Lal, and he could not understand now why he had felt the need to come thus secretly by himself.

The low arched door which led to the swami's room stood open. Prem peeped in and saw that the room was empty. A few mats lay askew on the floor and there were some flower petals scattered about and trailed across the swami's bed lay a piece of orange-coloured cloth. The room was sweet and heavy with incense, and a little wisp of smoke still came from the last smouldering remains of joss-stick which had been stuck into the window-frame. Altogether the room had an air of only just having been abandoned by a crowd of lively people, though apart from the bed and the mats and a little oblong grey tin trunk under the bed, it was quite empty. Prem climbed farther up the stairs. He was sure they must all be somewhere, so he was not surprised when the last landing brought him on to the roof and there they were.

But what did surprise him was the roof itself, which had been made into a charming garden. The parapet was covered with clusters of red creepers, and there were flowers in pots all round and a little leafy bower under which stood a garlanded image of Vishnu. There was even a tiny ornamental pond built up on stones, with water crystal-clear and many-coloured fish swimming around. The swami in his orange robe was walking up and down the flagged paving with a young man on each side of him and his arms slung around their shoulders. Other young men stood round in groups. It was sunset time, and the sky, which looked very near, had such a strong glow that everything seemed tinted with an orange colour which was just like that of the swami's robe.

The swami recognized Prem at once and said, while Prem was respectfully touching his feet, ‘How do you like our garden?'

‘It is so beautiful,' Prem said eagerly.

‘Yes,' said the swami, and he smiled all round as if he were seeing for the first time how beautiful it was.

A tall handsome young man with a very dark skin and a frown on his face, said impatiently, ‘What need have we of these things?'

The swami turned his smiling face on him: ‘Why not? It is always nice to see how God sports with flowers and fish and birds in his playful mood.'

‘God's place is in my heart,' said the young man severely. ‘What do I care for anything outside of that?'

‘God has many attributes!' called one young man in a challenging tone.

The dark young man turned on him: ‘God has no attributes! He is without shape or Form.'

‘Now we have started,' said another youth in mock despair.

The swami said, ‘But I only want our friend here to enjoy our garden'; and he smiled at Prem, who answered, ‘Oh I enjoy it very much.'

‘What else matters?' said the swami. He turned to the frowning young man and lightly touched his cheek with his finger-tips: ‘Don't be angry with me,' he said in a pleading voice. ‘For some God has attributes, for others He has none, and discussion on this topic can be sharp and everlasting. But in the end all that matters is that we should love Him and enjoy His love.'