The Householder (16 page)

‘How true!' Prem cried with pleasure. It was not a problem he had ever really considered, but now that he heard it stated like this, he at once gave it his enthusiastic assent.

But the angry young man said, ‘You make everything too simple.'

The swami smilingly bowed his head. He looked ready and even glad to listen to a rebuke, like a father proud to have his opinion corrected by a beloved son. ‘If you make it too simple,' the young man said,' fools will come and sit with gaping mouths, and then afterwards they will set themselves up as teachers and astonish other fools with foolery.'

‘There was once a village headman,' the swami said. Prem moved in closer, so as not to lose a word; his eyes were fixed on the swami's face and there was an expectant smile on his lips. The other young men also drew close, some with their arms clasped round each other's neck. Someone leant his elbow in a carelessly friendly manner on Prem's shoulder. Prem felt proud and happy and stood quite still under the weight of this friendly elbow. ‘It was the time of his son's marriage. He had made a very good match for him with the daughter of a rich man in another village. He was very proud of this match, so much so that when the time came to make preparations for the feasting, he did not consider his friends and relatives good enough to be invited. In the end he invited only the three richest men in his village. But it so happened that on the day they were to set off for the bride's village, all these three sent excuses to say they could not come. So the village headman had to arrive alone with his son, without relatives or friends or supporters. What shame he felt then before the bride's family!'

The angry young man curled his lip and threw back his head; he looked very proud: ‘God shall never want friends,' he said, and his voice too was full of pride.

At that moment the temple bells began to ring, and there was chanting and clashing of cymbals in the temples in the city below. ‘You are right,' the swami said, tenderly looking at the angry young man.

‘No,' said this young man,' that is not what I meant. God does not need temples or priests or bells.'

‘He needs love and a pure heart,' the swami said. His eyes were now very large and brilliant and his lips were parted in a smile. Then he was singing in ecstasy. He sang ‘O God, let me drink you like wine!' Soon others had joined in. They were singing and dancing and clapping their hands in joy. The swami turned round and round in a circle, laughing like a child. The angry young man was on his knees, watching him, and from time to time he threw back his head and gave a burst of happy laughter. Someone had begun to play on a flute, and this music too ascended on spirals of joy. Prem stood by and watched. There was great longing, almost like pain, in his heart. He wanted to join in the dancing, but his limbs felt heavy and fettered. He thought that if he could shake off these fetters, then the longing in his heart too would resolve and he would be free to sing and dance and be happy with the others. His eyes filled with tears when he thought of this, and he trembled with the expectation of happiness.

Indu wrote ‘How are you? I am well. We are all well. Please do not worry at all.' Her handwriting was like that of a child. Prem read the letter several times, and his mother put on her spectacles and scrutinized it with pursed lips. The servant-boy hovered round, anxious for someone to read it out to him. In the end he asked Prem, ‘What does she write?' ‘Is there no work for you in the kitchen?' Prem's mother shouted. The servant-boy disappeared. After some time Prem followed him into the kitchen and said, ‘She says she is well and not to worry.'

He left for college in quite a lighthearted mood. He was not at all embarrassed by the students lounging outside the college and he got through his classes without any difficulty. Afterwards he sat with Sohan Lal in the staff-room, drinking Mrs. Khanna's tea and feeling more contented than he had been since Indu's departure. He told Sohan Lal ‘Today I had a letter from my wife who has gone to stay with her parents'; he said this in a matter-of-fact tone, as if it were an everyday occurrence for him to get a letter from his wife, and indeed a quite ordinary and accepted fact that she should go and stay with her parents. ‘She says she is well,' he added. Sohan Lal sat by sympathetically; he looked ready to listen to a lot more. Prem would like to have told him a lot more, but there was nothing he could put into words. So instead he said, ‘Yesterday I went there.'

An expression of eagerness came on Sohan Lal's face. ‘Really?' he said. ‘What did he say?'

‘He talked about—oh, many things.'

‘He sang? He said the name of God?'

‘Yes.'

‘Ah,' said Sohan Lal with a smile of longing. After a while he said, ‘Who else was there?'

Prem told him about the angry young man. ‘That is Vishvanathan,' Sohan Lal said. ‘Swamiji loves him very much for he knows that Vishvanathan thinks about God so much that he has cut all his ties with the world.'

Prem sighed with admiration. He thought of tall, black Vishvanathan, fierce with love for God, careless and contemptuous of the worldly things other men longed for. ‘How wonderful to see a young man give up everything for God,' he said with shining eyes.

But Sohan Lal looked despondent; and when he spoke it was almost bitterly: ‘What is there so much to give up? Who would not turn to God and take pleasure only in thinking about Him, if he could?' Prem was surprised by the other's tone, which sounded resentful. ‘It is easy for a young man whose marriage has not been made to vow himself to God,' Sohan Lal said. ‘What burdens has he, what responsibilities? He is free to do as he pleases.' Prem nodded in agreement. He was rather embarrassed by Sohan Lal's outburst, which was too unexpected for him to decide how to react to it.

‘Here in our India,' said Sohan Lal, ‘it is so that while we are still children and know nothing of what we want, they take us and tie us up with a wife and children.'

‘True,' said Prem, nodding sagely.

‘So that when we are old enough to know what the world is and what God is, then it is too late, for we have a burden on our back which we cannot shake off for the rest of our days.'

Prem tried to look wise; but he did not feel particularly stirred by Sohan Lal's words. He could not help admitting to himself that he rather liked his burden, which was Indu. He thought of her letter with the child's handwriting and felt like smiling to himself.

He soon returned to thoughts of how to support his family. He lay on his bed at home, under the two cupids, and frowned with anxiety. But the anxiety was deliberate and he enjoyed it. It made him feel responsible. He thought about asking Mr. Khanna for a rise in salary and about asking Mr. Seigal for a reduction in rent. He told himself that both these tasks must be achieved before Indu returned. Then he got up and opened the drawer and took out the piece of pink satin. He folded and refolded it to feel its softness. She would sit on the floor and sew it into a blouse for herself; and on special occasions—on occasions when she wore her jewellery and her platform-sole shoes and jasmine in her hair—she would put it on and it would fit tight and gleaming over her breasts. He smiled to himself and shut the drawer. Then he got back to serious thoughts.

After a while he came out into the sitting-room and found his mother sitting on her bed, telling her beads and saying God's name. In between she sighed. Prem knew at once that she was thinking more of her own troubles than of God. It had always been like that: prayer stimulated her to dwell on the circumstances of her own life and to regret them. Even on happy occasions, such as a wedding or name-giving ceremony or some other festival when prayers were said, she always reverted to feeling sorry for herself.

Prem distinctly remembered one Diwali, when he was about five years old. They had all gathered in the little prayer-room, he and his father and his mother and his four sisters and an old aunt of his father's who had been staying with them at the time. His mother and the old aunt were lighting the little lights in front of the garlanded image of the goddess Lakshmi, offering rice and sweetmeats and intoning their prayers. The aunt was still chanting lustily, when Prem's mother suddenly clasped her hands before her face and began to sob loudly. Prem was shocked and looked from one person to the other for guidance. His sisters sat straight-backed and stared at the goddess and did not dare move. His father was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief as if he were feeling hot from the burning lights; his face had assumed that pompous look it always had when he was embarrassed. The aunt continued the prayers on her own, and when she had finished, she distributed the sweetmeats among them all. Prem's mother also took one and as she put it in her mouth, she wailed, ‘What is my life? What has become of me?' Prem's father wiped his forehead harder and cleared his throat. The four daughters still stared at the goddess; only their jaws moved as they chewed the sweetmeats. ‘Once I was a child in my parents' house,' Prem's mother sobbed. ‘I was as free of worries as this child here,' and she clasped Prem's head which he jerked away, for he was rather nervous of her in this mood. ‘Now what has become of me?' she cried. No one answered. There was no answer, for everyone knew that she was perfectly contented and even proud to be the wife of a Principal and in charge of a household of her own. And after the prayers were over, she herself seemed to forget her outburst. At any rate, she behaved much as usual and came with them to see the Diwali lights in the town, sitting in the horse-carriage Prem's father had hired for the occasion and apparently enjoying the outing.

After that Prem became used to her bursting into tears in the course of her prayers—indeed, he even expected it. Consequently he was not at all surprised when he heard her deep sigh as she sat on the bed and told her beads; soon she had dropped the rosary into her lap and was wiping tears from her eyes and her cheeks with the end of her sari. ‘What has become of my life?' she sobbed.

But even though he had expected her tears, Prem could not help feeling sorry for her when he actually saw them. He cleared his throat, ran his hand over his hair and wished he could say something to comfort her.

‘What am I today?' his mother said. ‘No one cares for me, no one thinks of me, I am nothing, less than nothing.'

‘We all care for you,' Prem said hoarsely.

His mother covered her face with her sari and sobbed from behind it. ‘Would it not be better for me to be dead?'

‘Why do you speak like that?' Prem mumbled. He hardly dared look at her. Though he had never shown any disrespect towards her, yet he knew he was guilty. He did not need her or want her any more the way he had done before he was married.

‘Why should you care for me? You have your wife now, soon you will have a family—what is your mother to you now?' She wiped at her eyes again. ‘It is so in life. When we are old we are forgotten. No one has need of us any more.'

‘Yesterday I brought a present for you,' Prem said. ‘I wanted it to be a surprise for you.' He went into the bedroom, opened the drawer and took out the piece of pink satin.

Her eyes lit up as soon as she saw it. ‘You brought this for me?' She stroked it, held it up to the light, touched it against her cheek. ‘What is the use of bringing such a thing for an old woman like me?' She held it in front of herself. ‘For your wife you should bring.'

‘I brought it for you.'

One evening he decided he wanted to see Raj again. He felt Raj was now the person with whom he had most in common and he wanted to have a long discussion with him about the problems of family life.

Raj's office was a sub-division of the Ministry of Food. It was housed in a row of barracks, consisting of one room next to the other and with a long narrow veranda running all down the row. The doors and windows were boarded with screens made of scented grass on which water was to be sprinkled to keep the rooms cool; however, the grass was quite dry and the rooms looked hot. Each room was divided into cubicles and they were all crowded with regulation office chairs, steel filing cabinets, tables littered over with odd charts and papers and brimming wire trays, telephones and big old-fashioned typewriters. Among these sat many clerks with their sleeves rolled up high and their foreheads wet with perspiration; from time to time they drank water or wiped their palms with handkerchiefs. The rooms looked close and tense with heat; old fans in inadequate working order creaked slow and lazy from the ceiling, stirring up hot air.

Prem wandered down the stretch of veranda, peering round each grass-screened door to see if he could find Raj. But though all the clerks were rather like Raj, with oiled hair and thin worried faces, none of them actually was he. Prem wondered whether he could ask someone. He hardly dared, for everybody looked hot and bad-tempered; and after one short impatient glance when he first peered in, they took no further notice of him. The peons, who stood lounging outside on the veranda in their khaki uniforms, also took no notice of him; they were either sleeping or carrying on desultory conversation with one another.

Prem lingered on the veranda and felt excluded. All these men were Government servants, graded correctly according to their official standing, with salaries and increments laid down precisely, with so many days sick leave a year, with a dearness allowance and family allowance apportioned to them. They belonged here, among the regulation chairs and tables and grass screens; they had their allotted share in the working of files and ordinances, and when they retired, they were given a pension which was in a fixed and settled ratio to what they had been earning all their working lives.

Prem wanted very much to be one of them. If one succeeded in getting into government service, one's future was settled; there was nothing more to fear. And one belonged somewhere, one was part of something bigger than oneself. That was just what Prem wanted: he felt a great need to be absorbed. He knew that this could never happen to him in Khanna Private College, for Khanna Private College was neither big nor impartial enough. But Government was: it was like a stern kind father who supported his children and demanded nothing in return but their subservience.