Half a Life Read online

  One day not long after he said, in as gentle a way as he could (it wasn't easy for him to talk gently to this boy), “We have to think of your higher education, Willie. You mustn't be like me.”

  Willie said, “Why do you say that? You are pretty pleased with what you do.”

  His father didn't take up the provocation. He said, “I responded to the mahatma's call. I burnt my English books in the front courtyard of the university.”

  Willie Chandran's mother said, “Not many people noticed.”

  “You can say what you please. I burnt my English books and I didn't get a degree. All I'm saying now, if I'm allowed, is that Willie should get a degree.”

  Willie said, “I want to go to Canada.”

  His father said, “For me it's been a life of sacrifice. I have earned no fortune. I can send you to Benares or Bombay or Calcutta or even Delhi. But I can't send you to Canada.”

  “The fathers will send me.”

  “Your mother has put this low idea in your head. Why would the fathers want to send you to Canada?”

  “They will make me a missionary.”

  “They will turn you into a little monkey and send you right back here to work with your mother's family and the other backwards. You are a fool.”

  Willie Chandran said, “You think so?” And put an end to the discussion.

  A few days later the exercise book was on the verandah table. Willie Chandran's father didn't hesitate. He flicked through the red-ticked pages to the last composition.

  It was a story. It was the longest thing in the book and it looked as though it had been written at a great rate. The fast, small, pressing-down handwriting had crinkled every page, and the teacher with the red pen had liked it all, sometimes drawing a red vertical line in the margin and giving one tick to a whole paragraph or page.

  The story was set, like Willie's other stories or fables, in an undefined place, at an undated time. It began at a time of famine. Even the brahmins were affected. A starving brahmin, all skin and bones, decides to leave his community and go elsewhere, into the hot rocky wilderness, to die alone, with dignity. Near the limit of his strength, he finds a low dark cavern in a cliff and decides to die there. He purifies himself as best he can and settles down to sleep for the last time. He rests his wasted head on a rock. Something about the rock irritates the brahmin's neck and head. He reaches back to touch the rock with his hand, once, twice, and then he knows that the rock isn't a rock. It is a hard grimy sack of some sort, full of ridges, and when the brahmin sits up he discovers that the rock is really a very old sack of treasure.

  As soon as he makes the discovery a spirit calls out to him, “This treasure has been waiting for you for centuries. It is yours to keep, and will be yours forever, on condition that you do something for me. Do you accept?” The trembling brahmin says, “What must I do for you?” The spirit says, “Every year you must sacrifice a fresh young child to me. As long as you do that, the treasure will stay with you. If you fail, the treasure will vanish and return here. Over the centuries there have been many before you, and all have failed.” The brahmin doesn't know what to say. The spirit says with irritation, “Dying man, do you accept?” The brahmin says, “Where will I find the children?” The spirit says, “It is not for me to give you help. If you are resolute enough you will find a way. Do you accept?” And the brahmin says, “I accept.” The spirit says, “Sleep, rich man. When you awaken you will be in your old temple and the world will be at your feet. But never forget your pledge.”

  The brahmin awakens in his old home and finds himself well fed and sturdy. He also awakens to the knowledge that he is rich beyond the dreams of avarice. And almost immediately, before he can savour his joy, the thought of his pledge begins to torment him. The torment doesn't go away. It corrupts all his hours, all the minutes of all the hours.

  One day he sees a group of tribal people passing in front of the temple compound. They are black and small, bony from starvation, and almost naked. Hunger has driven these people from their habitations and made them careless of old rules. They should not pass so close to the temple because the shadow of these people, their very sight, even the sound of their voices, is polluting. The brahmin has an illumination. He finds out where the tribal encampment is. He goes there at night with his face hidden by his shawl. He seeks out the headman and in the name of charity and religion he offers to buy one of the half-dead tribal children. He makes this deal with the tribal headman: the child is to be drugged and taken to a certain low cave in the rocky wilderness and left there. If this is fairly and honestly done, a week later the tribal man will find a piece of old treasure in the cave, enough to take all his followers out of their distress.

  The sacrifice is done, the piece of old treasure laid down; and from year to year this ritual goes on, for the brahmin, and for the tribals.

  One year the headman, now better fed and better dressed, with shiny oiled hair, comes to the brahmin's temple. The brahmin is rough. He says, “Who are you?” The headman says, “You know me. And I know you. I know what you are up to. I have known all along. I recognised you that first night and understood everything. I want half your treasure.” The brahmin says, “You know nothing. I know that for fifteen years you and your tribe have been carrying out child-sacrifice in a certain cave. It is part of your tribal ways. Now that you have all prospered and become townsmen you are ashamed and frightened. So you have come and confessed to me and asked for my understanding. I have given you that, because I understand your tribal ways, but I cannot say I am not horrified, and if I choose I can lead anyone to the cave with the bones of many children. Now get out. Your hair is oiled, but your very shadow pollutes this sacred place.” The headman cringes and backs away. He says, “Forgive, forgive.” The brahmin says, “And don't forget your pledge.”

  The time comes for the brahmin's annual sacrifice. He makes his way at night to the cave of bones. He turns over and polishes every kind of story in case the tribal chief has informed on him and people are waiting for him. No one is waiting. He is not surprised. In the dark cave there are two drugged children. The headman has, after all, behaved well. With a practised hand the brahmin sacrifices the two to the spirit of the cave. When he comes to burn the little corpses he sees by the light of his wood torch that they are his own children.

  This was where the story ended. Willie's father had read without skipping. And when, mechanically, he turned back to the beginning he saw—what he had forgotten during the reading—that the story was called “A Life of Sacrifice.”

  He thought, “His mind is diseased. He hates me and he hates his mother, and now he's turned against himself. This is what the missionaries have done to him with Mom and Pop and Dick Tracy and the Justice Society of America comic magazine, and Christ on the Cross movies in Passion Week, and Bogart and Cagney and George Raft the rest of the time. I cannot deal rationally with this kind of hatred. I will deal with it in the way of the mahatma. I will ignore it. I will keep a vow of silence so far as he is concerned.”

  Two or three weeks later the boy's mother came to him and said, “I wish you would break that vow of silence. It is making Willie very unhappy.”

  “The boy is lost. There is nothing I can do for him.” She said, “You have to help him. No one else can. Two days ago I found him sitting in the dark. When I put the light on I saw he was crying. I asked him why. He said, ‘I just feel that everything in the world is so sad. And it is all that we have. I don't know what to do.' I didn't know what to say to him. It's something he gets from your side. I tried to comfort him. I told him that everything would be all right, and he would go to Canada. He said he didn't want to go to Canada. He didn't want to be a missionary. He didn't even want to go back to the school.”

  “Something must have happened at the school.”

  “I asked him. He said he went to the principal's office for something. There was a magazine on the table. It was a missionary magazine. There was a colour picture on the cover. A priest w
ith glasses and a wristwatch was standing with one foot on a statue of the Buddha. He had just chopped it down with an axe, and he was smiling and leaning on the axe like a lumberjack. I used to see magazines and pictures like that when I was at the school. It didn't worry me. But when Willie saw the picture he felt ashamed for himself. He felt the fathers had been fooling him all these years. He was ashamed that he ever wanted to be a missionary. All he really wanted was to go to Canada and get away from here. Until he saw that picture he didn't know what missionary work was.”

  “If he doesn't want to go to the mission school he doesn't have to go.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  “The mission school was your idea.”

  So Willie Chandran stopped going to the mission school. He began to idle at home.

  His father saw him one day asleep face down, a closed copy of a school edition of The Vicar of Wakefield beside him, his feet crossed, the red soles much lighter than the rest of him. There was such unhappiness and such energy there that he was overwhelmed with pity. He thought, “I used to think that you were me and I was worried at what I had done to you. But now I know that you are not me. What is in my head is not in yours. You are somebody else, somebody I don't know, and I worry for you because you are launched on a journey I know nothing of.”

  Some days later he sought out Willie and said, “I have no fortune, as you know. But if you want, I will write to some of the people I know in England and we'll see what they can do for you.”

  Willie was pleased but he didn't show it.

  The famous writer after whom Willie was named was now very old. After some weeks a reply came from him from the south of France. The letter, on a small sheet of paper, was professionally typewritten, in narrow lines with a lot of clear space. Dear Chandran, It was very nice getting your letter. I have nice memories of the country, and it is nice hearing from Indian friends. Yours very sincerely … There was nothing in the letter about Willie. It was as though the old writer hadn't understood what was being asked of him. There would have been secretaries. They would have stood in the way. But Willie Chandran's father was disappointed and ashamed. He resolved not to tell Willie, but Willie had a good idea of what had happened: he had seen the letter with the French stamp arrive.

  There was no reply from a famous wartime broadcaster who had come out to India to cover independence and partition and the assassination of the mahatma, and had been exceptionally friendly. Some people who replied were direct. They said they couldn't do anything. Some sent long friendly replies that, like the writer's, ignored the request for help.

  Willie's father tried to be philosophical, but it wasn't easy. He said to his wife—though it was his rule to keep his depressions to himself—“I did so much for them when they came here. I gave them the run of the ashram. I introduced them to everybody.” His wife said, “They did a lot for you too. They gave you your business. You can't deny it.” He thought, “I will never talk to her about these matters again. I was wrong to break my rule. She is quite without shame. She is a backward through and through. Eating my salt and abusing me.”

  He wondered how he would break the bad news to Willie. Now that he had understood the boy's weakness, he didn't worry about the scorn. But—still a little to his surprise—he didn't want to add to the boy's suffering. He couldn't forget the picture of the ambitious, defeated boy sleeping face down with the dead old school text of The Vicar of Wakefield beside him, his feet crossed, feet as dark as his mother's.

  But he was spared the humiliation of an all-round refusal. There came a letter in a blue envelope from London, from the House of Lords, from a famous man who had paid a brief visit to the ashram just after independence. His fame and his title had made him memorable to Willie Chandran's father. The big and fluent handwriting on the blue House of Lords paper spoke of power and display, and what was in the letter matched the handwriting. It had pleased the great man to display his power to Willie's father, to win gratitude and merit in that far-off corner, to wave a wand, to lift a little finger, as it were (all the other fingers being busy about greater matters), and set many little men in motion. The letter contained a little of the gold the little men had spun: a place and a scholarship had been found for Willie Chandran in a college of education for mature students in London.

  And that was how, when he was twenty, Willie Chandran, the mission-school student who had not completed his education, with no idea of what he wanted to do, except to get away from what he knew, and yet with very little idea of what lay outside what he knew, only with the fantasies of the Hollywood films of the thirties and forties that he had seen at the mission school, went to London.

  *

  HE WENT BY SHIP. And everything about the journey so frightened him—the size of his own country, the crowds in the port, the number of ships in the harbour, the confidence of the people on the ship—that he found himself unwilling to speak, at first out of pure worry, and then, when he discovered that silence brought him strength, out of policy. So he looked without trying to see and heard without listening; and yet later— just as after an illness it may be possible for someone to recall everything he had at the time only half noticed—he was to find that he had stored up all the details of that stupendous first crossing.

  He knew that London was a great city. His idea of a great city was of a fairyland of splendour and dazzle, and when he got to London and began walking about its streets he felt let down. He didn't know what he was looking at. The little booklets and folders he picked up or bought at Underground stations didn't help; they assumed that the local sights they were writing about were famous and well understood; and really Willie knew little more of London than the name.

  The only two places he knew about in the city were Buckingham Palace and Speakers' Corner. He was disappointed by Buckingham Palace. He thought the maharaja's palace in his own state was far grander, more like a palace, and this made him feel, in a small part of his heart, that the kings and queens of England were impostors, and the country a little bit of a sham. His disappointment turned to something like shame—at himself, for his gullibility—when he went to Speakers' Corner. He had heard of this place in the general knowledge class at the mission school and he had written knowingly about it in more than one end-of-term examination. He expected big, radical, shouting crowds, like those his mother's uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, used to address. He didn't expect to see an idle scatter of people around half a dozen talkers, with the big buses and the cars rolling indifferently by all the time. Some of the talkers had very personal religious ideas, and Willie, remembering his own home life, thought that the families of these men might have been glad to get them out of the house in the afternoons.

  He turned away from the depressing scene and began to walk down one of the paths beside Bayswater Road. He walked without seeing, thinking of the hopelessness of home and his own nebulous present. All at once, in the most magical way, he was lifted out of himself. He saw, walking towards him on the path, half leaning on the stick he carried, a man famous beyond imagining, and now casual and solitary and grand among the afternoon strollers. Willie looked hard. All kinds of old attitudes awakened in him—the very attitudes of some of the people who came to the ashram just to gaze on his father— and he felt ennobled by the sight and presence of the great man.

  The man was tall and slender, very dark and striking, in a formal charcoal double-breasted suit that emphasised his slen-derness. His crinkly hair was combed back flat above a long, narrow face with an amazing hawk-like nose. Every detail of the man approaching him answered the photographs Willie knew. It was Krishna Menon, the close friend of Mr. Nehru, and India's spokesman in international forums. He was looking down as he walked, preoccupied. He looked up, saw Willie, and out of a clouded face flashed him a friendly satanic smile. Willie had never expected to be acknowledged by the great man. And then, before he could work out what to do, he and Krishna Menon had crossed, and the dazzling moment was over.

&n
bsp; A day or so later, in the little common room of the college, he saw in a newspaper that Krishna Menon had passed through London on his way to New York and the United Nations. He had stayed at Claridge's hotel. Willie looked at maps and directories and worked out that Krishna Menon might simply have walked that afternoon from the hotel to the park, to think about the speech he was soon going to make. The speech was to be about the invasion of Egypt by Britain and France and others.

  Willie knew nothing about that invasion. The invasion had apparently been caused by the nationalisation of the Suez Canal, and Willie knew nothing about that either. He knew, from his school geography lessons, about the Suez Canal; and one of the Hollywood movies they had shown at the mission school was Suez. But in Willie's mind neither his school geography nor Suez was strictly real. Neither had to do with the here and now; neither affected him or his family or his town; and he had no idea of the history of the canal or Egypt. He knew the name of Colonel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, but it was only in the way he knew about Krishna Menon: he knew about the greatness of the man without knowing about the deeds. At home he had read the newspapers, but he read them in his own way. He had learned to shut out the main stories, the ones about far-off wars or election campaigns in the United States that meant nothing to him and went on week after week and were slow and repetitive and then ended, very often quite lamely, giving, like a bad book or movie, nothing or very little for much effort and attention. So, just as on the ship Willie was able to watch without seeing and hear without listening, Willie at home for many years read the newspapers without taking in the news. He knew the big names; very occasionally he looked at the main headline; but that was all.

  Now, after his sight of Krishna Menon in the park, he was amazed at how little he knew of the world around him. He said, “This habit of non-seeing I have got from my father.” He began to read about the Egyptian crisis in the newspapers, but he didn't understand what he read. He knew too little about the background, and newspaper stories were like serials; it was necessary to know what had gone before. So he began to read about Egypt in the college library, and he floundered. It was like moving very fast and having no fixed markers to give an idea of position and speed. His ignorance seemed to widen with everything he read. He turned in the end to a cheap history of the world published during the war. This he could hardly understand. It was as with the leaflets about London in the Underground stations: the book assumed that the reader already knew about famous events. Willie thought he was swimming in ignorance, had lived without a knowledge of time. He remembered one of the things his mother's uncle used to say: that the backwards had been shut out for so long from society that they knew nothing of India, nothing of the other religions, nothing even of the religion of the people of caste, whose serfs they were. And he thought, “This blankness is one of the things I have got from my mother's side.”