My Days (14 page)

I lost sight of this girl suddenly—but found another, a little farther off, standing on the terrace of her home drying her hair—I noticed her at first on my way to the college, and then looked for her constantly on the way to and from; sure enough she would be there, a squat lumpy girl, but I loved her none the less. I think she was a flirt in her own way, ogling at every passer-by—not necessarily only me. I lost interest in her soon and bestowed it on another girl going to Maharani's College, who used to give me a smile and pass on. All this love for someone was necessarily one-sided and unspoken. But it made no difference. It gave me a feeling of enrichment and purpose. Among an inner circle of friends we always discussed girls and indulged in lewd jokes and enjoyed it all immensely. The blind urge to love went to fantastic lengths—I even fell in love with a lady doctor who had come to attend my mother because she spoke a few words to me whenever I greeted her; she was a British lady well past middle age, stout and married. But I saw great possibilities in her and read a significance in every glance. Love, especially one-sided, can know no bounds, physical, racial, of age, or distance. My most impossible infatuation was for a penfriend I had in England; we exchanged letters every week. She sent me her photograph and I sent her mine. I kept her photo in my breast pocket and hoped she did likewise with mine—five thousand miles away; even if I wished to reach her, it would mean a P & O voyage of four weeks. I wrote impassioned love-letters which she rejected outright; she wrote back impersonal letters describing a holiday in Brighton or her latest collection of stamps. Although she protested against the tone of my letters, she never stopped writing, and that seemed to me a hopeful sign. I continued to send her my unmitigated love in every letter, and treasured her cold, impersonal replies and the scent of her stationery for years—until I was married, when I threw them over the wall.

After the false starts, the real thing occurred. In July 1933, I had gone to Coimbatore, escorting my elder sister, and then stayed on in her house. There was no reason why I should ever hurry away from one place to another. I was a free-lance writer and I could work wherever I might be at a particular time. One day, I saw a girl drawing water from the street-tap and immediately fell in love with her. Of course, I could not talk to her. I learned later that she had not even noticed me passing and repassing in front of her while she waited to fill the brass vessels. I craved to get a clear, fixed, mental impression of her features, but I was handicapped by the time factor, as she would be available for staring at only until her vessels filled, when she would carry them off, and not come out again until the next water-filling time. I could not really stand and stare; whatever impression I had of her would be through a side-glance while passing the tap. I suffered from a continually melting vision. The only thing I was certain of was that I loved her, and I suffered the agonies of restraint imposed by the social conditions in which I lived. The tall headmaster, her father, was a friend of the family and often dropped in for a chat with the elders at home while on his way to the school, which was at a corner of our street. The headmaster, headmaster's daughter, and the school were all within geographical reach and hailing distance, but the restraint imposed by the social code created barriers. I attempted to overcome them by befriending the headmaster. He was a book-lover and interested in literary matters, and we found many common subjects for talk. We got into the habit of meeting at his school after the school-hours and discussing the world, seated comfortably on a cool granite
pyol
in front of a little shrine of Ganesha in the school compound. One memorable evening, when the stars had come out, I interrupted some talk we were having on political matters to make a bold, blunt announcement of my affection for his daughter. He was taken aback, but did not show it. In answer to my proposal, he just turned to the god in the shrine and shut his eyes in a prayer. No one in our social condition could dare to proceed in the manner I had done. There were formalities to be observed, and any talk for a marriage proposal could proceed only between the elders of families. What I had done was unheard of. But the headmaster was sporting enough not to shut me up immediately. Our families were known to each other, and the class, community, and caste requirements were all right. He just said, “If God wills it,” and left it at that. He also said, “Marriages are made in Heaven, and who are we to say ‘Yes' or ‘No'?” After this he explained the difficulties. His wife and womenfolk at home were to be consulted, and my parents had to approve, and so on and so forth, and then the matching of horoscopes—this last became a great hurdle at the end. He came down to a practical level one day, by asking me what I proposed to do for a living. Luckily for me, at about that time a small piece that I had written (“How to Write an Indian Novel,” lampooning Western writers who visited India to gather material) had unexpectedly been accepted by
Punch
and brought me six guineas. This was my first prestige publication (the editor rejected everything I sent him subsequently) and it gave me a talking-point with my future father-in-law. I could draw a picture of my free-lance writing for London papers and magazines and explain to him that when my novel was finished it would bring in income all my life and fifty years after. He listened to me with apparent interest, without contradicting me, but off and on suggested, “I'm sure, if your father used his influence, he could fix you in a government job at Bangalore. Won't he try?” This always upset me, and I immediately explained my economic philosophy: how I spurned the idea of earning more than was needed, which would be twenty rupees a month or, with a wife, forty rupees, and I expected my wife to share my philosophy. Not a very politic statement to make to the bewildered and hesitant father of a girl, but I became headstrong in my conviction. However, while it distressed the gentleman it did not materially affect my progress toward matrimony.

What really mattered was not my economic outlook, but my stars. My father-in-law, himself an adept at the study of horoscopes, had consultations with one or two other experts and came to the conclusion that my horoscope and the girl's were incompatible. My horoscope had the Seventh House occupied by Mars, the Seventh House being the one that indicated matrimonial aspects. The astrological texts plainly stated that Mars in the Seventh House indicated nothing but disaster unless the partner's horoscope also contained the same flaw, a case in which two wrongs make one right.

The next few weeks were a trying period for me. The headmaster would have none of me. In very gentle terms he expressed his rejection of me, as also his resignation to such a fate, since he seemed to have been secretly in my favour. I lost the taste for food and company, and lay sulking in a corner of my sister's house on a gloomy easy chair. My mood was noticed by others with sympathy. I think I enjoyed a certain amount of self-dramatization and did all that one does when “crossed in hopeless love.” I avoided going out in the direction of the street-tap, I avoided the headmaster and his school. Late in the evening when it became dark, I went out for a brisk walk, with my head bowed in thought, looking neither left nor right, but totally wrapped up in my own gloomy reflections, just enough initiative left to smoke two Gold Flake cigarettes and return home. My sister, being my hostess, tried to cheer me up in various ways. My pensive pose got on her nerves. At this period I remember writing a play; it kept me busy all the afternoon. The play was called
The Home of Thunder
—a frightful tragedy in which all the principal characters are struck dead by lightning on a tower open to the skies, the play ending with a clap of thunder. It was a highly philosophical play examining the ideas of love, resignation, and death, the writing of which diverted my mind a great deal. I had great hopes for its future, and in due course sent it round to all kinds of producers and directors in every part of the civilized world. I had forgotten all about its existence till a few months ago, again when David Higham's office discovered and returned the manuscript while clearing out old papers.

The evil of my stars soon became a matter of discussion among the headmaster's astrological group. He sought me out and sent me here and there to meet his colleagues and talk it over with them and bring him their opinions and conclusions; finally he sent me along to meet an old man, living not far from us in the back of a coconut garden. His name was, strangely, “Chellappa-sir,” I don't know why—perhaps he was a retired teacher—and he was said to be an expert. I went to his house and explained my mission. He snapped at me, “What do you want me to do? Am I Brahma to change your stars?” He looked angry for some inexplicable reason. “Go and tell that headmaster one thing. I don't care whether his daughter gets married or not; I'll hold on to my views. I have spoken to that man again and again, but still he is full of doubts. If he knows better astrology than I do, he should not trouble me like this. If he listens to reason, he should go ahead and fix a date for the wedding, that's all. I see no harm in it. He hasn't noticed the moon's position in his daughter's horoscope, which neutralizes the Mars. But that man expects me to give him a guarantee that Mars will not harm his daughter's life. I can give no such guarantee. I am not Brahma.” He raised his voice to a shrieking pitch and repeated, “I do not care whether that man's daughter is married or not. . . .”

In spite of all these fluctuations and hurdles, my marriage came off in a few months, celebrated with all the pomp, show, festivity, exchange of gifts, and the overcrowding, that my parents desired and expected.

Soon after my marriage, my father became bed-ridden with a paralytic stroke, and most of my mother's time was spent at his side upstairs. The new entrant into the family, my wife, Rajam, was her deputy downstairs, managing my three younger brothers, who were still at school, a cook in the kitchen, a general servant, and a gigantic black-and-white Great Dane acquired by my elder brother, who was a dog-lover. She kept an eye on the stores, replenishing the food-stuffs and guarding them from being squandered or stolen by the cook. Rajam was less than twenty, but managed the housekeeping expertly and earned my mother's praise. She got on excellently with my brothers. This was one advantage of a joint family system—one had plenty of company at home. Yet with all the group life, there was still enough privacy for me and my wife. We had a room for ourselves and when we retired into it, we were in an idyllic world of our own. Within six months, she proved such an adept at housekeeping that my mother left her in complete charge, and we found the time to exchange pleasantries and intimacies only when she took a little time off during the day and came to my room or at night after everyone had retired and the kitchen door was shut. Presently I did not find too much time to spend at home either.

In order to stabilize my income I became a newspaper reporter. My business would be to gather Mysore city news and send it daily to a newspaper published in Madras called
The Justice
. The daily was intended to promote the cause of the non-Brahmin who suffered from the domination of the minority Brahmin class in public life, government service, and education. Though
The Justice
was a propagandist paper against the Brahmin class, it somehow did not mind having me as its correspondent in Mysore. I left home at about nine in the morning and went out news-hunting through the bazaar and market-place—all on foot. I hung about law courts, police stations, and the municipal building, and tried to make up at least ten inches of news each day before lunchtime. I returned home at one o'clock, bolted down a lunch, sat down at my typewriter, and typed the news items with appropriate headings. I now had an old Remington portable (the double-barrelled one having been given away for twenty rupees, off-setting the bill for cigarettes and sweets at a shop), which was a present from my younger sister. It took me an hour or more to type the items, and then I signed and sealed the report in an envelope, and rushed it to the Chamarajapuram post office before the postal clearance at 2:20 p.m. If my youngest brother (Laxman, now a famous cartoonist) was available, he would be ready, with one foot on the pedal of his bicycle, to ride off to the post office for a tiny fee of a copper for each trip; but when he wasn't there, I practically sprinted along with my press copy. There was really no need to rush like that since most of the news items could wait or need not be published at all; but we were in a competitive society; I feared that other Madras papers like
The Mail
or
The Hindu
, whose correspondents had telephone and telegraph facilities, might get ahead of me. But those correspondents were lofty and did not care for the items I valued.

After the despatch of the copy, I relaxed in my room; that was also the time when my wife could give me her company. I described to her the day's events, such as traffic accidents, suicides, or crimes, which were the grist for my mill; then I sank into a siesta for an hour and was ready to go out again at four o'clock after a cup of coffee. This time it would be a visit to the magistrate's court before closing time, to take down the judgement in a counterfeit case or murder conspiracy. On Saturday afternoons I sat at the municipal meeting, watching the city fathers wrangle over their obscure issues—all through the evening it would go on. In those days there were always a couple of lawyers on the council, and they never permitted the business to proceed beyond an examination of the procedure and the by-laws. No more than a couple of items in the voluminous agenda would be covered at the end of two hours. After a coffee break, I would suddenly clutch the agenda papers and leave, afflicted with a headache. Some days there would be academic matters to cover, a distinguished visitor lecturing at the university or a senate meeting. In those days there was a local League of Nations Union, which strove to establish peace in this world in its own way. The secretary of this union, who was a history professor, decreed that our reports should be scrutinized by him before we filed them. I resisted his order as an encroachment on the freedom of the press, and he threatened to disaccredit me as a correspondent (which would, in effect, only mean denying luncheon facilities) whereupon I declared that I would report him to our Journalists' Association, pass a resolution against him, and syndicate it to all the world's press and denounce him as an autocrat and enemy of freedom. He said, “Do you know that I have powers to smash you and your papers. . . .” I walked out of the union meeting in protest, and so did a couple of my colleagues. I began to ignore its activities and boycotted its functions. I realized soon that this did not affect the prospect of world peace either way, nor provoke my news-editor to question why I was not covering the League of Nations Union.