She knew at that moment that she must go away from that place at once. It was not because she took fright at the sight of blood. But it became clear to her that this blood that was being shed was in no way within the permitted bounds of justice. When those first few drops appeared, singly and so unexpectedly that for an instant she almost fainted with the shock, and then began to flow rapidly, spreading crimson over his forehead, and eyes, and nose, and mouth, she knew with certainty that she must make an end that very day. All her quarrels, her arguments, the misgivings that she had hitherto justified, her disaffections and fears, rose up like demons clad in red, standing like a rearguard behind that blood.
She walked away.
The boy from the thatched corner shop saw her and asked, “Tea, didi?”
She nodded and sat down. Nambiar and Meena, who were already there, looked up and came to sit by her, asking, “Has the struggle finished so soon?”
“No. I didn’t feel very well. I came away.”
“Headache?”
“Mm.”
“It strikes me that these headaches and monthly pains all reflect the enforced repressions of the lower middle class. Look, Meena doesn’t suffer from any of these things. Do you know why? She has no obstacles by way of money worries. Isn’t that so, Meena?
Reasons. Reasons. Reasons. For headaches, for constipation, for facial pimples, for hiccoughs.
Everything had to be subjected to the rules of logic, researched in depth, analysed with the whole weight of one’s knowledge; broken down, separated into tiny glass containers, their reasons written on labels and pasted on…
She thought of herself as a much-used legal file, the edges bent and crumbling with much fingering. Written on its front cover would be: Hitha, a representative of the lower middle class. Characteristics: given to mental struggles because of insecurity, tending to be emotional and to be emotionally dependent.
“Well, Hitha, am I right?”
Nambiar had studied at Oxford. It was given out that when he went there, he had taken with him ten suits tailored to his measurements. He returned wearing pajamas and kurtas. At the university, he was one of those most enthusiastically on the Left. He only smoked bidis. At times he would even be seen in torn kurtas. The only attributes he was unable to abandon were his Oxford mannerisms and his Ambassador car. He spoke with a bidi in his mouth, but his tongue could only manage an English “r.” He found it impossible to learn to speak either Malayalam or Hindi. But he fully believed that he could convert the working-class people of Kerala to his way of thinking through his bidis and kurta-pajamas alone. He spoke with emotional fervour of the time when he himself converted to the Left:
“I was walking in Paris on a bitterly cold winter’s evening. I had gone there for the vacation. There was a little girl, without shoes, her feet red with the cold, heels cracked and chapped, wearing scarcely any warm clothes, picking up pieces of coal in the snow. I couldn’t bear the injustice of it. I joined the Left that very day.
Hitha asked him once, “Is there less poverty in the lanes and slums of India than in Paris, or what? Or does the lack of snow make it an easier life here?”
Nambiar became angry. He called her an anti-intellectual. Another time he castigated her saying she was a bourgeois who accepted everything and wandered about holding on tight to her own security. It was on that occasion that he told her about the Indian village he had seen for the first time.
“I was sitting outside, in the garden. The tap was just next to me. A woman came by, she might have been a servant. ‘Open the tap, please,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you do it yourself?’ I asked her. ‘These people are Brahmins; I am a Harijan woman,’ she replied. Look at the restrictions of caste, Hitha. I couldn’t stand it.”
“That’s existed for a long time, Nambi. It has been there many years before you went to Oxford, and it’s still there today.”
“Ah, we have to dig very deep down, to uproot such superstitions, to throw them away and bring about change.”
“You sit tight in your chair. There will be others to do the digging, and while they are about it, to uproot the likes of you.”
“You are trying to humiliate me, Hitha. I accept it only because you belong to the Party. I know you are only a bourgeois, going about seeking security.”
“And you?”
Nambiar was not without his own mental struggles. He had freed himself from his class boundaries with difficulty, and managed to fall in love with the daughter of a clerk who lived in one of those little houses that had to be passed when one went from one part of the university to another. He was holding forth one day in his broken Hindi, giving a detailed account of the horrors committed in Vietnam by a capitalistic United States, when she used the end of her sari to wipe her baby brother’s nose. Suddenly his stomach turned. He suffered great remorse because of his feeling of revulsion. But at the same time, he could not deny that it was much easier to be in love with Meena, whose father possessed lakhs. She had the time, the intelligence, and the opportunity — all three — to think about independence and to try to experience it to the full. It was easy for her to unite herself with Marxist principles. She had no difficulty in understanding the horrors of Vietnam, the problems of black Americans, the harijan struggle, class war, and even the reasons for hating her own class. Nor was she unaware that spending thirty-five rupees for a Peter Pan bra or fifteen rupees for a pair of panties could be at variance with those same Marxist principles. It was not difficult to be in love with someone who argued that to be aware of one’s own inconsistencies was actually a victory for Reason.
The tea arrived.
“Hey, Hitha, what are you thinking about?” asked Meena.
“Nothing.” The tea felt warm to her throat.
“Have you quarrelled with Gautam?” Meena was laughing.
“Nothing like that.”
“What’s happened then?”
As she was asking the question, Gautam came in, in a great hurry. Tenderly he placed a hand against her fingers which were pressed around the teacup.
“What’s the matter, Hitha, why did you come away so suddenly? Are you not feeling well? Headache? Mm?” he asked in Tamil.
“A headache,” she said in a low voice.
He drank a mouthful from her cup. “Right,” he said to her, “I’m off. You go home straightaway. Don’t bother to cook a meal. We’ll see to things after I get home.” Then he left on his own, saying to Meena and Nambiar, “You two stay here.”
Nambiar, who had understood what Gautam had said to her in Tamil, commented, “Gautam needs your support even in this small struggle.”
It seemed to her that it would have been better if it had not been so. She had a sense that all the work she had done among the students in the past two years as his inseparable companion, and her total belief hitherto that there was nothing else she could have done, was today laid bare at the very roots to the swing of a hatchet. She experienced a pain as if all her nerves reverberated from such a swinging blow. It was as if that pain caused fissures and cracks in her from which all the doubts and disagreements that for so long she had firmly suppressed now crawled out like crabs, making her whole body shudder as they walked all over, pressing their claws into her.
“Okay, Hitha, you’d better go home. You really look as if you are ill,” said Meena.
Hitha rose. She handed the boy some money.
“Okay,” she said and began to walk away.
If she walked all the way, it would take her half an hour to get home. Never mind. This was one thing about her that Gautam genuinely admired. Her stamina. Her good health, which, like a lightning conductor, absorbed all physical pain. He was astonished by her thighs, her calf muscles, her arms — all as firm as rolling pins. Such sturdiness, he would say, was the birthright of her class. As for him, he was torn to pieces every time he got an attack of asthma. His was a delicate body. He only got illnesses that required expensive medication. “Diseases appropriate to the moneyed class,” he would say, laughing. He’d take her hand and say, “These are sturdy fingers.”
“No. These are fingers that have been put to use,” she would answer, pointing to the scars acquired from grinding flour, and to the fingertips worn down from scrubbing vessels.
She was used to confronting troubles and obstacles without having to formulate complex strategies; without having to refer to guiding doctrines. Because she knew very well about hunger, shame, reproach, and contempt, she tended to oppose injustices with nothing but a blind emotional fervour, an intense rage.
Once Gautam said to her, “You can’t achieve anything single-handedly. Doesn’t it ever strike you that you need my help?”
At that time she was both studying and working. Kishori Lal was an office boy at her place of work. He did not get the health certificate that he required, to comply with the office rules for employment. The reason given was that he was underweight for his age. She had seen Kishori Lal’s house. It was in Panchkuyya Street, by the sweepers’ lane. It had seemed to her that the pervading smell of faeces was not conducive to anyone’s gaining weight in that area, except, perhaps, for pigs. It struck her as an unbearable wickedness that a system which did not make it possible for a boy to attain the weight appropriate to his age should then make that a reason for dismissing him from work. She fought for the boy.
It was at that time that Gautam asked his question.
“No. I’ll only get crushed within the confines of a party. Just leave me to fight my battles on my own.”
Not only was she defeated, she lost her own job as well. Then at last she realized that it was not a matter of Kishori Lal alone. What she had to oppose was not merely the brother who hit her with his shoes, and the sister-in-law who ordered her to scrub vessels until her very fingers seemed to burn away. It wasn’t even possible for her to believe any longer that her father, who had put all his desires, longings, disappointments, and hardships into one wheelchair, the one in which he would one day end his life story, was the one and only example of life’s injustices. He was only a means of introducing her to them. The bitterness and hatred that her brother had awakened in her as he opened the creaking padlocked door at eight one evening and pushed her out even while her wheelchaired father watched with ash-covered eyelids and paralysed gaze; the fire that was lit in her belly during that night of distress — it was because of these things alone that she had battled thus far. She admitted as much, to Gautam.
Then she was unemployed. She accepted the generosity of Gautam’s married friends, a room to live in, food to eat; with the same commitment with which she worked for her exams she united herself with Gautam’s politics. But she was not without doubts that niggled at the back of her mind.
After they had attended seminars such as that on “The responsibility of students in a changing society,” after those debates on social consciousness, equality in education, and consciousness raising, after the discussion that continued over beer with Agarwal, Prasad, and Nambiar in Gautam’s room, when at last she lay down alone on the terrace under the stars, questions would gleam in her mind.
Is this really what I want?
After she and Gautam had decided to live together, the question raised its head many times.
“Agarwal has no right to talk about peasants and agricultural methods.”
“And why not?”
“He hasn’t even met a peasant farmer. He doesn’t even know that most peasants still use a wooden plough. When I tell him so, he gapes at me with his mouth open, the idiot.”
“So what? Is that such a huge flaw in him? This is your whole problem. You think everything should be perfect, without the tiniest fault. Do you think it will be Agarwal who is actually going to transplant the rice? He will be an expert at theory. He will be the one to make policies.”
“Perceiving India from Delhi alone?”
“Are you being sarcastic?”
“No, Gauta. Sometimes I have the picture in my mind of a frightful cultural island. Everybody is sitting around, continually talking about American democracy and Russia’s unfinished revolution and about the Chinese revolution, and about factories and factory workers. Amongst themselves and for themselves. They slap one another on the back. If one of them exclaims that blood must flow and that the revolution has got to come, ten of the rest praise him and pour him a whisky. At first they speak out because they have something to say. Later they continue because they like the sound of their own voices. In the end they begin to believe that what they say is the actual truth. You can hear the sound of their voices everywhere, like the howling of dogs, reverberating like drumbeats.”
“Hitha, can’t you hear how incoherent you sound?”
“I’m not playing a game, Gautam. Sometimes, there is a real battle going on inside me.”
“Madness.”
If she were to explain to him about this morning and begin an argument, he would put it aside in the same way. For him, it was only a strategy for self-preservation. A mere strategy to attack a man in a wheelchair as soon as they realized they were only ten individuals and that the people opposing them numbered over thirty. A mere strategy to beat them with cycle chains as soon as they gathered round the disabled man, and to run away. She knew very well how the conversation would go.
“When the entire royal family was committed to the guillotine at the end of the French Revolution, do you think it was rose water that they sprinkled about? It is blood that needs to be spilt,” he would say in his fluent English.
“Gauta, he was a cripple. This was no strategy. It was a crooked path we took.”
“I don’t do my work in order to gain a certificate from you, Hitha.”
“But why can’t you understand what I say?”
“Because I am not one of your humanitarians who kiss orphaned children and believe that the world can be changed through love. I am a revolutionary. It’s that language alone that I understand.”
“What I’m saying isn’t humanitarianism. I’m saying that you can’t turn an unjust act into a just one by referring to the revolution.”
“It is all part of the same thing. I do not wish to say any more.”
She had realized that Gautam’s sense of “justice” was not one that he had formulated by himself, but rather one whose bounds had been set by others. It was similar to the way he had acted in the business over Mahesh.
Mahesh’s father was an important lawyer based in Lucknow. A believer in nonviolence. Mahesh was nonviolent in Lucknow and a revolutionary in Delhi. He had been close to Anandi for three years. When the nonviolent father raised objections about her caste, the revolutionary immediately accepted them. There were a few lakhs implicated in those objections anyway. It was Hitha who had wandered about with Anandi to prevent the birth of an heir to the revolutionary.
“This is really base, it is making use of a woman,” she had said. He had replied, “He’s one of us. We can’t give him up.”
“Do all the rotten things he does become just simply because of his service to the revolution? There is no difference whatsoever between a revolutionary and any other man when it comes to treading upon women.”
“You are confusing the issue by bringing in the question of women’s freedom.”
“Where’s the confusion? It is all perfectly and absolutely clear. We used to be conned in the name of motherhood, compassion, womanhood, chastity. And now too we are cheated in the name of modernity, freedom, and the revolution.”
“Enough, Hitha. Where has your brain gone? I will not betray Mahesh. Leave it now. It’s not our business.”
That’s how that affair ended.
She was home. She unlocked the door, went in and fell upon her bed. For a few minutes, she had the feeling that she had become a material object in the room, like the chair, the table, the bed; the four walls narrowed about her, becoming a coffin bearing her as she gradually grew rigid.
She had been born through an accident, in the days before there were contraceptive pills. She had felt rejected by all those around her. By her mother first of all. Then by her brother and sister-in-law.
She needed love with a huge hunger. Gautaman had never understood this. Whether it was because in his family they had showered him with money in place of love, she did not know, but both her love for him, and his friendship for her were like necessary weaknesses that he merely endured.
On one occasion, when they were together, at a most intimate moment of lovemaking she had asked him, “Do you love me?”
He had freed himself and turned away. He had made her sit up. “Why have you asked me this question now?”
“I just felt I had to ask you.”
“What’s the difference between you and the heroine of a two rupee novel? It is possible for you to think about the revolution. You have been able to accept a relationship like ours without any difficulty. Then how can you ask such a question?”
“Are we together only to help to bring about the revolution? Then you could be with anybody else, couldn’t you?”
“Desire, love, compassion — these are all bourgeois diseases.”
“Are they not going to exist after the revolution?”
“After the revolution there will be justice. There will be honesty. There will be work. There will be equality.”
“No, Gauta, there will be this too. Surely an important goal of our revolution is that love and friendship should change altogether from being mere words for cheating and using each other. Not to kill all feelings. The revolution is to make us more human; not to turn us into castrated creatures.”
He got up with a quick sound of disgust and lit himself a Charminar.
In the darkness, the cigarette ends glowed. One, two, three, four, five Charminars. When at last her eyes, weary from watching, began to close, he shook her awake.
“Hitha, in what sense can I say the words, ‘I love you?’ There is no value attached to those words as we use them ordinarily. If I use them for a different meaning, then I have to understand that first. And if I say them now, what certainty is there that they won’t be mere words in order to use you, for the comfort of this one night? Mm?”
What he said seemed true enough. She was thoroughly confused.
She used to be very fond of Pankaj Mullick’s Hindi songs with their Bengali resonance. That voice seemed to her to throb with life, and at the same time, to suggest the moment of death, and of life’s departure. She was not unaware of the falsehood inherent in those love songs. Yet there were times when she could really enjoy them.
She was immersed in those songs one day when Gautaman came in with Meena, Nambiar, Agarwal and two others.
“Turn that off, Hitha.” Gautaman said the words casually and went to fetch the glasses. Nambiar took the bottles out of his bag. Hitha felt as if she had been slapped hard. As if he hadn’t respected her as a woman. She didn’t move to switch off the record player.
“Hitha, turn off the record.”
“I want to listen to it.”
The emphasis in her voice made him look up in some astonishment. Meena and Nambiar exchanged glances.
“Why don’t you stop listening to all this sentimental nonsense?”
“Why don’t you stop flying to your Chivas Regal? Why don’t you stop your upper-class habits, talking revolution and drinking whisky?
Meena hung her bag on her shoulder. “Well, Gautam, don’t you think it is time for us to go?”
Gautam’s face tightened.
He said, “Don’t, Meena,” and rushing to the record player, pulled out the plug and flung it aside.
For a second, Hitha was totally taken aback by his rage. Then to his complete surprise — why, hers too — she took a couple of strides forward and kicked aside the bottles. Her foot was pierced by a splinter of glass. Blood flowed, mixing with the alcohol, seeming to burn through her.
The rest got up and left. She sat down in the midst of the spilt alcohol, surrounded by splinters of smashed glass, put her head on her knee while her foot bled freely, and began to weep. He stood there and looked at her and then walked out. She wept for a long time.
When Gautaman returned in the evening, the room had been tidied up completely. There was a rather large bandage on her foot. When she hobbled to the door to let him in, he glanced at the foot briefly and then came in without a word. He sat down on a chair.
She began to spread some old newspaper on the floor in order to put down the dishes of food.
“I am not eating, Hitha.”
She lifted her head with fury. “What is the difference between you and an average husband? He beats his wife, goes off to his gambling and comes home after eating at a restaurant. If he’s rich, he’ll drink at his club before coming home. At home he’ll remain aloof and stiff so that his male pride isn’t diminished in any way. What revolution are you capable of?” He went and lay down without speaking to her.
Sadness welled up within her. She, who had mocked him for being like an average husband, had actually expected, like any average wife, that he would pacify her with something that she liked: with gifts such as jasmine flowers, jilebis, gin. Yes, she had indeed limped rather obviously when he came in. She hadn’t quite imagined the crudity of a dialogue that began, “I behaved like an animal, Hitha, forgive me,” and “Nevermind, it’s the hands that hit that also embrace.” But she knew that her expectations were of that order, all the same. She fell asleep that night, pierced by thoughts of the contradictions that remained with her and the ordinariness that characterized them both.
She thought about their relationship with a kind of surprise mixed with fear.
Who was Gautam?
A revolutionary?
A reactionary?
A research student?
A student leader?
A clever son who managed to differ in his principles from his father without causing hostility?
Her lover?
Who was Hitha?
A research student?
A camp follower of the revolutionaries?
A bourgeois looking for security?
A woman expecting some kind of freedom?
A soul yearning for love?
Gautaman’s intimate friend?
Everything inside her seemed fragmented, incomplete. She needed completion. Perfection? Was there such a thing?
She shut her eyes tightly to avoid the cloud of smoke which choked her.
Why did Gautaman stay with her? She knew that at first, he and Meena had been very close. Was it because she was saturated in the kind of experience he couldn’t even begin to imagine? Was it because his relationship with a lower-middle-class girl would push all his own class weaknesses into the background and become the most important thing about him?
And she? What satisfaction did she get out of the relationship? Was it his passion, his intensity, his idealism?
Gautaman’s father was a high-ranking official in the United Nations. He usually lived in the US or in other countries abroad. Whenever he came to Delhi, Gautaman would go to see him, wearing somewhat different clothes than his usual ones, and taking her along with him. They usually met at the Oberoi Intercontinental or the Hotel Akbar or the Hotel Ashoka. Hitha was a kind of representation of Gautam’s total opposition to his father principles. When they were preparing to meet him for the first time, Hitha realized that Gautam was somewhat nervous.
“Why, Gauta? Are you afraid of what your father will say about us?”
Gautaman shook his head, denying it. Very hesitantly he spoke.
“You won’t get cross, will you, if I say something?”
“No.”
“The place we are going to is a sophisticated setup. It’s my uncle’s house. Will you try, when we are eating, not to gobble your food?”
She felt absolutely attacked by him.
Her sister-in-law had practically killed her by withholding food from her. When she was working, for the first six months she had cooked and eaten enough for two every single day. Her tongue would salivate even while she was cooking. Sometimes she would fall upon the food as soon as it was ready, without changing her clothes or bathing, even at times, without brushing her teeth. It was only after — breathing hard, her forehead breaking into a sweat — she had swallowed the first five or six mouthfuls that she would become tranquil. Even now the intensity of that hunger was somewhere within her, like a dog held on a leash. Her enjoyment of food was something that was accepted among her group of friends. Although they were slightly contemptuous of the fact that she ate three times as much as Meena, and that when she ate, it was always single-mindedly, without letting her thoughts spill on to anything else, nevertheless they accepted it with generous hearts.
She had been making aviyal in the kitchen when Gautaman brought her a research article to read.
“What possible pleasure can there be in cooking? This shows that what you actually crave is an ordinary married life. What difference is there between you and other women?” he snapped at her in annoyance.
She screamed back at him, “I don’t choose to do things by considering that if I do I will be different or that if I don’t I will be like everyone else. By cooking food, I don’t become like everyone else. Nor does someone who stops cooking suddenly become different, either. These are all external things, anyway. Like Nambiar drinking beer and wearing torn kurtas. Like Meena going about for a few days without a bra. Even their smoking cigarettes is just to show they are different. It’s not as if they have a real desire to smoke or anything. My difference is not in these things. It’s inside me. If I want to, I’ll drink gin. I’ll smoke. It’s not to make some sort of statement.”
He had just flung the article on the bed and left.
That night, after they had both read the article, he said, “I was not in a good mood this evening.”
After a short silence, she told him about her hunger. She told him about the plain rice and rasam and wild-lime pickle her sister-in-law had given her. “While you were pushing away your untouched cutlet and apple, I was spreading my mat and lying down, my belly aching with hunger. It ached even after I had cooked and eaten properly for six months, because I wasn’t used to eating well.”
Without a word he laid her face against his chest and she had thought that this particular problem would never rise between them.
Then when he asked her that question on the day when they were about to visit his father, she stared at him blankly.
“Are you ashamed of me?”
“Che, che. Nothing like that,” he said and took her along with him.
But in that big house, her chest heaved, leaping up and down like an uncontrollable frog, putting her in a state of terror. Her feet became entwined in the carpet. Gautam’s father greeted her normally enough. The uncle’s butler brought her a strange-tasting liquid which he called lime juice. The uncle, noticing the state of her face, said, “This is not made by squeezing limes. Who can keep running to the market every day? We get our bottled lime juice from Sicily once every six months.”
“What is your research on?”
“Latin America.”
“Oh, have you studied Spanish? I have been in that part of the world.”
“Mm. I’m learning Spanish.”
“Hablas español?” he asked suddenly.
“Un poco,” she answered instantly, starting to sweat. His father seemed satisfied with her knowledge of Spanish with those two words. She began to suspect that his knowledge of the language, too, was confined to the same two words.
During the conversation, he ascertained through discreet enquiries that she was a brahmin woman. The meeting was more or less satisfactory.
Because she tended to imagine everything in an excessively dramatic style, this meeting seemed to her to be totally insipid. She had expected him to be shocked by their relationship, to protest about it. In her family too, it had been the same. She had rehearsed many logical arguments in her mind to explain why she did not wish to marry, and went to her father expecting a veritable earthquake. She looked at his paralysed body lying there and said, “Appa, I do not wish to marry.” He murmured, “Mm?” in a weak voice and turned aside, trying to make himself more comfortable. She had almost felt cheated. She felt the same now.
“What do you think of my father?” asked Gautam.
“I feel a bit scared when I think of him.”
“Nonsense. You are not scared of me, are you?”
“Sometimes,” she said quietly.
“Idiot,” he said, clasping her about the waist.
But it was true that an indefinable fear branched out from her mind every now and then.
There was the fear at the level of feelings. A fear that, even though she was so close to him, she could be attacked by small things; that part of her mind which had already been pierced through with lances, which was already bruised, could bleed easily if pressed, wounded by his inconsistencies.
Fear took other forms too.
When she gave assent to such principles as the equal distribution of wealth, and began to study them in depth, it was her lack of preconceptions that helped her to read with clarity and sharpness, without either confusion or mixture of other colours, with the engagement of her whole mind. But this had not been expected of her. What was asked of her was acquiescence, acceptance, and obedience — these three alone.
A silent howl tore at her lower belly every time Ammukutty Menon began a speech with the words, “According to our long standing revolutionary principles…” At each meeting she felt a ball of fire striking at her vocal cords and urging her, “Speak, shout out, roar.” Finally she did just that.
Hitha shouted, “The revolution needs to be repeated again and again, but in different forms. Stagnation cannot be strength. Self-examination, purification, more and more analysis, clearing out the weeds that have branched out within us — without these there can be no growth. To ask permission of a group that has stopped growing is like giving the appropriate rites to a dead man.”
Gautaman put his arm around her shoulder and took her out forcibly.
In the coffeehouse she burst out in English, the veins in her neck swelling, “Gauta, you don’t understand my confusions. A fire starts burning in me every time I come to a meeting. Every single person there has an address in one of Delhi’s richest, choicest areas. They make me feel humiliated. Anybody who joins the Party is respected only according to his class. Nobody gave Nambiar a job to do in translation, or in the trade unions, or at grass roots level. He got to the top ranks of the Party organization without having done any work. You too are the same. I’m respected because I am with you. How can you claim to be free of class-consciousness?”
“There’s a difference between actual practice and your book learning. Don’t talk nonsense, Hitha.”
This incident happened again and again in various guises. Mrs. Menon summoned Gautaman and asked him to speak sharply to Hitha. Self-control and discipline were important, she said.
Hitha replied, when Gautam reported this to her, “A buffalo hide is important.”
It sometimes seemed as if their principles were actually like drugs that were necessary, that injected some enthusiasm into their lives which were otherwise without complexities, which faced emptiness. Sunday revolutionaries, they were.
Were they all frauds? Then, in that case, am I genuine, Hitha asked herself.
Confusions crowded in upon her before she could understand where and which corner they came from. They moved in front of her eyes, like carcasses that were rotting away, broken up, shapeless, blackening. Before she could define each shape and name it, it moved, changing form.
Her temples ached as if from the pain of hammer blows.
The door opened.
Gautaman came in. He came to sit by her, asking, “How are you, Hitha?”
She sat up and said, “Only a headache.”
“Shall I make some tea?”
“No. It is cooler this evening. Shall we go and sit on the hill? It should be pleasant there.”
“Come on then,” he said, and went to wash his face.
They locked the room and began to climb the little hill opposite their house.
“We had a hair’s-breadth escape today. All ten of us could have been beaten up.”
Hitha said nothing.
“What is it, Hitha? Haven’t you got a reply?”
She took his outstretched hand and said, “Gautam, I have so far agreed with all your actions, whether I objected to them or wanted to reject them or otherwise, arguing that they had to be done in order that a further good should come about. But today it strikes me for the first time that what we are doing and the goals we claim for ourselves are actually miles apart.” Before she could go on, he interjected, “Please, Hitha, you often get these attacks of doubts. You know that this is what we must do. It is also what we can do.”
“Are you certain of that? Even about beating up a cripple in his wheelchair?”
“That was a strategy, Hitha. What else could we have done at that moment?”
“I seem to remember that you and the other boys with you wore beards. You could have taken the beating. I was prepared to do so as well.”
“Nonsense.”
They were silent for a time. Then Hitha said quietly, “I have lost my belief in this. Yes, I have a genuine desire to do something. I can’t live with only the illusion of doing something. I want to get inside myself, to ask questions, nag, shake myself free of the mud and mire in which I am stuck, and to wash myself in floods of water. I am terrified by the masks and disguises implicated in the work we do.”
“Did you remember your father when you saw the wheelchair? Did you get frightened by the blood it was necessary to shed in order to complete our job? Are you going in for nonviolence?”
“Those are not my fears, Gautam. My fear is that when that day comes, when blood really has to be shed, when truly a gun is being held out for justice, it will be pointing at you and your friends. My fear is that it might be that I will be holding that gun.”
He was completely taken aback.
“Are you calling me a fraud?”
She shook her head. Then she said softly, in English, “If you and your friends are frauds, then who is genuine? My question is, where are those true revolutionaries? Yet they must be around somewhere. They must be there, without belonging to any organization, with real ideals, with anger and a passion for justice as their only companions.
“What’s this, a lecture?”
Hitha smiled at him and said, “I have decided to go.”
Gautam opened his mouth to protest against that, to argue with her, but he was silent.
They reached the top and sat down.
Hitha stared ahead, holding back the confusions in her mind: whether she was doing the right thing, what she must do next, whether she should accept the security of Gautam’s simple rules after all, and repress all those opposing questions.
In all those empty nights to come, would she yearn for Gautam’s comforting hand upon her breast, the feel of his fingers stroking her nipples, adding pleasure to her slumber?
When Gautam got his attacks of asthma and muttered her name, who would be at his side?
She climbed on steadily, treading on each question.
She was overcome with weariness at the thought that she had lost forever the security of accepting everything with closed eyes, that from now on she must walk through paths which she herself had to clear of stones and thorns. At the same time her backbone stiffened. Tears gathered slowly under her lashes and began to run down. She stayed still, allowing them to flow for the time being.