Half a Life Read Free Page A

a bonfire. Books aren't so easy to burn, unless you have a good fire already going. And it was possible that in the untidiness and noise of the university front yard, with the life of the street just there, what I was doing in a little corner mightn't have seemed so strange.
    I felt more useless than ever. In other parts of India there were great men. To be able to follow those great men, even to catch a sight of them, would have been bliss for me. I would have given anything to be in touch with their greatness. Here there was only the servile life around the palace of the maharaja. Night after night I debated what I should do. The mahatma himself, I knew, had gone through a crisis like this only a few years before in his ashram. Apparently at peace there, living a life of routine, adored by everyone around him, he had actually been worrying, to a pitch of torment, how he might set the country alight. And he had come up with the unexpected and miraculous idea of the Salt March, a long march from his ashram to the sea, to make salt.
    So, living securely at home, in the house of my father the courtier in livery, still (for the sake of peace) pretending to attend the university, but tormented in the way I have said, I at last felt inspiration touch me. I felt with every kind of certainty that the decision that had come to me was just, and I was determined to carry it through. The decision was nothing less than to make a sacrifice of myself. Not an empty sacrifice, the act of a moment—any fool can jump off a bridge or throw himself in front of a train—but a more lasting kind of sacrifice, something the mahatma would have approved of. He had spoken much about the evils of casteism. No one had said he was wrong, but very few had done anything about it.
    My decision was simple. It was to turn my back on our ancestry, the foolish, foreign-ruled starveling priests my grandfather had told me about, to turn my back on all my father's foolish hopes for me as someone high in the maharaja's service, all the foolish hopes of the college principal to have me marry his daughter. My decision was to turn my back on all those ways of death, to trample on them, and to do the only noble thing that lay in my power, which was to marry the lowest person I could find.
    I actually had someone in mind. There was a girl at the university. I didn't know her. I hadn't spoken to her. I had merely noticed her. She was small and coarse-featured, almost tribal in appearance, noticeably black, with two big top teeth that showed very white. She wore colours that were sometimes very bright and sometimes very muddy, seeming to run into the blackness of her skin. She would have belonged to a backward caste. The maharaja gave a certain number of scholarships to “the backwards,” as they were called. The maharaja was known for his piety, and this giving of scholarships was one of his acts of religious charity. That, in fact, was my first thought when I saw the girl in the lecture room with her books and papers. A lot of people were looking at her. She wasn't looking at anyone. I saw her often after that. She held her pen in a strange, determined, childish way, and copied down the professor's notes about Shelley and W, of course, and Browning and Arnold and the importance in Hamlet of soliloquy.
    The last word gave us a lot of trouble. The professor pronounced it in three or four different ways, according to his mood; and when he was testing our knowledge of his notes, and we had to speak the word, it was, you might say, every man for himself. Literature for many of us was this kind of confusion. I thought for some reason that the scholarship girl, since she was a scholarship girl, understood more than most of us. But then one day when the professor asked her a question— normally he didn't pay her too much attention—I saw that she understood a good deal less. She had almost no idea of the story of Hamlet. All she had been learning were words. She had thought