The Pledge Read Free Page B

“I was at this British Officers’ Club at the parade grounds. A correspondent for the Times invited me to join him for dinner there, and they have these steam baths and we took them before dinner. Then there were these attendants with towels — bearers, they call them. Well, we dried ourselves, but the British officers were being dried by these bearers, and they were drying their … well” — glancing uneasily at Mrs. Chatterjee — “their parts, and the officers appeared completely unaware of it, as if these were not men, not human —”
    â€œYet we don’t hate them,” Professor Chatterjee said.
    â€œAh, you see, you must understand the British,” Majumdar said. “When I was working in Old Delhi two years ago, I would conduct an evening class in simple, beginning literacy. I must have had fifty or sixty students, bearers, tonga drivers, laborers, water carriers, rickshaw drivers. It was the most primitive thing, hardly better than abc , but there was such hope, such will, and all we had for a classroom was a small, flickering streetlight, a lamppost, where we all squatted together on the pavement. So I wrote a letter to the High Commissioner, who was a few miles away in New Delhi, and I explained that my students could barely see the scraps of paper on which they wrote their letters. Do you know what the British did?”
    â€œI hope they provided a classroom.”
    â€œAh, no. You must understand what they did, because it will explain why we do not hate them, but they must go. They had a larger light bulb put into the streetlamp. You see, they were responsive — but to people they regarded as only a little better than animals. Like the bearers in the steam bath. They are so polite and sometimes considerate insofar as they understand. But the one thing they do not understand is that we are human beings, as human as they are.”
    Standing in front of Professor Chatterjee’s little cottage later that evening, waiting for the jeep to pick them up, Legerman asked Bruce how he had enjoyed the evening.
    â€œEnjoy is not the word.”
    â€œInteresting?”
    â€œDamn interesting. But I don’t have the story.”
    â€œI’m no writer, but it seems to me you got yourself a story.”
    â€œMaybe. Maybe it’s another story.” He didn’t want to discuss the evening with Legerman. He didn’t want to discuss it with anyone. He wanted to go back to his quarters, drink a glass of the warm British beer, and brood about food and hunger and life and death and people like Chatterjee and Majumdar.
    â€œWho are they?” he asked Legerman.
    â€œHow do you mean that, Mr. Bacon?”
    â€œTime you called me Bruce. Same as you, Sergeant. Who the hell are you and who is Chatterjee and who is Majumdar?”
    â€œWell, me. You know who I am. Chatterjee teaches math and physics. Majumdar — well, he works on a local newspaper.”
    â€œWhat newspaper?”
    â€œ Prasarah , which I’m sure you never heard of. It’s a communist newspaper, and prasarah is the old Sanskrit word for freedom or something of that sort. I guess it gives it a sort of universality, with India full of different languages.”
    â€œSo Majumdar is a communist.”
    â€œThat’s right. Chatterjee, Majumdar, and me too. If you feel you were put on, I’m sorry.”
    â€œI don’t know what I feel,” Bruce said.
    â€œYou can sit around the palace like the rest of them and read the handouts and rewrite them, and it’s no skin off my back. I thought you were looking for something.”
    â€œWhat are you getting so pissed off about?” Bruce demanded. “Did I say anything? Who the hell do you think I am, Howard Rushmore? I don’t work for the Journal. I work for the Tribune.”
    â€œOK, OK. You came here for a story that no one else wants. I think Chatterjee and Majumdar are two of the most