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- but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented - I am an Indian, it is an Indian habit to take pan. - The roads, named after victorious generals and intersecting at right angles, were symbolic of the net Great Britain had thrown over India. He felt caught in their meshes. - He felt caught in their meshes. When he turned into Major Callendar's compound he could with difficulty restrain himself from getting down from the tonga and approaching the bungalow on foot, and this not because his soul was servile but because his feelings—the sensitive edges of him— feared a gross snub. - The first, who was in evening dress, glanced at the Indian and turned instinctively away. - Tonga wallah, club, club. Why doesn't the fool go?" - The inevitable snub— his bow ignored, his carriage taken. It might have been worse, for it comforted him somehow that Mesdames Callendar and Lesley should both be fat and weigh the tonga down behind. Beautiful women would have pained him. - There is something hostile in that soil. It either yields, and the foot sinks into a depression, or else it is unexpectedly rigid and sharp, pressing stones or crystals against the tread. - A mosque by winning his approval let loose his imagination. The temple of another creed, Hindu, Christian, or Greek, would have bored him and failed to awaken his sense of beauty. Here was Islam, his own country, more than a Faith, more than a battle-cry, more, much more . . . Islam, an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable, where his body and his thoughts found their home. - Elsewhere some Hindus were drumming— he knew they were Hindus, because the rhythm was uncongenial to him, - — and others were bewailing a corpse— he knew whose, having certified it in the afternoon. There were owls, the Punjab mail . . . and flowers smelt deliciously in the station-master's garden. - Belief in ghosts ran in his blood, but he sat firm. - Suddenly he was furiously angry and shouted: "Madam! Madam! Madam!" - "I have only come from the club. They are doing a play that I have seen in London, and it was so hot." "What was the name of the play?" "Cousin Kate." - "What are their names? Not also Ronny, Ralph, and Stella, surely?" The suggestion delighted him. "No, indeed. How funny it sounds! Their names are quite different and will surprise you. Listen, please. I am about to tell you my children's names. The first is called Ahmed, the second is called Karim, the third— she is the eldest— Jamila. - He burst out with: "She has just taken my tonga without my permission—do you call that being charming?— and Major Callendar interrupts me night after night from where I am dining with my friends and I go at once, breaking tip a most pleasant entertainment, and he is not there and not even a message. Is this charming, pray? But what does it matter? I can do nothing and he knows it. I am just a subordinate, my time is of no value, the verandah is good enough for an Indian, yes, yes, let him stand, and Mrs. Callendar takes my carriage and cuts me dead ..." She listened. - his heart began to glow secretly. - "You understand me, you know what others feel. Oh, if others resembled you!"

- Rather surprised, she replied: "I don't think 1 understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them." "Then you are an Oriental." - "Indians are not allowed into the Chandrapore Club even as guests," he said simply. He did not expatiate on his wrongs now, being happy. As he strolled downhill beneath the lovely moon, and again saw the lovely mosque, he seemed to own the land as much as anyone owned it. What did it matter if a few flabby Hindus had preceded him there, and a few chilly English succeeded? Ch. 3 One electric fan revolved like a wounded bird "I want to see the _real_ India," The two ladies had happened, the night before, to see the moon's reflection in a distant channel of the stream. The water had drawn it out, so that it had seemed larger than the real moon, and brighter, which had pleased them. Neither of them knew the speaker nor did they ever see him again. He passed with his friendly word through red-brick pillars into the darkness. Moore agreed; she too was disappointed at the dullness of their new life. They had made such a romantic voyage across the Mediterranean and through the sands of Egypt to the harbour of Bombay, to find only a gridiron of bungalows at the end of it. and had learnt that Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. Miss Quested learnt it with anxiety, for she had not decided whether she liked dignified men. She tried indeed to discuss this point with Mr. Turton, but he silenced her with a good-humoured motion of his hand, and continued what he had come to say. Conversation and billiards stopped, faces stiffened. It was the Anthem of the Army of Occupation. it reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile. One said, "Wanting to see Indians! How new that sounds!" But the lady, entirely stupid and friendly, "Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," said Mrs. Callendar. "He can go where he likes as long as he doesn't come near me. They give me the creeps." "You can practically see any type you like. Take your choice.

"Well, we don't come across them socially," he said, laughing. "They're full of all the virtues, but we don't, A community that bows the knee to a Viceroy and believes that the divinity that hedges a king can be transplanted, must feel some reverence for any viceregal substitute. At Chandrapore the Turtons were little gods; soon they would retire to some suburban villa, and die exiled from glory.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MOON In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars. A sudden sense of unity, of kinship with the heavenly bodies, passed into the old woman and out, like water through a tank, leaving a strange freshness behind. She did not dislike Cousin Kate_ or the National Anthem, but their note had died into a new one, just as cocktails and cigars had died into invisible flowers. - Unity from orient? Thereupon the truth struck him, and he cried, "Oh, good gracious! Not a Mohammedan? Why ever didn't you tell me you'd been talking to a native? I was going all wrong." Why hadn't she indicated by the tone of her voice that she was talking about an Indian? Below them a radiance had suddenly appeared. It belonged neither to water nor moonlight, but stood like a luminous sheaf upon the fields of darkness. He told them that it was where the new sand-bank was forming, and that the dark ravelled bit at the top was the sand, and that the dead bodies floated down that way from Benares, or would if the crocodiles let them. She continued: "What a terrible river! what a wonderful river! " Nothing's private in India. Aziz knew that when he spoke out, "It's the educated native's latest dodge. They used to cringe, but the younger generation believe in a show of manly independence. "India isn't home," - excuse to change Perhaps he mistook the peg for a branch— no Indian animal has any sense of an interior.

CHAPTER IV

And there were circles even beyond these—people who wore nothing but a loincloth, people who wore not even that, and spent their lives in knocking two sticks together before a scarlet doll— humanity grading and drifting beyond the educated vision, until no earthly invitation can embrace it. In our Father's house are many mansions, they taught, and there alone will the incompatible multitudes of mankind be welcomed and soothed. Not one shall be turned away by the servants on that verandah, be he black or white, not one shall be kept standing who approaches with a loving heart. And why should the divine hospitality cease here? Consider, with all reverence, the monkeys. May there not be a mansion for the monkeys also? he saw no reason why monkeys should not have their collateral share of bliss, "The great point to remember is that no one who's here matters; those who matter don't come. But these people— don't imagine they're India." They had tried to reproduce their own attitude to life upon the stage, and to dress up as the middle-class English people they actually were. the women did nothing that they could not share with the men. Their ignorance of the Arts was notable, and they lost no opportunity of proclaiming it to one another; it was the Public School attitude; flourishing more vigorously than it can yet hope to do in England. when they had seen Cousin Kate_ in London together in the past, he had scorned it; now he pretended that it was a good play, in order to hurt nobody's feelings. Oh, those purdah women! The sight was significant: an island bared by the turning tide, and bound to grow.

"You're superior to them, anyway. Don't forget that. You're superior to everyone in India except one or two of the Ranis, and they're on an equality." She had learnt the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer forms and of the verbs only the imperative mood. "Why, fancy, she understands!" said Mrs. Turton. as if she was describing the movements of migratory birds.

Her manner had grown more distant since she had discovered that some of the group was Westernized, and might apply her own standards to her. as if they sought for a new formula which neither East nor West could provide. Indeed all the ladies were uncertain, cowering, recovering, giggling, making tiny gestures of atonement or despair at all that was said, and alternately fondling the terrier or shrinking from him. Everything pleased her, nothing surprised. and at the proper moment he retired to the English side of the lawn. and it amused him to note the ritual of the English club, and to caricature it afterwards to his friends. - juxtaposition of opinions Amid much that was alien I envy you being with Indians." "Do you care to meet one or two?" "Very, very much indeed; it's what I long for. The rest make me perfectly ashamed, When tennis began, the barrier grew impenetrable. It had been hoped to have some sets between East and West, but this was forgotten, and the courts were monopolized by the usual club couples. contemplating the hills. How lovely they suddenly were! But she couldn't touch them. In front, like a shutter, fell a vision of her married life. while the true India slid by unnoticed. She would see India always as a frieze, never as a spirit the menu of Anglo-India. but the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand it. -why are they exiled?? Who are they at home?? Accustomed to the privacy of London, she could not realize that India, seemingly so mysterious, contains none, and that consequently the conventions have greater force. Trying to recover his temper, he said, "India likes gods." "And Englishmen like posing as gods.

and the country's got to put up with us, gods or no gods. I am out here to work, mind, to hold this wretched country by force. I'm not a missionary or a Labour Member or a vague sentimental sympathetic literary man. I'm just a servant of the Government; it's the profession you wanted me to choose myself, and that's that. We're not pleasant in India, and we don't intend to be pleasant. We've something more important to do." Every day he worked hard in the court trying to decide which of two untrue accounts was the less untrue, trying to dispense justice fearlessly, to protect the weak against the less weak, the incoherent against the plausible, surrounded by lies and flattery. The traces of young-man humanitarianism had sloughed off, and he talked like an intelligent and embittered boy. "Because India is part of the earth. And God has put us on the earth in order to be pleasant to each other. God . . . is . . . love." He is omnipresent, even in India, They did not part for a few minutes, but the conversation had become unreal since Christianity had entered it. Ronny approved of religion as long as it endorsed the National Anthem, but he objected when it attempted to influence his life.

CHAPTER VI He only knew that no one ever told him the truth, although he had been in the country for twenty years. She had died soon after he had fallen in love with her; he had not loved her at first. Touched by Western feeling, he disliked union with a woman whom he had never seen; moreover, when he did see her, she disappointed him, and he begat his first child in mere animality. The change began after its birth. He was won by her love for him, by a loyalty that implied something more than submission, and by her efforts to educate herself against that lifting of the purdah that would come in the next generation if not in theirs. He amused himself, he forgot her at times: but at other times he felt that she had sent all the beauty and joy of the world into Paradise, and he meditated suicide. the more he looked at this photograph, the less he saw. not realizing that the very fact that we have loved the dead increases their unreality, and that the more passionately we invoke them the further they recede.

He had breathed for an instant the mortal air that surrounds Orientals and all men, and he drew back from it with a gasp, for he was young. - foreign youth Perhaps some day a rich person might require this particular operation, and he gain a large sum. - depending on one rich man He forgot the whole damned business of living as he scurried over the brown platter of the Maidan, with the evening wind on his forehead, and the encircling trees soothing his eyes. freedom of natural India Aziz liked soldiers— they either accepted you or swore at you, which was preferable to the civilian's hauteur "I am so awfully sorry~I was compelled to go to the Post Office." One of his own circle would have accepted this as meaning that he had changed his mind, an event too common to merit censure. Your absence, I may remark, drew commentaries." "They can damn well comment." Aziz had a wild desire to make an enemy for life. And here came a second invitation, without a rebuke or even an allusion to his slip. Here was true courtesy— the civil deed that shows the good heart— He longed to know everything about the splendid fellow— his salary, preferences, antecedents, how best one might please him. - becomes like a naive colonised native

CHAPTER VII...