The Vendor of Sweets

“Conquer taste, and you will have conquered the self,” said Jagan to his listener, who asked, “Why conquer the self?” Jagan said, “I do not know, but all our sages advise us so.”

As long as the frying and sizzling noise in the kitchen continued and the trays passed, Jagan noticed nothing, his gaze unflinchingly fixed on the Sanskrit lines in a red-bound copy of the Bhagavad Gita, but if there was the slightest pause in the sizzling, he cried out, without lifting his eyes from the sacred text, “What is happening?”

Everything in this house had the sanctity of usage, which was the reason why no improvement was possible.

Jagan found his son’s attraction to aspirin ominous. He merely replied, “I’ll get you better things to eat than this pill. Forget it, you understand?”

“Writer” meant in Jagan’s dictionary only one thing—a “clerk”—an Anglo-Indian, colonial term since the days when Macaulay had devised a system of education to provide a constant supply of clerical staff for the East India Company. Jagan felt ghast. Here he was trying to shape the boy into an aristocrat with a bicycle, college life, striped shirts, and everything, and he wanted to be a “writer”! Strange!

Even with the passage of time, Jagan never got over the memory of that moment. The coarse, raw pain he had felt at the sight of Mali on that fateful day remained petrified in some vital centre of his being. From that day, the barrier had come into being. The boy had ceased to speak to him normally.

“I hate to upset him, that’s all. I have never upset him in all my life.”

“That means you have carried things to the point where you cannot speak to him at all.”

“Did Valmiki go to America or Germany in order to write his Ramayana?” asked Jagan with pugnacity. “Strange notions these boys get nowadays!”

“They eat only beef and pork in that country. I used to know a man from America, and he told me . . .”

“They also take a lot of intoxicating drinks, never water or milk,” said the cousin, contributing his own bit of information.

Gradually his reading of the Bhagavad Gita was replaced by the blue airmail letters.

The only letter Jagan rigorously suppressed was the one in which Mali had written, after three years’ experience of America, “I’ve taken to eating beef; and I don’t think I’m any the worse for it. Steak is something quite tasty and juicy. Now I want to suggest why not you people start eating beef? It’ll solve the problem of useless cattle in our country and we won’t have to beg food from America. I sometimes feel ashamed when India asks for American aid. Instead of that, why not slaughter useless cows which wander in the streets and block traffic?”

“You are not one who knows how to make money. If you were unscrupulous, you could have built many mansions, who knows?”

“And what would one do with many mansions?”

Jagan asked, “Do you want to use this for writing stories?”

“Yes, I am also going to manufacture and sell it in this country. An American company is offering to collaborate. In course of time, every home in the country will possess one and we will produce more stories than any other nation in the world. Right now we are a little backward. Except Ramayana and Mahabharata, those old stories, there is no modern writing, whereas in America alone every publishing season ten thousand books are published.”

Prayer was a sound way of isolating oneself—but sooner or later it ended: one could not go on praying eternally, though one ought to.

“Do you make your images there?”

At this, the man burst into a big laugh and said, “Did I not tell you what I do now? I make hair dyes. I can make the whitest hair look black.”

He went on talking and Jagan listened agape as if a new world had flashed into view. He suddenly realized how narrow his whole existence had been—between the Lawley Statue and the frying shop[.]

“It would be the most accredited procedure according to our scriptures—husband and wife must vanish into the forest at some stage in their lives, leaving the affairs of the world to younger people.”

“If she has nothing to do here, she goes back, that’s all. Her air ticket must be bought immediately.”

“But a wife must be with her husband, whatever happens.”

“That was in your day,” said Mali, and left the room.

“Mo has no more use for me.”

“Use or no use, my wife—well, you know, I looked after her all her life.”

“Our young men live in a different world from ours and we must not let ourselves be upset too much by certain things they do.”

“Grace has been getting funny notions, that’s why I told you to pack her off, but you grudged the expenditure,” said Mali.

Jagan, as became a junior, was careful not to show too much personal interest in his marriage, but he was anxious to know what was going on.

They sent out three thousand invitations. […] Jagan’s whole time was spent in greeting the guests or prostrating himself at their feet as if they were older relatives. The priests compelled him to sit before the holy fire performing complicated rites and reciting sacred mantras; his consolation was that during most of these he had to be clasping his wife’s hand; he felt enormously responsible as he glanced at the sacred thali he had knotted around her neck at the most auspicious moment of the ceremonies.

“That’s why I discouraged his idea of buying that horrible green car!” He vented his rage against the green automobile until the cousin interrupted, “A bottle could be sneaked in anywhere . . .”

“You don’t understand. It’s the motor car that creates all sorts of notions in a young fellow,” said Jagan[.]

“If you meet her, tell her that if she ever wants to go back to her country, I will buy her a ticket. It’s a duty we owe her. She was a good girl.”