As he pondered new directions appeared to him, as if one more wall was crumbling under his accumulated strength. He remembered the stories from the Bible about Jesus’s messenger, John the Baptist—that young man with those wild eyes, coarse, tousled hair and hardened body clad in deer skin stood in a place just like this and called, ‘Come! Let me baptize you with the water of life!’ And in a similar rust-stained twilight the members of the rejected lower castes of humanity turned a deaf ear towards him, perhaps said he was crazy, but upon hearing his interminable caterwauling probably came out of their houses to see what this water of life business was all about . . .
Shekhar was pleased with the fact that he had remembered that incident here because what was the water of life anyway? Ganga, Yamuna, Godavari, Krishna, Narmada—the waters of all of these rivers had become lifeless from being washed over and over with religion and devotion. Life, if ancient, life was anywhere it was in an open sewer like this in which the boat of society had been flowing down obliviously from time immemorial, through this colony of untouchables . . . The waters of those so-called ‘sin-purifying’ rivers were just as dead as the erudition of the pundits; that was why they were so useful for putting out funeral pyres, washing away the remains of the dead . . .
It was now clear to Shekhar that within a week he would open a school for the untouchable children in that neighbourhood and teach them himself. He hadn’t worked out yet how the arrangements would be made or where the books would come from or the rest. Having come to a decision he no longer felt the need to wander any farther; he went straight back to the hostel.
On the way, he spotted a middle school building and immediately cried out, ‘Guard!’
Exactly five days later, Shekhar’s night school opened in that very middle school building. The Hindu patrons of that middle school gave permission for untouchable classes in two of the rooms on the condition that the watchman was given three rupees a month—so that he could get up early and do the extra work of cleaning, sweeping and sprinkling water in those rooms so that the taint of the dirty children would not rub off on the regular students.
There were only two books, both of which were picture books. There were two instructors—Shekhar and Sadashiv. The blackboard was used to teach the alphabet; all other instruction was done orally or through many kinds of games. There were seven students.
*
Those people whose minds are restless, who always enjoy battling new problems all the time, the first problem that seems to arise for them is always the same—the problem of suffering. The first revelation of the world is always a revelation of its afflicted form.
The next problem that comes up is also always the same—the first problem is a sort of preamble for it—and that problem is the condition of women. The second revelation of the world is a revelation of the idol of woman.
Shekhar’s mind was very soon standing face-to-face with this second problem.
Shekhar had gone home for the week-long holiday during Dussehra and was returning. In the atmosphere created by the reverberating din of four or five Dravidian mothers in a railway car crammed with throngs of Madrasis, Shekhar’s mind was absorbed with matters concerning his night school, his young and adult students and their textbooks. There were now twenty-five students among whom were several adults who could already read. The small gauged railroad engine groaned as it moved forward, struggling to carry the weight of its load. The undulations of its progress comforted Shekhar’s thoughts and he could rise above the commotion that had descended around him. Whenever the train stopped, he would stop thinking for a while and watch the crowds getting on and off.
The train stopped at a major station, and Shekhar saw that behind the throngs of men getting on the train through the doors and windows was a woman who was watching the crowd helplessly. She has two bags in each hand, and a coolie stands behind her with a trunk and some bedding. The woman occasionally steels herself to move forward, but then stops. Sometimes she looks over at another car with an even greater crowd and it is now time for the train to leave. The guard has sounded the first whistle, too.
Shekhar got up, stood next to the window and said, ‘Here, give me your luggage.’ He pulled the bag inside and took the trunk from the coolie and put it on the floor. Then just before the train started moving he went to the door and opened it and pushed the crowd aside and said, ‘Please, this way.’
Nervous about being thanked, Shekhar gestured towards his seat and said, ‘You can sit there.’
‘No, you took great trouble to get me on to the train, that’s more than enough. It would be ill-mannered to take your seat after that.’
‘I will be fine,’ Shekhar said as he sat down on the trunk and bedding and looked out the window so that the woman would see that his attention was in the opposite direction and would sit down on her own.
He guessed right. She sat down. Shekhar turned around to look in her direction and she was about to offer her thanks, but Shekhar immediately turned around as if he hadn’t looked over there and she became quiet. After a while, she took out a book and began reading. Shekhar drifted into his thoughts about his school.
But he was suddenly startled. At some distance stood an Anglo-Indian whom Shekhar had stopped from taking the seat next to his because he had come on board the train by pushing a few men out of the way and had even cursed at one. He was now muttering to himself on seeing that woman sitting there. He was saying something in his vulgar British imperialist language about Shekhar having given up his seat. Shekhar saw that the woman turned bright red on hearing that man’s mutterings but she hid behind her book and pretended not to hear.
Shekhar also utilized the White imperialist (though a very mild version) language and said as he got up, ‘Shut up, you cad!’9
It was fuel to the fire. The Anglo-Indian began cursing even more. Shekhar moved towards him and said, ‘So you’ll have to be made to shut up,’ and punched him very hard on the left side of his jaw. He fought back but Shekhar pulled him towards his chest and landed a second punch on his chin which had the effect of making him stare up at the ceiling of the car, and then his back collided with the back of his seat and he collapsed with a thud and didn’t get up for a while.
The train slowed; the police arrived when they heard the commotion at the station. But the Punjabi sub-inspector at the station knew Shekhar; he heard the narrative of what happened and said, ‘You did the right thing, should have landed a couple more on the scoundrel.’ He then took the white man off the train and let the train go on its way.
That should have been the end of the story, but this is actually where the problem began. Shekhar now had a place to sit down, and he even got to know the woman well enough that she told him her name and also told him that she was a teacher in some school, and Shekhar told her that he lived nearby. Then the two fell silent and the schoolteacher began reading again. Shekhar wanted to get lost in his thoughts again but he now realized that people were looking at him with strange, terrified eyes, that he was being assessed in multiple languages, in hushed voices. One of them said that he was Punjabi (because he was dressed as a Madrasi, his Punjabi-ness hadn’t been detected until now) and in all that staring and assessing no one had been able to see that Shekhar had upheld common decency in seating that woman on the train and ending the ravings of that white man.
In the eyes of some he was a lustful young man who wanted to use this small matter as a pretext to get closer to that woman; for others he was a stupid youth who would remain trapped in the clutches of modern, educated and immoral women; for others, Shekhar and that women were both immoral and wanted to mask their shameless crimes with this deceitful action . . . All of this was not something that was heard, but their gestures—their glances and their whispers—said it for them. They weren’t saying it for Shekhar’s benefit; they were trying to conceal their conversation from him and so it stung Shekhar even more . . .
Shekhar turned away and put his head out the window. The wind from
the cloud-covered mountains whirred past his overheated ears and he began to wonder about what was wrong. He had never experienced such deep moral suspicion before. He had seen sin in many places, committed it, too, but the terrible doubt—such certain suspicion—that sin was the root of all of man’s desires was never something he had held in his heart. He didn’t understand how someone could go on living, how anyone could have peace when worms were writhing around in the vessels around his heart . . . The relationship between man and woman—not the relationship between individuals but between men in general and women in general—appeared before Shekhar for the first time as a form of brutal suspicion; today he realized that even more important than the problem of the suffering in the world was the problem of the suspicion in the world, this very serious matter which humanity has focused on that one individual who Shekhar had until now only understood as being a support—woman! And this thought began choking him as if worms were crawling into his nostrils, his lungs . . .
In his committee, Shekhar’s views began slowly acquiring clarity. As important as it was to nurture feelings of grave dissatisfaction and a desire for change in young men, it was equally important to nurture them in women. The self-satisfaction of this male-centred civilization would need to be broken, the falsity of its claims to propriety would have to be exposed, so that we can find the way forward. This mistrust of womankind, this collective conspiracy to view only the feminine as sinful, would have to be destroyed. Crazed by the intoxication of their own virility, our philosophers and thinkers say that understanding women as driven by sin is a relic from the Romantic10 period; when we start losing confidence in old conventions, old religions, old ways of thinking, old divine laws, the rationale for our new ways of thinking seem insufficient and false, the first time we realize that our previously well-ordered world contains something chaotic, even out of place, that’s when we call it a sin; but when we also think of it as sweet, when it draws us to it, we become Romantic and hide the impropriety of our attraction.
We say that beauty is attractive. It shackles us, turns us into slaves of fate and pushes us into an abyss. And if woman isn’t the best, the pinnacle, the most powerful symbol of beauty then what is? This is why woman is the root of sinful thought, is a great delusion, is fallen, and in this way we make ourselves content. And we erect the walls of collective mistrust. We will have to fell those walls.
It was Shekhar speaking. Sadashiv occasionally offers praise, but otherwise remains silent. Shekhar understands his silence to be agreement. Devadas laughs but he still diligently performs whatever task is assigned to him. It’s only Raghavan whose enthusiasm wanes. As the objectives of the society grow in number, so do the number of its members since they want to attach their dinghies to the steamboat of an extremely clear principle and be dragged along to cross the realm of society. But it didn’t seem as if this made any substantial improvement in their work. Rather their detractors now had an easy time finding something that they could oppose.
Still, the steamboat continues to move along, cutting through all kinds of snares and nets, billowing plumes of dark smoke, and its captain, Shekhar, considers himself lucky to have a first mate like Sadashiv.
One day, all of a sudden, Shekhar and his friends had their naming ceremony, ‘Antigonon Club’. This is what happened . . .
After much debate, the society came to the decision that their youth group would relate to women in the same way one would relate to a respected guest—even if they were strangers, they would still be respected, would receive help in times of trouble, would get protection in times of danger, and even after all of that they would still be independent and would in no way feel obligated to men. As for himself, Shekhar had also decided not to marry, wouldn’t even think about the matter. It was only after coming to that decision that he called for a smallish meeting under a vine that grew on one side of the hostel and that’s where he shared his views. And by the time he got to explaining about remaining unmarried and maintaining an emotional distance from women the audience had got bored and began leaving in ones and twos.
The only ones who stayed were his three friends. Shekhar was still going on:
‘Look, in our literature, in stories, in novels, in plays, on stage and screen, everywhere you will find that writers create false models of ethics—girls who are enduring the torments of hell will give lengthy, eloquent speeches11 to demonstrate that they are dying in order to fulfil their marital vows because marriage is their greatest resource, their most important duty, for which hundreds have died, hundreds have performed sati12 or jauhar13 and immolated themselves, hundreds have been crushed under the feet of elephants14 . . . A mirage created by men for male spectators! Drunk on his own vaunted image and self-importance, the stupid bull of a man watches, listens, reads and becomes heady . . . why? Because what after all are the marital obligations of the heroine of the story or the play? It’s another kind of slavery, even if it is a slavery that is voluntarily accepted, by which she subordinates herself to her husband, or rather to the spectator, to all mankind, and so to an infinite number of spectators! Because by virtue of being a man, the spectator is vicariously15 the husband, and the disgusting spectacle of the heroine’s cruel suffering is all for him, confirming the arrogance of his own personality . . .
‘This is ruination, it’s the greatest of sins. It is a vast conspiracy to manufacture an original sin and perpetuate it—in order to maintain the privileges of men.’
Sadashiv interrupted, but not out of disagreement, ‘But women accept this fact, after all.’
‘We beat them into acceptance. That’s why women’s literature doesn’t have the same power. When they write, they do so by chaining themselves to the models set by men, and that’s why their prose is always false and lifeless, even when beautiful—like flowers made from paper.’
‘But—’ Sadashiv started but trailed off into thought.
Devadas said, ‘Hmm, your ideas will make life impossible. How are we going to accomplish anything if we try to be idealistic all the time and in everything we do? And what will happen if some woman asks you something? You won’t even be able to give her an answer since you’ll be stuck thinking about whether or not there’s any male chauvinism in your response! I promise you, you’ll make a fool of yourself in no time. You won’t be able to move.’
Shekhar clutched the vine in his hand. A faint smile crossed his lips as he heard what Devadas said, and then he became serious and said, ‘So why should I be afraid of turning into a fool? If you’re going to do anything, you’ll have to be a fool at some point. Rather I want to be able to be proud of that fact—to wear my embarrassment like this vine bears these red flowers.’
As he finished speaking, he broke off a bunch of flowers and placed them in the buttonhole of silently sitting Raghavan.
In jest, the others also plucked some flowers and fixed them to their buttonholes. The meeting broke up in laughter. The four of them went back to the hostel, when someone spied the flowers of the antigonon vine and said, ‘Here comes the Antigonon Club.’
And in an instant, the name became famous, and accepted, too, and as it was accepted the sting of ridicule contained evaporated.
But it wasn’t the case that the ridicule itself evaporated.
The membership of the club began to expand. Shekhar began to suspect that the reasons for this growth were not the club’s principles but the club’s symbol—that antigonon flower. A number of times he had seen that when you called people out in the name of the nation, no one came, but when you waved the national flag around many people would come to stand underneath it, and there would even be a tricolour badge on the lapel of their coats. At the same time, Shekhar didn’t have any means to discriminate between them; there was no trial save a trial by fire, and to his mind, fanning the flames just for a test was such a great sin that he even found it impossible to respect the God Ram.16
After much deliberation, Shekhar decided to publish a handwritten newsletter that cou
ld disseminate the principles of the club. He asked for articles from the members and began writing himself. He assigned Sadashiv the task of illustration—a red antigonon bouquet for the title page, and whatever he wanted on the inside.
The issue was nearly completed and people were anxiously awaiting it. So much, in fact, that a few of the students in the hostel were plotting to snatch the manuscript from Shekhar’s room, since it would be passed among the members of the club for several days before they would get a chance to see it. Shekhar was pleased by the fact that there was such interest in the newsletter, but his happiness was also the source of a problem in his work. The editorial piece wasn’t finished, and as the expectation grew so did Shekhar’s uncertainty, because he wanted there to be an uproar when people read the editorial—that would silence those who had opposed his club, that would make them swallow their ridicule . . .
Then one day something happened.
Raghavan came back from class and began packing his things. When Shekhar asked, he learned that he was going home on ten days’ leave.
‘What’s the matter? Is everything all right? You’re leaving so suddenly.’
‘Everything is fine—there’s some work I have to do.’
‘Well, come on, tell me what it is.’
After much interrogation, Raghavan haltingly replied, ‘Look, I’m getting married.’
Shekhar was taken aback, ‘Huh?’
After a little while he had composed himself and he began asking questions—when, with whom, how was it decided, why and so on. At first Raghavan was quiet, then he began to explain that his father had got him engaged five or six years ago, that the girl was from a wealthy family, that he had never seen her nor did he want to get married, but his father was pressuring him and that the date had already been decided and so he was going.
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