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By Root 256 0

She lay the heater on its back and she set the pots on the metal guards above the glowing electric coils. They ate off paper plates and she washed up the pots in the sink at the end of the corridor. Sarojini had never been a good cook, and the food she cooked in the college room was awful. The smell stayed in the room. Willie was worried about breaking the college rules, and he was just as worried about people seeing the dark little cook—clumsily dressed, with a cardigan over her sari and socks on her feet—who was his sister. In her new assertive way, but still not knowing too much about anything, in five minutes she would have babbled away all Willie's careful little stories about their family and background.

She said, “When you get this famous degree or diploma, what will you do with it? You will get a little teaching job and hide away here for the rest of your life?”

Willie said, “I don't think you know. But I've written a book. It's coming out next year.”

“That's a lot of nonsense. Nobody here or anywhere else will want to read a book by you. I don't have to tell you that. Remember when you wanted to be a missionary?”

“What I mean is that I feel I should wait here until the book comes out.”

“And then there'll be something else to wait for, and then there'll be something after that. This is your father's life.”

For days after she left the smell of her cooking was in Willie's room. At night Willie smelt it on his pillow, his hair, his arms.

He thought, “What she says is right, though I don't like her for saying it. I don't know where I am going. I am just letting the days go by. I don't like the place that's waiting for me at home. For the past two and a half years I have lived like a free man. I can't go back to the other thing. I don't like the idea of marrying someone like Sarojini, and that's what will happen if I go home. If I go home I will have to fight the battles my mother's uncle fought. I don't want to fight those battles. It will be a waste of my precious life. There are others who would enjoy those battles. And Sarojini is right in the other way too. If I get my teaching diploma and decide to stay here and teach it will be a kind of hiding away. And it wouldn't be nice teaching in a place like Notting Hill. That's the kind of place they would send me, and I would walk with the fear of running into a crowd and being knifed like Kelso. It would be worse than being at home. And if I stay here I would always be trying to make love to my friends' girlfriends. I have discovered that that is quite an easy thing to do. But I know it to be wrong, and it would get me into trouble one day. The trouble is I don't know how to go out and get a girl on my own. No one trained me in that. I don't know how to make a pass at a stranger, when to touch a girl or hold her hand or try to kiss her. When my father told me his life story and talked about his sexual incompetence I mocked him. I was a child then. Now I discover I am like my poor father. All men should train their sons in the art of seduction. But in our culture there is no seduction. Our marriages are arranged. There is no art of sex. Some of the boys here talk to me about the Kama Sutra. Nobody talked about that at home. It was an upper-caste text, but I don't believe my poor father, brahmin though he is, ever looked at a copy. That philosophical-practical way of dealing with sex belongs to our past, and that world was ravaged and destroyed by the Muslims. Now we live like incestuous little animals in a hole. We grope all our female relations and are always full of shame. Nobody talked about sex and seduction at home, but I discover now that it is the fundamental skill all men should be trained in. Marcus and Percy Cato, and Richard, seemed to be marvellous that way. When I asked Percy how he had learned he said he started small, fingering and then raping little girls. I was shocked by that. I am not so shocked now.”

He telephoned Perdita early one morning. “Perdita, please come to the college this weekend.”

“This is foolish, Willie. And it's not fair to Roger.