Island - Aldous Huxley [39]
“At school,” Radha answered with a simple matter-of-factness that took all the Rabelaisian wind out of his sails.
“Everybody’s taught it,” Ranga added.
“And when does the teaching begin?”
“About the same time as trigonometry and advanced biology. That’s between fifteen and fifteen and a half.”
“And after they’ve learned maithuna, after they’ve gone out into the world and got married—that is, if you ever do get married?”
“Oh, we do, we do,” Radha assured him.
“Do they still practice it?”
“Not all of them, of course. But a good many do.”
“All the time?”
“Except when they want to have a baby.”
“And those who don’t want to have babies, but who might like to have a little change from maithuna—what do they do?”
“Contraceptives,” said Ranga laconically.
“And are the contraceptives available?”
“Available! They’re distributed by the government. Free, gratis, and for nothing—except of course that they have to be paid for out of taxes.”
“The postman,” Radha added, “delivers a thirty-night supply at the beginning of each month.”
“And the babies don’t arrive?”
“Only those we want. Nobody has more than three, and most people stop at two.”
“With the result,” said Ranga, reverting, with the statistics, to his pedantic manner, “that our population is increasing at less than a third of one percent per annum. Whereas Rendang’s increase is as big as Ceylon’s—almost three percent. And China’s is two percent, and India’s about one point seven.”
“I was in China only a month ago,” said Will. “Terrifying! And last year I spent four weeks in India. And before India in Central America, which is outbreeding even Rendang and Ceylon. Has either of you been in Rendang-Lobo?”
Ranga nodded affirmatively.
“Three days in Rendang,” he explained. “If you get into the Upper Sixth, it’s part of the advanced sociology course. They let you see for yourself what the Outside is like.”
“And what did you think of the Outside?” Will enquired.
Ranga answered with another question. “When you were in Rendang-Lobo, did they show you the slums?”
“On the contrary, they did their best to prevent me from seeing the slums. But I gave them the slip.”
Gave them the slip, he was vividly remembering, on his way back to the hotel from that grisly cocktail party at the Rendang Foreign Office. Everybody who was anybody was there. All the local dignitaries and their wives—uniforms and medals, Dior and emeralds. All the important foreigners—diplomats galore, British and American oilmen, six members of the Japanese trade mission, a lady pharmacologist from Leningrad, two Polish engineers, a German tourist who just happened to be a cousin of Krupp von Bohlen, an enigmatic Armenian representing a very important financial consortium in Tangier, and, beaming with triumph, the fourteen Czech technicians who had come with last month’s shipment of tanks and cannon and machine guns from Skoda. “And these are the people,” he had said to himself as he walked down the marble steps of the Foreign Office into Liberty Square, “these are the people who rule the world. Twenty-nine hundred millions of us at the mercy of a few scores of politicians, a few thousands of tycoons and generals and moneylenders. Ye are the cyanide of the earth—and the cyanide will never, never lose its savor.”
After the glare of the cocktail party, after the laughter and the luscious smells of canapés and Chanel-sprayed women, those alleys behind the brand-new Palace of Justice had seemed doubly dark and noisome. Those poor wretches camping out under the palm trees of Independence Avenue more totally abandoned by God and man than even the homeless, hopeless thousands he had seen sleeping like corpses in the streets of Calcutta. And now he thought of that little boy, that tiny potbellied skeleton, whom he had picked up, bruised and shaken by a fall from the back of the little girl, scarcely larger than himself, who was carrying him—had picked up and, led by the other child, had carried back, carried down, to the windowless