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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Chandanagar. Perhaps you're right and I'm a common man.' you are so common wouldn't you be ashamed if she knew you Adamant, she said, 'You're a spoiler, Tancred, like all your race. You make me feel dirty. That's all I have to say to you.' 'That's all, eh? No deep Indian wisdom to give to the dis-appearing white man! There's a myth in Switzerland - and in England too - that India is a land of ancient wisdom, where eventually a man will come face to face with the knowledge of himself. Have you nothing like that to offer, eh, instead of catty remarks?' She laughed. 'You often come face to face with yourself, Tancred, but you will not acknowledge it.' 'Tell me, then! Give me a piece of your wisdom, the im-memorial wisdom of the East! What does go on inside that brain of yours, anyway, sex apart?' She began to light a cigar, and only then looked at him through the smoke. 'I will tell you! I will tell you something to keep stored among the funny voices in your head. Perhaps you will strike me, but I don't care! I don't think you often get the luxury of hearing the real truth about yourself, do you? You have come to Chandanagar and the famine because it represents a state of Mutti Mutti I didn't mean it really I didn't mean it don't cry mind to you from your childhood. I don't know what. And there you have come to me to torment me because I also repre-sent to you something other than what I. really am. You see, you cannot understand famine as famine, because it is a thingalien to your part of the world, and so for you it can be believed only as a famine of love. That you can experience! It is the common experience of Europe and America, the famine of love. Your lands are deserts in that sense. Your famine of love is your big neurosis that drives you to live among machinery.' 'You're joking, of course!' He laughed harshly. She arched her superb eyebrows and did not smile. 'And you suffer the malnutrition of the soul, which brings all kinds of shadow-diseases to you. You have been pushed to seek comfort in my bosom because you have to respond in that way to the hunger all round you, as the psychic forces of Chandana-gar bear down on you. But even to my bosom you have to bring your deeper discontents from other times. Even my bosom you make your battleground! Your dirty common adulterous battleground! You are slowly dying, even as the people in the UNFAW enclosure.' He had not expected to hear it, rattling in the truck with death's landscape leaden under the storm clouds. Her words were a terrible torment for him; no precognition prepared him for her judgement. It took away his defences of anger, so that their relationship was at an end, that she had killed it as deliber-ately as one chops off a snake's head. He wished he could have wept. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html She spoke again as the vehicle turned away from the river. 'My wisdom comes mostly not from me, but from Kisari Mafatlal. He understands about all the matters people do not you try to hide that you are unsure of your own psychological care to reveal. I believe he knows what you are really like under-neath.' 'Do you have to discuss me with him?' 'Don't sound so much like an old beaten dog! When we spoke of you, we hoped only that we could help find yourself.' 'Very good of you to put yourself out on my account!' The withering sarcasm withered and died. Mafatlal, that windbag, talking seriously with, sharing confidences with, Sushila! It might be wondered what else they shared! These Indians, they were so treacherous.... Even a girl educated in England.... the tulips were over by the end of the last week in April with You never knew. The long afternoon was tiring visibly .over the immense bowl of plain when they sighted the camp. Neither spoke to the other as the truck bumped forward over the last mile. Again the mon-soon clouds were gigantic in the sky although not a drop of moisture spilled from their purple lips. She said, 'The gate's shut already!' He peered ahead, instinctively accelerating the truck. The gate was indeed closed. Flipping off the automatics, he steered the truck until its nose was thrust hard against the wire-shielded pole now barring the gateway. He jumped out, shout-ing in Hindi as he did so for the guards to lift the barrier. Two men ran forward, very black and in filthy clothes. Frazer had never seen them before. Both were armed. They fired at him. As he flung himself down, he heard the windshield shatter be-hind him and a bullet go screaming into space. Diving behind the truck, he climbed up and fumbled in the tool box for a weapon. There was not enough time: the men were on him. Frazer flung himself at one of them, but the man whippd up his rifle, so that Frazer ran against it. The other man clamped his weapon round Frazer's throat. 'Don't make struggle,sahib !' He had little chance of struggling. They had him tight. Neither looked the kind who would mind killing him. Another man ran up, shouting. He hauled Sushila out of the front of the truck; she stood unconcernedly brushing shattered glass off her sari. As she and Frazer were led past the guard house, he saw the guards lined up against a wall inside, their palms to the wall and their trousers down, as a bandit with a rifle stood over them. The camp had undergone a change of ownership, it seemed. 'This is all your fault, Frazer!' Sushila said. Two strange trucks were inside the camp. One stood outside the new store, one was further down, covering the hospital. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html He knew what the raiders were after, of course. The grain! The store was full of rice, plus large quantities of wheat and flour, as well as canned goods. Plundering would start any mo-ment. The bandits marched him and Sushila roughly down the road. They stopped by the store, the doors of which were closed, and one of them shouted something, evidently to a superior inside. The store door opened and a ferocious face peered out. It belonged to a large Indian witha thatch of lank hair. He was the very glow of summer is on thy dimpled cheek cold and eating. In an angry-sounding exchange, he gestured to the office block next door, and threw Frazer's captor a key. Frazer and Sushila were then dragged to the offices. The door was unlocked, and their captors told them to stay inside and we always keep all the shutters closed when we're away to keep quiet, adding that they were lucky to escape so lightly. They were pushed in and the door slammed and locked on them. 'Oh God, they are robbing the store!' Frazer said. Sushila strolled over to a swivel chair and sat down, resting her delicate wrists on the desk. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |