The Cat and Shakespeare by Raja Rao Read Free Book Online Page A

for he was so concerned with every thing. Once he talked so much on manure that an agricultural expert asked if he was a professor at the local college. Just the same way he talked of the twenty-three types of Enfield guns. Or for that matter of boils. Two cups of coffee were handed down the wall. You just saw hair and hand and Govindan Nair brought in the coffee. The sun was up and the light played on his head. ‘Ah, you big British boil,’ he said, and laughed.
    ‘Let’s drive the British out,’ he declared, and after a quarter of an hour’s silence—during which he did nothing but play with his toenails—he added: ‘And now for the fight.’ In half an hour he had been to Narayan Pandita Vaidyan. The medicine smelled disgusting, like horse dung. ‘To fight evil you must use evil,’ he assured me. I swallowed the paste and fell on the bed exhausted. The Lord knows how much pus must have eked itself out. Shridhar, Govindan Nair’s second son, came in again and again, to inquire if Uncle wanted anything.
    Then I woke up so long afterward . . . Where was I? The definition of Truth is simple—you wake up and you are in front of Truth.
    For when I woke up I thought I saw someone. But actually it was nobody. It was as if Govindan Nair was there when he was not there but yet he was truly there: one can be and not be but be, and where one is one cannot be seen, for light cannot see light and much less can light see the sun.
    So when I woke up and, frightened, said: ‘Who’s there?’ I wanted to see something on the chair in front of me. But actually I saw Govindan Nair hiding behind the door. He went to the window (for he was munching tobacco) to spit out and said: ‘I am Govindan Nair.’ His son Shridhar stood by him brave and well protected. But what had happened in all truth? What, I ask of you?
    The facts are there. Shridhar had not been very well, and Narayan Pandita Vaidyan had ordered complete rest, with an oil bath towards noon. So that when Govindan Nair returned for his midday meal (his office was between the Secretariat and the General Hospital, on the Statue Road—a low-down-looking shed with sacks and a huge red-coloured scale in the middle, and men at the desk examining ration cards—and above was his august office), Shridhar usually woke up, held his father’s coat and hung it on the rack. Then he took a towel and held it forth for his father to wipe his feet. Meanwhile his brother Modhu would return. Modhu preferred to eat in the kitchen and to have the meal quickly finished and over—so he could run back to school and have a bout of football. Today, however, he did not return—he had some schoolwork. (At such times he usually ate something in the coffee shop opposite). Shridhar took the towel back to the bathroom and went and lay down on his bed.
    Govindan Nair was at his meal, and suddenly he said: ‘And, son, what about our delightful neighbour ? Is he still emptying his bowels? Has the horse-dung-smelling purge worked?’ The son answered: ‘Father, I have not been to see him since eleven o’clock, that is, since I started on the oil bath.’ ‘And you,’ Govindan Nair said to his wife, ‘and you, my lady, I imagine you are too virtuous to find out whether our friend is living or dead. I fear the medicine was very strong. Ah, our Vaidyans! 5 They know how to purge a calf but not a delicate Saraswath Brahmin. Shridhar, go and see.’
    It was a very hot day in March. No, it was actually April, getting on to May. The sun was indeed very hot. The
bilva
tree seemed more thorn than leaf, more sun than air. Shridhar, so I learned later, jumped down the garden wall and entered my house from the backyard. He saw me, so he said, lying flat, my face to one side, my latrine bucket gone rolling on itself, and lying handle out in a corner. I was obviously unconscious. Going to the latrine, with the sun so hot, and I so weak, I must have tumbled and fallen against the threshold. I could not reach