In a Free State Read Online Free PDF

in a dream, not easy to believe – there were many people who looked like my own people. I tightened the string around my loose pants, held down my flapping shirt and ran through the traffic to the green circle.
    Some of the
hubshi
were there, playing musical instruments and looking quite happy in their way. There were some Americans sitting about on the grass and the fountain and the kerb. Many of them were in rough, friendly-looking clothes; some were without shoes; and I felt I had been over-hasty in condemning the entire race. But it wasn’t these people who had attracted me to the circle. It was the dancers. The men were bearded, bare-footed and in saffron robes, and the girls were in saris and canvas shoes that looked like our own Bata shoes. They were shaking little cymbals and chanting and lifting their heads up and down and going round in a circle, making a lot of dust. It was a little bit like a Red Indiandance in a cowboy movie, but they were chanting Sanskrit words in praise of Lord Krishna.
    I was very pleased. But then a disturbing thought came to me. It might have been because of the half-caste appearance of the dancers; it might have been their bad Sanskrit pronunciation and their accent. I thought that these people were now strangers, but that perhaps once upon a time they had been like me. Perhaps, as in some story, they had been brought here among the
hubshi
as captives a long time ago and had become a lost people, like our own wandering gipsy folk, and had forgotten who they were. When I thought that, I lost my pleasure in the dancing; and I felt for the dancers the sort of distaste we feel when we are faced with something that should be kin but turns out not to be, turns out to be degraded, like a deformed man, or like a leper, who from a distance looks whole.
    I didn’t stay. Not far from the circle I saw a café which appeared to be serving bare feet. I went in, had a coffee and a nice piece of cake and bought a pack of cigarettes; matches they gave me free with the cigarettes. It was all right, but then the bare feet began looking at me, and one bearded fellow came and sniffed loudly at me and smiled and spoke some sort of gibberish, and then some others of the bare feet came and sniffed at me. They weren’t unfriendly, but I didn’t appreciate the behaviour; and it was a little frightening to find, when I left the place, that two or three of them appeared to be following me. They weren’t unfriendly, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I passed a cinema; I went in. It was something I wanted to do anyway. In Bombay I used to go once a week.
    And that was all right. The movie had already started. It was in English, not too easy for me to follow, and it gave me time to think. It was only there, in the darkness, that I thought about the money I had been spending. The prices had seemed to me very reasonable, like Bombay prices. Three for the movie ticket, onefifty in the café, with tip. But I had been thinking in rupees and paying in dollars. In less than an hour I had spent nine days’ pay.
    I couldn’t watch the movie after that. I went out and began to make my way back to the apartment block. Many more of the
hubshi
were about now and I saw that where they congregated the pavement was wet, and dangerous with broken glass and bottles. I couldn’t think of cooking when I got back to the apartment. I couldn’t bear to look at the view. I spread my bedding in the cupboard, lay down in the darkness and waited for my employer to return.
    When he did I said, ‘Sahib, I want to go home.’
    ‘Santosh, I’ve paid five thousand rupees to bring you here. If I send you back now, you will have to work for six or seven years without salary to pay me back.’
    I burst into tears.
    ‘My poor Santosh, something has happened. Tell me what has happened?’
    ‘Sahib, I’ve spent more than half the advance you gave me this morning. I went out and had a coffee and cake and then I went to a movie.’
    His