In a Free State Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes went small and twinkly behind his glasses. He bit the inside of his top lip, scraped at his moustache with his lower teeth, and he said, ‘You see, you see. I told you it was expensive.’
    *
    I understood I was a prisoner. I accepted this and adjusted. I learned to live within the apartment, and I was even calm.
    My employer was a man of taste and he soon had the apartment looking like something in a magazine, with books and Indian paintings and Indian fabrics and pieces of sculpture and bronze statues of our gods. I was careful to take no delight in it. It was of course very pretty, especially with the view. But the view remained foreign and I never felt that the apartment was real, likethe shabby old Bombay chambers with the cane chairs, or that it had anything to do with me.
    When people came to dinner I did my duty. At the appropriate time I would bid the company goodnight, close off the kitchen behind its folding screen and pretend I was leaving the apartment. Then I would lie down quietly in my cupboard and smoke. I was free to go out; I had my separate entrance. But I didn’t like being out of the apartment. I didn’t even like going down to the laundry room in the basement.
    Once or twice a week I went to the supermarket on our street. I always had to walk past groups of
hubshi
men and children. I tried not to look, but it was hard. They sat on the pavement, on steps and in the bush around their redbrick houses, some of which had boarded-up windows. They appeared to be very much a people of the open air, with little to do; even in the mornings some of the men were drunk.
    Scattered among the
hubshi
houses were others just as old but with gas-lamps that burned night and day in the entrance. These were the houses of the Americans. I seldom saw these people; they didn’t spend much time on the street. The lighted gas-lamp was the American way of saying that though a house looked old outside it was nice and new inside. I also felt that it was like a warning to the
hubshi
to keep off.
    Outside the supermarket there was always a policeman with a gun. Inside, there were always a couple of
hubshi
guards with truncheons, and, behind the cashiers, some old
hubshi
beggar men in rags. There were also many young
hubshi
boys, small but muscular, waiting to carry parcels, as once in the hills I had waited to carry Indian tourists’ luggage.
    These trips to the supermarket were my only outings, and I was always glad to get back to the apartment. The work there was light. I watched a lot of television and my English improved. I grew to like certain commercials very much. It was in these commercials I saw the Americans whom in real life I so seldomsaw and knew only by their gas-lamps. Up there in the apartment, with a view of the white domes and towers and greenery of the famous city, I entered the homes of the Americans and saw them cleaning those homes. I saw them cleaning floors and dishes. I saw them buying clothes and cleaning clothes, buying motor cars and cleaning motor cars. I saw them cleaning, cleaning.
    The effect of all this television on me was curious. If by some chance I saw an American on the street I tried to fit him or her into the commercials; and I felt I had caught the person in an interval between his television duties. So to some extent Americans have remained to me, as people not quite real, as people temporarily absent from television.
    Sometimes a
hubshi
came on the screen, not to talk of
hubshi
things, but to do a little cleaning of his own. That wasn’t the same. He was too different from the
hubshi
I saw on the street and I knew he was an actor. I knew that his television duties were only make-believe and that he would soon have to return to the street.
    *
    One day at the supermarket, when the
hubshi
girl took my money, she sniffed and said, ‘You always smell sweet, baby.’
    She was friendly, and I was at last able to clear up that mystery, of my smell. It was the poor country weed I smoked.