Resistance Read Online Free PDF Page B

exchange for meals, a clean bed, some private space, and a few books, and for money enough to keep traveling, for gift giving, and for keeping up a reliable set of tools.
    I was conscious of the emotions of love, so the necessary partings sometimes made me feel like a cracked vase, something from which the water had drained and in which the flowers had withered. It was a long while, of course, before I understood that my arduous efforts to be kind to each person, my expressions of compassion and acts of generosity, my will to accommodate were all a sort of mask. I could express love strongly, but I could not accept it, could not allow myself to be loved.
    I could not, then, really claim to know love.
    Once, on a train between Madras and Bangalore, I realized, watching feral dogs fight over food on a platform, that I regarded myself unconsciously as a pariah, beyond anyone’s touch. My regular stints as a good neighbor one place and another, even the attractiveness of my work, the flawless cutting of a dovetail joint, were a wall behind which I dwelled. What I, in truth, feared were not the repeated departures from a well-made life, with the comfort of its routines, the loyal companionship, the sweet conversation over meals. I feared that a desire to stay on would overwhelm me, that I would not leave. My life would then include reciprocities I was not prepared for. I would have to fake the life unfolding in my blind spot.
    To understand myself as a pariah, a person who chooses to be an outcast, was a relief. On disembarking in Bangalore that time, I was willing to concede that I was less than what I had imagined— a man with only a slight limp. The damage, I could say, had been more extensive. If I accepted myself in that moment as an outcast, a species of leper, it was not out of self-pity, however. It was out of humility, as I understand the word. I was going to play to exactly what I was. I would give up my hazy notions of someday living a different life, and fully embrace this life I had: useful, harmless, and chosen freely. I would now live as if I were even more fully the result of my own decisions.
    On the walk from the train station to the home of my acquaintance, I realized I was making a new peace with my past. I had not gotten away as uninjured as I wanted to believe from the episodes in that shabby room; but considering the number of homes open to me, that I traveled without restraints, and that I possessed so many stories I could create a place for myself at nearly anyone’s table, from Addis Ababa to Christchurch, I had not paid too high a price.
    My friend Gileathal opened the door at my knock that night, pulled me through the opening with an embrace, introduced me to his four children, then to his wife and her brother, and we sat down right away to eat. Gileathal related to the others the circumstances of our first meeting, exaggerating it all to encourage laughter; and I of course embellished his version. The evening then grew quieter and I entertained Belinda, Gileathal’s youngest daughter, with cat’s cradle tricks. I tied her a string loop of her own and taught her how to make “the fish” and “the wagon.”
    Gileathal sent one of his sons to the station after my bags and tools and then showed me to quarters at the back of his house. I stretched out full length on the narrow straw tick mattress, satisfied and pleasantly exhausted. I felt, after my insight on the train, more honestly engaged with my life now. I was just at the edge of sleep when Belinda came into the room. She walked directly to the bedside. Our eyes met, hers gleaming dark in the rays of an alley lamp slanting through the window. She took my face in her hands and kissed my forehead, then walked from the room.
    The sound of the door latch closing, the bolt sliding slowly up the striker plate until it clicked shut, expanded the volume of space in the room and created a kind of vacuum into which I silently tumbled. I fell through