The Pledge Read Online Free PDF Page B

around him, and he was reminded of Hal Legerman’s story of filling his pockets with pice. He had only a handful of coins in his pocket, and he distributed these among the children, who first stared at the coins with awe and disbelief and then tried to give them back. When Bruce refused to take them, the children chattered rapidly and then raced away. Now half of the men and women in the group were shouting at each other, with Majumdar trying to quiet them and impose some order. It took almost a half hour before Majumdar could unroll his newspaper and read the news, and after that, there was more discussion. When they rolled out of there on their bicycles, Majumdar explained the problem to Bruce.
    â€œWhat decision did they come to? Or was the decision up to you? They seemed to trust you.”
    â€œI hope so. The decision was theirs, but I pushed them a little. I said that if the survival of the village depended on sending the families into Calcutta, then it might be considered just and proper. On the other hand, they could not send the children of these hill people to death without great agony and terrible karma, terrible karma. Maybe it was the thought of the karma. Possibly, the thought of separating the children from their parents. They will allow the hill folk to remain.”
    â€œAnd the karma? Do you believe in karma — you, a communist?”
    Majumdar smiled. “Does communism change the universe? Shall I not be accountable for my actions? Shall I be released from my karma?”
    â€œNo one gave you rice there,” Bruce said.
    â€œQuite true. They sacrificed. I must sacrifice.”
    Bruce wrestled with this as Majumdar went through his rite of reading the news at the next village. As before, the children gathered around him. He went through his pockets, but he had no more change and he felt uneasy about giving them paper money. His guilt — which he decided was totally unreasonable but nevertheless present and provocative — set him to brooding over the matter of karma. As well as he could remember, karma was the name given to the sum of a person’s actions during the successive phases of existence, and this storehouse of karma, measured in some strange way by compassion, determined a person’s destiny. Since Bruce, as a proper twentieth-century man, rejected any notion so preposterous as successive phases of existence, the problem of Majumdar, a man of obviously keen intelligence, believing in it, puzzled him — but no more than everything else in this strange land. The fact that he, Bruce Bacon, raised in the most proper middle-class circumstances in New York City, graduate of Williams College and postgraduate at the Columbia School of Journalism, was sitting in the shade of a wickerwork fence, a bony cow lying beside him chewing her cud and indifferent to his presence, his uniform soaked with sweat, listening to a communist organizer reading a newspaper in a language he did not understand, underlined that.
    At the next village, Bruce finished the first of the three water bottles. Majumdar drank the village water wherever they were, so thirst was not his problem. “As far as food is concerned,” Bruce told him, “I can’t eat any of their food.”
    â€œYou will not be offered food,” Majumdar assured him. “We’ll feel better in this heat if we don’t eat until this evening.”
    â€œWhen you will be my guest for dinner.”
    Majumdar demurred, but Bruce insisted. “Ah, I shall have to find a clean dhoti.” Majumdar sighed.
    â€œI didn’t mean I wouldn’t eat their food,” Bruce added hastily. “I mean, I’m not afraid to eat it. I mean the guilt — oh, hell, how can you eat in this heat?”
    â€œOf course,” Majumdar said.
    Where their path crossed a larger road, they paused and stood with their bikes to watch a troop of British soldiers marching by. The soldiers wore chalk-white sun