Who Are You? Read Online Free PDF

movement about the house. The only living being in sight is the chuprassi, stretched out on the back porch, his sash and badge of office beside him, his raised arms folded over his face, the black bush of beard jutting beneath the apex of a triangle of which the other two points are the tufts of black wire sprouting in his armpits.
    In the blinding glare nothing moves, either in the house itself or in the compound, or in the untidy, village-like cluster of huts composing the servants' quarters, hidden by straggling bushes, where even the constant crying of children is hushed. A half-starved pi-dog is panting with its head in a patch of shade; the only motion to be seen there is the bellows-like pumping of its skeletal ribcage.
    The master of the house sleeps fitfully beneath his mosquito net, nervously watched by a turbaned youth squatting on his hams. The bearded Moslem, whose successor he is to be, is descending the stairs : his lean bare legs shut and open like blackish scissors, outlined against the white material hitched round his middle, the upper part of his body only a shade or two darker than his grey beard. Now, without making the slightest sound, he comes out on to the verandah, and turns his hook-nosed face to the left.
    Here, on the shady side of the house, the girl is lounging on an old steamer chair, her bare legs hanging over the side, her bare arms reaching up to the chair-back; a position which lets the maximum amount of air touch her body. On her lap lies a letter, but she is not reading. It came some days earlier, and has already been read so often that its folds are starting to wear thin. She knows by heart what is written on the paper under the college heading, about it being a thousand pities she can't take up the scholarship she won last year is it entirely too late to reconsider . . .? Isn't she rather wasting her talents in that primitive country known as the white man's grave?
    She keeps the letter carefully hidden from her husband. It is only because he happens to be down with a bout of malaria that she is now holding it openly, though apparently giving less attention to it than to the dazzle beyond the verandah. From her seat she can see a slice of the compound's bare earth, the rickety boundary fence and the path beyond, all framed by exotic orchids and by the large dangling bones of dead animals from which these parasitic plants derive nourishment. She doesn't really see any of it. She's as oblivious of the arrival of her husband's boy as she is of the uncomfortable chair and the ghastly heat, living a fantasy version of what her life would have been if her mother had not married her off at the first opportunity.
    Recalling a phrase in the letter, she wonders whether the woman's determination to force her into this particular marriage had anything to do with the name white man's grave ' sensationally applied to the region, from which mosquitoes and other disease-carriers have not yet been eliminated. Deciding that the intention probably is that she shall not return, she accepts this without any special feeling, accustomed all her life to being unwanted among people blind to her gifts. It's only at school that her intelligence has ever been recognized; and that period, not many months ago, already seems immeasurably remote — almost mythical — so hat she doesn't consider seriously the letter's suggestion. is as much as she can do to cope with each day as it comes, each one a little hotter than the one before. Unaware of the hostile gaze fixed upon her, she lies dreaming about university life, incapable of the effort of self-assertion that might turn the dream into reality.
    Mohammed Dirwaza Khan has ready a question about tonight's dinner (justified by his master's being in bed, and her frequent absences from the meal), should she look up and ask what he wants. He can't understand why she doesn't do so, and suspects her of pretending not to know he is there. The letter is his main interest :