outside Anwar’s house. We hadn’t yet gone inside the house. Our talk encouraged a young man from the adjoining house or section to come out to have a look at us. He was of medium height, with a good physique, and he was freshly dressed, as if for relaxation, in a singlet and khaki shorts. It was momentarily astonishing to me that someone of normal size and so reasonably turned out should have come out of such a restricted space. We fell silent when he came out and stood in the lane in the dim light, in his patch of territory, saying nothing; and, as though we felt we had been indiscreet or discourteous talking in the open about the houses of the settlement, we went then, almost as if for the privacy, into the wire-netted front room of Anwar’s house. The young man came back into the front room of his own house and stood about for a while. In the dim light there he or his pale shadow, changing size, could be seen against the white-sheet divider or screen – the sheet fixed to the wire netting on his side – like a figure in a puppet play.
Someone in Anwar’s family had made preparations for our visit. A clean sheet had been spread on the string bed in the front room, as a courtesy to Nikhil and me. At Anwar’s invitation, we sat there. Anwar’s father then came out from somewhere in the middle room. He was our host now; and Anwar was sent to buy cold lemonade.
Anwar’s father, a small man, though not as small as Anwar, looked frail and unwell; and I thought that some of the son’s apparent debility would have come from the father. He was very dark, with a very thick, silver beard. That beard was like the old man’s only physical vanity: it was expertly trimmed and combed, and it rippled and shone. And more than physical vanity was therein India different groups wear different styles of beard, and Anwar’s father’s spade-shaped beard was a Muslim beard. That was the beard’s forthright message.
He said he was sixty-four. And before Nikhil and I could say anything, he said he knew he looked much older – and that was true: I had thought of him as close to eighty. Europeans didn’t look as old as Indians, he said. He knew; he had once worked in an Italian firm, and he had seen Europeans of seventy looking healthy and working hard. Indians aged as they did because of the conditions they lived in. Here, for instance, they didn’t just havetraffic fumes; they also had mill smoke, from a cloth mill. Still, he was sixty-four. That was something; his father had died at forty.
Anwar came back with some chilled bottles of lemonade. This was formally offered, bottle by bottle. We drank a little – the lemonade was very sweet, and seemed to have some chemical tincture – and we tried to make general conversation, though we were really too many in the space, and voices and sounds came to us from all directions, and that white screen (pinned to the other side of the wire-netting divider) began to seem ambiguous in its intention, not wholly friendly.
I asked the old man whether there were thieves in the settlement. It had occurred to me that the very openness of life there, and the communality of it (as of a commune), might have offered people a kind of protection.
The old man said there were thefts every day. And there were quarrels every day. The quarrels were worse. A lot of the quarrels came about because of the children. People hit other people’s children, and the parents became angry.
He had lived under every kind of pressure. So had Anwar. Perhaps – if, in circumstances like these, there could be said to be a scale in such matters – it had been harder for Anwar, who was more sensitive, better educated, and, in the outside world, had a harder fight in the technical field he had chosen.
Playing with the lemonade, considering the old-fashioned courtesies of father and son in that setting, the humanity that remained to them, the old man’s calm acknowledgement of the better health and strength of others,
Someone in Anwar’s family had made preparations for our visit. A clean sheet had been spread on the string bed in the front room, as a courtesy to Nikhil and me. At Anwar’s invitation, we sat there. Anwar’s father then came out from somewhere in the middle room. He was our host now; and Anwar was sent to buy cold lemonade.
Anwar’s father, a small man, though not as small as Anwar, looked frail and unwell; and I thought that some of the son’s apparent debility would have come from the father. He was very dark, with a very thick, silver beard. That beard was like the old man’s only physical vanity: it was expertly trimmed and combed, and it rippled and shone. And more than physical vanity was therein India different groups wear different styles of beard, and Anwar’s father’s spade-shaped beard was a Muslim beard. That was the beard’s forthright message.
He said he was sixty-four. And before Nikhil and I could say anything, he said he knew he looked much older – and that was true: I had thought of him as close to eighty. Europeans didn’t look as old as Indians, he said. He knew; he had once worked in an Italian firm, and he had seen Europeans of seventy looking healthy and working hard. Indians aged as they did because of the conditions they lived in. Here, for instance, they didn’t just havetraffic fumes; they also had mill smoke, from a cloth mill. Still, he was sixty-four. That was something; his father had died at forty.
Anwar came back with some chilled bottles of lemonade. This was formally offered, bottle by bottle. We drank a little – the lemonade was very sweet, and seemed to have some chemical tincture – and we tried to make general conversation, though we were really too many in the space, and voices and sounds came to us from all directions, and that white screen (pinned to the other side of the wire-netting divider) began to seem ambiguous in its intention, not wholly friendly.
I asked the old man whether there were thieves in the settlement. It had occurred to me that the very openness of life there, and the communality of it (as of a commune), might have offered people a kind of protection.
The old man said there were thefts every day. And there were quarrels every day. The quarrels were worse. A lot of the quarrels came about because of the children. People hit other people’s children, and the parents became angry.
He had lived under every kind of pressure. So had Anwar. Perhaps – if, in circumstances like these, there could be said to be a scale in such matters – it had been harder for Anwar, who was more sensitive, better educated, and, in the outside world, had a harder fight in the technical field he had chosen.
Playing with the lemonade, considering the old-fashioned courtesies of father and son in that setting, the humanity that remained to them, the old man’s calm acknowledgement of the better health and strength of others,
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