Read Online The Cat and Shakespeare by Raja Rao - Free Book Online

will ever touch your potion of the dark bean. We have no feline instinct. We live like rats,’ etc., etc.) Thinking of Usha of an evening is a pleasant thing. I could always take her out on a walk: ‘Come, child,’ and she will leave her book and give her little finger for me to take. And so we go. Usha is the dearest thing in my life. She is my child. She is not merely that. She is child. When I hear somebody say, he walks, you may think it is an impersonal, a grammatically correct statement. I walk, he walks, they walk. But for me walking is Usha. When she sits it is sitting. Shantha understands this. Shantha’s silence has all that logic cannot compute. Saroja wants two and two to make four, and if I say, ‘What about your dreams, there do two and two make four?’ she says, ‘It always makes four, according to me. Yet in the logic of my dreams it’s seven. But I am not living in a dream. Usha is five years old. She is not ten. You can open the school register and see.’
    When you have Saroja’s logic, what can you do? What logic, Usha must ask herself, has the railway train that says Kimkoo-chig, chug, chug, as if it were a great-aunt, and it goes on spitting out fire at the Elayathur railway station? The train watches all school returners. Evening after evening it will come and spit out friendly smoke. The cigarette vendors, the
wada
sellers, the coolies, the
jhatka-
and
bandi-walas
6 outside will all have a logic with the train system. Soon after the train arrives, passengers will get out. They have so many bundles. Usha is sure the train knows it. She knows too that
jhatkas
come in the right numbers. As there are so many benches at the school every morning for so many children, you have so many
jhatkas.
Every evening you have so many
bandis.
Snakes know when the school children pass. The train has told them: Take care, take care, they are under my protection.
    I love Usha for the way she comes back from school. She dreams of the train behind her. She has no fear. For the train will let her pass first on the Sethupallea bridge. Then you go down and stand in the field below, under the small young coconut tree. The train is happy. The tree says, ‘Good morning,’ as the soldiers say to one another. Usha and her friends put stones around the tree. They are building a marriage house. Once the train has passed with all the men and women, faces and shouts, Usha feels she can go home. Saroja does not wait for her. She is busy inspecting the rope making. Saroja is a tremendous worker. For her fact is that which yields. Her fathers have left thirty-three acres of wet land. They worked hard. They gave her and her sister education. Land is a fact. You reap what you sow.
    I have a system of no logic, and that is the story. What logic can speak of Usha? How and what shall I say about Shantha? She lives backwards, as it were, when, with her rounded belly, she moves forward. Birth is instantaneous with time. Who is born where? Time is born in time. And that is Shantha. To be a wife is not to be wed. To be a wife is to worship your man. Then you are born. And you give birth to what is born in being born. You annihilate time and you become a wife. Wifehood, of all states in the world, seems the most holy. It stops work. It creates. It lives on even when time dies. Suppose you broke your clock, would the garden go? Suppose the garden were burned, where will the sky go? Such is woman.
    I was thinking of the house and of Usha, scratching my feet, sitting on the canvas chair. The evening will slowly draw in bringing the sea nearer. How the night coming gives trees and sound a peculiar shy truth. They want to hide and go and come. Morning will reveal them, as if they had gone somewhere, and returned. The
bilva
tree always seems on a voyage to nowhere. It has gone and come like a clock that ticks. Time ticks. You close your eyes and open. I want to be free.
    Shall I build a house for Usha? Who will give the money? I ask myself.