Free The Cat and Shakespeare by Raja Rao

stomach was bubbling with demand. Fortunately the coffee had come in once again. Till nine o’clock, he read the
Astavakra Samhita
from any where to the very end, and then he said: ‘I have done a good job. I have explained to the Brahmin what Brahman is. “Brahmin is he who knows Brahman,” etc., etc. Ruling princes taught sadhus the Truth in the Upanishadic times. Now Nairs alone can teach the Truth in the world.’ I knew at once he was right. He was right. He is right. He will ever be right.
    ‘Isn’t it time to be coming home?’ whispered Tangamma from the wall. ‘The children have gone to sleep.’
    ‘Good night, sir,’ he said as if he had said what he wanted to say to me, and jumped across the wall—there was such flowing moonlight on the
bilva
tree. I walked thoughtfully along the road to the Home Friends. Would they still have chapattis. A hungry stomach is a bad friend. It smells bad. There were chapattis, Ananthkrishnan said, and I felt good.
    Ration Office No. 66 is just above Ration Shop No. 181. As I told you, it is on Statue Road, between the Secretariat and the General Hospital, beside the mansion of Justice Varadaraj Iyengar (the man known in Trivandrum for having hanged more people in his lifetime than any other living magistrate. For him evil was concrete, and he had it removed from the mass of mankind. So he gave the best punishment. ‘It makes our daughters hope for better marriages,’ he said. And it did). Varadaraj Iyengar, of course, as everybody knows, finally died, and he died far away and well, in some Himalayan hermitage he had constructed overlooking the young Ganges. Nobody did him any harm. People knew he was just. He lived like a hermit, with but one family servant, and he died peacefully reciting some mantra. His ashes were flown to Benares. Thus he died a happy man.
    Just next to this mansion, almost touching his casuarina tree at the door, is Ration Shop No. 181. It is an old garage of Mr Shiva Shankra Pillai, the retired Tahsildar, who himself married from Mavelikara, that is from just where Her Highness the Maharani comes. Shiva Shankra Pillai had two sons and both of them turned bad. One enlisted and went to the wars a subaltern. The other opened a cloth shop at Chalai, and is doing good business. The daughter married well; she is the daughter-in-law of Kunni Krishna Menon and she lives happily. All that is old is stable. Otherwise how could you say it is stable? It is stable because it is traditional. So Kunni Krishna Menon, with huge estates run well, continued the tradition of his ancestors. He and his wife amassed a fortune—thus Shiva Shankra Pillai’s daughter was happy. Her children often came to see their grandfather and usually went through the ration shop up to the ration office. The garage had drivers’ quarters at the top. This and the garage were extended so that the ration shop and office ran all over the pentagonal shapes, with four rooms at the top and five at the bottom.
    The children liked to play among the chillies and tamarind, for these were sold as a side line by the ration-shop vendor to make a little extra money. His programme was, he who eats rice cannot eat it alone, so why not make some more profit? Government or no government, who is there to come and see? Sometimes the children went and sat in the huge scales, shouting and chaffing, one weighing against the other till the women, who came with their baskets and sacks, would jerk and let the scale go from one side to the other as if it were a cradle. And the louder shouted the children, the wilder became the crowd. Meanwhile people from the street came rushing forward to see the fun, and old ladies standing in the queue would say: ‘The sun is hot for us. The fun is over now. Why make us hunger more?’ And from the staircase of the ration office, a head or two would show, to prove that under the office is the ration shop, and one should not play with such serious things. What is this nonsense