A Passage to India: Chapters 22–32

After one of these bouts, she longed to go out into the bazaars and ask pardon from everyone she met, for she felt in some vague way that she was leaving the world worse than she found it.

He was worn with indignation and suffering, and she wished she could comfort him; but intimacy seemed to caricature itself, and the more they spoke the more wretched and self-conscious they became.

He is now the mainstay of the defence, I needn’t add. He is the one righteous Englishman in a horde of tyrants.

They would have to meet now, year after year, until one of their husbands was superannuated.

A sort of resentment emanated from her.

He had a return of tenderness for his mother—as we do for our relatives when they receive conspicuous and unexpected honour.

Just as the Hindu clerks asked Lakshmi for an increase in pay, so did she implore Jehovah for a favourable verdict.

Her deity returned a consoling reply, but the touch of her hands on her face started prickly heat, and she seemed to swallow and expectorate the same insipid clot of air that had weighed on her lungs all the night.

She was afraid of reticence, in case something that she herself did not perceive took shape beneath it, and she had rehearsed with Mr. McBryde in an odd, mincing way her terrible adventure in the cave...

She was afraid of reticence, in case something that she herself did not perceive took shape beneath it, and she had rehearsed with Mr. McBryde in an odd, mincing way her terrible adventure in the cave...

Her aim this morning was to announce, meticulously, that the strain was appalling, and she would probably break down under Mr. Amritrao’s cross-examination and disgrace her friends.

Pleader Mahmoud Ali now arose, and asked with ponderous and ill-judged irony whether his client could be accommodated on the platform too: even Indians felt unwell sometimes, though naturally Major Callendar did not think so, being in charge of a Government Hospital.

Mr. McBryde smiled faintly at their fatuity.

“Do so; this trial is a farce, I am going.”

And he handed his papers to Amritrao and left, calling from the door histrionically yet with intense passion, “Aziz, Aziz—farewell for ever.”

It was revolting to hear his mother travestied into Esmiss Esmoor, a Hindu goddess.

“An extraneous element is being introduced into the case,” said the Magistrate.

And then the flimsy framework of the court broke up, the shouts of derision and rage culminated, people screamed and cursed, kissed one another, wept passionately.

Unaware that anything unusual had occurred, he continued to pull the cord of his punkah, to gaze at the empty dais and the overturned special chairs, and rhythmically to agitate the clouds of descending dust.

The faint, indescribable smell of the bazaars invaded her, sweeter than a London slum, yet more disquieting: a tuft of scented cotton wool, wedged in an old man’s ear, fragments of pan between his black teeth, odorous powders, oils—the Scented East of tradition, but blended with human sweat as if a great king had been entangled in ignominy and could not free himself, or as if the heat of the sun had boiled and fried all the glories of the earth into a single mess.

“I was afraid, I was mislaid,” the suppliant continued.

“Well, here’s our solution,” said the barrister, who had terminated his slightly minatory caress and strolled to the window.

The banquet, though riotous, had been agreeable, and now the blessings of leisure—unknown to the West, which either works or idles—descended on the motley company.

Aziz was full of civilization this evening, complete, dignified, rather hard, and it was with diffidence that the other said: “Yes, certainly you must let off Miss Quested easily. She must pay all your costs, that is only fair, but do not treat her like a conquered enemy.”

If you are right, there is no point in any friendship; it all comes down to give and take, or give and return, which is disgusting, and we had better all leap over this parapet and kill ourselves.

“I do not believe him,” said Aziz; he was inured to practical jokes, even of this type.

At Port Said the grey blustery north began.

The weather was so cold and bracing that the passengers felt it must have broken in the land they had left, but it became hotter steadily there in accordance with its usual law.

“There’s propaganda behind all this,” he said, forgetting that a hundred years ago, when Europeans still made their home in the country-side and appealed to its imagination, they occasionally became local demons after death—not a whole god, perhaps, but part of one, adding an epithet or gesture to what already existed, just as the gods contribute to the great gods, and they to the philosophic Brahm.

Exempted by a long career in the Secretariate from personal contact with the peoples of India, he was able to speak of them urbanely, and to deplore racial prejudice.

She never repined at getting the worst of both worlds; she regarded it as the due punishment of her stupidity.

His Indian friends were, on the other hand, a bit above themselves. Victory, which would have made the English sanctimonious, made them aggressive.

Although Sir Gilbert had been courteous, almost obsequious, the fabric he represented had in no wise bowed its head.

But wistfulness descended on them now, as on other occasions; the shadow of the shadow of a dream fell over their clear-cut interests, and objects never seen again seemed messages from another world.

He met Fielding at the railway station on his return, agreed to dine with him, and then started taxing him by the oblique method, outwardly merry.

A pause in the wrong place, an intonation misunderstood, and a whole conversation went awry.

“Let us talk about poetry.” He turned his mind to the innocuous subject.

He held the tiny conversation in his hand, and felt it epitomized his problem.

Suspicion...is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner cannot comprehend.

They would see the sumptuousness of Venice, not its shape, and though Venice was not Europe, it was part of the Mediterranean harmony.