graduate daughter-in-law in the kitchen at the back knew her duties. It was tea brewed in the Indian way, sugar and tea leaves and water and milk boiled together into a thick stew, hot and sweet. The tea, in chipped china cups, came first for the chief guests. We drank with considered speed, held out our cups to surrender them – the Patel now, calm in his role as host, detaching himself from his zealous attendants – and presently the cups reappeared, washed and full of the milky tea for the lesser men.
And the Patel sat below us, in the vestibule, looking like so many of the villagers, a slight, wrinkled man in a peasant-style turban, a dhoti and koortah and brown woollen scarf, all slightly dingy, but mainly from dust and sweat, and not as studiedly grimed as the sarpanch’s shirt and slack pyjama bottom. But as he sat there, no longer unknown but a man who had established his worth, our host, the provider of tea (still being slurped at and sighed over), the possessor of this house (was he boasting about the cost of the newfloor?), his personality became clearer. The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head, have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an authority that to him and the people around him was more real, and less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole families, as servants, from their birth to their death.
He said, talking about the great cost of the new floor (and still evading the question about the value of the house), that he didn’t believe in borrowing. Other people believed in borrowing, but he didn’t. He did things only when he had the money to do them. If he made money one year, then there were certain things he felt he could do. That had been his principle all his life; that was how he intended to do the new floor, year by year and piece by piece. And yet he – like the sarpanch, and perhaps to a greater degree than the sarpanch – was almost certainly a moneylender. Many of the people I had seen that morning would have been in debt to the Patel. And in these villages interest rates were so high, ten per cent or more a month, that debts, once contracted, could never be repaid. Debt was a fact of life in these villages; interest was a form of tribute.
But it was also true that when the Patel spoke about borrowing he was not being insincere. The occasion was special. We were outsiders; he had done us the honours of his house; and now, in public audience, as it were, he was delivering himself of his proven wisdom. This was the wisdom that lifted him above his fellows; and this was the wisdom that his attendants were acknowledging with beatific smiles and slow, affirmative swings of the head, even while accepting that what was for the Patel couldn’t be for them.
Now that we were on the subject of money, and the high cost of things these days, we spoke about electricity. There was that fluorescent tube, slightly askew and in a tangle of cord, in the vestibule:it couldn’t be missed. The government had brought electricity to the village five years before, the Patel said; and he thought that forty per cent of the village now had electricity. It was interesting that he too had adopted the official habit of speaking in percentages rather than in old-fashioned numbers. But the figure he gave seemed high, because the connection charge was 275 rupees, over twenty-seven dollars, twice a labourer’s monthly wage, and electricity was as expensive as in London.
Electricity wasn’t for the poor. But electricity hadn’t been brought across the plateau just to light the villages. Its primary purpose was to develop agriculture; without electricity the irrigation scheme wouldn’t have been possible. Electricity mattered mainly to the
And the Patel sat below us, in the vestibule, looking like so many of the villagers, a slight, wrinkled man in a peasant-style turban, a dhoti and koortah and brown woollen scarf, all slightly dingy, but mainly from dust and sweat, and not as studiedly grimed as the sarpanch’s shirt and slack pyjama bottom. But as he sat there, no longer unknown but a man who had established his worth, our host, the provider of tea (still being slurped at and sighed over), the possessor of this house (was he boasting about the cost of the newfloor?), his personality became clearer. The small, twinkly eyes that might at first, in that wrinkled head, have seemed only peasant’s eyes, always about to register respect and obsequiousness combined with disbelief, could be seen now to be the eyes of a man used to exercising a special kind of authority, an authority that to him and the people around him was more real, and less phantasmal, than the authority of outsiders from the city. His face was the face of the Master, the man who knew men, and whole families, as servants, from their birth to their death.
He said, talking about the great cost of the new floor (and still evading the question about the value of the house), that he didn’t believe in borrowing. Other people believed in borrowing, but he didn’t. He did things only when he had the money to do them. If he made money one year, then there were certain things he felt he could do. That had been his principle all his life; that was how he intended to do the new floor, year by year and piece by piece. And yet he – like the sarpanch, and perhaps to a greater degree than the sarpanch – was almost certainly a moneylender. Many of the people I had seen that morning would have been in debt to the Patel. And in these villages interest rates were so high, ten per cent or more a month, that debts, once contracted, could never be repaid. Debt was a fact of life in these villages; interest was a form of tribute.
But it was also true that when the Patel spoke about borrowing he was not being insincere. The occasion was special. We were outsiders; he had done us the honours of his house; and now, in public audience, as it were, he was delivering himself of his proven wisdom. This was the wisdom that lifted him above his fellows; and this was the wisdom that his attendants were acknowledging with beatific smiles and slow, affirmative swings of the head, even while accepting that what was for the Patel couldn’t be for them.
Now that we were on the subject of money, and the high cost of things these days, we spoke about electricity. There was that fluorescent tube, slightly askew and in a tangle of cord, in the vestibule:it couldn’t be missed. The government had brought electricity to the village five years before, the Patel said; and he thought that forty per cent of the village now had electricity. It was interesting that he too had adopted the official habit of speaking in percentages rather than in old-fashioned numbers. But the figure he gave seemed high, because the connection charge was 275 rupees, over twenty-seven dollars, twice a labourer’s monthly wage, and electricity was as expensive as in London.
Electricity wasn’t for the poor. But electricity hadn’t been brought across the plateau just to light the villages. Its primary purpose was to develop agriculture; without electricity the irrigation scheme wouldn’t have been possible. Electricity mattered mainly to the
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