A Passage to India: Chapters 6–11

But the boredom of regime and hygiene repelled him, and after inoculating a man for enteric, he would go away and drink unfiltered water himself.

Aziz liked soldiers—they either accepted you or swore at you, which was preferable to the civilian’s hauteur—and the subaltern liked anyone who could ride.

But Dr. Lal, being of low extraction, was not sure whether an insult had not been intended, and he was further annoyed because Aziz had buffeted the Brahminy Bull.

He thought no longer, “Can I get on with people?” but “Are they stronger than I?” breathing the prevalent miasma.

He longed to know everything about the splendid fellow—his salary, preferences, antecedents, how best one might please him.

He only said this to be cheery, he did not realize that “white” has no more to do with a colour than “God save the King” with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote.

The Brahman, polite and enigmatic, did not impede his eloquence, and even applauded it.

“Such affability is seldom seen. But what can we offer to detain them?”

The old man was silent, perhaps feeling that it was unseemly of her to criticize her race, perhaps fearing that if he agreed she would report him for disloyalty.

Sometimes, to the exasperation of Major Callendar, he would pass over the one relevant fact in a position, to dwell on the hundred irrelevant. The Major accused him of disingenuousness, and was roughly right, but only roughly.

It was rather that a power he couldn’t control capriciously silenced his mind.

Everything he said had an impertinent flavour or jarred.

“I’m afraid I can’t, thanks all the same. I’m awfully sorry you feel I’ve been remiss. I didn’t mean to be.”

Here was Aziz all shoddy and odious, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested both silly, and he himself and Heaslop both decorous on the surface, but detestable really, and detesting each other.

Here was Aziz all shoddy and odious, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested both silly, and he himself and Heaslop both decorous on the surface, but detestable really, and detesting each other.

It was the qualified bray of the callow official, the “I am not perfect, but—” that got on her nerves.

Tired and disappointed, he quite lost self-control, and added in a loud lecturing voice, “I won’t have you messing about with Indians any more! If you want to go to the Marabar Caves, you’ll go under British auspices.”

The Bhil who was holding an officer’s polo pony, the Eurasian who drove the Nawab Bahadur’s car, the Nawab Bahadur himself, the Nawab Bahadur’s debauched grandson—none would have examined a difficulty so frankly and coolly.

She held out her hand. The old gentleman judged from so wanton a gesture that she was new to his country, but he paid little heed.

Determined to give him no more trouble, she agreed, but her desire to see India had suddenly decreased. There had been a factitious element in it.

Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly.

“Unless it was a hyena.”
Ronny approved this last conjecture.

“Now what’s all this? I’m not an omnibus,” said Miss Derek with decision. “I’ve a harmonium and two dogs in here with me as it is. I’ll take three of you if one’ll sit in front and nurse a pug. No more.”

Trying to look and feel like a European, the chauffeur interposed aggressively.

They sped off, and Mr. Harris, after a reproachful glance, squatted down upon his hams.

“I would scarcely call her wrong,” broke out the Nawab Bahadur, from his isolation on the front seat, whither they had relegated him.

He grew more and more voluble.

The accident was over, and his life, equably useful, distinguished, happy, ran on as before and expressed itself in streams of well-chosen words.

Krishna the earth, Krishna the stars replied, until the Englishman was appeased by their echoes, fined the absent peon eight annas, and sat down to his arrears in the next room.

She had experienced it twice herself, during her own engagements—this vague contrition and doubt.

Mrs. Moore continued to murmur “Red ten on a black knave,” Miss Quested to assist her, and to intersperse among the intricacies of the play details about the hyena, the engagement, the Maharani of Mudkul, the Bhattacharyas, and the day generally, whose rough desiccated surface acquired as it receded a definite outline, as India itself might, could it be viewed from the moon.

It was Sunday, always an equivocal day in the East, and an excuse for slacking.

He had learnt all he needed concerning his own constitution many years ago, thanks to the social order into which he had been born, and when he came to study medicine he was repelled by the pedantry and fuss with which Europe tabulates the facts of sex.

The squalid bedroom grew quiet; the silly intrigues, the gossip, the shallow discontent were stilled, while words accepted as immortal filled the indifferent air.

“I think not much,” said Ram Chand, desirous of fomenting trouble.

“It is good of Mr. Fielding to condescend to visit our friend,” said the police inspector.

He was not the unattainable friend, either of men or birds or other suns, he was not the eternal promise, the never-withdrawn suggestion that haunts our consciousness; he was merely a creature, like the rest, and so debarred from glory.

Fielding sat down by the bed, flattered at the trust reposed in him, yet rather sad.

“I shall not really be intimate with this fellow,” Fielding thought, and then “nor with anyone.” That was the corollary.

And abruptly he took up a new attitude towards his friend, the attitude of the protector who knows the dangers of India and is admonitory.