“Don’t you want to find out how to live a better life, brothers?”

He thought that his writing too would contribute to that cause-although he was honest enough to admit that perhaps only his vanity made him think so. The word “talent” was now lodged in his mind, and that gave him hope; but even as he was wondering how to improve his writing, he was sent to jail.

The police came for Comrade Thimma one day. This was during the Emergency.

“You are right to arrest me,” Thimma had said, “as I freely and openly support all attempts to overthrow the bourgeois government of India.”

Murali asked the policemen, “Would you mind arresting me as well?”

Jail had been a happy time for him. He washed Thimma’s clothes and hung them out to dry in the mornings. He had hoped all the free time in jail would concentrate his mind and help him reshape his fiction, but he had no time for that. In the evenings, he took notes as Thimma dictated. Thimma’s responses to the great questions of Marxism. The apostasy of Bernstein. The challenge of Trotsky. A justification for Kronstadt.

He collected the responses faithfully; then he pulled a blanket over Thimma’s face, leaving his toes out in the cool air.

He shaved him in the morning, as Thimma thundered to the mirror about Khrushchev’s defiling of the legacy of Comrade Stalin.

It was the happiest period of his life. But then he had been released.

With a sigh, Murali rose from his bed. He paced around the dark house, looking at the mess of the books, at the decaying editions of Gorky and Turgenev, and saying to himself, again and again, What do I have to show for my life? Just this broken-down house…

Then he saw the face of the girl again, and his whole body lit up with hope and joy. He took out his bundle of short stories and read them again. With a red-ink pen he began to delete details of his characters, quickening their motives, their impulses.

It came to Murali one morning, on his way to Salt Market Village: They’re avoiding me. Both mother and daughter.

Then he thought, No, not Sulochana-it’s only the old woman who’s gone cold.

For two months now, he had been catching the bus to Salt Market Village on a variety of fictitious premises, only to see Sulochana’s face again, only to touch her fingers when she brought him his cup of scalding-hot tea.

He had tried to put it to the old lady that they should marry-hints could be delivered, and the topic would insinuate itself into the woman’s mind. That had been his hope. Then, purely out of social responsibility, he would agree, despite his advanced age, to marry her.

But the old lady had never divined his desire.

“Your daughter is excellent in the household,” he had said once, thinking that enough of a hint.

The following day, when he arrived, a strange young girl came out to meet him. The widow had moved up in life; she had now hired a servant.

“Is Madam in?” he asked. The servant nodded.

“Will you go get her?”

A minute passed. He thought he heard the sound of voices behind the door; then the servant came out and said, “No.”

“No, what?”

She turned her gaze toward the house again. “They…are not here. No.”

“And Sulochana? Is she in?”

The servant girl shook her head.

Why shouldn’t they avoid me? he thought, trailing his umbrella on the ground as he returned to the bus station. He had done his work for them; he was not needed anymore. This was how people in the real world behaved. Why should he be hurt?

In the evening, pacing around his gloomy home, he felt he had to agree with the old woman’s judgment: surely this was no fit habitation for a young girl like Sulochana. How could he bring a woman into it?

Yet the next day he was back on the bus to Salt Market Village, where, once again, the servant girl told him that no one was home.

On the way back, he rested his head against the grille and thought, The more they snub me, the more I want to fall down before that girl and propose marriage.

At home he tried writing a letter. “Dear Sulochana: I have been searching for a way to tell you. There is so much to say…”

He went back every day for a week, and was refused entry every day. I will never come back, he promised himself on the seventh evening, as he had for six evenings before. I really will never come back. This is disgraceful behavior. I am exploiting these people. But he was also angry with the old woman and Sulochana for treating him like this.

On the journey home, he stood up and shouted to the conductor, “Stop!” He had remembered, out of the blue, a story he had written twenty-five years ago, about a matchmaker who worked in the village.

He asked the children playing marbles for the matchmaker; they directed him to the shopkeepers. It took an hour and a half to find the house.

The matchmaker was an old, half-blind man sitting in a chair smoking a hookah; his wife brought a chair for the Communist to sit in.

Murali cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles. He wondered what to say, what to do. The hero in his story had walked around the matchmaker’s house and then left; he had never come this far.

“There is a friend of mine who wishes to marry that girl. Sulochana.”

“The daughter of the fellow who…” The matchmaker pantomimed a hanging.

Murali nodded.

“Your friend is too late, sir. She has money now, and so she has a hundred offers,” the matchmaker said. “That is the way of life.”

“But…my friend…my friend has set his heart on her…”

“Who is this friend?” the matchmaker asked, and with a dirty, omniscient gleam in his eyes.

He caught the bus in the mornings, as soon as his work was over at the party office, and waited for her at the market. She came in the evenings to buy vegetables. He would follow her slowly. He looked at the bananas, at the mangoes. He had been buying fruit for Comrade Thimma for decades. He was expert at so many women’s tasks; his heart skipped a beat when he saw her choose an overripe mango; when the vendor tricked her, he wanted to run over and yell at him and protect her from his avarice.

In the evenings, he stood waiting for the bus back to Kittur. He observed the way people lived in villages. He saw a boy cycling furiously, a block of ice strapped to the back of his bicycle. He had to make it in time before the ice melted; it was already half gone, and he had no aim in life but to deliver the rest of the ice in time. A man came with bananas in a plastic bag and looked around; there were large black spots on the bananas already, and he had to sell them before they rotted. All these people sent Murali a message. To want things in life, they were saying, is to recognize that time is limited.

He was fifty-five years old.

He did not take the bus back that evening; instead, he walked to the house. Rather than approach the front door, he went around to the back. Sulochana was winnowing rice; she looked at her mother and went inside.

The servant went in to bring a chair, but the old woman said, “Don’t.

“Look here; you want to marry my daughter?” she asked.

So she had found out. It was always like this; you make an effort to conceal desire and then it is out in the open. The greatest fallacy: that you can hide from others what you want from them.

He nodded, avoiding her eyes.

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Fifty.”

“Can you give her children at your age?”

He tried to respond.

The old woman said:

“Why would we want to get you into our family, in any case? My late husband always told me, Communists are trouble.”

His jaw dropped. Was this the same husband who had praised the Communists? Had this woman just made all that up?

Murali understood now; her husband had said nothing about the Communists. In their wanting they became so cunning, these people!